ALTER.NATION #121 (13trx 1h 4m)
Allie Crow Buckley, Valerie June,Lake Street Dive, Mike Dillon, Charles Lloyd & the Marvels, Throttle Elevator Music, Nubiyan Twist, Blake Mills, Pino Palladino, Cory Hanson, The Sunburned Hand of the Man, Cool Ghouls
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"Nothing Sacred"
Allie Crow Buckley - Moonlit and Devious / Nothing Sacred
...Produced by Buckley and returning producers Jason Boesel (Rilo Kiley) and Mike Viola (Candy Butchers), her full-length debut, Moonlit and Devious, features a song she co-wrote with Sharon Van Etten ("God Medallion"). The track "Nothing Sacred" opens the album with a bit of swagger and a gaping interval between rumbling synth bass and drums and Buckley's voice, as she employs mythological metaphors to explore the notion of destiny regarding a night out drinking and dancing ("Is this all part of some plan?/Living out some prophecy lifetimes in the making?")...
...Based in Brooklyn but hailing from Memphis, June's music rose out of a tapestry of American roots traditions that she has since elevated and, in the case of 2021's The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, transcended. Ambling with guitar in hand down creative paths less taken, she and co-producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys) have captured a rare gem of heartfelt expression and sweet liminality. Like a modern-day Astral Weeks, The Moon and Stars filters the familiar and organic through a celestial veil with June serving as medium between the spiritual and corporeal worlds...
Lake Street Dive - Obviously / Hush Money
Having started out as a genre-bending indie outfit, Boston's Lake Street Dive have matured into sophisticated purveyors of vintage-inspired soul, funk, and adult contemporary pop. It's a sound that helped make 2018's Free Yourself Up such a delightful surprise, and one which they further perfect on their seventh album, 2021's thoughtfully ebullient Obviously. Produced with warm clarity by Mike Elizondo, the album again showcases the talents of lead singer Rachael Price, bassist Bridget Kearney, guitarist Mike "McDuck" Olson, and drummer Mike Calabrese. Also rejoining the group (having initially come aboard in 2017) is their not-so-secret weapon keyboardist/vocalist Akie Bermiss, whose jazzy piano chops and warm vocals help elevate the group's sound throughout...
Mike Dillon - Suitcase Man / Empty Bones / Tiny Pink Asses
Vibraphonist Mike Dillon's 2020 album Suitcase Man is a highly personal nine-song cycle in which he ruminates on his life and his over-30-year-long career... on Suitcase Man he takes a more minimalist approach, framing his gravelly vocals with spare vibraphone and percussion arrangements. Also contributing is Givers singer Tif Lamson, who lends gentle harmony and background vocals. There's a textural quality to many of Dillon's songs, with his rough, throaty, and hushed vocals working in bold contrast to the woody, soft-focus tones of his vibraphone... There's a textural quality to many of Dillon's songs, with his rough, throaty, and hushed vocals working in bold contrast to the woody, soft-focus tones of his vibraphone. It's a sound that evokes a vivid combination of the classical music of Harry Partch and the punk singer/songwriter sound of Tom Waits...
An eclectic ensemble centered around saxophonist Charles Lloyd and guitarist Bill Frisell, Charles Lloyd & the Marvels play an expansive brand of jazz that draws upon the members' love of modal post-bop, country, surf rock, and more.
Charles Lloyd & the Marvels - Tone Poem / Lady Gabor
Tone Poem is the third album by saxophonist Charles Lloyd's Americana jazz quintet the Marvels -- guitarist Bill Frisell, pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Eric Harland... At 82, Lloyd is a master of the form who knows what he wants from his sidemen and how to get it... Lloyd and company render it with breezy elegance, poignant emotion, and deep respect... Both Gábor Szabó's "Lady Gabor" and Lloyd's "Prayer" date to the early 1960s when the guitarist and saxophonist were with Chico Hamilton's group. On the former, dancing drums and bass meet spiky flute jabs that feed Frisell's biting garagey psychedelia...
Throttle Elevator Music was never a conventional band. From 2011 to 2017 they existed as a studio cooperative assembled by Wide Hive Records' founder, producer, engineer, and composer Gregory Howe (who is also a brilliant guitarist). The lineup included saxophonist Kamasi Washington, pianist/bassist Matt Montgomery, and guitarist/drummer Mike Hughes. Between 2012 and 2017 their core membership expanded to include trumpeter and flugelhornist Erik Jekabson, guitarist Ross Howe, saxophonist Kasey Knudsen, and organist/keyboardist Mike Blankenship... Because of his dogged restlessness, aesthetic vision, and capable ear, Howe is adament that Final Floor is not an inferior, kitchen sink collection of castoffs. Instead it's a set of inspired ideas that could easily have found a place on any of the group's releases carefully sequenced into an aesthetic whole... "Ice Windows" is a bubbling dubwise rocker that weds funky guitars to bluesy, swaggering horns before exploding into a maelstrom of color, texture, and dynamic. .. Closer "Rooftop Sunrise" sounds like a lost film cue from a chase scene in Across 110th Street. It commences with a nearly stifling closeness before Jekabson's trumpet breaks out amid nasty-sounding surf guitars, pulsating keys, clattering snares, and grooving saxes...
Freedom Fables is the third long-player by London-based world groove fusion outfit Nubiyan Twist... On Freedom Fables, the role of the vocalist is primary. The band's eight instrumentalists serve both songs and singers with a propulsive polyrhythmic approach and kaleidoscopic harmonic palette that encompasses a rainbow of tones, colors, and textures... U.K. neo-soul chanteuse Ria Moran fronts Nubiyan Twist for the scene-setting "Morning Light." Atop a bumping, jazz-hop bass line, cooing horns, and drifting electronics, Moran's singing is silky smooth and deeply expressive. She invites the horns to embrace her sunny, optimistic lyric with resolve -- and they do... Tittle Tattle" features current frontwoman Cherise Adams-Burnett. She glides, sasses, exhorts, and warns as horns charge headlong at multi-layered organic and synthetic percussion and keyboards, while guitarist Tom Excell's spiky funk vamps propel the groove...
Pino Palladino is a Welsh-born bassist, composer, and producer of Italian ancestry. Since beginning his professional career in the 1980s, he has become one of the most prolific and sought-after session bassists in most genres...
Blake Mills / Pino Palladino - Notes With Attachments / Just Wrong
Though just over half-an-hour in duration, Notes with Attachments, a curiously compelling set of instrumentals by bass ace Pino Palladino and producer, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist Blake Mills, took more than two-and-a-half years to complete. .. Notes with Attachments began life as Palladino's first solo album. He'd send Mills tracks based on ideas he'd was working on, hoping to involve him. Mills responded and Palladino sent more. Before long, Mills was adding production and instrumental touches to these mixes. It occurred to both men that a full collaboration made sense. They enlisted a small cast of friends including drummer Chris Dave, keyboardist Larry Goldings, saxophonists Sam Gendel, Marcus Strickland, and Jacques Schwartz-Bart, and violist/violinist Rob Moose.... Opener "Just Wrong" is a breezy little jam that grows right out of its frame. Mills plays sitar, nylon-string acoustic, and a Brazilian berimbau. These all create a bottom floor for Dave's syncopated kit drums as Moose's ethereal strings and Palladino's semi-acoustic bassline frame Gendel's wafting Poly Sax in a futurist take on bossa nova...
Cory Hanson - Pale Horse Rider / Angeles
Prolific and versatile, Los Angeles musician Cory Hanson's music has many faces. As the frontperson of Wand, Hanson and his bandmates churned out ragged and glorious psychedelic art rock, but his duo with like-minded polymath Ty Segall toned the experimentation down a touch for more acoustically drawn surreal rock... With second solo album Pale Horse Rider, Hanson goes in yet another direction, shaking off the reverb and fuzz of previous outings for an album of restrained and melancholic Americana. .. "Angeles" surrounds the singer with backing from bass and a steady kick drum, highlighting his plaintive but still somewhat abstract lyrics linking the Los Angeles wildfires to searching for fulfillment in life and relationships. Hanson sings about someone driving an ambulance in his dreams as wails of noisy feedback squelch low in the mix...
The Sunburned Hand of the Man - Pick a Day to Die / Pick a Day to Die
Boston-based collective Sunburned Hand of the Man burned brightly throughout the 2000s, their lineup shifting with almost each new release as they zigzagged between everything from free jazz skronk to warped takes on old-timey folk... The album's seven tracks come from an archive of unreleased material recorded between 2007 and 2017, edited and reassembled into one flowing, if erratic statement... Even at its most bizarre and feral, Pick a Day to Die conveys a sense of positivity and excitement as the collective remains in the constant state of rediscovering themselves that they've made their life's work.
Cool Ghouls - At George's Zoo / 26th St. Blues
After a bunch of records that established Cool Ghouls as one of the better garage rock bands around in the 2010s, the San Francisco quartet launch themselves in about 12 different directions on their third album, At George's Zoo.-- They were never just a garage rock band -- adding some country-rock here and psychedelic folk there -- and now they sound like a jukebox where each song is a prime example of a style of music born in the mid- to late '60s. They tackle baroque pop, acoustic folk, piano ballads, surf psych, and sunshine pop, while still finding a couple slots for some jangling garage rock too. .. Everything the band touches turns to gold here; At George's Zoo is an impressive display of musical skill, and every stylistic gamble they take pays off. Before this record, Cool Ghouls came across like a group of guys having a good old time playing some good ole tunes; now they feel like a band capable of making something lasting. This is a fine first step in that direction.
Allie Crow Buckley, Valerie June,Lake Street Dive, Mike Dillon, Charles Lloyd & the Marvels, Throttle Elevator Music, Nubiyan Twist, Blake Mills, Pino Palladino, Cory Hanson, The Sunburned Hand of the Man, Cool Ghouls
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