Gavin B.

Pearls Before Swine: The Surrealist Dark Side of 60s Psychedelica



Tom Rapp the singer, songwriter and frontman for Pearls Before Swine had a sublimely dark musical vision that was a stark contrast to the sunshine dayglow optimism of the psychedelic music of the 60s

Pearls Before Swine (PBS) is one of the great unsung groups of the first psychedelic era. PBS originally signed on to the independent avant garde jazz label ESP whose most notable artist was Sun Ra. The only other rock act on ESP were the Fugs and controversial East Village NYC folk rock group whose confrontational politics and use of "crude expletives" in their song lyrics made most of the Fug's albums an under-the-counter item, sold only in underground record stores. The Fugs first album was the subject of many obscenity busts of record stores in 1967 and this link to the archives of The Havard Crimson gives a blow by blow account of a 1967 obscenity bust of a Cambridge MA record store for selling the Fugs debut album.

Pearls Before Swine was in good company with space jazz pioneer Sun Ra and the raucous avant garde rocks the Fugs because PBS was one of those "not ready for primetime" bands that were too edgy for a major label contract in the mid-60s. Reprise picked up Pearls Before Swine in 1969 following two ESP releases but PBS never rose above it's cult band status during it's six year musical journey.

The first two PBS albums One Nation Underground & Balaklava established the group as earliest darkwave psychedelic peers to L.A.'s Love and NYC's Velvet Underground. Most striking was the album cover of One Nation Underground which was a reproduction of 16th Century Flemish painter Pieter Breugal's portrait of the savagery of warfare, The Triumph of Death:


The Triumph of Death Click on this link for a more detailed rendering of this amazing painting

The use of the Bruegal album cover was a sharp contrast to the prevailing album cover design that featured standard group portait photo usually embelli embelished with psychedelic calligraphy letter, offbeat color cominations, pop art imagery, and flower power psychedelic designs. One Nation Underground was an acid soaked broadside against the insanity of war and more specifically the American involvement in the Vietnam War.

All of the PBS album covers were end result of singer Tom Rapp's interest in frightfully striking images in the artwork of Medieval painters like Pieter Breugel (the Elder) and Hieronymus Bosch whose other-worldly imagery predated the formal Surrealist movement the 20th Century by over 400 years. Tom's keen appreciation of Hieronymus Bosch made the unsung Dutch painter the favorite artist of the psychedelic counterculture in the late 60s. To fully appreciate the surreal qualties of Bosch's paintings I've provided a link to his notable work a spectacular 3 paneled epic painting entitled The Garden of Earthly Delights

Each new PBS album cover provided the listener with an education in 15th and 16th Century European art. Many latter day indie artists like Joy Division and Fleet Foxes followed suit & used classic works of art as album covers but PBS was the first group to do so.


Tom Rapp (middle with accoustic guitar) in one of his last public performances before disappearing from the pop music scene.

I corresponded with Tom Rapp in late 90s via email, simply because of my curiosity about where he had traveled and what he had done since he disappeared from the face of the earth after the release of his final album Sunforest in 1973. As it turns out, Tom was living in Florida and retired from a highly successful 20+ year career as civil rights attorney in Philadelphia. With his second career as a civil rights attorney Tom Rapp has disproved the F. Scott Fitzgerald theory that "there are no second acts in life."

There Was A Man is from the1968 album Balaklava which was PBS' second and final album on ESP. After From 1970 on, Pearls Before Swine was essentially Tom Rapp vehicle and he was backed by a revolving lineup up studio musicians and touring bands. The Rapp/PBS 1970 debut on Reprise Records had superstar lineup of Nashville studio musicians like Kenneth Buttrey on drums, Charlie McCoy on dobro and guitar, Norman Putman on bass and David Briggs on key boards.

Gavin B.

Espers Revives Sixties Era Psychedelic Folk Rock



Over the course of the past five years, the Philadelphia based band Espers has become my favorite band. The band has vintage folk rock, psychedelic sound (circa 1968) that was pioneered by the Byrds and Love in Los Angeles and Celtic rockers like Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band and Pentangle in the UK. Espers has cultivated the Haight Ashbury thrift shop hippie fashion look of the psychedelic era, but there are unmistakable post-modern touches to the band's music that make Espers's music akin to contemporary indie folk rockers like Fleet Foxes, Marissa Nadler, Band of Horses and Iron & Wine.


Meg Baird & Greg Weeks both have many other musical projects and solo careers aside from the involvment in Espers.

Singer and guitarist Meg Baird sounds and looks a lot like Sandy Denny the uniquely talented Celtic musician who sang for Fairport Convention during their peak years of musical success. Ms. Denny's brilliant career was sadly ended at age 31 by a fall down a flight of steps that took her life. Meg Baird shuns the comparisons to Sandy Denny and to be fair Ms. Baird's songwriting is her own unique musical statement. I've come across a solo album by Meg where she's playing guitar and singing with very litte other accompaniment and her voice has an entirely different quality in that musical setting.

Greg Weeks is an indie record label owner, a member of five different bands and the singer and guitarist for Espers. Mr. Week's long serpentine guitars solos bring the psychedelic element to the folk rock of Espers. All six band members (3 male & 3 female) are proficient singers and Week's choral arrangements makes their pristine vocals sound like delicately etched glass.

You'll notice that the haunting arrangement of Dead King uses some electronic enhancements and there isn't really a strict purist attitude toward technology on the part of the group. The vocal arrangement on Dead King is dazzling. There 4 (maybe 5) vocal parts, 2 guitar parts, a synth part, violin and some sort of woodwind, and they still all manage to texture the music beautifully instead of just making noise. That sort of texture layering of sound is what gives the Espers music an ethereal, other worldly qaulity.



The Road of Golden Dust is from the latest Espers album entitled Espers iii and primary features Greg Weeks on vocals with some assistance from Meg Baird. This song also showcases a psychedelic guitar crossfire between Greg Weeks and Brooke Sietinsons that recalls the celestial sounds of the twin guitar solos of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd when they both played guitar in Television.

Gavin B.

Ian Carey: Master Remixer


Ian Carey at the soundboard

Ian Carey has been a part of the worldwide house music scene for a number of years. He's one of my favorite producers and house music remixers.

Carey grew up in a small town in Maryland , USA about 2 hours from Washington DC. He had been exposed to the music business at a young age, as his father was a live sound engineer and ran a sound reinforcement company and had engineered for such groups as Kool & The Gang and The Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Carey became involved with dance music while in college. He had already experimented with the graffiti-writing scene in Baltimore, MD, where he met a number of hip-hop DJs, which led to him becoming involved in DJing. He was also introduced to house music while working at a record store. The success of Carey's first self-produced single "Rise" later influenced him to move to Europe to pursue a career in dance music production. His Song "Get Shaky" reached the top ten.

The first remix of Ian's I heard was his remix of Summerloverz' Summer of Love . It was a massive hit on the Paris and Ibiza underground club scene a few years back.



Ian Carey did this vibrant remix of Red Light:



The Ian Carey Project also did this 2009 remix of the Get Shakey.

Gavin B.

YACHT's Neo-Eighties Revival


Claire Evans & Jona Bechtolt of YACHT

I wasn't that impressed with last summer's See Mystery Lights by YACHT until I started hearing some of the remixes of the music by deejays. The remixes added a funky drum & bass line that recalled some music of some of the 80s London punk riot girrrrls like the Slits, Au Pairs and the Delta Five. This delightful Classixx remix of Psychic City is my new favorite dance floor remix of the newest crop of spring/summer 12" releases:



The video below of a live performance of YACHT at the French Rivera Midi-Festival gives you an idea of what the original Psychic City sounds like. Over the past year YACHT has toured the world from China, to Europe to Brazil while issuing cryptic manifestos online and in print; displaying a conspicuous obsession with triangles; and propagating a series of aphoristic mantras. AMG writes:

Gavin B.

The Tallest Man on Earth: Sweden's Dylanesque Bard


The Tallest Man on Earth (Kristian Mattson) is actually of average height

I cringe whenever the critics label an up and coming musician "the next Dylan" because it's usually hypervole, Comparing an up and coming performer to Dylan is usually the kiss of death for the the performer. It really doesn't do a service to the performer to be compared to Dylan because doing so sets an impossibly high set of expectations for the listener. Over the years I've heard "the next Dylan" comparison used to describe "used to be" preformers as P.F. Sloan, Barry McGuire, Bob Lind, Peter Mulvey & Lloyd Cole and look what it did for their careers. Bruce Springsteen was about the only survivor of "the next Dylan" tag and as it turned out, Springsteen turned out to be something very different from Robert Zimmerman.

So I was skeptical when AMG wrote the following about Kristian Mattson, a young Swedish folksinger who performs under the name of The Tallest Man on Earth. As it turns out AMG's review does a pretty good job of describing Mr. Mattson's talent and it's pretty hard to avoid "the next Dylan" cliche when you listen to the music. Like the early Dylan, Mattson performs without a backup band and he almost seems like an anacronism in the age high tech electonica, but it works in his favor because it gives his music a timeless quality. His brand new album The Wild Hunt is simply the best album I've heard in 2010 and I hope the Tallest Man on Earth survives "the next Dylan" label and keeps making great music own his own terms.

The first song is The Wild Hunt which is the title song of the Tallest Man on Earth's current album:



The King of Spain is the first single release from The Wild Hunt:

Gavin B.

Get Down with Get Back Guinozzi!


If quirky Europop with a dash of postpunk anarchy is your thing, then Get Back Guinozzi! may be the band for you.

Carpet Madness the debut album of the Paris/London band, Get Back Guinozzi!, was an 11th hour release in late October 2009, which has really grown on me since I purchased it last December. At first I didn't know what to make of this band. Most of their songs had a skittery funk groove similar to a lot of the early punk and post punk bands like the Delta 5, the Bush Tetras, the Gang of Four, the Mekons, Essential Logic and Au Pairs. Get Back Guinozzi! also has an element of self parody to their music similar to the space cadet schlock sensibility the B 52s.

I spent a good part of the early spring of 2010, only listening to their skewed cover of the great Junior Murvin/Lee Perry reggae classic Police and Theives (also covered by the Clash on their 1977 debut album). I really didn't know quite what to make of their wistful, bittersweet cover a song that the Clash played as a firey anthem to galvanize all young punks, way back in '77. I grew to like GBG's post-modernist intrepetation of Police and Theives and moved on to the rest of the songs which are all written by the two band leaders, vocalist Eglantine Gouzy and guitarist Frederic Landini.

There is a sense of mad giddiness that permeates nearly every track of Carpet Madness and despite their plethora of influences Gouzy and Landini have crafted an album of highly original music that is a joy to listen to on it's quirky own terms. Get Back Guinozzi! is getting heavy rotation on my radio show and lots of play in my own Zune player. The first song is Carpet Madness, the title song of the album:



The second song is their wacked-out cover of Police & Theives that I refered to earlier in the post:

Gavin B.

Gavin B.'s Picks: 2010 Summer Albums

The 2010 Spring/Early Summer music releases have contained a bounty of good albums if you're an indie pop music fan. I went through my pile of new releases last night and picked the following three albums as great downloads for your listening pleasure on summertime trips to the beach, the mountains or the forests.

The People's Record by Club 8



Club 8 is a joint musical project of Karolina Komstedt and Johan Angergård. Club 8 is the pillar of the ever growing community Swedish pop artists. Since 1998 the band has released 7 albums of eclectic indie pop with influences running a spectrum of music from trip hop, to bossa nova, to jazz, to the everpresent influence of ABBA, as is the case with most Scandanavian pop groups. Western Hospitality is the first single release from The People's Record.



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Clinging To A Scheme by The Radio Department



The Radio Dept. is another Swedish band and in the early 2000s R.D. was one of the more successful shoegaze bands to come out of Sweden. The Radio Dept.'s much anticpated late spring release finds the band moving away from their early fuzzy, low-fi shoegazer sound into a sleeker electroica/Brit pop sound.



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Gemini by Wild Nothing



Wild Nothing founder Jack Tatum is a veteran of the Blacksburg Virginia indie rock scene. Unfortunately, Blacksburg VA is mostly noted for being the home of Virginia Tech, the college campus where the notorious 2007 shooting spree by student Seung-Hui Cho took place. Gemini is the debut album of Wild Nothing and there were a couple of songs on it that I instantly connected with, including the song embedded below entitled Live In Dreams.



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Bulldog

I'll confess that I wasn't really impressed by that Radio Dept song you posted, but perhaps that's just me not being in the mood for it more than anything else. That Wild Nothing song's pretty cool, but the Club 8 one's the that stood out for me the most - has a real panache to it, which is never a bad thing. Just thought I'd say thanks for the post as well - I've been on the lookout for some good, genuinely new albums lately, so I'll be sure to check all these out as soon as I can.

Gavin B.

I'm with you on the Club 8. The People's Choice is one of the best releases this year. Club 8 a band that's been making near perfect albums since the turn of the millenium. It's the best choice of the summer releases.

The Wild Nothing (great name by the way) and Radio Dept.'s albums are a bit more uneven but there's a couple of outstanding cuts on each album if you look for them. I chose all three albums because they are lighter, summertime indie pop.

The best of the summertime oriented indie pop releases is Beach House's sublime Teen Dreams, but it was released way back in January and didn't qualify as a late spring/early summer release.

One of the summer appropriate releases I've been revisiting a lot on these hot summer days is the Flaming Lips' sublime 1999 album Soft Bulletin. I like the album in 2010 even more than I liked it 11 years ago. I especially have developed a deep affection for the song Buggin' which the only song you need to celebrate the summertime invasion of mosquitoes.

Gavin B.

As we rapidly approach the midway point in 2010, I decided it was time for me to jot down albums that have been noteable releases from January through June 2010, just to be prepared for the summer and fall glut of new releases that will come across my desk. This list got longer than I thought it would, and my midyear selections be a pretty decent listing for an entire years worth of releases. It's shaping up to be a great music year with lots of new artists that are begging for the attention of listeners.

Notable 2010 Releases (January-June)

Rock & Pop
Jose Gonzales- In Our Nature
Blitzen Trapper- Destroyer of the Void
Avi Buffalo- Avi Buffalo
Lightspeed Champion- Life Is Sweet! Nice to Meet You
Club 8- The People's Record
Woods- Echo Lake
Wild Nothing- Gemini
Port O' Brien- Thredbare
Samatha Crain- You (Understood)
The Radio Dept.- Clinging to a Scheme
Ariel Pink's Haunted Grafitti- Before Today
The National- High Violet
Beach House- Teen Dream
Karen Elson- The Ghost Who Walks
Joanna Newsome- Have One on Me
Charlotte Gainsbourg- IRM
David Bowie- A Reality Tour

Electronica
YACHT- See Mystery Lights
Yeasayer- Odd Blood
Crystal Castles- Crystal Castles (II)
BT- These Hopeful Machines
Lindstrom & Christabelle- Real Life Is No Cool

Folk & Americana
Brandi Carlille- XOBC
Carolina Chocolate Drops- Genuine Negro Jig
Band of Horses- Infinite Arms
Lissie- Catching A Tiger
Mary Gauthier- The Foundling

International
Gotan Project- Tango 3.0
Scientist- Dub Healing
Julieta Venegas Si
Rubén Blades & Willie Colón- Siembra


R&B/Hip Hop
Janelle Monáe- Archarachnoid
Reflection Eternal- Revolutions Per Minute
Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings- I Learned the Hard Way
Bettye LaVette- Interpetations: The British Song Book
Gil Scott Heron- I'm New Here

15 of the 35 artists are either female or bands where a female is the prominent artist and it mirrors the great strides made by women artists in pop music over the past decade. The day of the boyz in the band are behind us and women are beginning to get their due as both players and musical innovators.

There are a few albums conspicuously missing from my list that were heralded by both Pitchfork and AMG but those albums weren't up to par by my own listenings. Those below par albums are new issues by LCD Soundsystem, Male Bonding, Robyn, & Titus Andronicus.

There are also a few album issues that I'm anxious to hear but can't find or I haven't had the opportunity to really give a good listen to. If my list is missing something that you like, let me know and I'll give it a listen.