Dieselboy

I don't think I've ever wanted to pick up an instrument and learn it more than I do after that video. I'm sure I couldn't afford getting one made, and then picking it up, but jeez. The fact that it's so limitless, like you said, and that it just sits in his lap and looks like he's playing a ridiculous game of Simon really appeals to me. ><

Looks like hes got a full album of just him and the hang drum. Gonna check that out I think and see if it's all this cool.

jackhammer

Son Of Dave and Kid Beyond are phenomenal one man bands:

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Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Transference is the latest album by Spoon

Before Destruction- Spoon Before Destruction is from the brand new Spoon album, Transference which is being released today. Amazon USA has a one day album release price of $3.99 to download the entire album Transference by Spoon for $3.99

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Let's Go Get Stoned epitomized the blues and gospel style that Ray Charles sang and played so well.

Let's Go Get Stoned- Ray Charles Toward the end of his career Ray Charles tarnished his legacy by doing too many Coca Cola ads, doing too many duet/tribute albums and allowing release of too many inferior anthologies of his work.

This 1964 song finds Ray at the top of his game singing a song that was the first songwriting effort of Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, the team that fell into MOR irrelevance as Motown performers in the 70s and 80s. Let's Go Get Stoned was a success because it was the epitomy of the blues and gospel style that Ray sang and played so well.

Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Conspiracy of Beards is a San Francisco based men's choral group whose members dress like Leonard Cohen and do nothing but cover versions of Leonard Cohen songs.

Hallelujah- Conspiracy of Beards For the sake of disclosure I'll tell you that one of the members of Conspiracy of Beards is my cousin Gavin Raders who has a fine tenor voice and plays every instrument under the sun. Yes, Gavin and I are the only two first name "Gavins" in my family but "Gavin" is also the last name of my mother's father. Are you confused? Good!

Conspiracy of Beards had a very sucessful East Coast tour and are now in LA doing a multi-night gig at the Mint in West Hollywood. An album is forth coming and it will have this version of Hallelujah on it. BTW Gavin is the 5th person in the last row in the photo on the video embed.

Engine

Have you given the album a listen? If so, what do you think?

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Gavin B.

Sorry it took song long to get back to you. I've been travelling and took a long vacation from my home computer.

To answer your question about Transference: I don't like the album nearly as much as some of their earlier ones. Spoon set an impossibly high standard for themsevles with their previous album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. If Tranference was released in 2008 a year after the release of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, I would have been less disappointed. However Transference was three years in the making.

Most of the songs on Transference sound like demos with the low tech sound of a 4 track recording. This is the first album fully produced by the band so I should have expected some changes. Spoon has enjoyed critical and commerical success for a decade and many bands wage a rebellion against their own commerical success as part of their maturation process.

Many successful bands who came through the indie music ranks are never able resolve the enevitable conflict between the yin (artistic integrity) and the yang (commericial success). Most indie bands want to succeed on their own quirky idealistic terms and Nirvana is the worst case scenario of what happens when a band can't live with the existential contradiction between art and commerece. Spoon seems to be handling the issue in a far less destructive manner than Nirvana did. Bob Dylan rebelled against his own success by spending nearly three decades dliberately making god awful albums but we still loved him. Let's hope Spoon doesn't have the iron willed resolve of Dylan.

Perhaps I should reserve judgement on the new low tech, no frills approach of Spoon. When Girls Can Tell was released in 2001, it took me to fully appreciate it because the pop music sheen of the album was in complete conflict with what I usually listened to. Now 9 years later, I'm criticizing Transference for not having enough of a pop music sheen. Perhaps the problem is me.

Gavin B.

A Few Trip-Hop and Lounge Favorites


This high concept video of Alphawezen's Frost really caught my eye with it's dazzling deep space visuals that fit like a glove with the music.



Under My Star is collaboration between singer Beth Hirsh with Gelka, available on the latest Cafe del Mer collection, which is Volume XV. Beth Hirsh is a stellar jazz/trip hop vocal stylist who first appeared on Moon Safari the groundbreaking debut album by the French electronica duo Air. On that album Ms. Hirsh arranged and sang all the female vocal, chorus and choir parts and Beth was also the lead vocalist on Air's first internatinally released single, You Make It Easy.



My final selection is from the Postmarks' latest album Memoirs at the End of the World. The Postmarks aren't technically within the trip hop genre but the influence of bands like Thievery Corporation and Portishead are pervasive in the Postmarks' arrangement of this song, No One Said It Would Be Easy. The song is a mysterious slice of exotica in the tradition 60s era Italian B-movie soundtrack composers like Alessandro Alessandroni, the Baragozzi Group, Piero Ulmilani and the master, Ennio Morricone.

Gavin B.

Loudon Wainwright III: American Iconoclast



Loudon Wainwright III grew up in Westchester County an area just north of New York City an area that has long been associated the old money families who form the inner circle of America's social elites. Despite the decline of old money in America, Westchester still ranks as the 7th wealthiest county in the United States with a median family income of $98,000 more than twice the national average of $44,000.

The Wainwrights are a prominent American family and are direct descendants of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch religious leader and colonial governor who founded the city of New Amsterdam in 1653 which came to be called New York City when it was conquered by the British in 1664. The earliest historical chronicles of Manhattan Island has Stuyvesant's fingerprints all over it. As colonial governor of New Amsterdam, for instance, Styvesant commissioned the building of the flood wall that Wall Street is named after. Loudon's father (Loudon Wainwright Jr.) was a renowed news journalist and long time editor at Time magazine.

An element Loudon Wainwright's mystique was his decision to rebel against his own socially prominent birthright by becoming a musician. Loudon was the "refugee from a wealthy family" and the "holy man on the FM radio" that Joni Mitchell wrote and sang about in her memorable 1970 song Rainy Night House. Those families in the social registry firmly beleive that acting or singing popular music is a debasing and tawdry manner of earning an income that doesn't suit the higher aspirations of the ruling class. So Loudon was indeed a refugee from a wealthy family.


Loudon Wainwright's cover shot for his first album which got a lot of airplay in the small network of "uderground" FM radio stations in 1970

First impressions are lasting and I’ll never forget my first encounter with his debut album. I was transfixed by photo of Wainwright on the cover of the album. The iconic photo for Loudon Wainwright's first album (called Album) has a picture of a young man directing a disarming gaze at the camera. Wainwright's studied pose suggested a world weary misanthrope who saw too much, too soon in life. . It’s a mesmerizing but disturbing portrait of an artist as a young man that is a timeless statement. It's the same camera ready glare adopted many angry punk rockers directed at photographers, six or seven years later.

40 years and 22 albums later Wainwright's personae is a bit less threatening but his songs can still draw out wide range of disturbing emotional responses. At age 62 Wainwright's music maintains the razor edged psychosocial and political commentary. While a middle aged Dylan took a 30 year detour into a ghost town of musical mediocrity, Loudon Wainwright kept thrilling his fans with a magical mystery tour of sublimely dark albums that evoked the existential pain of the human condition with brilliant clarity.

Part of the reason Loudon did not go gentle into that good night was his own ignoble firing by two major labels early in his career. Atlantic and Columbia Records both dropped Wainwright early in his career for being a difficult artist who refused to knuckle under to the demands of producers. Atlantic and Columbia Records wanted Wainwright to stop writing dark moody music and write more humorous songs like Dead Skunk, Wainwright's only commercial success, Dead Skunk was a novelty song he detested and regretted ever having recorded.

By age 27 Loudon Wainwright was without a label deal. In the early Seventies, an artist who provoked a major label into firing him, was an artist with a career death wish. Loudon managed to provoke two different labels into firing him. By the mid-Seventies many astute observers thought Wainwright’s 15 minutes were over and he was on the fast track to obscurity. Loudon Wainwright had become an independent musical contractor who was forced to sell his music on it's own merits to small indie labels who have made concessions to his unique musical vision. Along the way Wainwright married and divorced the recently deceased French Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle and he sired two son (Rufus) and a daughter (Martha) who were both precousious musical prodigies as children and successful recording and perfoming artists as adults. Later he married Suzzy Roche of the family musical group the Roches and their child will probably become another musically precocious brat in the Wainwright tradition.


Wainwright & Son- Loudon shares a father/son moment with Rufus

Most critics and the general public have ignored Loudon's music over the past 20 years, It's unfortunate because Loudon saved his best stuff for last. Since his early 40s Wainwright has been composing frightfully good songs that soar far above the music he wrote when Joni Mitchell celebrated him as the holy man on the FM radio. The choices are many but in the interest of space I selected three of my favorites:

Handful of Dust from the album History (1992)



Primerose Hill from the Album Little Ship (1998)



Graveyard from the album Last Man On Earth (2001)

jackhammer

Really liking that first track especially the drum track. Is it just a one off track (such is prevalent in the Electronica arena)?

I have the Cafe Del Mar series up until 14 and there are gems on absolutely every album and generally they eschew going down the commercial route and release many unknown artists. Cafe Del Mar Dreams 2 is a great album with completely unknown names and another series of albums that are worth your time are these: Various - Real Ibiza 2 (2xCD) at Discogs. I only have the first three in the series on C.D with number 3 being an almost acoustic album and it's pure bliss.

I really like The Postmarks track too. It reminds me of Saint Etienne which is no bad thing at all in my book and I will have to check that album out. Although they don't use too much orchestration you may want to check out the Luke Haines (Auteurs) English Pop band Black Box Recorder who have that quintessential English Lounge sound:

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