The first hints of fall and the shortening of days seems to bring with it more evening time for music listening. Thus I am back again with a wide range of discs worth paying attention to. As always, I recommend supporting your local independent music store and all they add to our city.
Van Dyke Parks
Songs Cycled
Bella Union Music
There isn’t much that Van Dyke Parks hasn’t done. One of pop music’s greatest Renaissance men, Parks collaborated with Brian Wilson on some of the Beach Boys most beloved (and misunderstood) songs, composed dozens of soundtracks, worked with Frank Zappa, and arranged and produced more than a hundred albums, including recent efforts by Joanna Newsome and Silverchair.
Parks is one of few who have earned the title living legend, but, despite the accolades of his peers and historians, even the most well educated music lover might know the name but not the details.
He’s had a deliberately low key, bordering on the obscure, solo career which has encompassed a scant nine releases over more than four decades. So any Van Dyke Parks album is going to be, by nature, something special. Songs Cycled follows his last studio release by a mere 18 years – a drop in the bucket in Parks universe – and in typical Parks fashion, doesn’t even offer up all new material.
The earliest songs date back two decades while the rest were released over the past decade as a stream of 7” singles that no one, outside of his immediate family and record label, likely even knew existed. But no matter, because here they are and they’re uniformly brilliant, a mixture of world Caribbean beat and baroque layered pop as only Parks could serve up.
The songs are elaborate, at times fastidious, and employ everything from steel drums to strings to woodwinds and ukulele. They’re also highly topical with Parks addressing such concerns as post 9/11 paranoia (the ragtime piano driven “Wall Street”) or “Missin’ Mississippi”, quite possibly the most moving post Katrina song yet, in which Parks’ throaty intonation is starkly set against jubilant accordion and brass. It’s the sort of audacious arrangement that few musicians would attempt and even fewer can pull off.
“Hold Back Time” (originally found on the Brian Wilson collaboration Orange Crate Art), reveals a romantic warmth not found in the original, while the clarinet (seriously, clarinet!) driven “Sassafrass” is a tongue in cheek bit of seduction. It all adds up to a record that only Van Dyke Parks could have made.
Now 72, Parks, who has been in show business since age 10 (starring in several early television productions), remains one of our most idiosyncratic and brilliant musical lights. His records have at times confounded and exasperated me, but not once have they ever left me anything other than grateful for the man who made them. Songs Cycled is another chapter in a saga that in so many ways demonstrates the best of American music. *****
Nine Inch Nails
Hesitation Marks
Columbia Records
When Trent Reznor announced he was putting NIN on hiatus, with an eye towards leaving music altogether, I doubt anyone took him seriously. A perfectionist whose work ethic borders on compulsive, Reznor hardly slowed down.
He scored several film soundtracks (earning an Academy Award for The Social Network), dabbled in video production, and quickly teamed with his longtime amigo Atticus Ross to form the industrial rock trio, How to Destroy Angels. The third part of that equation, Mariqueen Maandig, soon after became his wife and mother of his two children. So, it’s into the relatively bucolic circumstance that Reznor, now clean and sober for the first time in years, brings back Nine Inch Nails.
Thankfully, while he a very different person than he was a decade ago, Reznor has lost none of his edge. In fact, Hesitation Marks, which builds nicely upon two NIN previous releases, is as good as it gets. It engages many of the same danceable grooves of Pretty Hate Machine while exploring the subtle underpinnings of Downward Spiral, doing so in ways that are both startling and entirely logical.
Reznor has long been enamored by the art rock affectations of such bands as The Talking Heads and Tusk era Fleetwood Mac, so why not bring Adrian Belew and Lindsay Buckingham on board? And if you’re wanting to really pump up the bass lines, who better than Pino Palladino? The end result is the most optimistic record NIN has ever made, from the nearly giddy throes of “Everything” (who would have thought NIN capable of such chirpy power pop?), to “Find My Way”, a surprisingly uncomplicated roadmap of what lies ahead.
Reznor sings with a deliberate confidence that indicates a singer that has finally embraced his abilities. Sure there are moments of doubt and darkness – the somber “Came Back Haunted” would have fit nicely on a number of earlier albums – but while the old Trent Reznor would have lingered in such shadows, the 2013 version pays it a visit and moves along. That balance of light and dark makes Hesitation Marks a richly rewarding experience, one that lingers long after the luminosity has faded. *****
The Rides
Can’t Get Enough
429 Records
Forty five years after the original Super Session, Stephen Stills, Barry Goldberg (both of whom played that gathering, though not on the same tracks), and Kenny Wayne Shepherd try to rekindle that magic moment in time with this loosely constructed collection of originals, covers, and remakes.
While it has all the elements (Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, guitar wunderkind, and grizzled veteran of the blues), Can’t Get Enough doesn’t quite succeed: But not for lack of trying. The Rides do offer up some stunning six string fireworks, jubilant piano playing and a rhythm section that knows when to hold fort and let the big boys play their toys.
With the exception of an electrified take on Muddy Waters’ “Honey Bee” the cover tunes stay a bit too close to the originals, and the shortage of new material feels like a missed opportunity. But this is an album built around great grooves rather than solid songs, and in that regard Can’t Get Enough might not enhance the reputations of those involved but neither does it tarnish them.
The fun that Stills, Goldberg, and Shepherd must have had in making this record is evident and that sense of camaraderie is infectious. It may not be the trend setting epic that was Super Session, and I doubt we’ll be singing its praises 45 year hence. But for what it is – three consummate artists spending a week in the studio making a record and having a heck of a good time – this is one Ride worth taking. ***1/2
Beware of Mr. Baker
(DVD)
Insurgent Media
Flamboyant and intense, mercurial and brilliant: all of those adjectives describe drummer Ginger Baker, whose work with the rock trio Cream earned him fortune, fame, groupies galore and a nasty drug habit. This documentary of the scarlet haired madman is alternately illuminating and infuriating.
Even as you marvel at the unbridled talent that Baker so boundlessly exudes, you’re equally saddened by his ability to so casually toss it all aside, doing him and his loved ones irreparable harm. Director Jay Bulger manages to gain almost unheard of access into Baker’s notoriously private life, visiting him on his South African compound (whose grim warning sign gives the film its title), and interviewing former wives (of which there are four) and aggrieved children (of which there are three).
Beware of Mr. Baker is an alternately haunted and hysterical portrait of rock’s first truly great drummer, and Bulger wisely lets his subject tell his own story, even when that story results in Baker bloodying Bulger with a sharp right to the snout. Footage of his amazing journey, from bombed out London to continent hopping superstar, adorns the film with an authenticity that makes the viewer almost feel as if they know the man: Except you wouldn’t want to.
Interviews with Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, Johnny Rotten, Charlie Watts, Carlos Santana, and others paint a portrait of a gigantic talent whose personal demons, fueled by four decades of heroin addiction, have made him both revered and reviled.
“I’d love to work with him again” says Jack Bruce, who Baker seems to despise with intensity well into wickedness. “But I wouldn’t want to be in the room with him for more than a few minutes.” ****
