Welcome back to another go around at sharing some of my favorite recent discs. Among this month’s “something for everyone” offerings are a long forgotten live album from a largely forgotten band, a new hipster pop release, and a few bits of roots rock. As always be sure to legally purchase these albums from your local record store of choice. Without them, the town of Asheville would be a little less cool.
The Move
Live at the Fillmore 1969
What Records?
For the rock and roll archeologists among us the unearthing of two in-concert discs from The Move – and their prime years at that – is almost too good to be true. Fourteen tracks from one of most influential bands that few people seem to remember, or even knew of in the first place. Although they scarcely made a dent in the U.S. market the band did perform a handful of stateside shows in the fall of 1969, a brief tour that ended up being their only visit to this side of the pond.
Culled from a pair of San Francisco shows in October of that year, Live at the Fillmore demonstrates the Roy-Wood-led Move at a critical junction; they’d already scored a few minor hits in their native UK but only one of them, the sublime “I Can Hear The Grass Grow,” is featured here.
The rest of the set is comprised of songs that hadn’t yet been released – including the Roy Wood composed acid romp “Cherry Blossom Clinic (Revisited)” and a number of cover tunes.
In fact for a band that wrote such wonderfully ingenious material, Fillmore is surprisingly tilted towards songs by others. Of those, the best is an incredible take of the Nazz’s “Open My Eyes” in which drummer Bev Bevan really stretches out, and a somewhat less impressive 14-minute jam of “Under My Ice” in which the band quotes bits of Eleanor Rigby.
Equally surprising is how hefty the band sounds. For a group whose chic straddled the worlds of progressive rock and flower power pop, The Move could easily turn up the volume. In that regards Fillmore seems the natural precursor to 1970’s masterful Shazam!
Those hoping to hear Wood’s more succinct pop inflections will likely be disappointed, but taken on its own terms, Live at the Fillmore is an eye opener. Two years later the band would implode, with Wood going on to first form Electric Light Orchestra and later Wizzard – one of the most perplexing but rewarding groups of its era – while Bevan and later day Move member Jeff Lynne would go on to find spectacular commercial (if not always artistic) success with a Wood-less ELO.
So what we have here is part artifact and part concert, and while it could hardly be called essential Live at the Fillmore is, despite the somewhat rickety sound, a pretty welcome discovery.***
Andrew Bird
Break it Yourself
Mom and Pop Music
Say what you will, one never knows what might emerge next from the fertile and mercurial imagination of Andrew Bird. Following a lengthy exploration of lushly produced indie pop, the ever shrewd violinist/songwriter and musical trivia buff delivers a set of straight ahead (at least as straight ahead as he ever gets!) tunes that is a far removed from the obsessive studio tinkering of such efforts as The Mysterious Production of Eggs and Armchair Apocrypha as one might imagine.
Recorded at his own Western Illinois studio/barn, cut primarily in one or two live takes with minimal corrections or overdubs, Bird and his cohorts, percussionist Martin Dosh and guitarist Jeremy Ylvisaker, put together a surprisingly upbeat collection of songs that reflect the pastoral settings that spawned them.
Managing to be both circuitous and intent, the beautifully soulful fourteen songs herein – most of which clock in at around the four minute mark – give evidence to Bird being the logical successor to XTC’s Andy Partridge. Like Partridge he’s endlessly fascinated with carefully constructed loops, oddball sonic flourishes, and subjects that most songwriters would gladly shy away from. And like Partridge he plays well with others, needing to bounce his seemingly endless mélange of ideas off those around him.
In that regards Break it Yourself is as exuberant as it is charming. Stand up and take notice while tracks such as “Orpheo Looks Back” and “Eyeoneye” demonstrate Bird’s gift for comfortable but never predictable melody, while “Danse Caribe” reminds us how easily he can balance various elements of music (in this instance Americana, Calypso, and Celtic) without sounding the least bit artificial.
Things really get cooking when the band stretches out; the eight minute plus “Hole in the Ocean Floor” hits a groove from which it never swerves, and the more Bird-like “Fatal Shore” sounds a bit like his occasional collaborations with the Squirrel Nut Zippers. And that’s very much the beauty of the album. It sounds like a new and exciting direction while remaining entrenched in a sound that fans of Andrew Bird have come to expect.
In short, it’s the best of both worlds, one that fans new and old can easily embrace. ****
Tommy Womack
Now What!
Cedar Creek Music
Not half dozen years ago Tommy Womack’s career seemed in perpetual free fall. His post punk band Government Cheese had fallen apart, while the Bis-quits, despite being guided by no less a figure than John Prine, had failed to make any measurable commercial dent.
Womack admits much of this was by his own undoing – he’d too readily embraced the familiar rock and roll excesses while giving no thought to any sort of long range strategy – but one still had to feel badly to see a guy with as much talent as Womack being tossed aside and back to the land of day jobs.
Then, almost inexplicably, Womack largely funded his own solo album with 2007’s There, I Said It! The near universal praise it received prompted a return of sorts, with Womack reuniting with former band mate Will Kimbrough and eventually playing solo and band gigs while formulating plans for what came next. Now, as Bob Dylan sang, things have changed. Womack, at just this side of 50, is again an in demand songwriter with enough current material to satisfy others and record a new album.
Now What! finds him in a decidedly confessional mood, reenacting the past five years with guitar in hand, and righteous anger in his heart. He is also, as seen in the CD package, a happier and more domesticated family man, to whom much of the album seems to have been written.
The album’s terse opener, “Play that Cheap Trick, Cheap Trick Play” (generously giving a co-writing credit to Rick Nielsen) explodes out of the gate while the suitably careening (“90 Miles an Hour on a Dead End Street”) is given a funk treatment, with Womack rapping along to snares and drum. In theory it shouldn’t work, but it does.
“I’m Too Old to Feel That Way Right Now” reflects upon the mid life crisis that dominates those of us who survived the wretched excesses of youth. That song, and the album’s closing track “Let’s Have Another Cigarette” are both given a Stones-like bluesy treatment. On the latter Womack bemoans his own self awareness by singing “I’ve got about a half a tank of gas/I’m a pimple on Dylan’s ass/But tonight I’m gonna play some rock and roll.”
It may not be great poetry, but it sure as heck gets across the point: Kudos also to the sympathetic production choices of keyboardist John Deaderick, who has worked with everyone from Todd Snider to Michael McDonald, for keeping the proceedings direct and on track. The simple bass/drums/guitars out front approach is best for this type of music, and he and Womack instinctively know when to say “cut” and move on to the next track.
The result is an album of Americana that is as pure and honest as they get, proving that in the hands of the right person the genre is far from depleted. And even at the half century mark, with decades of hard knocks and bittersweet triumph behind him, Tommy Womack is that right kind of guy. ****
Todd Snider
Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables
Aimless Records
Using the broad brush of singer/songwriter to describe Todd Snider seems a bit inadequate for his work. He’s much more a storyteller/advocate in the best tradition of Woody Guthrie or Billy Bragg, and like both those greats he has never shied away from espousing his worldview. And like any great artist he knows the difference between passion and pontification. He’s genuine without ever being strident, a distinction surprisingly few artists comprehend.
But Snider’s obsession with topical songwriting can also be a detriment. Just as 2008’s Peace Queer chronicled his reaction to the election cycle of that year, Agnostic Hymns suffers from the same miasma, an annoying lack of specifics and a tendency to see the world in terms of good guys and bad.
We all know the Wall Street tycoons and corporate CEO’s are getting too large a piece of the pie, but Snider doesn’t always tell us the whys and hows. When he does focus on specifics, as in New York banker, in which a teacher discovers his retirement fund has been wiped out, he does his subject matter justice.
Snider makes no secret of his disdain of the wealthy and powerful but there are times I’d wish he’d move beyond such didactics and write a damn love song or two. ***1/2