10 Music Reviews

40 Watt Hype, Strong Feet on the Concrete (self-released)

40 Watt Hype is a tight enough funk/soul band from California, with two so-so emcees obsessed with complaining about the state of hip-hop today. Their rhymes are preaching-to-the-choir nonsense, lending otherwise hot dance music (not counting some unfortunate rock turns) the spirit of a rather dull lecture. I'm sure there's people who'll eat this stuff up, but I can't stop being too distracted by the supposedly progressive, but really unoriginal, rants to let myself be carried by the grooves. They also seem obsessed with the idea that music today doesn't value artists writing their own songs, yet they can't write a compelling song of their own, no matter how hard they try. What they can do, this 8-piece band (including trombone and congas) plus 7 guest musicians, is rock a tight soul-funk jam…it's just a shame that they MCs keep getting in the way of the funk. – dave heaton

Amy Duncan, Pilgrimage (Plain)

Amy Duncan's Pilgrimage is on the surface a conventional singer/songwriter album – voice-and-guitar or voice-and-piano music, very much in the mold of Joni Mitchell, whose voice and songs Duncan most often brings to mind. It opens with a tribute to a "Wonderful Friend", and includes a song called "Unconditional Love": very conventional. At the same time, when you're listening to it, it doesn't feel nearly as conventional as it should. Right from the start the album grasps you with its presence. There's two reasons for this, I think. One is her voice, which isn't just strong, but used in a varied way – to be quiet, and then to grab at you. The other, probably more important one is the amount of space left in the music, how minimalist it is. It's often just her voice and an instrument or maybe two, and even what the instruments are playing is sparse, stretched out. This keeps ample room for mystery, for fascination, for wonder…within songs that otherwise might be too ordinary to feel strongly about. – dave heaton

Fern Knight, Music for Witches and Alchemists (self-released)

I'm not a witch of an alchemist; is Music for Witches and Alchemists right for me? No, and sometimes yes. Fern Knight – Marge Wienk and a band of musicians, mostly members of Espers – does seem to be playing for an audience that wishes they lived in a land of druids and dragons, or that does (in their minds, maybe), and that's not me. "Song for Ireland" kicks the album off, and it sounds like a psychedelic version of a medieval Christmas carol…though that description sounds cooler to me than the music usually sounds. That said, as the album continues, I find the overall atmosphere – setting her voice with the cello, guitar, and sometimes harp or accordion or other instruments – really distinct. It's like Joni Mitchell lost in a D&D world, or perhaps Mary Timony having given up on all traces of rock and fully embraced her inner wizard. And there's a few songs I find striking, outside of the just the overall atmosphere. "Murder of Crows" is one, with its lingering image of crows blocking out the sun. And then there's the cleverly named "The Dirt South", with background harmonium, and other sounds, that I find especially spooky. Sometimes I think, OK, maybe I am part-witch or –alchemist after all. – dave heaton

The Green Pajamas, The Night Races Into Anna (Hidden Agenda)

As music fans we take a different approach to especially prolific musicians – either we become obsessive, or we pick and choose, setting up our own criteria for which releases are worth our time and which aren't. Or we start on the first path and just shut off at some point, get tired of chasing. It's especially tricky of musicians with one dominant style/sound, which is often the case. I'm somewhere in the middle with the Green Pajamas, the Seattle-based psych/pop/rock group with Jeff Kelly as its sage/frontman. There's something I favor about Green Pajamas compilations – the songs are typical of their style, but not all built around one theme or story, as with most of their releases. This CD lays out Kelly's obsessions across 20 similar, but still quite distinct, songs. Starting with a song about an 11-year-old girl who runs away to "look for Heaven," and comes back as a 7-year-old, the album explores common Green Pajamas themes of seeking, of mysterious women, of other worlds. And similar musical concerns too, from hooks and riffs to more baroque atmospheres. It's a great collection, pulling from nine years of artistic searching. – dave heaton

Kind of Like Spitting/Lemuria, Your Living Room's All Over Me (Art of the Underground)

Your Living Room's All Over Me: not a misheard version of the Dinosaur Jr. album title, but a two-band tribute to touring DIY bands playing shows in living rooms, basements, lofts. The Buffalo-based trio Lemuria kicks it off with seven pop-punk-ish love songs. "Your sheets were made for ghosts like me," one lyric memorably goes. Then there's five songs by Ben Barnett's Kind of Like Spitting, sounding even rawer and louder than usual, fitting for the context. "Shallow Doses" is angry as heck, "Team Reasonable" more sad/gentle. There's a Thermals cover, and some songs of driven, not at all sappy, introspection. "Driven" is a good word for all of this – both bands play with an immediacy that should remind you why the best performances are the closest ones, when you're seeing real people, with billion-dollar companies behind them, singing and playing their hearts out right in your face. – dave heaton

Lambchop, Damaged (Merge)

The country/folk/soul/pop collective Lambchop has been one of the most unique American bands for a while. Working with the electronic duo Hands Off Cuba is only helping give their music yet another side, though their touch is so light. Still, if they had anything to do with the hushed, mysterious atmosphere of Damaged (it seems that they did), kudos to them. This album's filled with unique and surprising moments. There's the opener "Paperback Bible": a weirdly beautiful, and weirdly touching, collection of nonsequitors, mundane and disarming. There's "I Would Have Waited Here All Day," a striking ballad written for Candi Staton. Kurt Wagner's vocal delivery is again unmistakable – sullen and stone-faced, stern and naughty, yet fragile somehow, and mesmerizing…even better within the textured atmospheres of the Lambchop universe. Damaged finds terror, loss, and beauty in small moments and details, sometimes unlikely and even ugly ones. It's a treasure. – dave heaton

Patience Please, Parallel Plots EP (Jigsaw)

You;ve got to love a compressed, sparking little pop-rock recording like this. Five songs and then they're out: each song marked by choppy guitars, forward energy, catchy tunes, friendly harmonies. Nothing innovative, but wonderfully spunky and sweet, with both charged rock energy and a pure-pop side. I love the optimism of the hooks, the lonely but hopeful crush side of some songs' lyrics, the detailed scene-setting here and there (like on the first track, "Cynics & Critics"), the moments when keyboardist Keenan Dowers asserts her voice from the background closer to the forefront, balancing with the two male singers' voices. I love the sparser, slower complicated-live song "Too Forthright" and the romantic glow it gains near the end, as the instruments mostly drop out. And I especially love the anxiety and longing in the final song, "Unpublished." - dave heaton

Shedding, What God Doesn't Bless, You Won't Love; What You Don't Love, the Child Won't Know (Hometapes)

Electronic musician/sound scientist Connor Bell, aka Shedding, was inspired by Eric Dolphy's music, and a Dolphy quote about bird songs, to make What God Doesn't Bless…, and utilized samples of his music in the soundscapes. He sees it as a tribute to Dolphy, and to "listen(ing) to our world with a different set of ears." That's interesting, and the music definitely shares with Dolphy the quest to hear anew. But it'd be a mistake to saddle this work too heavily to the ghost of a dead musician, when a living one has created such an absorbing, fresh work of his own. The album, three pieces in total, starts out slow in speed, but not in thought or action. It's a busy but meandering, enveloping world of horns and electronic growls and bizarre, hard-to-pin-down sounds. The effect is eerie, but in a provocative way (like a fog-encased city). It creeps forward, pulling us further into it. And as it does so, increasing in strangeness. It's disorienting at times, echo-y, almost dissonant but stopping short from 'noise', at times almost made of static, but not. Start to finish the music is mindbending: "psychedelic" but not in that tainted, dated way. It threatens to disappear, and always comes back. It's an intriguing sonic forest – deep and wide, dense and spacious enough to get lost in. It's less a narrative of a direct statement than its own world. And the more I listen the more particular sections and moments stand out, or come to resemble their own worlds within the world. It never ends. – dave heaton

The Specific Heats, Aboard a Spaceship of the Imagination (Total Gaylord)

The Specific Hearts may have set up their album to look like a child's adventure through space, but musically the childlike side is more evident than anything intergalactic. Think soft, simple, catchy pop tunes. At the same time there's way more broken hearts here than you'd find in most children's stories. "I won't be the boy of a girl who thinks she can toy with my heart til it breaks," Mat sings in the first track, singing it like it's a '50s vocal pop hit. But instead of a girl group singing it with confidence, there's a shy boy singing it with sadness and a certain amount of fear. That's the basic approach here: a classic pop sound, but filtered through a minor-key filter of sad wistfulness. It tempers the melodies, so they don't immediately come off as bright and snappy, though often they are. The album's less a quest for some far-off star than for love and comfort and belonging. That search is channeled well into memorable melancholy moments throughout, and into some brilliant, still in their own way reserved (by hesitant longing), singalong, clapalong numbers like "Are You for Real, Mehgan O'Neill", or the group "ba ba ba" chorus at the end of "Ice Cream Shop." It's the wistful, less fun, sadder "Carl Sagan" that ultimately reveals the true nature of the space décor: that true love and memories of good times often seem as distant as the furthest galaxies. – dave heaton

The Twin Atlas, Magic Car Wash (Tappersize)

One look at the album art photos of the city at night should tell you that this is a relative of the last Twin Atlas release, Sun Township. That album of twilight-pop had gorgeous melodies and an equally memorable late night/early morning mood. This 11-song CD is in the same vein, and just as good. The tunes are perhaps not as direct, more impressionistic in places, but that's no criticism. There's a lingering glow to these songs which holds inside of it hope, loss, mystery. Light, tantalizing guitars, hushed singing, a general palette of wonder. Is The Twin Atlas in touch with the cosmos, in some deep way? Sure sounds like it. – dave heaton