The Myths v. The Truths

It’s raining again. Cannes is half flooded and the crowd in Morrisons is consequently thinner than it might be. I’ve come for Les Jupes but find another band onstage when I get there. Then, there’s the now familiar wait as the changover drags and drags

As the band take the stage I see that I’ve spotted them earlier loading gear out of a taxi. The tiny stage plays host to the house kit, two keyboards, a bass and a guitar and as the band take the stage I realise that I’ve been blindsided. I’m expecting cool, I’m expecting a certain degree of stylisation and I’ve assumed the edgy looking bass player with the on-trend glasses and hair is the lead singer. He’s not.

The first song start with a clinically executed drum pattern from one of the tightest drummers you’ll hear and then the blocky guy stage left, the guy you could imagine playing a New York cop in a David Lynch movie reveals himself to be Mike Falk, core writer and lead singer of Les Jupes. I’ve read about his powerful baritone, it still doesn’t prepare me for it. It instantly calls to mind – not quite Ian Curtis – but New Order’s Ceremony, their hastily put together momento mori for their dead leader. The song’s queasy keyboard riffs tug back and forth at the vocal in an exemplar of how to unsettle and emote at the same time. Over the course of the next few songs David Schellenberg weaves back and forth between keyboard and bass while Mike Falk’s vocals become increasingly hypnotic.

The band are touring on the back of the European release of their ‘Modern Myths’ album and the set features both that albums ‘myth’ songs – Myth #3 (the Mountain) ansd Myth #7 (Honour) with which they close in a wonderfully realised pocket-tornado of harmonies with both David Schellenberg and Kelly Beaton really singing for the first time in the set.
Somewhere along the way they have insinuated a few as yet unreleased tracks into the set and here’s the truth – these songs are among the strongest they’ve played tonight.

Really, it’s over much to soon. It’s a festival set, a little taster that hints at a broader palate and I’m hungry for more.

Raiding The Archive

The MIDEM festival at Cannes likes to think it’s shaking off it’s fuddy-duddy image and getting ‘down with the kids’ or some such. A big part of that is MIDEM OFF which is an attempt to bring a scuzzy / indie live dimension to the proceedings and so I hauled myself through the rainswept streets of Cannes to see Edmonton’s ‘The Provincial Archive’. I got to the venue to find a girl wringing what sounded like a heavily mutated version of Take Five out of a piano before realising I was in the wrong room. This meant I missed The Provincial Archive’s opener ‘I’m A Believer’ and if that’s their standout track then apologies to all involved.

Battling for space on the tiny stage the basic line-up was guitar, keyboard, drums and upright bass with brief sorties into melodica wrangling and banjo taming (both very successfully) and some electric bass which at least meant they had room to exhale. They’ve also mastered the art of swopping instruments onstage without creating stops in the flow of the music which is no mean feat and quite a testament to their stagecaft.

Although the guitarist takes the bulk of the vocal duties, as far as I could make out everyone else also sings and some of the highpoints came when they hit the harmonies.

Their set was consistently catchy and it would be difficult to pick standout tracks but if I was pushed I’d opt for Trading Thrills, which closes out their second album ‘Maybe We Could Be Holy’ and the song which closed their set ‘Weight & Sea’ in which they throw in a mix of live drums and programmed beats, with the keyboard track running off the laptop and some heavily treated guitar, like a poppier Centro-matic but without the weight and menace that that band can assert.

This was their first gig outside Canada, but their forthcoming third album is getting a European release so hopefully we’ll see more of them.

You can find out more about them (although not a whole lot more, they play their cards pretty close to their chests) at http://www.theprovincialarchive.com

High Drama

For Willy Vlautin it’s almost always about the story and for most of Richmond Fontaine’s history their records have been dotted with vignettes and novellas disguised as songs. Some, like Laramie, Wyoming for example, share narrative elements with his novels while others, like the postcards dotted throughout ‘Post to Wire’ tease out the bare bones of a story. Sometimes, as in The Boxer, the whole narrative unfolds in the course of one song. Absolutes, definites and conclusions are rare and that is one of Willy Vlautin’s great strengths as a writer, his ability to give away just enough of the story that we can supply our own ending if we want.

‘The High Country’ then is a departure of sorts in as much as the story plays out over the course of the whole album and while there are stories that trail off deliciously, leaving us to draw our own conclusions, there is also a beginning, a middle and an end of sorts. It has taken me quite a while to come to terms with it as a record and to figure out which of my knee-jerk reactions is justified. The cast of characters is wider than anywhere before (even in his novels he tends to keep it pretty tightly grouped) and although the principal character remain nameless we’re introduced to a gallery of misfits whao are drawn with broad strokes. One of the most striking departures though is the abandoning of the trademark gritty realism for a gothic sense of the grotesque, Raymond Carver deserted in favour of the ghost of Mary Shelley.

It’s tempting to characterise the album as an alt-country opera but it’s looser than that, more a song cycle, but it does share a sense of high melodrama with opera and it does use spoken word recitative pieces to move the story along. The opening scene setter has an unidentified narrator outline the bear bones of the story, revealing a fragmentary knowledge which we’ll have expounded upon and the scant details filled in with the real story. With a new producer on board we might expect the sound of the record to move away from what they’ve done before but although it’s looser in its overall feel than it’s predecessor it makes nods towards the band’s extensive back catalogue and ranges across the gamut of styles they’ve embraced through their career.

Is it any good though? As a whole it works. As a concept, once you accept that it doesn’t share the same groundrules as their previous work, it’s strong. The story is high gothic and it is served with a wry side of schlock humour which takes a bit of geting used to. The essential bind though is that the songs are secondary to the overall story and while the record has some great moments musically (The Chainsaw Sea, Let Me Dream of The High Country, The Eagles Lodge, Lost In The Trees) many of the link pieces don’t bear much in the way of repeated listening and some – I’m thinking here of I Can See A Room – are frankly bizarre. It’s as if they’ve deliberately set out to record something that sounds like a substandard 1980s musical, a cast-off from Phantom of The Opera or Les Miserables. It may be a joke, it may even be a good joke, but I find that mawkish synth too much to stick with.

I’ve found myself listening to it a lot, but skipping to the songs that strike home. I guess it may be one of those ‘get it out of your system’ records. We’ll have to wait for its successor to know that for certain though.

Joe Gracey – an appreciation

This isn’t so much an obituary for Joe Gracey – other people who know more about him will do that far better elsewhere – as an appreciation of a man of tremendous personal courage and grace. I met him briefly a couple of years back when Miss Paula Flynn and myself supported Kimmie Rhodes in Sligo. After the gig we stayed behind to interview her and of course ‘Gracey’ as she invariably referred to him, had to hang back too, which he did with a wry smile and a casual toss of the head. Anyone who has seen Kimmie play – and she has been to Ireland on a regular basis over the last few years – will have known the long, tall, perennially stooped (so that he didn’t completely tower over his diminutive wife) figure of Joe Gracey, playing beautifully restrained bass and grinning beatifically. Once a talented singer in his own right, his voice had been taken by cancer of the larynx in the late 1970s although on her last visit here it seemed, astonishingly, as if he might regain some power of speech. His difficulties though made him into the kind of cool, laid back guy who observed life with a wry smile as he moved quietly through the world. He exuded a warmth and a sense of ease with his lot.

His sense of calm acceptance and self-assurance probably came from the fact that his achievements were many and that he had been central in building what we now know of as alternative country. In the early seventies he had been a disc jockey at Austin’s legendary KOKE-FM where he played Willie Nelson – who he described as the Bob Dylan of country music, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, Commander Cody and Kinky Friedman, laying down the foundations of what would come to be called Redneck Rock. He was also a rock critic and at a time when rock music itself was increasingly unfocussed and flaccid he pointed his readers towards the fledgling Outlaw country movement

He was also the original talent coordinator for the Austin City Limits television series and his booking policy ensured that Townes van Zandt, Clifton Chenier, Marcia Ball, and Asleep at the Wheel were all recorded for posterity. His forward thinking approach also meant that the series was unmissable for any right-thinking music fan and in no small way helped build a reputation so solid that the series is still running.
After his initial tussle with cancer his days as a radio presenter were at an end but encouraged by his friend Cowboy Jack Clement he opened Electric Graceyland studios where he recorded, amongst others, Alejandro Escovedo, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and a young Stevie Ray Vaughn. It was there too that he first met Kimmie Rhodes who at the time had not fully developed as a musician. She wrote – plays and poetry mainly – but had not become the songwriter that she would develop into with his encouragement.

He continued to be a vital force in country music recording at his studio when he wasn’t on the road, sharing guitar duties with Gabe Rhodes on the Willie Nelson / Ray Price collaboration ‘Run That By Me One More Time’ which he also recorded and engineered. His star, like his courage, never faltered.

As a radio presenter his catchphrase was ‘another day in paradise’. I hope that’s how it plays out for him.

Veirs off course

OK. let’s get one thing out of the way. The latent sub-editor that lurks within me drove me to that ‘Veirs off course’ tag-line. In point of fact I think she’s right on track. After a major label career lasting through most of the past decade she has now decided to once again take the reins herself. Her new album ‘July Flame’ is therefore reverts back to her own Raven Marching Band imprint on which her first pre-Nonesuch records appeared. In the UK and Ireland the record is released by Bella Union and there’s a fittingness to that, with so much of Bella Union’s roster having a spiritual link back to label founders the Cocteau Twins, it’s a label with a very definite feel and this album fits. The ‘file under folk’ categorisation can sometimes sound a death-knell for a record but here the songwriting is too strong for the albums impact to be denied. The instrumentation is kept pared back with only the title track feeling a little bass and drum heavy. Elsewhere, her guitar playing, as might be expected, is the principal driving force of the record. Where she shifts from this central tenet it’s with good reason, the banjo and strings backbone of ‘Where Are You Driving’ for example gives it an emotional palette that guitar by itself couldn’t furnish. Elsewhere there are little country tinged flourishes, a few dabs of pedal steel here, some tremelo saturated electric guitar there. A lot of the songs have an easy familiarity about them, glancing off melodies that are already imprinted somewhere in the back room of your consciousness but making them her own. ‘I wanted to make something sweet’ she sings on the album’s closing track ‘Make Something Good’ and she certainly has done that. Elsewhere she sings of doing ‘as you damn well please’ and I’d like to think she enjoyed herself making this record in that spirit.

Vic Chesnutt R.I.P.

It’s hard to take on board that Vic Chesnutt has died. I was in Newfoundland in November and found his latest album ‘Skitter on Take-Off in a record shop. I bought it. You would. Ramshackle as he could be, and this is at the most ramshackle end of the spectrum his records were always exuberant in some strange downtrodden way and always yielded up a few tracks worth the price of admission. Produced, if you could call it that, by Jonathan Richman and Tommy Larkins it’s quintessential Chesnutt – the celebrity friends without any of the glitz or glamour. He was a cantankerous, awkward, morbidly depressive man who railed against his paraplegic condition but he was so well loved by his friends (celebrity and otherwise) that you had to accept on faith that there was a warmth there as well. Reports have attributed his death to a self administered overdose of muscle relaxants, his suicide, if that was what it in fact was, the result of a deepening sense of desolation brought on by his inability to pay for his medical bills. In a story that mirrors the demise earlier in the year of former Wilco member Jay Bennett, the US healthcare system must once again accept a burden of blame as it fails time and again to make any allowances for the realities of life for those unable to get health insurance. Chesnutt, confined to a wheelchair since the age of 19 and with a couple of decades of solid drinking and drug abusing under his belt would have found it impossible to get health insurance at a price he could afford on a gigging musician’s income and that was what sentenced to death. He died on Christmas Day in a society that has made an unreformed Scrooge it’s guiding light. He has left a huge body of music but the most fitting bequest he could leave would be if some of those celebrity friends could use his death as a fulcrum on which to lever a move for healthcare reform. Barack Obama has promised a dream of America, but a waking reality is also needed, a reality where a broken backed man has an option other than to take his own life

More detour than beginning

I’ve never been much of a one for Tina Dico, although she’s presented as much as a singer-songwriter as a pop artist I never bought into it. The production, to my mind, pegged her as a pop wannabe. To be fair, artists don’t necessarily get to call the shots in production terms and anyone can change so let’s take ‘A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending’ on its own merits. First of all, you don’t see a lot of triple albums anymore – well you never did really, the only other one I can think of outside of 70s prog rock is the Clash’s Sandinista set – so it’s going to be a long haul. That said, there are a total of 20 tracks, one of which is a pretty short instrumental so maybe there isn’t so much cause for concern after all. Dico’s sleeve notes explain that after recording ‘Count To Ten’ she was left with a drawerful of songs and that her initial intent was to bang out three EPs that she could sell on tour and that only when the recording was finished did she realise they merited a full release.

The first disc opens promisingly enough with ‘He Doesn’t Know’ a temptingly dour little paean to an ended relationship, all minor keys and self doubt, and it sets the mood production wise too, drawing on a limited palette of guitar, piano and, apparently, whatever was knocking about the studio. this production approach serves the record well and some of the songs stand up for themselves too, while others circle around themselves as if attempting unsuccessfully to get to the point. There’s a strongly confessional strand to the songs and on some, like ‘Friend In A Bar’ the lyrics carry a weight of emotional honesty but there are others like ‘London’ which dissipate the energy.

Producing a three disc set is a costly and indulgent way to release music and it draws a level of focus onto the songs, a level of scrutiny that this particularly set of songs doesn’t bear well enough. This is a cracking little album. It’s not, unfortunately, three cracking little albums.

Listen . . .

Christy Moore’s new album ‘Listen’ arrived in my mailbox with a pile of photocopied sheets that I presume are the inlay card and booklet. No press release, no cover letter, no excess PR junk. If the point was that Christy needs no more than his own recordings it couldn’t have been more succinctly put. Even the album title ‘Listen’ seems to reinforce the point. Just listen to the music. Nothing else. After forty years touring, releasing records Christy Moore has become such an institution in Ireland that he himself, more often than not, becomes the story and somehow the music get lost. People tell Christy stories, how they saw him at such and such a festival, what he said, the jokes he cracked, how he told a heckler to shut up. Somehow the music gets sidelined.

Over the last number of years he has subtly changed his approach, gigging less frequently than before, performing two handed shows with his long time companion Declan Sinnott, a guitar player of breath-taking scope who can do as much with six strings as most bands muster in a show. Although the set still contains many of the classic feelgood Christy songs there are quieter, more contemplative songs too and the pairing onstage adopt an almost zen-like calm at times.

This is how we’ve come to the latest album, its minimalist artwork wouldn’t be out of place on an ambient release and from the minute the title track – Hank Wedell’s ‘Listen’ starts to play the basic premise is established. The instrumentation is fuller than the live shows, but subtly so, there are no histrionics, no pyrotechnics and the album’s power comes from the slow unfolding of a set of contemplative songs, mined from a wide variety of sources, being welded into one powerful block by a singer whose true gift is being able to inhabit the songs like the ghost of their writers. Christy Moore has always performed the songs of others but here it becomes blindingly apparent that he has a giant gift for empathy, a towering ability to feel the words of others as if they were his own. He lives Gortnatagort, a personal song even by the extremely personal standards of its writer John Spillane. People wonder why John Spillane songs aren’t covered more. His songs are so personal and so idiosyncratically written that it takes a masterful re-imaginer to get under their skin and breathe in them and few can manage that.

When I got the record and saw that it had a cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ I wondered at the wisdom of tackling it. The original, although written about a lost friend is so overblown and theatrical that it runs itself into the ground like a slow puncture. Here though it is stripped down and humanised, humbled as a song it finds its purpose again.

Towards the end of the album there is a three song coda which starts with a cover of the old Billy Fury track ‘I Will’, sung not by Christy but by Declan. What other singer would have the humility and the confidence to hand over the reins like that? A version of the folk standard ‘John O’Dreams’ beds the record down again before the closing track, a ripsnorting live version of ‘Rory is Dead’ a paean to the late Irish rocker Rory Gallagher.

Idiosyncratic in its own fashion to the last this record should go down as one of the strongest to date in his forty year plus career

Mavericks 1 Convention 0

I don’t know where it came from but in my postbox I found an album called ‘Fading Fast’ by a Dublin singer called Garret Baker. The cover artwork was beautiful – very evocative pencil drawing of three blindfolded girls in a wood with a fox. Now sometimes a cover means absolutely nothing but I was more inclined to slap this one into the CD player than the rest of the morning’s crop. Presumably because it’s mainly guitar and voice either garret or whoever does his PR thought it should qualify as folk and I guess in some way it does, with it’s tales of a gloomy alt-Dublin, peopled by characters with their own sorrows to keep them company. At times it veers dangerously close to singer-songwriter slush but it gets a lifeline from it’s creaky patch it up and make it do production which reminded me of the first Young Marble Giants LP with a few nods to Nico and the Velvet Underground thrown in. Lots of heavily reverbed guitars and asthmatic keyboards make it a queasy listen and Garret’s vocals are fairly nasal too. The playing has a threadbare chic to it, with the odd bassline wandering from the fold and guitars just about in tune but it suits itself and feels well worn rather than sloppy. The decision to mire the vocals in reverb comes close to sabotaging the whole affair and at times it drives the sound into unlistenable teritory but the songs are well written for the most part and bear sticking with. This could have been a better record but it’s sins are venial. You can find him online at http://www.myspace.com/garretbaker

Dylan schlepp

I’ve just heard the first preview track ‘Beyond Here Lies Nothing’ from the upcomiong Bob Dylan record, which he has posted on his rcrdlbl.com mini-site.    Like a lot of musicians before him he has looked to the dirty backwater jazz blues of New orleans to give up the sonic vocabulary he needs but whereas Paul SImon blended it with jit-jive and Tome Waits transformed it into a half alien tongue with a band as maverick as himself Dylan plays it horrendously straight with nary a surprise from the swampy guitar and squirling hammond.   The lyrics are pretty programmatic.   Unless this is some sort of ruse to throw us off the scent this doesn’t bode well for the album.  Beyond Here Lies Nothing?  I hope not, but I’m not holding my breath.