If you wondered why Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber moved to Brooklyn last year–because, you know, all of us wait with bated breath to learn about the Exalted Imam of indie-rock’s next move–a band called “Elika” is one good reason why. Brooklyn’s ongoing underground rock renaissance, responsible for such wicked miracles as TV on the Radio and The Honorary Title, continues to deliver some of the greatest music you’ve never heard. For Elika, that anonymity ends with the release of their lush and ambient debut, Trying Got Us Nowhere (yeah, join the club, dude.)
With a sound that Ulrich Schnauss describes as “an incredibly exciting, radical fusion of shoegaze and electronica,” the band covers enough musical terrain to map the globe, naming influences anywhere from Brian Wilson to Pat Benatar, Nico to Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch. We might add Depeche Mode, Kate Bush and Love and Rockets while we’re at it. The duo that comprises Elika–with Brian Wenckebach on guitar and programming and Evangelia Maravelias’s vocals silvered in the restrained radiance of the song–join forces to produce a kind of modernized Tears for Fears album that leans into the sounds of the past to envision their possible future. But they’ve sent Roland Orzabald a well-earned retirement check in the mail and replaced him with Eva’s hypnotically airy vocals, and they’re not looking back.
This is no retro band; Elika’s vision is far more independent than derivative. And if the intentions behind a name like Fiercely Indie Records, Elika’s label, is that their brand of indie boasts big dripping wolf fangs and the claws of a cougar, they did well to prove the point by signing these two. While Benatar’s crystal wail does flourish somewhere in the distance of Eva’s vocal delivery, she tempers that gargantuan influence with a whispery restraint and grace that rivals Dolores O’Riordan. The ghost of Nico may haunt the aching and eerie “To the End,” but a lambent burst of synth and guitar ignite the song into something wholly Elika’s own. Brian Wenkebach, for his part, channels the atmospherics of guitar luminaries like Nick McCabe, Robert Quine or Paul Reynolds while leaving little doubt as to whose sound he serves–his.
Elika themselves describe their sound as “blissed-out ambience with head-nodding beats that range from Downtempo to Trance to IDM.” That’s about right, and it’s this bold union of influence and authenticity that promises to help Elika see the day when you don’t have to be from Brooklyn to know who they are. The peculiarly engaging power of their debut album, Trying Got Us Nowhere, guarantees that it won’t be long now.
I step into the stale air of Barnes & Noble, where a logo and four-dollar cappuccino replaces the mug and first-name basis of the local coffee house. The store flanks a highway choked with the obnoxious and insistent neon glow of corporate excess. An enormous Best Buy sign juts out with blinding hues of yellow and blue; the golden arches of McDonald’s glimmer over the road. Another Longhorn steakhouse announces itself amid a vast island of blacktop carved up by bold white lines; the ground stained with oil of Fords, Hondas, Buicks and SUVs. This is the new scenery down in Stuart, Florida — one of the fastest growing towns in America. Where there were dirt roads, there are traffic lights. Where there were fruit stands, there is Walmart, Petco, Wendy’s. Ten years ago you could drive through this town without passing a single car.
I did not come here for a four-dollar cappuccino; nor am I interested in a grande soy vanilla latte, thank you. I am here for the music. Specifically, Live at Benaroya Hall, a two-disc unplugged set by Pearl Jam featuring a vicious and timely rendition of Dylan’s “Masters of War.” “Come you masters of war,” Eddie Vedder bellows, his haunted voice poised to burst through the Ozone, “you that build all the guns/you that build the death planes/you that build all the bombs.”
Most of my fellow shoppers, though, are not exactly clamoring for the “P” section. It is 2004, and Mike, my friend behind the counter, tells me that Ashlee Simpson’s “debut album” (how loosely we Americans have come to use these terms) just became the store’s #1 best seller. The “record,” as it is being called, was released just hours ago. “You know, she already had her own TV show before ever making an album,” Mike says, “meanwhile, Pearl Jam gathers dust on the shelf.” But after driving through a wilderness of advertising and corporate glitter on my way to work each morning, Mike’s revelation is hardly an astonishment. So I wipe the dust off my copy, toss a crumpled receipt in the trash by the door, and dart for my car stereo, Circuit City’s crimson insignia glowering from across the street.
But even Vedder and his taut guitar duo of McCreedy and Ament do not prepare me for the allures of Andi Starr, whose album, Me Beautiful, waits for me in my mailbox. No, Ms. Starr does not have any sisters on TV, and you probably haven’t heard of her. Starr, a local singer/songwriter from Oregon promoted by her manager/husband, writes great songs and prefers to keep her clothes on, if you please. The album, Starr’s second, offers neither Gwen Stefani’s navel nor Britney Spears’ latest hair color. No wonder I don’t see her photo next to Ashlee Simpson’s in Barnes & Noble display windows.
Nor is it any surprise to hear Starr singing “hold a mirror up to your soul/not your face/up to your heart.” As the opening track’s patient crescendo of piano, guitar and drums blooms into a soundscape entirely her own, I quickly understand that Starr’s songs cut deeper than flesh, further than bone. “I would crawl inside of you,” she croons amid “Little Angel’s” hushed ambiance, “to find the room that is dark.” But Starr, who confesses to a terror of performing and “being seen,” is a bit modest. There is nothing conditional about it: these songs do crawl inside of you, and as the biographical note on her Web site asserts, “If Andi’s music doesn’t follow you, haunt you, comfort you, awaken you, challenge you, inspire you, then you’re simply not listening.”
Andi Starr hits the right notes: the notes that hurt, the notes that know you, the notes that make you meet yourself. If glass had a voice it would sing like this woman. Fragile and clean, listening to her vocals is like peeking through the wiped window of an abandoned house. It is dark inside but you look a little harder, you want to know what’s in there. Gradually you begin to discern the silhouette of a coffee stand, the impression of a light switch, the beveled edges of a mirror. You can almost make out the angles where walls come together to form the corners of the room.
The brilliance of Starr’s work — truly a refreshing experience — is in its refusal to flip the light on. Me Beautiful never exposes more than shapes and shadows strewn about its dimly lit landscape of sound. Songs like “Wash Away,” with its gentle and surprising gust of mandolin and percussion, allow listeners to imagine and participate where so many of her more renowned contemporaries condescend and overindulge. The structured harmonies of many of these songs are as taut as any radio single without compromising the artist’s integrity.
Starr’s voice and lyrics plead with the past: the bruises of its memories and the dreams of its pleasures. Yet, for all the album’s complicated emotions and ideas, Starr herself seems to put it best in the end: “it’s simpler than we make it out to be/yeah it’s simpler than we make it out to be.” This may or may not be true of life, but it certainly speaks accurately for the music. That is precisely the thing that cannot be said of so much product hurled upon the masses by many of pop music’s female singer/songwriters. Andi Starr is new because her music is a familiar echo of the roots that made it possible: from Joni Mitchell and Cindy Lauper on down to Julie Miller and Aimee Mann. Starr’s voice combines the earnestness and intensity of this eclectic heritage into one cohesive force. One can only hope that it will soon be a force of change and influence.
I don’t want to be the last one caught beating a dead horse, but much remains to be said about the latest Miley Cyrus photo debacle. For those of you who have been living in a media-free hole over the past week (lucky you), one of our most loathed “Plastic Wannabes” Miley Cyrus was recently immortalized by the famed Annie Leibovitz. While I acknowledge that Annie Leibovitz herself has recently become a media mogul of sorts due to her rising popularity among the stars, she remains, without question, the most talented female photographer of our time.
An opportunity not even the densest of airheads would turn down, Miley not only gratefully took the offer to be shot by Leibovitz, but also helped create the shot itself. As seen in footage from the shoot, Miley’s parents and family attended the shoot and agreed on the shots before they were submitted to Vanity Fair. Shortly after the shoot took place Miley was quoted saying “I think it’s really artsy. It wasn’t in a skanky way. Annie took, like, a beautiful shot, and I thought that was really cool.” The question is, what happened between the shoot and press time to cause Miley and her family to completely reject the photos?
Bored conservatives happened. It never occurred to Miley how the mothers and fathers of her major demographic of fans would perceive the photos. This is a group of people so desensitized by the media and dangerous ideologies that openness toward art would never be a possibility. It is no surprise that their responses include degrading statements to Miley’s image and Leibovit’s artistic ability. It is a surprise, however, to read the endless barrage of insults thrown Leibovit’s way from the media. TimesOnline contributor Janice Turner wrote that Leibovitz employed “the trick dirty-old-men artists have employed to seduce vulnerable girls through the ages: she persuaded Miley that the pictures were “artistic”. Artistic? Eew!Is it contagious?
To imply that Annie Leibovitz is some back-alley vaudevillian snapshot pedophilic hustler is grounds for decapitation. It is certain that Leibovitz is in no short supply for money or fame, but is it to be assumed that her shot of Miley Cyrus was deceptively concocted to snatch a dirty pic of the most popular teen in America for unclean reasons? Even more doubtful. Being a photographer myself, I have encountered similar situations with absolutely-not-famous people a few times. It is common to shoot people who are most themselves in front of the lens, but demand removal of shots after the fact when the reaction of others comes into play. It is hard for people to allow their innermost being to be displayed for others to see willingly.
But the act of demanding retraction of harmless photos shows low self-esteem and immaturity at its most volatile level. This is clear in Miley’s reaction, and it’s hers that matters most: “I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.”
What she really never intended to happen was to lose money or to be threatened by Disney to lose her brain-draining show, and that is what shedeeply cares about. Most disturbingly, her reaction shows her age. Miley is a 15 year old with more money and power than all of middle America combined. Will Miley Cyrus’s sheepish immaturity and her culturally-bubbled right-winging posse finally tarnish America’s most beloved photographer’s reputation? Probably not, but it is certain this “dead horse” won’t be laid to rest until every visionless conservative tool has had their say.
Of all the 60s legends who took baffling artistic detours through the decade Kris Kristofferson described as “shipwrecked,” Neil Young’s was by far the most fascinating. And Lord knows there were some “detours.” By the time Landing On Water came out in ’86, Dylan continued to languish in the alcoholic aftermath of a schizophrenic religious identity that produced material both interesting and intolerable (mostly the latter—and if you doubt that for one second, give a listen to Slow Train Comin’s “When You Gonna Wake Up” and let me know how you feel in the morning. Typical side effects include severe nausea, blurred vision, and sudden death.) The Stones, for their part, long-before settled into a steady offering of McSingles on albums they recorded with gritted teeth from opposite ends of a studio, tolerating one another only out of greed to produce records like Dirty Work, an album full of furiously delivered songs whose titles reflect the animosities of the band—“Too Rude,” “Had it With You.” You get the picture.
After responding to the epic success of the Rust albums with characteristically unpredictable forays into inaccessible pseudo-punk (Reactor) and rickety folk meanderings (Hawks & Doves)–exchanging main stream acceptance for the worship of anonymous new wave dorks in the underground clubs of New York and L.A.–Neil Young journeyed to places few of his fans were willing to go: the electronica beats of Trans which, we later learned, featured electronically distorted vocals that emerged from attempts at communicating through a computer with his son Ben, a quadriplegic suffering from cerebral palsy (Neil’s charitable efforts to defeat the condition are legendary and ongoing.)
In retrospect, the 80s are as legendary a period in Neil Young’s career as his 70s heyday–not because the music was great, but precisely because it wasn’t, culminating in the now-infamous lawsuit David Geffen filed against Young for making music that didn’t sound Neil Young enough (Geffen won.) Many like to call Landing on Water Neil’s worst album, but that distinction–if we really must make it–belongs to the morbidly produced Everybody’s Rockin, the musical middle finger to Geffen Records Neil recorded a few years earlier. While Springsteen and Joel discovered new voices with 50s nostalgia pieces like “Pink Cadillac” and “Uptown Girl” around the same time, Neil’s flirtation with similar curiosities reflected, if anything, a voice that had become all but irretrievable.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse: “Sleeps With Angels”
It is hardly a surprise, then, that Landing on Water further exemplifies the erratic artistic indulgences Young favored at the time, with its characteristically grungy licks and riffs laid over a jarring and misguided cacophony of synthesized drums and rhythms. It isn’t just that the album sounds dated in 2008; the production is so insular that it was destined to sound dated before the year of its release came to a close.
And yet, despite all this, Landing on Water contains three essential performances that open-minded fans will learn to appreciate. “Hippie Dream”–with its moving eulogy for the bygone days of flower power–is a biting indictment of an era he helped define. “Another flower child / goes to seed / in an ether-filled room / of meat hooks. / It’s so ugly, / so ugly,” Young sings of his cocaine-addled brother in arms, David Crosby, a disturbingly prophetic anticipation of the liver transplant Crosby would receive nine years later. Other tunes like “Drifter” and “Touch the Night” showcase a Neil Young who almost finds his groove amid the album’s synth-laden idiosyncrasies.
These songs are treasures of an artistic vision stretching to fathom the boundaries of its expression, and the ambition of the material it produced at that time is, to my ears, every bit as beautiful as Young’s best work. It may not always have sounded great—in fact, it usually strained just to sound listenable. But Neil’s refusal to look away from less familiar artistic terrain is exactly the kind of edginess his reputation is founded on, and it is the good fan who understands that glories like Sleeps With Angels, Freedom and Ragged Glory could not have been possible without the misadventures that preceded them.
“Little Walter was dead ten years before he died.”
– Muddy Waters
Even now, forty years later, no one knows for sure exactly what killed him that night: did the brother of one of Walter’s million wounded lovers bruise him with the fatal blow, a crushing shot to the head in an alley fight somewhere on the south side of Chicago, rupturing an injury sustained amid the many prior brawls that marbled his face with a storybook of scars–grooves arching over an eyebrow where stitches were sewn and plucked, the permanent gash of a broken bottle corkscrewed into the side of his head, a darker stripe of skin curling around the socket of an eye caved in by a man’s ringed fist. Was he beaten to death with an iron pipe in the street over a gambling debt, as others allege? “He’s real tough, Little Walter” Muddy Waters would say not long before then, “and he’s had it hard. Got a slug in his leg right now!”
It’s the lingering mystery of a life lost in a hazed oblivion of alcohol, womanizing, squandered genius, street fights, blues and pain. Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter why he died so young in his sleep on February 15th, 1968, more than a decade since the world passed the blues by in a cloud of kicked-up dust called rock ‘n roll and left him to shrink in the shadow of the giant he used to be, blasted on dope, boozed into uselessness, and forgotten along the road to newer thrills of younger gods like Richards, Page and Clapton. No matter the cause, the greatest blues man to ever play the harp was dead, and he was just 37 years old.
By then, Walter had fallen a long way from the harmonica king who cupped a mic and harp to his mouth and blew the thing into a hand-held fire from Memphis to Maxwell Street, where he’d cut his first record at Bernard and Red Abrams’s record shop in 1947. By the age of 17, Walter had already backed the biggest names in blues, from Memphis Slim, Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy and Robert Nighthawk, before Muddy Waters took him in to form the most badass duo the blues has ever heard. Unsurprisingly, Muddy measured every harp player that came his way later on against the gargantuan talents of their predecessor. “Walter’s was an uncommonly systematic musical mind,” Robert Palmer writes, “In his hands, the amplified harmonica became virtually a new instrument. In his soloing, Walter used tone, timbre, dynamics, phrasing and space with the freedom and imagination of a jazz saxophonist.”
Yes, he’d fallen a long way. From the fatcat who rolled around town in a Caddy with a trunk full of cash and credit for beating Muddy to the top of the charts with his legendary harp riff, “Juke,” in 1952. From the home he escaped at 13 to leave behind a father doing time at Angola for murder and busk his way to some kind of living in the streets. From the divine heights he climbed to the minute he plugged his harp into an amp and blew it into a microphone, rivaling the volume of any electric guitar.
“There is no other way around it,” Ben Harper declared as he inducted Little Walter into the rock ‘n roll hall of fame last month, “to pass through life, you must pass through the blues, and to pass through the blues, you must pass through Little Walter.” Through the haunted whirlwind of harp he blew to blacken the darkest mood on songs like “Blue and Lonesome,” a rattling flicker of guitar and drum blasting the bottom out of the song as Walter wills it to an unforgiving close. Through the spitting threats about the woman who left and hurt him so bad in “Hate to See You Go” and some doomed bastard who’s going around “stealing everybody’s chick” in the livid and fatalistic “It’s Too Late Brother,” how he’s got “no need of goin’ no further” and why the rest of you “better watch yourself.”
It’s exactly the kind of stuff you’d expect of a brilliant bluesman bent on brawling his way to an early grave. “He was behaving like a cowboy much of the time,” writes Mike Rowe in Chicago Blues, “and would roar up to a club date in his black Cadillac with a squeal of the brakes that sent everyone rushing to the door to stare.” It wasn’t long until they’d stare for a different reason, this time at the crumpled and bloody mess he’d become on night after night of boozed-up throwdowns in the streets of south-side Chicago, his talents wasted so thoroughly as to produce unrecognizably lame reworkings of his own songs in a super blues band of Muddy, Walter and Bo Diddley that turned out to be not so super after all.
But America’s heritage of self-destructive genius remains one of its saddest cultural chapters; Walter’s name wasn’t the first to join that tragic list, and it won’t be the last. As Ben Harper said the night Walter’s name entered a more celebrated canon in Cleveland this past March, however, “it is a historical occurrence when the word ‘immortal’ finds its proper home.” The word most certainly finds its home in Little Walter, and nothing, not even death, can take that from him.
“I like the word “fat” . . . what’s funny is that they treat it like a minority, but it’s actually the majority and I wonder why we haven’t gotten it together, because we are the majority . . . really most of us are fat asses, you know.”
— Beth Ditto, The Gossip
If the jury was still out on whether Arkansas is the armpit of America–it is, after all, the birthplace of Wal-Mart–Beth Ditto has donned the black robes, adjourned court in a characteristically thunderous manner, and settled it once and for all: “Fuck, no. No. Never,” she says as Matt Gonzalez of Pop Matters asks if she’d ever consider moving back to Searcy, her small hometown in Arkansas where lesbians are subject to the fiery wrath of the Lord and “punk” is the new communism, “There’s no way, no way. No, no, no.” OK, OK, we get it: Arkansas sucks. When you’re talking to Beth Ditto, a Southern Baptist lesbian punker with a penchant for feminism and fried squirrel, you kind of expect her to tell you how she feels about things. And she does. This is a woman who holds nothing back in life–not on stage, not over the phone, not anywhere. And that’s why she fronts one of the greatest bands to surface from the festering pond of indie rock in years.
That Ditto’s band The Gossip garners far greater notice in the UK than in the US is proof enough of their greatness–take The Eels, for example, a monumentally significant group summarily ignored in the States but whose every album’s considered for record-of-the-year honors in NME editorial meetings–and so it’s no shocker that their first record for Columbia, on subsidiary label “Music with a Twist” which seeks LGBT talent, is a live album cut at a club in Liverpool before a writhing crowd of 500 people whose stunned shrieks accompany every wail, lick and thump the band delivers. Whether those shrieks are gasps of horror or expressions of joy is anyone’s guess–the two emotions tend to be interchangeable at most Gossip shows, especially when Ditto starts taking her clothes off–but Ditto, a proudly rotund modern incarnation of the Mama Cass she adoringly listened to as a kid, performs to inspire both, and if you don’t like it, you can shove it.
“I don’t really care. I could give a shit,” she tells the A.V. Club, “I think if I were someone who takes themselves completely seriously as an artist I would, but I don’t take myself that seriously, I don’t think Gossip takes itself that seriously.” Look, the woman’s made a life-long crusade of bringing “heavy” back (she reportedly weighs in at 210), tells grand tales of smoking weed from a Coke can with friends down home who shoot squirrels out back for frying when they get the munchies, and frequently removes her clothes live to expose a hulking pair of pale legs that quiver with cellulite as she romps through the rest of the set in a bra and panties. It may also be important to note at this point that she neither wears deodorant nor shaves her armpits, because “punks usually smell.” “Serious” may not exactly be the woman’s M.O., but try telling that to a single person who’s sat through five minutes of The Gossip’s uproarious live act–these kids mean it.
Gossip guitarist Nathan Hodeshell (A.K.A. Brace Paine) rips such a nasty flame through Live in Liverpool that the album sounds like a devastated Jack White blasting an amp apart by himself in the middle of an abandoned and burning garage. Ditto, flailing and twisting in place as a quilt of sweat cements her self-made clothes to her body, belts out a tune like it’s the last piece of music the world will hear before an imminent nuclear holocaust. And drummer Hannah Blilie fuses every groove with a snarling backbone of disco that directs LCD Soundsystem to the back of the “cool” line at once. Yes, this is most certainly the band that Rick Rubin went to see one night to declare that it was “the best show I’ve seen in five years.”
It’s also a band you’ll be hearing about a hell of a lot more–this article, after all, results from the fascinated but profound trauma I experienced as Ditto and her rockin’ posse took the stage for an MTV performance the other night. If I recall correctly, my various responses ranged from a bewildered “WTF” to desperate and groveling 7-year-old-girl cries for my mother; but this, I learned after a bit of research, is a perfectly normal and scientifically documented symptom of initial exposure to The Gossip. It takes a minute to reconstitute your mind in such a way that the spectacle they put on becomes comprehensible–and when that happens, there’s no turning back. In short, I’m hooked.
Ditto’s crusade to put the human back in pop music is as admirable as it is sincere. Rarely will you meet someone as comfortable in her own skin as Beth Ditto–the woman did pose nude for for On Our Backs, for Christ’s sake, a lesbian erotica magazine run exclusively by women. At 210 lbs., that’s pretty much my definition of “comfortable.” It’s a courage she brings to every second of her stage performance, a kind of “fuck you this is what real people look like” schtick that wins her an understandably vast amount of respect. “I don’t want to look like Britney Spears, I just don’t want to. She’s Hideous,” Ditto explains, “I just like food too much, and I don’t want to change. I spent so much of my childhood trying to change, and I just got sick of it.”
And before we all weep into our double-pump Venti no-sugar soy vanilla lattes about the discriminatory semantics of the word “fat,” we may want to listen for a minute to Ditto herself: “I like the word ‘fat’,” she tells Pop Matters, “people bitch about fat people who are quote unquote overweight, which is a term that I hate, because it sets a standard for people to be.” In an industry dominated by plastic pop wannabes on steady diets of locust, bean sprouts and tape worm, Ditto’s daring assertion that real people make music too is a warmly welcome concept.
Amid all of Ditto’s well-publicized eccentricities, though–publicity whose flames she seems to fan at every opportunity–it’s easy to lose sight of how powerful and genuine a band this is. Joining a not-too-crowded list of great three-piece rock groups (Nirvana, The Police, Cream), The Gossip are a trio that pack more attitude than a rock stage has seen since Dylan turned to his band and ordered them to “play fucking loud” after some forgotten imbecile in the crowd called him “Judaaasss!” for going electric in ‘65. While earlier projects such as their Arkansas Heat EP or 2003’s relentless Movement convey that ferocity as effectively as a studio allows (was it Cyndi Lauper who said that recording in a studio is kind of like faking an orgasm?), nothing captures it more clearly than 2008’s Live in Liverpool.
Ditto herself is the first to admit that their studio output sounds a little canned at times, particularly on the comparatively tame Standing in the Way of Control, an album whose title track, a cry of rage against anti-gay discrimination, nonetheless became their best-known tune to date. “If I weren’t in this band, I would never listen to it,” Ditto concedes in laughter, “but I would go see it. It’s a band you would go see that you don’t necessarily listen to.” As usual, Ditto may be overstating the truth, but as the scorching torrent of meaty riffs and grooves she dresses in her full-bodied wail throughout Live in Liverpool proves, that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.
