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Old 03-29-2011, 10:24 AM   #291 (permalink)
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New Sounds of Neo-Soul

The current neo-soul revival began around the turn of the Millennium when a handful New York based black female artists like Lauren Hill, Alicia Keys, Erykah Badu moved away from the pervasive influence of hip hop & electronic dance music & began making albums that drew on the classic sounds of '60s Stax & Atlantic soul & the Philly sound of the '70s.

Forgotten '70s soul sister Bettye LaVette's career was revived with the release of "The Scene of the Crime" in 2007, in which she recorded in the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, backed by the southern soul rockers, the Drive-By Truckers. The queen of New Orleans soul, Irma Thomas is also one of the fountainheads of the current soul music revival. Etta James the earliest R&B hitmaker for Chess Records had never quit recording or touring but her long career as a jazz, blues & soul singer finally received widespread recognition with a 2003 Grammy for Lifetime Acheivement.

As the first decade of the 2000s progressed the neo-soul sound made inroads into the UK charts with high profile album releases by Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone, & Duffy all of whom were Anglo singers heavily influenced by the sounds of Sixties R&B. Across the Pond, Philadelphia based Jill Scott, Denver native India.Airie & most recently the Hollywood band, Fitz & the Tantrums and Canadian soul singer Jully Black brought the neo-soul revival to American audiences.

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Rahael Saadiq

Raphael Saadiq is an Oakland based soul singer that has been around since the '80s but has only been recording as a solo artist since the 2002 release of his album "Instant Vintage." Raphel's had an early gig touring with the Sheila E. edition of Prince's band in the 80's. He was a founding member of two groups: Tony! Toni! Tone! & a Tribe Called Quest. Raphael has also produced albums by En Vogue, TLC, Macy Gray, the Roots & D'Angelo. This song Radio is from his new 2011 release Stone Rollin'.



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Aloe Blacc

The Los Angeles based E. Nathaniel Dawkins (aka Aloe Blacc) first began playing trumpet in elementary school, and continued with the instrument throughout high school. There he also independently released Imaginary Friends, produced by DJ Exile, with whom he would go on to form the hip-hop group Emanon. I Need A Dollar is from his second album Good Things, released in 2010.



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Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Augusta Georgia soul singer Sharon Jones is the leading artist of the Daptone Records, the New York based artist owned soul revival record label. The Dap-Kings are foremost live band of the current neo-soul movement & the house band for Daptone Records. The Dap-Kings's sound is heavily influenced by the Bar-Kays, Otis Redding's recording & touring band. This rendition of I'll Still Be True was filmed at the SXSW music festival.



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Last edited by Gavin B.; 03-29-2011 at 11:20 PM.
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Old 03-30-2011, 09:10 AM   #292 (permalink)
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That Raphael Saadiq fella sounds like quite a good catch. Great little number you posted there - I love that lively, northern soul kinda rhythm it's got to it. Definitely gonna check his work out in more depth as soon as I can. Not to mention the other two as well, as I've been on the lookout for some more neo-soul lately.

Good post sir
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Old 04-01-2011, 09:08 AM   #293 (permalink)
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Underworld Live & Direct


Underworld will be touring the summer festival circuit this summer & it was just announced that the band will be headlining the South West Four festival on Clapham Common, London on August 27-28 2011.

If this mind blowing live video of Karl Hyde with the electronica band Underworld doesn't get your adrenalin surging, then you're a flat-liner ready for the embalming table. This live studio performance of Two Months Off is compelling evidence that the pioneering band isn't ready to roll over and play dead for the music opinion makers who been telling us that Underworld is "so yesterday." Underworld has been making music together for 30 years & still remains one of the premier electronica bands of the current generation.

The video was filmed at a live studio performance by the band on radio station KCRW in Santa Monica California on January 18th 2011.

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Old 04-01-2011, 09:23 PM   #294 (permalink)
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That's hilarious because Underworld sounds less dated than a lot of bands that formed much more recently than 1980. Don't see how anyone could watch a video like that and not see that the band has an immense amount of talent... Good post, and a great band are you going to get to see them this summer?
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Old 04-02-2011, 08:56 AM   #295 (permalink)
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I'd absolutely love to see Underworld live - I'd imagine they make for just about one of the best live experiences ever. Looks like I'll be digging through my wallet for that bus trip to London then...
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Old 04-04-2011, 07:49 AM   #296 (permalink)
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My Latest Video Project

I'm a true believer in the peace & love sentiments & hippie ethic of Bob Sinclar's 2006 dance club hit "Hold On World." Bob's real name is Christopher La Friant & he's been spreading his message of love & unity since the late Eighties when emerged as a deejay on the Paris underground scene when he was still a teenager.

I edited some video footage of some of my favorite hippie dancers from San Francisico, to Goa, to Ibiza and Paris which I hope to adds some complimentary visuals to Bob's wonderful song. The two young Russian female fire dancers are my favorites of all the hippie dancers.

I also extended the length of song by piggybacking Esmoove's remix of the song on the front end of the official Bob Sinclar 12" vinyl single.

BTW: There's actually old film footage of me dancing at a music show in Sav La Mar Jamaica at the beginning of the video. There's also footage of my wife dancing with a couple of rasta men friends of ours at about 1:44 in the video. It was really fun going through my old video archives to put together this film. I must have looked at about 50 hours of old video (mostly in fast forward) to pull out and edit the footage for the film.




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To Bulldog: You should definitely plan on seeing Underworld @ SW4 in London in August. I can't think of any electronic band (or rock band for that matter) that puts on as mindblowin' a show as Underworld. Tickets for the Underworld show alone start at the reasonable price of £20. If I can find a cheap flight to London I may go myself. Here's where the ticket info is: Underworld Tickets & Tour Dates 2011 | Underworld Concert Tickets - Stereoboard UK
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Old 04-05-2011, 02:57 AM   #297 (permalink)
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A Trio of European Indie Pop Chanteuses

For today's blog post I'm showcasing a talented trio of female singer songwriters who have enjoyed some measure of success in Europe but remain largely unknown to American audiences. I've collected all of their American album release & spent a lot of time listening to their respective releases over the past month or two.

Sophie Hunger


Sophie Hunger is a Zurich based musician who's creating a great deal of buzz in Europe but has yet to make inroads in the USA despite the 2010 release of an excellent (and mostly English language album), entitled 1983. If you like French pop chanteuses like Charlotte Gainsbourg & Francoiz Breut or the sultry vocal style of Beth Gibbons of the trip-hop ensemble Portishead, you'll probably like Sophie Hunger's music.

Her full-length solo album debut, Sketches on Sea (2006), was a home-recorded effort that steadily became an underground sensation. It helped, of course, that Hunger was an engaging live performer. Her renown as a live performer led to an appearance at the 2008 Montreux Jazz Festival, among other high-profile appearances.

Sophie Hunger- Le Vent Nous Portera, from the 2010 album 1983.



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Vashti Bunyan



In the mid 1960s Vashti Bunyan was an aspiring British folk singer who fell into the orbit of Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham and she was groomed to be a folk/pop singer in the mode of two other Oldham protégées, Nico & Marianne Faithfull. From my perspective, Vashti's musical talent was deeper and more unique than either Nico or Marianne's because of her abundant songwriting skills and her pristine mezzo-soprano singing voice.

Unfortunately, Vashti got lost in the delirium tremors of the '70's & she disappeared into to the parallel reality of the Almost Famous Icons of the Sixties Pop Subculture. Following her 15 minutes of musical fame, Vashti got married and raised a family.

Then something funny happened... In 2000, the right person found a dusty copy her 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day in a flea market bin & managed to convince the British indie label Dichristina Stair to release the long out of issue album. Suddenly at age 55, Vashti Bunyan was doing interviews for music publications, touring & recording new material. In fact her second "almost famous" career in music has been more successful than her first.

The song below, the delicately gorgeous Winter Is Blue was recorded for the Diamond Day sessions but never appeared on any album until Just Another Diamond Day was reissued thirty years after it's original release date.

Vashti Bunyan- Winter Is Blue (1970) appears as a bonus track on the 2000 reissue of the album Just Another Diamond Day.



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Elin Kastlander



I confess that I've fallen completely under the spell of Elin Kastlander's winsome voice. Ms. Kastlader is one half of the Swedish electronic pop group jj (Yes the two "J"s are spelled in lower case with no period after each of the "J"s.)

Jj combines atmospheric synthetic pop with mind spacing psychedelic effects. The duo's songs reveal the subtle influence of classical madrigals (Are You Still In Vallda?), childish nursery-rhymes (My Love), Western-movie soundtracks (My Hopes And Dreams) and girl-groups of the 1960s (the evocative and nostalgic Masterplan), but each becomes the victim of a deliberate shift of context by the arrangements. Jj's two album releases have the oddly generic titles of jj No.2 & jj No.3. I'm not sure what happened to jj No.1... maybe they're saving that title for a greatest hits album.

jj- Masterplan from the 2007 album jj No.2

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Old 04-06-2011, 06:39 AM   #298 (permalink)
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Commentary by Gavin B.


Two Tahitian Women. National security alert: There's naked ladies in the National Museum of Art!

Police say Susan Burns, 53 of Alexandria VA, tried to pull a painting called “Two Tahitian Women” off the wall, at the National Gallery of Art then started punching the painting with her fists. The painting is by the renown French painter Paul Gauguin.


Susan Burns- Self styled right-wing art critic

According to police the Ms. Burns made the following statement after her attack on the painting :
Quote:
'I feel that Gauguin is evil. He has nudity and is bad for the children. He has two women in the painting and it's very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned. I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you.'"
Well put Ms. Burns!....And that crazy Tea Party icon, Michelle Bachmann, is behind you 100%. Congresswoman Bachmann suggests you carry a gun on your next visit to the museum, so you can hold off the police while you demolish that homo Gauguin painting once & for all.

Seriously... don't you think that conservatives are going a bit overboard with their cultural jihad? If Susan Burns has a radio in her head, she should stop tuning in the Rush Limbaugh Show.

The Nazis may have burned books, but at least they had the common sense to put all the valuable works of art into storage so, they could raffle them off to pay off any future Third Reich budget deficits.

I'm guessing that right wingers never knew that paintings of unclothed subjects have been hanging on the walls of museums because they never bothered to visit one.

I can hear John Boehner now, "The won't be any naked ladies in the National Museum on my watch!" Apparently Republicans are unaware that Jesus never got the chance to sail to Tahiti, so he could tell all those bare breasted tribal women to stop flaunting it.

Don't worry about the fate of Susan Burns. The Lord will forgive her for her act of crazed vandalism and she'll land on her feet. I'm seeing a Tea Party nomination for one of the Virginia seats in U.S. House of Representatives in the feisty Ms. Burns' future. Until she makes the Virginia 2012 ballot, she make ends meet with a gig working for Rupert Murdoch as the Fox News resident art critic.

I can only quote rock music's Man with the Plan, Elvis Costello, on the current rise of lunatic behavior among right-wingers in America: "I used to feel disgusted, now I try to be amused."

Since Ms. Burns claims to have a radio in her head telling her to destroy evil works of art, I thought the Talking Head anthem for delusional loonies, Radio Head would be an appropriate selection for today's song. This one is dedicated to Susan Burns & the well armed legion of Tea Party radio heads everywhere.



Radio Head by the Talking Heads

Baby your mind is a radio
Got a reciever inside my head
Baby I'm tuned to your wavelength
Lemme tell you what it says:

Transmitter!
Oh! Picking up something good
Hey, radio head!
The sound...Of a brand-new world.

So look at my fingers vibrate
From their tip down down to my toes
Now I'm recieving your signal
We're gonna leave the land of noise

Transmitter!
Oh! Picking up something good
Hey, radio head!
The sound...Of a brand-new world.

Transmitter!
Oh! Picking up something good
Hey, radio head!
The sound...Of a brand-new world.

Now you and I have no secrets
Now baby, lemme read your mind
I hear ev'rything you're thinking
You can't help the way you sound

Transmitter!
Picking up something good.
Hey! Radio head!
The sound...Of a brand-new world

Oh! Radio Head
Radio Head
Radio Head
Radio Head
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Old 04-06-2011, 06:15 PM   #299 (permalink)
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I'll admit I never really listen to Talking Heads lyrics an awful lot - as much as I love the sound of the songs themselves, David Byrne's lyrics tend to just be random drivel to me. True Stories is probably the only one I tend to make an exception to that rule for though. Seeing as each song's based off tabloid stories of the day, it makes for more interesting reading/listening to the things.

As for the rest of it, you've gotta wonder what the point in it is. The world of visual art is never gonna pander to the over-sensitive, no matter what some right-wing nutjob tries to do about it.
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Old 04-07-2011, 09:44 AM   #300 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bulldog View Post
I'll admit I never really listen to Talking Heads lyrics an awful lot - as much as I love the sound of the songs themselves, David Byrne's lyrics tend to just be random drivel to me. .
Allow me to rise in defense of David Byrne. Many of Byrne's lyrics are more about mood rather that meaning. Byrne responded to his critics with his own terse but brilliant statement on the limitations of rigid conventional thinking, "Stop making sense."

Patti Smith, Beck, Syd Barrett, & most notably Bob Dylan (during his Bringing It All Back Home/Highway 61/Blonde on Blonde period) were all influenced by the Dada & Surrealist artists like Marcel Duchamp & Andres Breton along with the French Symbolist writers like Stephan Mallarme, Charles Baudelaire, & Arthur Rimbaud. Byrne is one of many outstanding musicians who have adopted the surrealist form of artistic expression.

And Byrne isn't the first artist to receive critical backlash for his use of surrealism. When Bob Dylan moved away from topical songs in 1965 and toward surrealist & symbolist influences, many of his fans, music critics, and musical peers criticized Dylan's stream of consciousness lyrics as self indulgent nonsense. Yet many of lyrics of songs like It's All Over Now Baby Blue, Mr. Tambourine Man, Ballad of A Thin Man, Desolation Row, & Visions of Johanna are regarded as his most enduring & literate songs.

It was rock music played a big role in raising the public's awareness of all but dead surrealist movement, during the Sixties & the Seventies. By 1967, even the Beatles were wearing their surrealist influences on their sleeve with songs like Strawberry Fields, Hello Goodbye & I Am the Walrus. My interest is surrealism began with my own curiosity about the title of the 1967 Jefferson Airplane album Surrealistic Pillow. That single innocuous album title opened the doors of perception for me.

David Byrne's unique role was to bring more of psychosocial element to the table. Byrne & his primary musical mentor, Brian Eno are both devotees to the ideas of psychoanalyst Karl Jung. Jung believed that the subconscious mind was every bit as important to human development as the fully awakened, self aware and analytical conscious mind.

From the Jung perspective, the great division between the non-logical dream life of the subconscious mind & the logical, fully awakened conscious mind is a false dichotomy. In that context David Byrne's use of literary devices like juxtaposed imagery, dystopian ideas, disjointed framing, dramatic irony & extended allegories are all within the stylistic range of the great surrealist writers & composers. Surrealist painters like Salvadore Dali, Max Ernst, & Rene Magritte expressed similar ideas on canvass.

David Byrne does deserve criticism for his post Talking Heads career. Since the breakup of the band, Byrne has become a bit of a obscurantist who is all over the grid in his pursuit of the esoteric. He hasn't made a single great album during his solo career. Instead Byrne become a tourist in the enchanted land of artistic pretentiousness. All told, David Byrne had about 15 brilliant years before falling into artistic irrelevance which is about 10 years longer the productive lifespan of even the most creative musicians.
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