ALTER.NATiON
Tav Falco, Monteagle, Marker Starling, Daniel Romano, GospelbeacH, Foxwarren, The Fernweh, Jeff Tweedy, Bryan Ferry, Reverend Horton Heat, Robben Ford, J Fernandez
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| Tav Falco |
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02-12-2018
The master of a raw and shambolic fusion of rockabilly, blues, and fractured noise, Tav Falco was, along with the Cramps, one of the earliest purveyors of what would come to be known as psychobilly (though his version of the sound lacked the campy horror movie ambience others brought to it), and he anticipated the fractured but hard-hitting blues wailing of the Gories and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion by close to a decade...
Monteagle is the solo project of Tennessee-born, New York-based singer/songwriter Justin Giles Wilcox, whose textural Americana first gained traction during his tenure as head writer for the similarly minded duo Nassau. Named after a mountain in Southern Tennessee, Monteagle's hazy epistles follow in the footsteps of roots-loving sonic explorers like M. Ward and Lord Huron, pairing a well-worn rustic drifter aesthetic with washes of experimental ambience. His solo debut, Midnight Noon, comes courtesy of Brooklyn indie Fire Talk Records, and more or less picks up the thread left by Nassau on their 2017 LP Heron...
The fourth Marker Starling album, 2018's Trust an Amateur is actually the second one Chris Cummings worked on when he began the project. After starting to write the songs, he took a break to record a 2016 album of covers, I'm Willing, and 2017's Anchors and Ampersands; he then doubled back to finish them and headed to Berlin to record with producer Guy Sternberg. It's a lovely collection of tracks sung by Cummings in his best sleepy croon, as he tells stories of everyday life and love backed by electric piano and a drum machine. It's standard Marker Starling, and that's a good thing...
The song celebrates “the unconformities of the natural and supernatural worlds,” says Romano. “The tangible world can often suppress our inherent instincts to shift our shape and transcend our surroundings. The long mirror of time is in-fact not a mirror but a passage of prisms. This song is for those who do not see themselves in these monotonous rays of light and instead remain unseen or further yet, push on into a realm imperceptible to those trapped in the mirror. The long mirror of time, reveals the prism faces, but not mine. Always dedicated to the freaks.
GospelbeacH's second album Another Summer of Love was a laid-back and organic take on early-'80s Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers that had an extra layer of energy and songcraft that was missing from their Grateful Dead-obsessed debut record. Under the guidance of Beachwood Sparks' Brent Rademaker and a crew of like-minded folks, the album was concise and focused guitar pop with all the harmonies and jangle of Petty at his best. It was good enough and true enough to that warm West Coast-meets-Heartland sound that it seemed a shame to have only been 11 songs long...
OUR TAKE: FOXWARREN’S SELF-TITLED ALBUM CEMENTS THEM AS KINGS IN THE INDIE ROCK SCENE / Canada-based singer/songwriter Andy Shauf joins childhood friends Dallas Bryson and brothers Avery and Darryl Kissick to create Foxwarren, an experimentation of the classic rock formula with inclusions of synths, modern flourishes, and some of the most poetic lyrics in the scene. Their self-titled album Foxwarren started a decade in the past and has now fully emerged into a piece of craftsmanship and art that excels at delivering a unique and fulfilling sound. The result is a spell bounding journey that is filled with gorgeous rhythms and an immense amount of heart...
The Fernweh’s debut album is a wonderful and very modern concoction of folk-rock with a psych chaser. Now, for the old guard who were there during (what my friend, Kilda Defnut, calls) The First Vinyl Age, I will simply quote Peter Gabriel as he sang, “It’s one o’ clock and time for lunch, bum de dum de dum.” Of course, that’s the opening monologue for “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe),” a tune that captures the quirky and highly eccentric British take on rock music. But don’t worry, this is not big epic prog stuff. However, the music, indeed, touches the autumnal folky moods of Genesis songs such as “Dusk,” “Seven Stones,” “Happy the Man,” and “Harlequin.” And “Dressing Up the Box” gets (sort of) jazzy with a sax solo which is shadowed by a grungy guitar bit.
...After hearing Tweedy trade riffs and sprawl out with full bands for so long, WARM’s solo setting feels fresh. This is his most threadbare collection of music. Songs drone on as long as he wants or stop abruptly once he runs out of words. This spontaneity allows Tweedy’s wisdom to feel both casual and all-encompassing: worn-in proverbs that just occurred to him, as he elaborates and pokes holes in his own fatalist tendencies. Textured with acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and brush-stroked drums from his son Spencer and Wilco percussionist Glenn Kotche, WARM follows a legacy of reflective, autumnal works like Neil Young’s Harvest Moon...
The Roxy Music frontman journeys through the past, inventively, in an album that offers a lush “remake/remodel” of familiar material.
It should be no surprise that elegant British crooner-composer Bryan Ferry has been influenced by Weimar Republic cabaret, Scott Joplin rags and Duke Ellington’s snazzy jazz throughout his 48-year-old career, both as Roxy Music’s frontman and as a solo artist. There have forever been hints of Brecht/Weill, Ellington and such in Ferry’s music and lyrics... A recent teaming with Netflix on the Weimar period drama “Babylon Berlin” guided Ferry’s hand in creating (in the words of one of his songs) a “remake/remodel” of music from his past with “Bitter-Sweet,” an album that builds on the premise of “The Jazz Age” while reintroducing his voice into the mix...
He’s been on fire for a long time and Jim Heath is showing absolutely no signs of stopping! To keep that fire stoked and burning... For “Don’t Let Go of Me,” they slow the pace down and dip into deeper tones for a reverb-heavy jam session. Here, a meandering plea in the name of love highlights the band’s musical talents. Similarly, the instrumental journey that is “Ride Before the Fall,” much like its predecessor, displays the band’s exceptional talents beautifully. Together, the band tell a story without words, painting a stellar, cinematic landscape.
There’s a lot to be said for a blues oriented guitarist willing to explore new directions deep into a lengthy career that has straddled rock-blues, jazz and fusion. Robben Ford makes much of the fact that he never records similar albums... ‘Purple House’ isn’t so much concerned with the amount of time it took to record, as the way it has embraces a bigger production, giving him additional electronic touches and an overall bigger sonic impact. It’s also an album on which he has paid more attention to his songcraft and particularly the lyrics. His eclectic imagery engages the listener in an exercise of joining the dots between his musical feel and his words... This is also the case on the all too sudden fade of the closing ‘Willing To Wait’, which is a soulful, spacey piece (think Bowie’s upflifting ‘Space Oditty’) with a lovely ascending guitar solo by Drew Smithers over an acoustic wash. The full production kicks in on an impressive wall of sound, with harmony vocals before the fade...
Sophomore album Occasional Din takes a surprising shift toward more adventurous and acid-bathed sounds. This shift is communicated in the first moments of the album, as field recordings, swirling keyboard lines, and ambient clouds melt into tempered fuzz guitar, falsetto vocal harmonies, and live drums washed in healthy doses of flanger... At just over a half-hour running time, Occasional Din is best absorbed on repeat, where the refined details of the songs can reveal themselves fully and listeners can get cozy in Fernandez's brightly drawn internal world.
Tav Falco, Monteagle, Marker Starling, Daniel Romano, GospelbeacH, Foxwarren, The Fernweh, Jeff Tweedy, Bryan Ferry, Reverend Horton Heat, Robben Ford, J Fernandez
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