This Week's Soundtrack: June 11, 2012

This week's soundtrack is seriously shaped by last week.
1. "The Coming Tide" - Luke Winslow-King: I've been listening to and enjoying Luke W-K's new album by the same name all week.
2. "Oh Susannah" - Neil Young & Crazy Horse: The lead track from Americana. By now, a collection of remakes of folk tunes is a little been-there/done-that, and his version of "Get a Job" doesn't change enough to be interesting. Still, I love Crazy Horse's native stomp, and spelling out "banjo" gives the song a sense of humor I hope I'll discover in some of the other tracks.
3. "Hey, Hey We're the Gories" - The Gories: The Detroit garage-punk band plays Saturday night at Siberia with the 3-D Invisibles.

4. "Face Down in the Gutter" - Quintron: A lot of this last week was spent at the Music Box, where Quintron conducted the final, improvised-within-a-framework shows. He mapped out the performance and signaled players in and out of the mix.
5. "Unforgettable Super Lady" - Javelin: The guys from Javelin were two of the performers at the Music Box.
6. "Armoire" - Curren$y with Young Roddy and Trademark: From The Stoned Immaculate. With Lil Wayne, I always felt like the mixtapes were the testing grounds for ideas that would take shape on Tha Carter II and III. With Curren$y, I wonder if the major label releases are the ads for mixtapes, which are where his music really lives.
7. "Crew Love" - Drake with The Weeknd: The Weeknd plays the House of Blues Tuesday.
8. "Street Parade" - Theresa Andersson: The title track from her most recent album. Part of the reporting for my story on Theresa in the current issue of OffBeat was done when she shot the video for this song at the Music Box.
9. "I Can't Make it Alone" - Continental Drifters" Susan Cowsill singing lead on the Dusty Springfield classic. Cowsill performed Dusty in Memphis in its entirety Saturday night at Carrollton Station.
10. "No Easy Way Down" - Dusty Springfield: If I'm going to play a Dusty cover ...
11. "Pacific Coast Highway" - The Beach Boys: From the new That's Why God Made the Radio. I wasn't eager for this album despite my love of The Beach Boys because of the sound of the title track and its nostalgia - usually my least-favorite of the band's modes. Most reviews agree that the last three songs give the album a reason to live; so far, this is my favorite of the three.
12. "Dreamer" - Dennis Wilson: From Pacific Ocean Blue. I think Beach Boys' obsessives overrate this album, but Dennis developed an authentic writing voice when Brian couldn't be counted on, and that gives his treatments of conventional subject matter life.
13. "Bells" - Quintron: Like "Face Down in the Gutter," this comes from his Sucre du Sauvage album, and it's more in keeping with the experimental nature of the Music Box performances. The ambient sounds were recorded in City Park during the time when Quintron installed himself as a museum exhibit at NOMA as part of his "Parallel Universe" show with Miss Pussycat.
14. "Little Boxes" - Teenage Head: A year ago Saturday, my friend Imants Krumins passed away. He kept seeing Teenage Head and giving them a chance way longer than anyone else did. I wish the original mix of Teenage Head's debut album could be found online instead of this artificially revved-up version, but since it's what we've got, it's what we go with.
15. "I Zimbra" (12" version) - Talking Heads: Right now I'm plowing through Jonathan Lethem's entry in the 33 1/3 series, Fear of Music. Lethem's wrestling with a lot of ideas starting with the question of how to address the album now while honoring his changing relationship to it over the years, and I wish he was handling that challenge with less circular writing. I've rarely moved so slowly through a 33 /13 book.
16. "Back.te.riality" (Magas remix) - Die-6, Magas: Chicago's Jim Magas was also among the performers at the Music Box this weekend.
17. "Express Yourself" - Diplo feat. Nicky Da B: From Diplo's new Express Yourself EP. This is one of the handful of non-New Orleans tracks to get bounce right.
18. "I've Got My Mind Set on You" - Luke Winslow-King: Also from The Coming Tide. Here he and Esther Rose cover George Harrison.
19. "Free State of Jones" - Cary Hudson: Blue Mountain's Cary Hudson periodically does a solo show on the House of Blues' patio, the Voodoo Garden. He'll be there as part of a songwriter's showcase Wednesday at 7 p.m.

This Week and More: May 28, 2012

Tonight, YACHT plays One Eyed Jacks. Here's a Spotify playlist with music from the week and more.
1. "The Doorway" - Pierced Arrows: Playing tonight at Siberia.
2. "Better Off Dead" - The Wipers: Classic and too often overlooked American punk from Portland.
3. "(I'm) Out of It" - The Nomads: Great Swedish garage punk (who I thought of because they do a great version of "Better Off Dead" on Powerstrip.
4. "Sixteen Saltines" - Jack White: from Blunderbuss. I have yet to pay attention much past this point in the album.
5. "E=MC2" (12" remix) - Big Audio Dynamite: From the second disc of the Legacy Edition of This is Big Audio Dynamite, which I skipped when it came out. Now I love how this version opens up the dubwise bass.
 6. "Freaking Out" - Toro Y Moi: Cool, contemporary/retro funk & the title track from last year's EP.

7. "Mama Used to Say" - Junior: Retro funk inspired by "Freaking Out."
8. "Banana Ripple" - Junior Boys: I have a soft spot for this electropop duo since they're from Hamilton, Ontario, where I lived for 10-plus years. But not while they were together.
9. "I'll Be Your Mirror" - YACHT: Playing One Eyed Jacks tonight.
10. "Ne Dis Pas (Girl Don't Tell Me)" - Souvenir: A lovely French Beach Boys cover from Caroline Now, an album of well-chosen Beach Boys covers including "I Wanna Pick You Up" by Alex Chilton.
11. "Credit in the Straight World" - Young Marble Giants: An obsession when I DJ'ed at CFMU in Hamilton.
12. "Listen to My Heels" - Theresa Andersson. From her new Street Parade album, which is really smart and more playful than is immediately obvious.
13. "Wild" - Beach House: Each time I listen to a track or three from Bloom, I think I need to spend more time with this album.
14. "Hold Me Close" - Flux Pavilion: Playing the Republic Wednesday.
15. Step - Kid Sister w/ Estelle: People loved or hated Kid Sister's Ultraviolet. The middle of the album gets thin for me, and I knew "Pro Nails" too well when the album came out to still get excited about it, but the first third of album's great fun.
16. "Ripe" - GIVERS: I wanted to see if I still like this album as much as I did when it came out. I do.
17. Aboulaguine Akaline - Bombino: A highlight from this year's Jazz Fest, along with Seun Kuti.
18. Too Many People - Paul McCartney: Maybe the first album I bought (Ram) and the first Fab Macca album on Spotify. I'm very pleasantly surprised at how good and eccentric it sounds.

(Coming soon: MySpiltMilk.com)

Theresa Andersson

Preparing for an upcoming television show appearance (WLAE Wednesday 7 and 9:30 p.m. in New Orleans)reminded me that I never got around to writing about a recent Theresa Andersson show at the Republic. Andersson's new Hummingbird, Go! is her most idiosyncratic album, speaking in a more personal, less genre-oriented voice than she has in the past, and it's more interesting for it. The songs are small, in some cases fragments, and they're firmly rooted in indie rock though, as her show made clearer, they embraced where she's been as well. She opened with "Mary Don't You Weep," a song consistent with her self-titled roots rock EP, and her version stands solidly beside Springsteen's Seeger Session recording. For the album and tour, she developed a circle of instruments and pedals to allow her to loop parts so she can accompany herself, the version of "Mary" grew in power and richness, while Springsteen's is unquestionably powerful, but is the case of so much Springsteen, his recordings hit one level of intensity and stay there.

One measure of success of the show is how quickly people stopped pointing at the pedals and whispering about them - how quickly the method of production became secondary to the music - and how effectively she used the looping technology. Too often, the live process of building and layering parts is inefficient, and good three minute ideas become slack five minute songs as the first minute or so is spent laying down parts. In Andersson's case, she builds the layers as quickly as possible, and the parts she adds were almost always musically interesting at the moment she added them. They felt like more of the performance, not the capturing of a part.

In fact, the show became a form of performance art, a sort of dance she performed as she moved from drums to guitar to pedals to pedals to microphone to her violin, and so on. It became hard to see which movements were expressions of the joy of playing and which were purpose-driven. It all came together for the set's most ecstatic moment, "Birds Fly Away," the album's highlight. She reminded us she's a New Orleans musician when she snapped on a sample of a drum loop of Smokey Johnson playing a portion of "It Ain't My Fault," but like Stereolab, she immediately adds parts that recontextualize the beat, in this case making it sound more Motown than New Orleans. Like Stereolab, there's a cool, mechanical precision to the sound, but her vocal in the chorus is anything but remote. The natural vision obviously reassures her ("Birds fly away / they seek shelter. / Trees stand tall / they don't falter."), so much so that she extends the song to repeat the chorus a few more times, singing it like a spiritual revelation. She returned to the song for an encore, but the magic was spent the first time around.

I gather the process of recording and looping was designed to make traveling cost-efficient; what's impressive is how successfully she took a challenge and made something personal and rewarding out of it.