Sculpted pop noise from guitar/drum duo. They run into the limits of their sound eventually, but they do make a good run for it.
zondag 8 september 2019
Capsule review: No age - Snares like a haircut (2018)
Sculpted pop noise from guitar/drum duo. They run into the limits of their sound eventually, but they do make a good run for it.
Capsule review: dEUS - Keep you close (2011)
Uber-romantic statement. I suspect the record Barman always knew dEUS had in them. It's an achievement. Too big for me. Of heart, of sound. I'm not into these Olympian levels.
Capsule review: Potty mouth - Snafu (2019)
Modern Weezer. Snappy ('22'). They bark, but not much bite.
Capsule review: Luc Ferrari - Presque rien N° 1 (1970)
I dig these composers who explore the limits of what is music, I do. Some I dig to listen to, some to read about. These environment sounds taped over 24 hours on a beach in Yugoslavia, may be compressed to 20 minutes, for this subjective listener they feel like a long day of listening.
Capsule review: Radical slave - Damascus (2010)
A pack of rabid rodents gnawing at your shoes. It it permitted? Trust me, they don't care. Raw no wave noise.
Capsule review: Beach boys - Keepin' the summer alive (1980)
I'll be in the garage chopping up this surfboard.
Capsule review: Beach boys - Love you (1977)
Confessions of a recluse with a synth. Legend has it they planted a keyboard in front of Brian's tv and he didn't realize a thing. But legends aren't real. It takes research and development to sound this damaged. You won't find a record like it, and neither will Johnny Carson. Even the synth needs psychological treatment.
Capsule review: Beach boys - In concert (1974)
Underrated concert recording from the last days when they were a modern band.
Capsule review: Beach boys - Holland (1973)
Quiet peak of the Brother years. You'd predict an artistic future for these guys, but this was the last stand.
zondag 1 september 2019
Capsule review: Mitsoobishy Jacson - The confusion of A.J. Schicksal (2009)
It was only a matter of time before some part of the Mauro extended musical family would get into soundtracking imaginary movies. Mitsoobishy Jacson are prime candidates. Actually they give it the intimacy of craftfullness of a radio play. Superior Air or just another facet of the Mauro universe? You decide. I'll listen again, I can never figure it out.
Capsule review: V/A - Boest! (2009)
As they say, poetry - it's a closed book to me. Even when read out loud. Minimalism is not in their vocabulary. Side B is a chaotic soundscape to devour these poets. You'd think I'd get more satisfaction from it.
Capsule review: Beach boys - Carl & the Passions 'So tough' (1972)
Everyone pitches in to fill the gap. Still, they've got heart. I want it to work.
Capsule review: Beach boys - Surf's up (1971)
The new direction is health. Be good to your feet, be good to your planet. Somehow it works, even through some awkward songs. Brian rises above with an apocalyptic message. Our soul is lost, then we die.
Capsule review: Beach boys - Sunflower (1970)
Patchy new start. Some lovely, but as a whole quite schmaltzy. I don't think that was the intention. They lack direction.
Capsule review: Beach boys - 20/20 (1969)
Wrapping up before heading off, but for now that's a strength. Even more democratic - side A is a succession of individual productions. Side B is Brian's, waving at us from the past.
donderdag 29 augustus 2019
Capsule review: Bill Callahan - Shepherd in a sheepskin vest (2019)
A man sits contented in the grass, mumbling in the distance. Who's to say he doesn't hold the key to our lives' meaning.
Capsule review: Beach boys - Friends (1968)
The Beach boys never went to college. After high school they grew up. The hard won pleasures of this music are beyond the experience of the teenage audience. Mike Love must've been otherwise occupied to let control slip out of his hands again after Wild Honey. He couldn't have written these songs.
Capsule review: Beach boys - Lei'd in Hawaii (1967, released 2017)
They sound misplaced, so they misplaced the record. The smallest a blockbuster band has ever sounded. But that's an intriguing sound too.
Capsule review: Mauro Pawlowski - Hallo, met Mauro (2004)
Give him a great idea for a commission and he delivers. These 'hold the line' messages for VisitAntwerpen are more groovy and melodic than they've any right to be. I'd call. Makes that robot voice come alive.
Capsule review: Othin spake - Live @ Archiduc (2009)
Long delayed release of 2005 concert. Supposed to be Othin Spake's debut, but shelved over technical difficulties. 15 minute 'Deity Ame' (also salvaged on the debut proper) the highlight.
dinsdag 27 augustus 2019
Capsule review: The beach boys - Smiley smile (1967)
If one album could've saved rock from self-importance. Such a joyful half hour. Come on now 'If I only had a little pad ... in Hawaii' Now that rock stars are effectively bald, tell me this album didn't see it all coming. Love that album cover too.
Capsule review: The beach boys - Smile session (1966-67, 2011 released)
The good stuff was out there. They were right not to release this. At some point you wanna strangle that guy that's been going 'Awadadoowop' for 45 minutes. Then they can arrest me. I feel Mike Love's pain.
Capsule review: The Beach boys - Pet sounds (1966)
It's that moment when the girl on the beach goes home with you and you realize you have no inner life to share. Start growing.
Moments with Mauro: Hitsville drunks - 'Before we got rich' (2007)
Early version of the Radical Slave single.
Capsule review: The Beach Boys - Summer days and summer nights (1965)
Some bands' autopilots are better than other bands' autopilots. Some come up with 'California girls'. Or even 'Let him run wild'.
Capsule review: The Beach Boys - Today! (1965)
Wonder and doubt. And some of the most beautiful ballads in the annals of pop.
Capsule review: The Beach Boys - All summer long (1964)
Everything comes together in this eternal youth classic. The high- and endpoint of their early phase as the platonic ideal of a youth band. From here on they'd have no other path but to grow up.
Capsule review: The Beach Boys - Shut down Vol 2 (1964)
Half a brilliant record ('Fun, fun, fun', 'Don'ty worry baby'), half studio debris ('Denny's drums', 'Cassius Love...'). These days there's something innocent and naïve about such brazen product creation. There was heart in it. Can we ever go back?
Capsule review: The Beach Boys - Little deuce coupe (1963)
Two weeks after their last record, the Beach Boys released their car album. Some old, 8 new songs recorded in a day. Remarkably some of it works.
Capsule review: The Beach Boys - Surfer girl (1963)
Expanding. The romance of surfing. Also cars and having your own bedromm. One question: what's a car club?
Capsule review: The Beach Boys - Surfin' U.S.A. (1963)
Toughening up. An early classic. They own this formula (surf + harmony).
Capsule review: The Beach Boys - Surfin' Safari (1962)
Sketches of the sea. Primary colors. Even Mozart made a surf album at 6.
Capsule review: Mauro Pawlowski - Nieuwzwart (2009)
A kick in the eye instrumental rock record. And poetry recitation. Mauro finds a new savage, spooked rock sound - the first to rival the Superstars - in two new partners Jeroen Stevens and Elko Blyweert. Both would feature regularly in a new and expanding family of musical collaborators which would pull him beyond dEUS.
Secret history of rock 'n' roll: Roy Acuff - The great speckled bird (1936)
Roy Acuff – The great speckled bird (1936)
The King of Country Music’s first great triumph, a quasi-devotional single that singlehandedly ushered country music out of the moribund string band and hoedown era into a new singer based format, the formidable success of ‘The great speckled bird’ and Acuff himself, as a singer, fiddler, promotor, music publisher has all but obliterated traces of a dark and troubling story at the heart of the song. A story which his former cohort, Hawaiian guitarist Clell Summery, who played a crucial role in its story, only now feels at liberty to share. ‘The payments from the estated stopped coming in,’ he explains, ‘so I’m putting the record straight.’
Hank Williams V (no actual relation), chairman of the Grand Ole Opry, admits the revelations hurt the carefully maintained reputation of the Nashville institution. ‘It’s like my [not actual] forefather Hank Williams said about my good friend [actually dead before Williams V was out of kindergarten] Roy: ‘He’s the biggest singer this music ever knew. You booked him and you didn’t worry about crowds. For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God.’ Of course he never saw Garth, but still… So to hear this twisted tale. Well, the Grand Ole Opry would prefer you didn’t.’
But Summery won’t be silenced. ‘First off, people think Claxton [Roy’s middle name] was this country farmboy rube, a pure soul untainted. Hell, his family was Tennessee state senators and Baptist preachers. He was schooled. He was an intellectual. Always his nose in the books. Crowley, Blavatsky. Satanism was in his blood. He wore a cape wherever he went.’ Career prospects however weren’t so good. An early media blitz balancing farm tools on his chin fizzled out when the hype died, but he never had to shave again.
At end’s rope a deal made at the crossroads gave him heretofore unsuspected athletic prowess. Summery: ‘Claxton was not the sportive kind. At all. He was the team mascot. We mocked him, actually. Andicapped Acuff, we called him. So he disappeared for a couple of weeks, after checking out every occult book in the Maynardville library. Lo and behold, he comes back an athlete. You can imagine the stories going ‘round. I axe him what happened. He says it happened at the crossroads, Plainview and Blaine. Traded his soul for upper body strength. And calves too. Boy…’
Demonic intervention or not, Roy was soon playing for the Knoxville Smokies and was tipped for great things. Then, ‘the deal went south’, says Summery, ‘Claxton was cut loose from the spirit. Lost his body strength. They said it was a sunstroke, but come on, did ya ever heard of a baseball player dropping out over a sunstroke? It was his devil deal gone wrong.’ Roy dropped out and went into seclusion at his parents’ house. ‘I just couldn’t stand the sun anymore,’ he said, in later years conceding that he’d had a nervous breakdown in the early ‘30s. ‘Nuff said,’ says Summery, ‘he’d wavered and lost everything. But now he chose the real nightlife – being a musician.’
Managed by his father, who handled all daytime contacts, Roy became first a competent fiddler, then a remarkable singer. He joined Doc Hauer’s Medicine Show (‘He loved our product,’ says Hauer) and started playing with guitarist Jess Easterday (‘obviously a stagename,’ says Summery) and childhood friend turned Hawaiian guitarist Summery in the Tennesse Crackerjacks, then the Crazy Tennesseans. ‘We really were crazy.’ They started building a repertoire and a reputation. It was a chance encounter with a six-year-old Anton LaVey in early 1936 however that led the way to ‘The great speckled bird’, eventually his breakthrough single for ACR. ‘Anton, even at 6, had the gift of persuasion,’ continues Summery. ‘He took us under his wing. We started wearing capes again. And under his tutelage we found the philosophy underpinning our work for the Crazy Tennesseans. We started writing a country opera, a cross between the book of Job, Faust and Pygmalion, but with more Satanism.’
‘‘Speckled bird’ was supposed to be the opening song. The main character was this country rube, indoctrinated by the Jesus cult, singing God’s praises. But that was just the start of it. In this guy’s life God and Lord Satan would stage a battle for supremacy, God raining down deprivation and torment upon the man, Lord Satan sending him sweet temptations. At first the guy won’t waver, he remains loyal to his God, but why? Eventually he confronts God and learns of the cheap bet the Lords of Good and Evil have made of his life. This is how God betrays his people. And he sees the honesty and glory of Lord Satan’s path. He spits on a preacher, an autobiographic scene for Roy, surrenders his soul willingly and becomes a preacher in the Church of Satan.’
‘A new life opens for this guy: narcotics, luscious group sex and success at the stock market beyond his wildest dreams. This all takes place during the Depression, while his pious, dull wife starves herself and 9 children for fear of eating Satan’s bread. He laughs at her funeral. Meanwhile he makes enough money to fulfill his lifelong dream of going to Lourdes and piss on Mother Mary’s ghostly apparition, causing an electric short circuit which kills him. His soul descends into hellfire, singing ‘Nearer my God to thee’
Needless to say, the success of its leading song derailed Acuff. Once again his resolution wavered. ‘Success went to his head,’ says Summery, ‘All of a sudden the sex songs had to be released under an alias [the Bang boys] and were buried on the market. Claxton was doing a column for Church Weekly. He abandoned the cape and started going out in the daytime again. It was clear to me our work would never be made.’ An impartial onlooker might conclude he went over to the good side. Whatever the truth of it, the Crazy Tennesseans soon fell apart. Summery was shoved to the side, replaced by a dobro player. ‘A fucking dobro’.
What to make of all this. Summery's later comedy career ('They sold it as comedy, but I meant every word.') casts some doubts on the veracity of his claims but who's to say? Summey still wears a cape. Acuff died in 1992 and hasn’t replied to our requests for comment. ‘The great speckled bird’ – still a remarkable single, whatever its back story. But Summery’s voodoo Hawaiian guitar sure casts a sinister glow on this seemingly idealistic slice of praising the Lord.
The King of Country Music’s first great triumph, a quasi-devotional single that singlehandedly ushered country music out of the moribund string band and hoedown era into a new singer based format, the formidable success of ‘The great speckled bird’ and Acuff himself, as a singer, fiddler, promotor, music publisher has all but obliterated traces of a dark and troubling story at the heart of the song. A story which his former cohort, Hawaiian guitarist Clell Summery, who played a crucial role in its story, only now feels at liberty to share. ‘The payments from the estated stopped coming in,’ he explains, ‘so I’m putting the record straight.’
Hank Williams V (no actual relation), chairman of the Grand Ole Opry, admits the revelations hurt the carefully maintained reputation of the Nashville institution. ‘It’s like my [not actual] forefather Hank Williams said about my good friend [actually dead before Williams V was out of kindergarten] Roy: ‘He’s the biggest singer this music ever knew. You booked him and you didn’t worry about crowds. For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God.’ Of course he never saw Garth, but still… So to hear this twisted tale. Well, the Grand Ole Opry would prefer you didn’t.’
But Summery won’t be silenced. ‘First off, people think Claxton [Roy’s middle name] was this country farmboy rube, a pure soul untainted. Hell, his family was Tennessee state senators and Baptist preachers. He was schooled. He was an intellectual. Always his nose in the books. Crowley, Blavatsky. Satanism was in his blood. He wore a cape wherever he went.’ Career prospects however weren’t so good. An early media blitz balancing farm tools on his chin fizzled out when the hype died, but he never had to shave again.
At end’s rope a deal made at the crossroads gave him heretofore unsuspected athletic prowess. Summery: ‘Claxton was not the sportive kind. At all. He was the team mascot. We mocked him, actually. Andicapped Acuff, we called him. So he disappeared for a couple of weeks, after checking out every occult book in the Maynardville library. Lo and behold, he comes back an athlete. You can imagine the stories going ‘round. I axe him what happened. He says it happened at the crossroads, Plainview and Blaine. Traded his soul for upper body strength. And calves too. Boy…’
Demonic intervention or not, Roy was soon playing for the Knoxville Smokies and was tipped for great things. Then, ‘the deal went south’, says Summery, ‘Claxton was cut loose from the spirit. Lost his body strength. They said it was a sunstroke, but come on, did ya ever heard of a baseball player dropping out over a sunstroke? It was his devil deal gone wrong.’ Roy dropped out and went into seclusion at his parents’ house. ‘I just couldn’t stand the sun anymore,’ he said, in later years conceding that he’d had a nervous breakdown in the early ‘30s. ‘Nuff said,’ says Summery, ‘he’d wavered and lost everything. But now he chose the real nightlife – being a musician.’
The Crazy Tennesseans:
Managed by his father, who handled all daytime contacts, Roy became first a competent fiddler, then a remarkable singer. He joined Doc Hauer’s Medicine Show (‘He loved our product,’ says Hauer) and started playing with guitarist Jess Easterday (‘obviously a stagename,’ says Summery) and childhood friend turned Hawaiian guitarist Summery in the Tennesse Crackerjacks, then the Crazy Tennesseans. ‘We really were crazy.’ They started building a repertoire and a reputation. It was a chance encounter with a six-year-old Anton LaVey in early 1936 however that led the way to ‘The great speckled bird’, eventually his breakthrough single for ACR. ‘Anton, even at 6, had the gift of persuasion,’ continues Summery. ‘He took us under his wing. We started wearing capes again. And under his tutelage we found the philosophy underpinning our work for the Crazy Tennesseans. We started writing a country opera, a cross between the book of Job, Faust and Pygmalion, but with more Satanism.’
‘‘Speckled bird’ was supposed to be the opening song. The main character was this country rube, indoctrinated by the Jesus cult, singing God’s praises. But that was just the start of it. In this guy’s life God and Lord Satan would stage a battle for supremacy, God raining down deprivation and torment upon the man, Lord Satan sending him sweet temptations. At first the guy won’t waver, he remains loyal to his God, but why? Eventually he confronts God and learns of the cheap bet the Lords of Good and Evil have made of his life. This is how God betrays his people. And he sees the honesty and glory of Lord Satan’s path. He spits on a preacher, an autobiographic scene for Roy, surrenders his soul willingly and becomes a preacher in the Church of Satan.’
‘A new life opens for this guy: narcotics, luscious group sex and success at the stock market beyond his wildest dreams. This all takes place during the Depression, while his pious, dull wife starves herself and 9 children for fear of eating Satan’s bread. He laughs at her funeral. Meanwhile he makes enough money to fulfill his lifelong dream of going to Lourdes and piss on Mother Mary’s ghostly apparition, causing an electric short circuit which kills him. His soul descends into hellfire, singing ‘Nearer my God to thee’
More Satanic country music:
Needless to say, the success of its leading song derailed Acuff. Once again his resolution wavered. ‘Success went to his head,’ says Summery, ‘All of a sudden the sex songs had to be released under an alias [the Bang boys] and were buried on the market. Claxton was doing a column for Church Weekly. He abandoned the cape and started going out in the daytime again. It was clear to me our work would never be made.’ An impartial onlooker might conclude he went over to the good side. Whatever the truth of it, the Crazy Tennesseans soon fell apart. Summery was shoved to the side, replaced by a dobro player. ‘A fucking dobro’.
Clell Summery in his later career:
What to make of all this. Summery's later comedy career ('They sold it as comedy, but I meant every word.') casts some doubts on the veracity of his claims but who's to say? Summey still wears a cape. Acuff died in 1992 and hasn’t replied to our requests for comment. ‘The great speckled bird’ – still a remarkable single, whatever its back story. But Summery’s voodoo Hawaiian guitar sure casts a sinister glow on this seemingly idealistic slice of praising the Lord.
maandag 26 augustus 2019
Capsule review: Franco Battiato - Fetus (1971)
Italian popsongs and special effects. An early '70s trip through at the time cutting edge technology, and also a dreamscape. Bad dreams.
Capsule review: Fontella Bass - The best of (1964-1968, 1992 released)
Quality, if formulaic mid-60s soul. Chess as in roots. Likeable.
Capsule review: Kapotski: Kapotski international shopdrop record tracking system (2008)
Lovely spacious sound on this LP of edited highlights from two improvised concerts in 2006, Kapotski curating a line-up of guests (side A: Jean-Marie Aerts, Isolde Lasoen; side B: Mauro Pawlowski, Steven De Bruyn) who met on stage. Like walking around in a cubist painting. Abstract, but it feels good to wander around in.
zondag 25 augustus 2019
Capsule review: Lou Barlow's Sentridoh - Winning losers. A collection of home recordings (1993)
Brevity's is lo-fi's friend.
Capsule review: Sentridoh - The original losing losers (1991)
Drink in the lo-fi gestalt. 43 track of hiss and bitter tomfoolery. But I get lost in it.
Capsule review: Mauro Antonio Pawlowski - Untertanz (2008)
If Antonio is Mauro's solo avant garde manifestation, then this is his pop album. But... because of its diversity in sounds and modes, its directness, its popmusic quotatins, not because it's filled with songs. There are none. This is on an abstract plain. A cover of Big Star's 'Thirteen' so dmeented the older Alex Chilton would have approved. On the whole something of a definitive statement for Antonio.
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