You Make the Call

I'm listening to the Minus Five's new Killingsworth and face the same three questions I face when dealing with A.C. Newman, Robyn Hitchcock and Robert Pollard:
1. Are the lyrics evocative or a dodge or both?
2. Does it matter?
3. Why are people so good at every other phase of pop music-making forcing me to ask these questions?

Something from Nothing

I admire Rich Cohen for his Vanity Fair profile of Jessica Simpson, not because it's so great but because she's obviously as bad an interview as you'd expect. There are few quotes from her from the interview, and he works around Team Simpson's general vapidity, exposing it in the process.

The Art of Writing - D.O.A. Again

Can we all call a time out on the reflexive Twitter/Facebook bashing? I suppose it's the inevitable byproduct of the moment when the cable news networks discovered members of Congress and the Senate used Twitter, and suddenly the social networking tool was ubiquitous - each time said with the same sense of oh-so-delicious naughtiness that accompanies the knowledge that it's a W away from something randy. Still, the easy, fake opposition Larry Blumenfeld created in the lead for his coverage of Jazz Fest is typical:

New Orleans inspires even inveterate Twitterers and Facebook correspondents to release their thumbs and touch real life. Except the guy at the bar of a club called DBA one recent Monday, who just leaned harder into his BlackBerry, typing feverishly as Glen David Andrews—trombone in one hand, mic in the other—upped the tempo of "It's All Over Now." Some people just don't get it.

Evidently people who use Twitter and Facebook are so caught up with themselves and their artificial networks that life is passing them by. But similar concerns were expressed about email, message boards and the telephone - each signaled the death of civilized written communication as people chose some ephemeral form of communication over carefully drafted, hand-written letters. Such hand-wringing really does little more than make the writer seem like a scold as he/she harrumphs "Kids these days ...!" and in the process, removed from the culture he/she is speaking to.

Trading Up?

Has anybody else found Christgau's Consumer Guide hard to use in its current form? At a technical level, I haven't been able to get the "Next" link to work to take me from review to review, but worse - what was once an easily read page has turned into 10 or so visually appealing, hard-to-use pages. I assume this is the handiwork of the good people at MSN, and it seems to be based on the premise that we only want to read the reviews of CDs we know, which is partially true. But I'd scan the other reviews to see if there was anything in there that sounded interesting enough to pursue, and every few months I'd make another discovery that way. The current model requires readers to choose to click on to see what comes next whereas before they had to choose to stop. And cover art's good, but it's not that good.

English as a Second Language

Rhino recently re-released Sammy Davis, Jr.'s All Star Spectacular as a download-only album, and in ways, the album's riveting. The album has the fingerprints of 1962 all over it to such a degree that it might as well have been recorded in a foreign language. Davis explains on the first track that on the album, he's doing impressions while singing the hits of the day, and he does so talking about his "swinging" association with Reprise Records, and how the project is "kind of a gas." His sincere bourgeois hipster tone is almost incomprehensibly unironic, giving the track a strangely mysterious quality even though I know all the words.

The project itself is strange, but its re-release is stranger because many of the songs have since joined history's parade of also-rans, and the people he's impersonating have no presence in the culture in 2009 - Frankie Laine, Vaughn Monroe, Al Hibbler and Mario Lanza to name a few. Songs you don't know as sing by Davis impersonating people you don't recall are fascinating and strange, but whatever frisson he thought he was creating at the time is utterly lost today. I'm entertained by it as an artifact of a show biz that was crushed by a meteor years ago, but I know that's not the album Davis made.

That, though, is what was once side one of the album. Side two is Davis without concept, simply singing cool, swinging songs with a band neither as to the point as any Sinatra would use nor as florid as any that appealed to Dean Martin and the results suggest that while accounts of Davis' impersonation skills may have been overrated, his talent as a singer weren't.

Such an odd project makes me wish Rhino would re-release more of Davis' albums because greatest hits collections and box sets show off his talent, but if the other albums have the eccentricity of All Star Spectacular, then it may be that his year-in, year-our recorded output is in its way as much a diary of his own issues and insecurities as any confessional indie rocker or singer-songwriter.

Everybody Out of My Box

Has anybody had a more uneasy slumber than Nat King Cole? First his daughter's regularly climbing into the coffin to sing a post-passing duet with him, and with Capitol Records' recent Re:Generations, another 20 or so artists join him in the box. Naturally, Natalie's there with the banal Will.i.am to produce a banal version of "Straighten Up and Fly Right," but the news is that much of this is entertaining and riffs on his image. Cee-Lo Green's remix of "Lush Life" affectionately situates Cole's urbanity in a contemporary context, while Salaam Remi's remix of "The Game of Love" suggests his notion of suave style is a bit corny. In the Just Blaze remix of "Pick-Up," now vs. then is the explicit theme as girls who would have loved Cole in his day find him and his pick-up lines laughable today (and in the song's only false note, they go with him anyway). When that theme is less prominent, Re:Generations presents compensatory charms such as a duet with Bebel Gilberto or a version of "Nature Boy" remade in TV on the Radio's own image. If we're going to make the dead croak out one more song, doing so this smartly makes it more palatable.

Sorting Things Out

I've been blogging at my more Louisiana-centric site recently since so much of what I've been writing about recently pertained to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. And I've still got a few thoughts on it that somehow seem more appropriate here than there, but I'll get to them soon enough.

While I've been working on our Jazz Fest issue, I've sorted CDs more than I've reviewed them, listening long enough to decide that something belongs in the "I hope to review it" pile but not actually doing any writing. Here's an attempt to deal with a fraction of that stack:

Black Moth Super Rainbow: Eating Us (Graveface): This is so up my alley - Moog synthesizers, trip-hop drums, melancholy robovocals singing surprisingly solid melodies. I'm not sure how this one's different from Dandelion Gum except that it doesn't smell like the packaging was fabricated by Topps, but I'm glad I have both.

Southside Johnny with LaBamba's Big Band: Grapefruit Moon - The Songs of Tom Waits (Leroy): I haven't thought about Southside Johnny in over 20 years, so I put this on more out of curiosity and have been pleasantly surprised. Waits' compositions are remade as swing tunes with his blessing (he sings on "Walk Away"), and the results are very agreeable if not compelling. Maybe it's because Southside Johnny's just not that compelling a singer, or maybe its because these versions of largely pre-Swordfishtrombones songs suggest that Waits' persona did the heavy lifting in those days.

Ha Ha Tonka: Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South (Bloodshot): I put this on and only moments ago noticed it - five songs later. I'd hoped it would catch for me the way Kings of Leon records eventually do, but they never disappeared entirely.

MSTRKRFT: Fist of God (Dim Mak/Downtown): Arena techno catches me because of its simplicity - throbbing, fuzzed-out riffs and little else. It's economical and made to be physically intense in a club, sports venue or aircraft hangar. I could use stronger hooks since I'll probably never hear MSTRKRFT in any of those venues, but I supsect what's here would be more than enough if I were dancing.