Culturespill

Bill Fox with The Mice in the 1980s (Far Right)

Trying to find Bill Fox these days is a bit too much like trotting the globe in a hot air balloon in search of Amelia Earheart’s plane. And trying to find an actual album of his? Well, it’s kind of like stumbling upon Atlantis, only to realize it’s just a foil reconstruction accompanied by a crayon map to the real deal.

Some swear his 1998 masterpiece, Shelter from the Smoke, is available on iTunes–so you click that stupid iTunes icon in the lower-left screen of your mp3-crippled laptop in a frenzy, only to find, yet again, absolutely no trace of this brilliant phantom. Then you read that something called “Scat Records” actually talked to the man–which, after all this time, sounds a lot like that dude who took publisher McGraw-Hill to the cleaners with his bullshit story about how Howard Hughes had chosen him to write his autobiography. So you dig a little deeper and find a story about how Shelter and his other solo gem, Transit Byzamtium, are actually going to be reissued, and that Shelter’s due out in September (as in, like, now.)

Then you go to the Scat Records website and find a tossed-off note explaining that “Bill Fox’s Shelter from the Smoke is going to be an ‘09 release” now, because they “couldn’t get the art together in time for the deadline.” This along with a stale promise that “Bill stopped writing and performing music a few years ago, but has plans to start back up again relatively soon.” Emphasize “relatively,” of course. The saga of Bill Fox’s mystifyingly difficult journey to the wider attention he so richly deserves continues, relegating him now to that dreaded remainder bin of American culture–the one marked “cult status.” Wonderful.

About 9 years ago, when I began this half-life of a music dork, I took some buddies of mine to a record sale being held up in NYC to benefit a favorite college station of mine (I think it was WFMU, but 9 years is a lot of time for various bouts with weed and Jamison to overwhelm whole passages of memory with a kind of dull blur, so who knows), and stumbled upon an album called Shelter from the Smoke by a guy named Bill Fox. I had never heard of him, but the dutiful indie elves pitching CDs for their label “Cherry Pop” pushed it hard, and I bit–in the same way I bit and bought a bootleg box set of Dylan’s so-called “Albert Hall” shows with the promise that it wouldn’t have the garbled, “recorded from ten-thousand leagues under the sea” sound of most bootlegs, only to find, 200 dollars later, that it had the “recorded from ten-thousand leagues under the sea” sound of most bootlegs.

Bill Fox with “The Mice” in 1988

Fortunately, however, Fox’s album was no tinny bootleg; it was a masterful onslaught of 18 folk-pop diamonds mined in Fox’s own apartment, often with little more than a guitar to accompany a voice full of honey and heartbreak–a lachrymose and vaguely effeminate wail so eternally young that it brings to mind a nest of just-hatched birds clamoring for a worm. Many great ghosts haunt these songs–Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Eliot Smith, Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, Nick Drake. You can hear Dylan’s “My Back Pages” calling from the chorus of “Junked Lot Serenade” where Fox sings about how “all the stars form their tragedies at ten.” Shades of The Byrds’ “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” color the lilting and bare-bones folk revival of “I’m Not Over Loving You,” and I think Tim Hardin dies somewhere in the distance of “Brittany Goes Right Down,” an instantly hypnotic dirge worthy of its own spot on the Velvet Underground’s Loaded (preferably in the capable hands of Nico.)

For whatever reason, I hadn’t listened much to the album since then, and hardly even gave it a second thought until Dave Eggers’s magazine The Believer came out with a piece by a guy who called himself “lefty” and went on a not-entirely fulfilling pursuit for the ephemeral Bill Fox, who had by then retreated back into telemarketing hell in some soul-choking cubicle wilderness of Cleveland, Ohio, banished to a bitter self-exile from unattained dreams. “I’m dying to lay some tracks down somewhere,” he would say in 1998, shortly before his comprehensive vanishing act from the music scene, “I’d love to record a rock ‘n roll record, but I’m not in a position to put up my own money right now.”

He’d long-since abandoned the local punk outfit he fronted with his bro on the drums, Cleveland’s “Mice,” back in the mid ’80s. “No longer was that garage-pop thing relevant for the kind of songs I was writing,” Fox told the Seattle Weekly ten years later, “I just kinda let it crumble.” He would learn not too long thereafter–to the dismay of the artist and to we who might have heard all the albums he never could afford to cut–that what will crumble will crumble whether or not he cared to “let it.”

In another prophetic concession published by Seattle Weekly in 1998, he would say “”I’m able to go a few months without working with the money I got from SpinArt”–the label the picked up Shelter from the Smoke after Cherry Pop released it to absolute critical and commercial disregard a couple years prior–”But I’m a telemarketer, and I’ll end up in that business again when the money runs out. Just living and writing songs.” All of which came true, except for the whole “writing songs” part: rumor has it that the man no longer even owns a fucking guitar, so complete has his disgust with the industry’s blindness to talent become. How fitting it is, then, that we too are left clinging to the very hope the man himself apparently abandoned so long ago, the thin likelihood that we may someday hear all those tracks he was “dying to lay down somewhere,” someday, somehow.

One More Track:

Over and Away She Goes

Hear an interview with Bill Fox (1998)

Bill Fox Fan Page on Myspace Here.

Praise For Bill Fox:
Things I’d Rather Be Doing: “It’s a shame that Fox has soured on music, because he’s awfully good at it. On his two solo discs, he offers a total of 36 songs, and nearly all of them are keepers . . . This is folk in spirit more than sound, the songs so well crafted as to feel like public domain wonders rather than 10-year-old pop tunes recorded in the basement on weekends by a 9-to-5er.”

The Narrative Review: “Stylistically, it perhaps hearkens back to early Dylan, only it has a more polished sound despite the fact that Fox recorded it at home. Fox is accompanied by nothing more than his own guitar, but he manages to flesh out the sound through his superb playing. Fox’s voice however is not like Dylan’s nasal twang, but is surprisingly effeminate. There’s something Nico-esque about it, although it’s nowhere as a deep or given the fact that he’s from Cleavland, Germanic. However, given my literary predilections, what gets me most about the song is the craftsmanship of the lyrics.

Rakes Progress: “I’ve been clued in and listening to Bill Fox’s albums Shelter from the Smoke & Transit Byzantium. They’re pretty wonderful, I think, especially the latter. I might not go so far as to call Fox a lost genius, but he seems to have a healthy respect for the Great American Songbook and knows his craft, which makes for great pop music (that unfortunately isn’t popular at all, but could or should be).”

The Driftwood Singers Present: “It’s hard to know why Bill Fox didn’t emerge as one of his generation’s great songwriters, but we hear tell of personal dilemmas that set him back and sidelined him from the music business altogether. Mental and emotional fragility infuse his songs, which are often the sound of idealism dog-paddling to stay above the cynical waters of modern life.”

by Stephen Foster

It is either fashionable to praise Glen Campbell’s recently released and ironically titled Meet Glen Campbell, or in fact I am completely off base here and it is truly an admirable work. I have yet to read even a slightly negative review of this “re-introduction” of the 72-year old Glen Campbell to a new and obviously younger (I suppose) audience—and perhaps reconnect with those who loved hits such as “Wichita Lineman” or “Gentle on My Mind” in the late 1960’s and early 1970s. The Hatch-Show-Print looking cover of Meet Glen Campbell possesses a slightly hip, yet still old-fashioned look: the perfect graphic illustration, one presumes, of what this release is all about. It’s about a long-dormant legend being acknowledged for his past and at the same time praised for his being artistically relevant, still.

On one level, it may accomplish all of that, certainly the former (giving props to a brilliant past). But it is, sadly, not very compelling, which is to say it’s not so great an effort. In fact, I don’t think much of it is even worthy of release.

Now, it’s sometimes too easy to criticize and even to veer into condescension—especially when the target is relevance itself, as in such and such a legend wants to re-prove himself or herself to the listening world, as if that’s important. It may be, for certain artists. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case for Glen Campbell, even though it’s clearly his right to record and release anything he chooses. It’s not necessary in my mind because Campbell has nothing more to prove, and the possible rewards outweigh the considerable risks—chiefly, that your efforts will merely come up short and remind all of us of what made you so good in the first place, which is sadly absent now: or put it this way, the artistic and cultural milieu that you thrived in simply does not exist and you are not a strong enough artist now to set free that long-ago bottled up genie.

Certain artists are able to pull “hear-me-now” rabbits out of the hat, but they are few and mostly they are defined by the legendary status they created in their earlier years—and that usually has to do with an authenticity that is nearly impossible (at least for me) to articulate—or by never truly having vanished at all in the first place.

Greenday. By Way of Glen Campbell. Yes, We’re Serious.

Johnny Cash, whose career essentially died in the 1980s, did indeed reinvent and significantly enlarge his stature when he connected with Rick Rubin and released, over time, five albums that were revelatory—is this the Cash who sang “A Boy Named Sue,” the song many people, amazingly, only knew him for?—because those discs were aggressively out of type for the Man in Black, and because Cash proved to be a brilliant interpreter of songs by Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails, and who would have ever guessed that? Plus, they all reminded us that this was the man who recorded “Walk the Line” and “Ring of Fire.”

No one needs to be reminded of Carlos Santana’s neat trick. His hiatus from the music scene was shorter (10 years, give or take) than Cash’s, but no one much cared anymore for 1969’s “Evil Ways,” even though it still shows up on FM radio with amazing regularity. In 1999 Santana, cannily, pulled together a current generation of musicians and released Supernatural, easily the biggest selling work of his career—an eight-Grammy producing work that, for Santana himself, was a personal, if not musical triumph. (“Smooth,” the most popular song off the disc, is actually the worst, but what can you do?)

One last example: Charlie Louvins, who last year released a self-titled work in the Santana vein, enlisting support from such artists as George Jones, Jeff Tweedy, and the luminous Tift Merritt. It worked, and praise be to Louvins for knowing precisely how to pick his friends.

Glen Campbell, on the other hand, doesn’t choose the route of getting other artists to help him out, and that, to some extent, is to his credit. He does opt for the cover song approach, and here his selection of titles is questionable.

On Meet Glen Campbell, the man who sang “Rhinestone Cowboy” covers, among others, John Lennon (“Grow Old with Me”); Jackson Browne (“These Days”); U2 (“All I Want is You”); Foo Fighters (“Times Like These”) and Paul Westerberg (“Sadly Beautiful). If Campbell were a distinctly country singer, which he is not, perhaps he’d bring the same alarming reinterpretation to “Sadly Beautiful” that Cash did to Trent Reznor’s “Hurt.” Combine a legitimately country, white-man-blues sensibility with Reznor’s gleaming nihilism and you have the only version of “Hurt” that really matters anymore, in all deference to Reznor.

Meet Glen Campbell

Campbell, though, was not a country artist, even though that’s where you will find him in record stores (if you can find one of those). He was always associated with country music and he’d likely (or maybe not) place himself in that category. But it’s simply not true.

Every hit Campbell ever had had a pop underpinning, around which he would inject just this or that much of a country hint. He was Garth Brooks (although Brooks is more “true” country) before Brooks was even a record exec’s dream: just enough country to satisfy listeners who may have become too “sophisticated” for George Jones, still want a nominal roots component in their music, and yet who also require the buoyancy of a good pop song. Campbell could sing “Wichita Lineman” all day long—a song with pure country content—but it still showed up on the Top 40 because it had a larger audience than Haggard could ever muster. That’s not a criticism of Campbell at all; it’s just that his “I-can-be-hip attempt” lacks the artistic leap that Cash’s did.

So: to cover the likes of Green Day—“Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”—is, first, to cover a song that does not need another interpretation, and it’s not a great stretch for Campbell. He does not add anything to the original. On none of the songs on Meet Glen Campbell does Campbell really bring anything new to the original. If it sounds like I’m saying he should have done a Hank Williams tribute that’s not entirely true, but neither is it altogether inaccurate. You would expect Campbell to stretch himself here, and he simply does not.

Add to this the over production of Meet Glen Campbell: Orchestration abounds, and it becomes tiresome after about song number three (which by the way is Tom Petty’s “Angel Dream”). This is all put together with the best of intentions, and Campbell is an important artist, but Meet Glen Campbell does not work. It ends up sounding generic and hollow. (For what it’s worth, Campbell would do better, in my opinion, to release an album that shows off his very excellent guitar-playing skills.)

Meet Glen Campbell doesn’t do what its creators hoped—burnish the elderly Campbell’s reputation—and that’s unfortunate. With different intentions and goals, a new “good” Glen Campbell record, of which there are many, would be welcome indeed. And there’s no doubt he could still make one.

by Stephen Foster

The Radiators Live: February 2004

Above all else, The Radiators are a gig band. Blues, no doubt; Cajun, yes; Swamp-boogie, absolutely: a mix of guitar-driven Swamp vibe meets formula-driven, but distinctive, rock and roll. Whatever you want is all there—The Radiators’ musical stew—as befits a true home grown New Orleans band. In some ways they are like their grander musical cousin, Credence Clearwater Revival; they excel at everything, and so don’t stand out in any one area. As Springsteen said about Credence, “they weren’t the coolest, just the best.”

The Radiators aren’t the best, just the coolest, but only when you hear them live. Put them in the studio and they cut a distinct groove, indeed. But it’s being on the road—in front of people, performing against the hum and jangle of a local bar or dive—that makes The Radiators one of the great, if not greatly known, bands of our time.

1987’s Law of the Fish is, by consensus, their best studio work. But their truly great work, what you pay the price of admission for, is, well, what you pay the price of admission for: to see them and hear them. Other than The Grateful Dead—surely the most self-indulgent rock band of our time—The Radiators represent perhaps the largest chasm between the live versus the playback experience. Live is better, and with The Radiators it’s not even close.

Which is why Radz Records has done all of us a favor by releasing the 2-disc Wild & Free, 28 songs that represent special performances, mostly in front of crowds, of some of The Radiators’ best work. A few of the songs are previously unreleased, and two new tunes—”Where Was You At?” and “Girl With the Golden Eyes”—were written especially for the release. But buy Wild & Free for its many live performance pleasures; everything else is thrown in just for good measure.

Meet The Radiators

Or look at it this way: The Radiators are a band that has been together for 30 years with no—that’s right, zero—personnel changes, and they’ve had always to tour and travel to support themselves and to flog their records. Thirty years together makes for an easy and mystical chemistry, and that is clearly evident on Wild & Free. It’s one of those rare albums that allow us to feel the performance as much as to hear it. That is, in fact, what it’s about: you listen, and these guys are playing at so and so juke joint, maybe just down the street. You can smell the sweat and feel the vibe. Someone’s throwing up in the bathroom. “Ok, let’s set this next one up for you. It’s about…” Well, you get the idea.

I’ve long admired The Radiators for their longevity and their ability to perform the way Spenser Tracy said all artists should: know your lines and don’t knock into the furniture. The Radiators may not scream and shout to be heard, but you’ll nonetheless feel them long after the gig’s over. Wild & Free allows us this privilege, and we’d be fools to ignore it.

You might even become a fish head and follow them around.

Now that we’re nearing the final third of the year [insert “how time flies” cliche here], the minds of all music dorks worth their weight in vinyl will gradually turn to the usual “best of” lists. We thought we’d put together a preliminary list of possibilities that may or may not make the final cut in December, but that’s the point: we, too, have already forgotten the names of those albums that came out in February and earned the fleeting rapture of our “this is the greatest album since OK Computer!” accolades, only to be tucked into the CD shelf and disregarded in favor of more recent thrills. So we’ve revisited that shelf of too-easily forgotten glories to take a second glance at CDs which, given the pace of things these days, will already be SO “last season” come Thanksgiving. But even if that sorry fate awaits these albums, at least they will have gotten their due here, in our not-so-middle-of-the-year list of 2008’s “Best Albums” contenders–in no particular order, by the way–what’s the difference between the fifth best and the 6th best album of the year? That’s right–nothing. So what’s the point? Check it out:

The Gossip: Live in Liverpool
Not since albums like Get Yer Ya-Yas Out or Lou Reed’s Rock ‘N Roll Animal have live albums been as much of an event as The Gossip’s Live in Liverpool. For starters–the title. Come on, what rock band today DOESN’T want to put out alive album called “Live in fucking Liverpool?” OK, maybe that would have been an even better title, but try this one out: Rick Rubin thought so much of this band’s power as a live unit that he declared their show the best he’d seen “in five years.” Coming from the mouth of Rick Rubin, that’s basically akin to comparing this band to Jesus. And rightfully so: now that even The White Stripes have gone all “art rock-y” on us with the truly icky Icky Thump, and The Black Keys suffered more than a modest share of polish at the otherwise skilled hands of Danger Mouse, The Gossip proudly (and loudly) pick up the slack behind the Mama Cass of Punk (Beth Ditto) with her rockin’ posse in tow. Just the first slap or two of Hannah Blilie’s drums on downright anthems like “Standing in the Way of Control” or the magnificently powerful “Your Mangled Heart” are enough to infect you with an unshakable love of l0-fi fury. There’s a reason why Rick Rubin decided on a live album as The Gossip’s first upon signing with Sony subsidiary label, Music with a Twist: they may be the best live band on the planet right now.

The Heavy: Great Vengeance and Furious Fire
The world hasn’t heard music with this much groove since RHCP lured George Clinton into a studio to lay down some tracks with them on their underappreciated Freaky Styley album 23 years ago–you know, back before the Peppers became “arteests.” As the funktastic “That Kind of Man” explodes with a relentlessly massive sound that brings to mind some dude straight out of the late 1970s with a mile-high afro and an early boombox half his size clutched to one ear as he struts right by you up the block, it becomes clear that The Heavy aren’t taking shit from anybody. That’s probably why they include “big bad wolves just doing what they do” among their band members on MySpace. There really isn’t a more accurate description of their sound than that. These boys (and one girl–clutching an axe with a murderous stare on their myspace page, no less) are here for the long haul. The Heavy’s sound is Tom Waits backed by The Stooges, Muddy Waters back from the Dead to make an album with Danger Mouse (because Danger Mouse SO needs another project on his hands.) These guys are bringing taste back in a big damned hurry, and judging from the friends they keep on MySpace, it’s hard to conceive of a more fitting band to do it–The Sonics, Howlin’ Wolf, Slim Harpo, Tom Waits, and even Waits’s great label Anti. These people know a good groove when they hear one, and they’re threatening to bring plenty more of their own for good measure. Check ‘em out.

MGMT: Oracular Spectacular
Like, DUH. If, halfway through the first rack of Oracular, it already feels like you’ve taken one too many sips of hallucinogenic mushroom tea while stepping inside another episode of VH1’s “Where Are They Now,” especially the part where the featured “artists” do lots of drugs, get fat and completely forgotten by the world, and then try to not be forgotten anymore by making really terrible music in their middle age for a “comeback” tour attended by thirteen-and-a-half people worldwide, that’s as it should be: You’re listening to MGMT, a duo of self-described “mystic paganists” devoted to “opening the third eye of the world.” The album’s first track, “Time to Pretend,” which was featured in the that movie 21 about some MIT kids who took Vegas to the cleaners by learning to count cards, takes aim at every one of those VH1 cliches with the sharp arrow of the band’s notorious sarcasm. Drenched in addictive hooks that marry Prince and The Flaming Lips in a union of space-funk and soul that somehow captures exactly the sound the band describes on their MySpace page– “surf jungle country”–Oracular delivers a sound that’s as fresh in 2008 as Beck’s was in 1994, leaping onto the scene with the same “we don’t care” abandon that “Loser” brought to the biz back then. And people are “getting into it”–lots of them. It’s no accident that the album vaguely echoes The Flaming Lips. Oracular IS produced, after all, by David Fridmann, the captain at the console for many a Flaming Lips album. Roll Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots with some speed-laced nicotine and you’ve got the addictive mindfuck that is Oracular Spectacular.

Bridges and Powerlines: Ghost Types
Though the brand of power-pop these guys peddle reveals a compelling brew of influences, the results are no less their own. Tunes like “Uncalibrated” or “Middle Child” are so bright you feel like you’ve just stared directly into the sun after sleeping in a hole in the ground for a week in winter (no wonder they used to call themselves “Sunspots”.) The music explodes in your ear with the relentless burst of a synthesizer that laces the song’s manic drums and guitar with an enthusiasm as focused as it is unhinged. No band has sounded this damned happy to be making music since The Thrills put out their debut “we are California” LP, So Much For the City. Equal parts Acrade Fire’s “Keep the Car Running” and Wilco’s “I’m Always in Love” with a tinge of Wolf Parade, most of the material on Bridges and Powerlines’ new album, Ghost Types, betrays the “love of the three-minute pop song” they say brought them together. With harmonies as soaring as the hooks and a psychedelic disposition that so perfectly suits the vaguely snotty abandon of taut rockers like “Half A Cent,” the band rarely lingers long in the unmapped musical terrain they explore. They prefer instead to wet their feet in the pond of your mind and run, leaving you to wonder whether what you just heard was of this world or the glittering residue of some wild and half-remembered dream. In the end, though, it really doesn’t matter–just as long as there’s more where that came from.

Sleepercar: West Texas
What an extraordinary exhibition of influence these songs offer: the echo of a latter day Lloyd Cole album drives a spike through the broken heart of “Heavy Weights,” the vaguely new wave “Sound the Alarm”–perhaps the album’s finest track–almost prepares you for Hall & Oates to take the mike and belt one out about a woman who only comes out at night as Mark Knopfler straps on a guitar and awaits his part. And if none of the material here really approximates Jim Ward’s vision of a rootsy American rock album as closely as he may have desired–Ward still sounds very much like the lead vocalist of Sparta throughout West Texas, the debut album from this dainty little side project–it’s in his aspiration for a sound so alien to the music he’s known for that brings him–and his listeners–to some unexpected creative landscape where willows drip with a melting and late-season snow as an iron and sweeping sky rushes the day to dusk. You lift the collar of your coat to combat a dank chill in the air–one of the last of the season–and you grin and walk right through it as the year closes in on so many warmer days. Only “Wednesday Nights” and “Fences Down” really hit the alt-country mark Ward seems to set his sights on here, songs that could quite easily pass themselves off as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot outtakes. But, again, it’s in the album’s misfires that something genuinely fascinating occurs. Don’t miss this record; it’s as close to a guaranteed pleasure as we may have heard all year.

Raconteurs: Consolers of the Lonely
“Needless to say, I was more than skeptical of the newest Raconteurs project. I accept and love that Jack White is a man of many escapades, including plastic camera and speaker manufacture, collaboration with the Gods (Loretta Lynn and Bob Dylan), cell phone protestation, and home movies of snoring band mates (sorry Meg). With the exception of the premier Raconteurs album, he hits all these ventures out of the park. Therefore, I gave him an open, yet highly analytical second chance. Consolers of the Lonely, HOT DAMN! I’m sorry my lord for ever doubting your ability. I grabble at your feet in repentance! The Kinks got busy with Icky Thump and conceived Consolers of the Lonely, plain and simple. This album delivers Jack White’s signature raw energy viciously burned with blistering horns and riffs to rival Zeppelin. The band let the album speak for itself, doing zero promotion and allowing the content to leak on iTunes and the like. Bravo boys. White and company have created radio-soluble tunes capable of pushing facileness overboard. So long Linkin Park and Flobots! This album is a must for summer and pairs perfectly with open-windowed driving.” — Sara Mrozinski

The Boxing Lesson: Wild Streaks and Windy Days
As if any further proof was needed, Wild Streaks and Windy Days confirms once again that to label a band is to kill a band. It is too easy to dismiss The Boxing Lesson as a post-punk new wave act and move blithely on to your next victim. But as Whoopsy Magazine puts it, “there’s a lot more going on here . . . catchy backing vocals, surreal lyrics, and a modern pop sensibility stand out the most.” But The Boxing Lesson aren’t just another upstart “indie” band pushing the praise of rags called “Whoopsy.” The Onion calls them “a hard-charging trio,” and The Austin Chronicle praises them for “opening a Pandora’s box of psychedelia.” The Boxing Lesson take us somewhere genuinely new with Wild Streaks and Windy Days; and if they have to fumble through a jewel chest of prior eras to get there, they never look back so long as to undermine a vision of their own. Oh, and check out our recent interview with the band!

Josh Rouse: Country Mouse, City House
If much of Rouse’s music is no heavier than a breeze at the beach in spring–particularly on the supine Subtitlio he recorded after splitting with his wife and defecting to Spain (as good a reason as any to be “supine”)–it is no less substantive because of it. And anyway, just when you think you’ve got this cool cat cornered, an album like 2005’s Nashville thunders with a vaguely unsettled dirge like “Why Won’t You Tell me What,” a spare and thumping chant that delivers the kind of bluesy acrimony you’d expect of a middle-aged loungesinger at some watering hole up the block, positioning his 14th cigarette in an ashtray on the lid of a beaten piano that’s knifed with the names of a thousand long-gone couples. Amid the apparent serenity of Rouse’s more recent material–breezy tunes like “Quiet Town” or the flawless “Hollywood Bass Player” from 2007’s Country Mouse album–it’s this defiant strand of discontent that completes the complex character his songs reveal, a ballsy volatility that so many songwriters might be wise to consider.

Young Knives: Superabundance
When Franz Ferdinand followed up their brilliant, eponymous debut with that frenzied and self-conscious clunker of a second album, You Could Have it So Much Better (how right they were), it seemed that we had another one-trick pony on our hands, that what glories they had brought us in 2004 were not the kind of thing that comes around every year–or every ten, for that matter. As much as I hate to describe one band by discussing another–comparisons do a lot more to confine bands than they do to illuminate them–Young Knives, a geek-rock outfit out of England that look and sound every bit as “Young” as their band name suggests, are both picking up the torch that Franz left behind and taking it to the places we expected them to go. If Ray Davies is correct in his theory that a band’s third album is really the one that shows you whether or not the kids are for real, then Superabundance, the third Young Knives album (if we’re counting their 2002 EP–and why not?), documents the arrival of a potentially great band. Geek or no geek, though, give the “Terra Firma” video a little look if you doubt for a second the comparisons to Franz. The song is an incorrigible fit of post-punk revival sweetness that drives relentlessly through an adrenaline-overdrive of manic guitars laced over a backbone of disco that puts a lot into perspective: Why, for instance, a previous label of theirs was called “Shifty Disco,” or why an acoustic take on “Turn Tail,” one of several singles the album has spawned, was recorded directly to vinyl all in one take at London’s Westbourne Studios–something that hasn’t been done commercially since people like The Partridge Family could actually make a living in music. In other words, it’s been a long, long time.

Everlast: Love, War, and the Ghost of Whitey Ford
OK, so maybe this album hasn’t been released yet. But dammit, it should have been! And anyway, it’s gonna be good! At least we can now hear Everlast’s mash-up cover of Johnny Cash’s legendary “Folsom Prison Blues,” which is slated to appear on this long-delayed new album. The album’s currently on deck for a September 24 release–which means absolutely nothing, of course, because the album has been on deck for a release for months to no avail, pissing Everlast off to no end and infecting his fans with a brutal case of rumor-mill blues. And that’s no fun at all–just ask AC/DC fans. While the “Letters Home From The Garden of Stone” single is strong, making waves on iTunes for months now, Everlast’s cover of “Folsom Prison” is little short of brilliant. Check it out here.

by Stephen Foster

Sam Phillips writes lyrics like a miser spends his money. Her literary equivalent would be, say, Amy Hempel, whose short stories possess the brutal concision of a guilty plea. What makes Sam Phillips’ music so rewarding—that she places demands on the listener to meet her at least half way—is precisely what makes it challenging for many other listeners: that she asks you to meet her half way. Those who are up to the challenge will discover an artist who has produced a consistently excellent, if not prolific, body of work—seven albums over nearly twenty years, plus, now, her latest, Don’t Do Anything.

It’s Phillips’ first record (excluding gospel releases recorded as Leslie Phillips) not produced by her former husband, T Bone Burnett. Self produced, Don’t Do Anything does not sound dramatically different from her previous work with Burnett. Where Burnett might tend to let Phillips’ sound breathe here and there or become gauzy and relaxed, on Don’t Do Anything Phillips wants the sound to exert itself, flex its muscles—and it does. Thus the music on Don’t Do Anything comes across as slightly claustrophobic and grimly atmospheric, but it is clearly self-assured, and, yes, challenging.

Because its rewards exceed it challenges, Don’t Do Anything is Sam Phillips’ best release since 1994’s Bikinis & Martinis, her only album (Grammy nominated) to receive wide-spread acclaim.

A listener thoroughly familiar with Phillips’ work might be inclined to pronounce it her “divorce” album. In the album there does reside a deep sense, painful at times, of abandonment, heartbreak, perhaps betrayal—but the idea that Don’t Do Anything is Phillips’ breakup record does the whole concept a disservice. Phillips is a woman of intense, if quirky, emotion—which includes great resilience—and it reveals itself here in ways not fundamentally different or more intense than in her other work. Subjects other than her former husband actually exist. Still, divorce is pain, and you’d have to call Don’t Do Anything a modest departure from the body of her work.

Sam Phillips Live in San Fransisco: “Signal,” Don’t Do Anything (2008)

A barely controlled fire underpins the music, and occasionally it flares up to great effect. The result is an album (especially “Another Song,” and “Shake it Down”) that tends sonically to edge toward Tom Waits’ late-career territory—a little bit cabaret, a dash of calliope, plus a modest industrial sound, as in the Waits of Bone Machine and Swordfishtrombones, while of course retaining the razor-like vignettes Phillips writes so devoutly. For this, The Section Quartet, as support, deserves recognition for the pitched and exotic feel of Don’t Do Anything.

Phillips opens Don’t Do Anything in a state of confusion, and then finds, without drama, a certain clarity: in “No Explanations,” she writes: “I thought if he understood/He wouldn’t treat me this way/No explanations…She looked me over and over/And couldn’t locate me/No explanation.” Almost imperceptibly we know there’s a she in the equation.

A number of songs represent a sort of lost-in-the-wilderness feel, but you’re never worried that Phillips won’t eventually find her way. In one of the albums best songs, “My Little Plastic Life,” Phillips acknowledges a premonition and then ignites the fire of self-renewal, even if the result is fake and small; perfect little lives you won’t find in Sam Phillips work. “I detected fire in myself/Before the flame/I burnt it all to the ground/Burnt it all to the ground/Burnt it all…Perfect was a nice disguise/It never fit/But I still have my little plastic life to remind me.”

In “My Career in Chemistry,” Phillips sings: “I’d rather be alone/Than with someone/Who doesn’t know secrets/A little bit of code…Lie, lie, bye, bye/My career in chemistry/I still wear you, but bbbye, bye, bye.”

Worlds divide, worlds collide: those are Phillips pitiless pronouncement in Don’t Do Anything. With a near-stingy use of perfect language—poetry: the right word in the right place—and a pool of talented musicians lending an assist, Sam Phillips, without glee or gloom, has given us a record as profound and perplexing and rewarding as any disc released this year.

Definitely NOT Giorgio Moroder!

If you too wish Geico would just dump the increasingly awful “Caveman” commercial series while their marketing people might still be able to salvage a scrap of credibility, consider this telling sign of a stale imagination: the most recent installment in the “so easy a caveman can do it” series of ads–which spawned a short-lived sit-com that was so hard to watch I actually caught myself begging to have my fingernails removed with a pair of tweezers–is a clear-cut rip-off of the unsung but brilliant Giorgio Moroder’s theme for the forgotten 1978 film Midnight Express, an 8-minute disco-meets-new-wave workout called “Chase,” and a tune that did more to pioneer the new wave genre than any blue-haired synth-master you care to name (the piece is well-known to listeners of the renowned late-night AM talk show, Coast to Coast AM, a show famous for the drunk people who come home late from the club and call in to exchange their Jesus sightings and alien abductions–it’s really a great listen after you’ve rolled yourself a nice fresh fatty and lit up.) The tune scored Moroder an Academy Award.

Moroder, who received Italy’s honorary title of “Commendatore” in 2005, is the unseen architect of some of disco, new wave and punk’s biggest commercial successes–from Blondie’s “Call Me” (a hit that emerged from Moroder’s downright filthy “Man Machine” instrumental for the American Gigolo soundtrack) to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and her 16-minute epic, “Love to Love You Baby.” Interestingly, the “Man Machine” demo was originally pitched to Stevie Nicks, who turned it down (Oops! Wish ya had THAT one back, eh Stevie?). Blondie, of course, turned it into a smash hit both here and overseas.

Giorgio Moroder’s “Chase”: So Easy Anyone Can Steal It

It shouldn’t be hard to see at this point that Moroder, though relatively unknown, has more than enough money to assuage his anonymity. His other noted collaborations include work with Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Queen, Sammy Haggar, Janet Jackson, Kenny Loggins, Graham Nash, Bonnie Tyler, Barbara Streisand, Cher, and, while we’re at it, the Prince of Tides, the Three Little Pigs, and each of Snow White’s 7 dwarfs. To put it simply–this man’s hands have found their way into nearly every major movement in modern music over the past five decades. Zeppelin, Queen and Elton John are known for frequenting Moroder’s Musicland Studios in Munich over the years.

Now everyone’s begging to know who performs the catchy, lo-fi disco gem featured in Geico’s ad with the new “Disco Caveman,” who blathers in wince-worthy attempts at humor about “jazz hands” and “a lotta heel work” as he glides back and forth under a sparkling mirror ball, extolling the greatness of Baltimore’s disco scene. Yes–Baltimore. It’s almost funny, if only it didn’t all come off as such a forced and condescending plea to America’s Incredible Shrinking Attention Span. The piece, slapped together by “composer” Devin Smith for Honor Roll Music, is clearly a jazzed-up (no pun intended) take on Giorgio’s comparatively primitive–and therefore better–”Chase” instrumental. Should you doubt the comparison, investigate for yourself: give Moroder’s tune a listen, and then check out Devin Smith’s “Baltimore Disco Geico” in its entirety on his myspace page here.

Geico’s Disco Caveman: ha-ha (insert “golf clap” here)