The Walkmen
A Hundred Miles Off
Record Collection

It almost never fails - just when I'm ready to wash my hands of Listening To Everything as an active lifestyle choice, cursing my self-inflicted lot as a sucker's bet or worse, I stumble on something that's actually good. What's so good about this particular record, you ask? Hard to say. It's certainly not "original" - the singer sounds like he's been eating a steady diet of Basement Tapes for a decade or more and the musicianship doesn't exactly beat the rock thing into any unrecognizable shapes. The difference, kids, I'm afraid, amounts to admittedly intangible stuff like passion, conviction, ETC, which, since this is my blog, I'm allowed to proclaim is here in spades. The backing track of "Good For You's Good for Me" sounds like an overdriven Crickets guitar part with someone beating on a plank of metal underneath and a Bringing It All Back Home vocal outtake pinned on top like a birthday ribbon. And it works, somehow, unimaginable as that seems. There's also a song where they sing the phrase "lost in / Boston" and later assonantly rhyme it with "Exhausted."This, I submit, is the thing called rock. And if this is also where we part ways, I can accept that. Adieu, motherfuckers.

Rocky Votolato
Makers
Barsuk

Okay, Elliot Smith is in fact dead, and therefore this kind of thing is inevitable - if it didn't happen naturally then the indie labels would damn well make it happen, that's how market niches work. Course,this is part of a long tradition of downed balladeers, stretching back past Elliot and Bright Eyes and even Uncle Paul "Here Comes a Skyway Regular" Westerberg over the horizon to, at least, um, James Taylor. This isn't bad, really, but it's not much else, either.

Transition
Get There
Floodgate

What a lousy name for a band - so non-commital, so lacking in what the plebs call "color." And what a blah title for a CD, too - although at least it's of a dull piece with the group's moniker. So this is where "punk" is today - as if I didn't know: A wilted bowl of emo salad garnished with the occasional chewy, post-expiration-date Cuomo/Billy Joe "pop" bacon bit. I'm not generally one to advocate violence, even in the abstract, but...someone needs their asses kicked - perhaps the attendant trauma would produce something of "artistic worth." But probably not.

Bob Schneider
The Californian
Shockorama

If it was 1981 I might think this was acceptably conventional, if the last record I'd bought was something by George Thorogood, I'd think this was avant-garde and I might even be shocked by the occasional self-conscious "F-bomb"...But the fact is it's 2006 and I'm just not that guy. What I'm hearing is bar music for a bar I'd never go to. The cover art seems to be based on the distorted portraiture on Tom Waits's Alice but the tropes being exploited and the personality on display here do nothing to offset the derivation. And the funk / rap "workout" going under the name "Mudhouse" might fly as a live encore, but it's a tedious-as-hell penultimate album track. And the faux-scratched-78 rpm beer-barrel singalong that ends the disc musically justifies my Waits comparison from before. But sucks, too. Just sayin'.

Rogue Wave
Descended Like Vultures
Sub Pop

This is good pop/singer-songwriter stuff, solidly played and recorded and sung with feeling, while not overly formulaic in composition. On first listen, though, Zach Rogue's songs seem like a closed universe - not a real problem since the same can be said for many of my favorite artists - I just have to decide whether it's worth the time and effort to find my way in. As of now, the jury's still out.

Quintron & Miss Pussycat
Swamp Tech
Tigerbeat6

The transformation of Mr. Quintron from Chicago avant-nuisance to New Orleans retro-futuristic, post-ironic party maniac / mad inventor was complete a few years back - a proposition to which this record, made shortly before he and his puppeteer paramour Pussycat nearly perished in the perilous path of Hurricane Katrina, attests handily. More ?-esque organ grinding, more Jon Spencer-like swagger, more early-B-52's-style dance rhythms. The schtick remains entertaining (although my promo copy didn't come with the "Electric Swamp" DVD so I can't claim to have the whole picture) but this many albums down the line, there's not a whole lot of surprise left. Nice KISS cover, though.

John Jacob Niles
An Evening With John Jacob Niles
Empire Musicwerks

The late Mr. Niles may not have technically hailed from another planet, but the sound of his swooping, trilling voice is certainly an otherworldly phenomenon. This is another amazing reissue of stuff from the pre-Dylan folkie fifties - apparently a time when folk music was anything but staid. As I may have pointed out before, Niles is nothing if not the progenitor of "freak folk" - this stuff easily out-weirds Devendra, Joanna and all the other legitimate nutballs on the current scene.

Mardo
The New Gun
House of Restitution

Kind of like the Jon Spencer Heavy Metal Explosion or Ween if they did a Zeppelin pastiche and then got stuck like that, the way your mom said your eyes would stay crossed if you weren't careful. Tom Lord-Alge's magic touch at the mixing board and a little more sincerity / obscenity on the part of the band help put this a cut or so above the band's obnoxious-if-rockin', glammed-up debut. Not sure if Pete Townshend would object to them using "see me, feel me, touch me, heal me" (a familiar refrain to all you musical theatre enthusiasts, I'm sure) as the chorus of their own 'original' song, but hey, I always give extra credit for sheer nerve.

Blaine Larsen
Rockin' You Tonight
BNA

This fella looks like he's barely hit all the stops on the long voyage to puberty, but his voice sounds old enough to drink, anyway. This perfectly listenable, straight-up commercial country disc is populated by-and-large with solid, witty little tunes, delivered with self-effacing charm and easily relatable, occasionally self-conscious pop culture references ("J Lo had nothing on her," etc) to let us know we are indeed walking the same wired-up planet at the same over-stimulated time as our down-to-earth bud Blaine. The cover of Mac Davis' bastard-stud anthem "Baby Don't Get Hooked On Me" is such a no-brainer, I'm surprised every current c&w mack daddy hasn't already re-recorded it. (Maybe next time he'll do "Never Been This Far Before" - as a medley with KISS's "Christine Sixteen," even...) To keep us guessing, diametrically opposed lyrical territory is explored in the gorgeously manipulative "In Love With A Married Woman." He even votes "no" on the issues of spray-painted swastikas and the Mr Pink-ing of waitresses on the pro-activist "Someone Is Me." Wotta dreamboat!

Karsh Kale
Broken English
Six Degrees

All-over-the-place techno/pop/hip-hop/world/ambient melange presided over by a guy with an untrustworthy-looking goatee. Easy enough on the ears and not exactly boring, this fades into the background fairly subserviently. Which I guess is okay, if that's your cup of lassi....

Michael Johnathon & the Folkboy Orchestra
Live
PoetMan

"The only part of life that will ever stay the same / Is that everything will change," sings our gracious host with a detached, somewhat cold-blooded existentialism odd for someone dedicating his life to the wide-eyed task of upholding eroding musical traditions. Of course, folks change, folk changes and yesterday's call to revolution inevitably becomes today's museum piece. In cases like that of the Barbara Dane reisssue I reviewed a few days ago, it can become a riveting piece of history that carries with it some of the ambient excitement and possibility of the time it was made. Or, in the case of this disc, it can become a mere trotting out of shopworn tropes played for an audience that wouldn't dream of disagreeing with a thing their well-fed troubadour says, let alone spend an 18th part of their disposable folky income on actually affecting the change they so love to hear people sing about (even when he actively chides them for this exact thing, as in "World We Made"). In truth, artists like iLL TACTICS or even X-TRCT are singing the 'music of the people' of today far more than this overly precious, retrograde, middle class, liberal, well-intentioned bore.

iLL TACTICS
"Lookin So Good"/"Rap Idol"

OK, I realize that this says more about me than it does about my man iLL TACTICS but my first thought upon hearing the hook "Lookin' so good/When I walk through the door" was that it might be in reference to his waiting girlfriend (or shorty or ho or bitch or whatever the kids are calling 'em these days) and not, like, his own ass. Guess I'm just not down enough with the self-love. The aggrandizement continues unabated on "Rap Idol" which I'm supposing is some sort of reality TV fantasia. Musically, the tracks are typical played-out, slicked-up, post-dutty souf: a little screwed, not all that chopped, nothing new, nothing super-bangin'. Big deal.

Allan Harris
Cross That River
Love Productions

Passing strange...Acclaimed jazz vocalist Harris composed and arranged this suite of Western (as opposed to Country) songs, dealing with the theme of the role played by the black man in the settlement of the old west. Unsurprisingly, the singing is pretty incredible, the songs less so. Still, its unique and impassioned - commodities always in short supply. The sound is something akin to Marty Robbins' "El Paso" but with occasional anachronistic sonic flourishes (paticularly on "Muleskinner") and lyrics about "being broken to the will of the white man's law."