Warpaint, Real Emotional Trash, and Saturnalia
Friday, March 7th, 2008Tuesday was one of those rare days in new music when there are a lot of things coming out that you are interested in, you have the free cash to purchase anything you want, you buy 3 or 4 or 10 records, you get them home, listen to them one after another and they are all great records. Not just, “well, i dont regret buying that” great but legitimately great, like flirting with your top 50 great. Im not saying any of these records are in my top 50 but if in five years im still listening them, they would not look strange amongst the golden tapestry of my top 50. We will take them one by one…
The Black Crowes - Warpaint
What can i say about this record that i havent already said in two of my previous posts this week. There are two misses here, “Wee who see the deep” a Mississippi Queen re-write that never gets off the ground on record and “These Gold in them Hills” which has a lot of good ideas rolling around in it but its obvious they had no way to connect them. their solution just throw them all together and pray that no one notices. However, neither of these songs are bad and they definitely dont ruin the record. there are some classics here, songs that you know are going to be in the live show for years. “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution,” “Movin’ on Down the Line.” There are a couple of songs that are perfect for sitting on the porch of your giant Day-Glo commune House’s porch smoking, drinking some New Castle passing around a couple of guitars and a pair of bongos. I listened to “Whoa Mule,” at 9 in the morning, at the beach watching the sun shine of the waves and the birds come home over the water and “Locust Street” was obviously written while they were all stoned and drunk, tinkering with a mandolin, writing down lyrics they didnt know were good until they sobered up the next day. This is just rootsy groovy soulful music man. This is the record that the Black Crowes have been trying to make since they took their sound as far out as they could take it with Amorica and we should all get down on our hands and knees and thank the lord they were still around to make it.
Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks - Real Emotional Trash
There was always a kind of unfathomable magic to all of Pavements albums, something you just couldnt wrap your face around. Some songs were pretty and you could sing along and song songs were ugly and Stephen spent most of the songs yelping about nothing in particular and some songs just seemed like genre exercises. Never the less, the sums was always at least relative to its parts and the result of that was always too insane to think about for any real length for time lest (am I using that correctly?) the next time you pick up your guitar everything you play sounds like Summer Babe or Silent Kit . You cant sing along to Real Emotional Trash, you cant even really listen to it for more than two songs consecutively with out going to back to re-listen to them. There is just no rhyme to reason to this record and because of this fact it is just an astounding piece of music. I may like this record better than Warpaint and i am the biggest Black Crowes fan from here to Baltimore. It just cannot be described what tremendous things are being done here and the presence of Janet Weiss, formerly of Sleater-Kinney, adds a foundation to the band that Stephen never had with Pavement. One thing that this record has that Pavement records never had is a sense of direction and purpose, albeit while still reveling in its random psychedelia and sometimes cringe sometimes laugh inducing guitar wanking. Good Times.
The Gutter Twins - Saturnalia
How many times can Greg Dulli make the same record before it stops being good? Apparently as many times as we let him. Saturnalia is another notch on his moody, slightly dementedly sexual, sometimes overwhelmingly dark but always groovy belt, the only difference this time is the sustained presence of Mark Lanegan. Sometimes he changes the bands name, Afghan Whigs to the Twilight Singers, sometimes he releases an EP of covers instead of an album of covers but sometimes you really need to shake it up and bring in the preeminent baritone of the 1990’s. And who’da thunk it, it works, again, like it always does, for no reason. Every song on the record sounds grossly similar to the ones that were on The Twilight Singer’s “Powder Burns” and his solo record “Amber Headlights,” but in the weirdo world of Greg Dulli if it aint broke, dont fix it and he never fixes it and at the end of every record i find myself turning the record over sliding the needle to the edge and re-listening to the whole thing. Saturnalia is no different. I compare Greg Dulli records to fantasy novels, more specifically fantasy novels that take place within a very expertly detailed and creatively realized realm, think Harry Potter. Starts out a little scary, in the middle it gets a little boring but by the end you are totally submerged in this alternate reality fighting back demons and begging for more. This record is a lot like that. Its starts scary with Mark Lanegans creepy rumble gets a little stale in the middle and by the end you are apologizing to Greg Dulli for making him so insecure about women and checking his website for tour dates and an EP release schedule. I dont know how he does it but he does and i love him for it. There are just Greg Dulli days, when you wake up in the morning, look out the window, sigh and say “god dammit.” Thats when you want your buddy Greg next to you telling you hes got some stuff that will make the day pass faster. he may mean tunes, he may mean cocaine, booze and ladies either way youre going to feel a whole let better until it ends and you start itching for more.
