ALTER.NATION #36
The Mystery Lights, Alex Lahey, Nobody, Jimmy Webb, Brad Mehldau, Theo Croker, Greys, Olden Yolk, Dommengang, Sam Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Mannequin Pussy
weekly favtraX
19-05-2019
Brooklyn-based psych-garage combo with with a Nuggets-inspired sound and roots in California.
The Mystery Lights -
Thick Skin from Too Much Tension!
The Mystery Lights are a band who live in the the year 2019 by fate, not by choice. Their music suggests that they arrived in the present day after passing through some wrinkle in time adorned with paisley; they are obsessed with '60s garage rock and psychedelia, and their songs and their approach make it clear they've done their homework when it comes to re-creating the nuts and bolts of this stuff. The Mystery Lights' third album, 2019's Too Much Tension!, captures the sound of that halcyon era when America's youth stopped playing "Louie Louie" and started abusing recreational drugs with a truly impressive accuracy, as if someone discovered a long-lost collaborative project with the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Chocolate Watch Band, and the Seeds joining forces in the studio...
An Australian singer/songwriter with a sardonic streak and a flair for crafting melodically charged and relatable pop-punk anti-anthems.
Alex Lahey -
Misery Guts from The Best of Luck Club
Some songwriters are interesting because they tell you things you may not know, and others are remarkable because they have a gift for expressing the thoughts and feelings that most of us share. Alex Lahey clearly falls into the latter category, and while the nuts and bolts of human interaction aren't uncharted territory in pop music, she builds clever and witty art from the ups and downs of friendship and relationships... especially with its singalong chorus, and "Misery Guts" is its ideal half-sibling, pure pogo'ing energy that suggests what Nirvana might have sound like if Kurt Cobain had been a level-headed woman from Australia...
Elvin Estela, better known by the moniker Nobody, is a Los Angeles-based producer whose music blurs the lines between abstract hip-hop, psychedelia, and downtempo electronic music, with jazz and R&B also figuring into his sound.
Nobody -
Sweet Feeling from All Too Familiar
A longtime Dublab regular and resident DJ at the now-defunct Low End Theory weekly, L.A. beat scene forefather Elvin Estela has twisted through several modes throughout his recording career as Nobody, from moody instrumental hip-hop to gentle psychedelia. The 2010s have brought his most modern-sounding music yet, with 2010's Auto-Tune-soaked One for All Without Hesitation followed by the trap-influenced Vivid Green in 2013. All Too Familiar is another change of approach for Estela -- he wrote most of the album on his guitar, and it's completely free of samples or vocals. Joined on several tracks by regular collaborators such as Damon Aaron and former Mars Volta member Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez, Estela explores a sort of earthy post-rock not unlike David Pajo's solo work as Papa M, but still informed by a cratedigger's ear for breakbeat-like rhythms...
Songwriter, singer, and pianist whose writing career has produced a mountain of pop classics.
Jimmy Webb has always been better known and respected as a songwriter than a performer, less because of any failings as a singer and instrumentalist and more because he's widely and justly acknowledged as one of the great pop tunesmith of the '60s and '70s... This album flies in the face of the expectations of most Jimmy Webb fans, but it works surprisingly well. Webb is a graceful and fluid pianist with a fine touch, and he brings a sense of invention to his interpretations of these songs, not losing sight of the melody but allowing other colors to find their place within the tunes...
Improvisational jazz pianist introduced a classical impressionist influence into modern jazz, often using pop music as source material.
Brad Mehldau -
Proverb of Ashes from Finding Gabriel
...Finding Gabriel marks his most idiosyncratically expansive release yet. Its thematically linked compositions were inspired by a close reading of Old Testament sources -- Daniel, Hosea, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Job -- while considering our current sociopolitical era. He also experimented with the Oberheim OB-6 analog synth while composing, an instrument whose possibilities were new to him. It's used alongside acoustic and electric pianos, organ, xylophone, mores synths, and voice. His celebrated cast of guests includes trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, violinist Sara Caswell, saxophonist Joel Frahm, drummer Mark Guiliana, vocalists Becca Stevens, Kurt Elling, and Gabriel Kahane, and small string and horns sections... Elling takes a killer sonically treated scat vocal on "Proverb of Ashes," with its backing track wedding EDM futurism to post-punk.
Trumpeter Theo Croker is an adventurous jazz musician known for his cosmically minded, spiritually enlightened take on post-bop, funk, and electronic-tinged fusion. The grandson of famed trumpeter Doc Cheatham...
Theo Croker -
Have You Come to Stay from Star People Nation
Since 2014's Afrophysicist, trumpeter Theo Croker has been expanding upon his funky, stylistically far-reaching jazz sound with ever more electric and electronic influences. He takes this approach even further on 2019's cosmically expansive Star People Nation. The album follows his equally ambitious 2016 effort Escape Velocity and once again finds him backed by his ensemble featuring saxophonist Irwin Hall, keyboardist Michael King, bassist Eric Wheeler, and drummer Kassa Overall. Also joining him again is co-executive producer Karriem Riggins, who previously played drums on Afrophysicist and has worked with such luminaries as J Dilla, Esperanza Spalding, Common, and others. Star People Nation is a stylistically balanced album, deftly counterpoised between spacy '70s world fusion, modal jazz, alternative R&B, and forward-thinking hip-hop. It brings to mind classic works by Eddie Henderson, George Duke, and Donald Byrd, the latter of whom Croker was mentored by while a student at Oberlin College. The opening "Have You Come to Stay" is a slowly rolling electro-space-mantra that emerges like an interstellar transmission from a hazy sparkle of keyboards before giving way to a cascade of overdubbed horn lines and two transcendent solos from Croker and Hall.
Self-proclaimed "loud rock band from Toronto" has roots in noisy post-hardcore and latter-day fast punk.
Greys -
These Things Happen from Age Hasn't Spoiled You
Toronto four-piece Greys have spent the early part of their career refining their lean, ferocious post-punk, peppering their albums with occasional studio adornments, but largely adhering to the tight live unit which they present on-stage. Following a pair of 2016 albums, the excellent Outer Heaven and its full-length companion piece Warm Shadow, the group took a step back and considered their approach. Roughly six years into their career, a significant step in a new direction seemed in order and they decided to stray from their live-in-the-room approach and use whatever tools necessary to gain new ground. While it's far from an abandonment of what came before, 2019's Age Hasn't Spoiled You introduces a multitude of influences and sounds into Greys' palette and makes for a challenging but overall worthwhile listen...
Spooky, psychedelic folk-rock from Quilt's Shane Butler and fellow singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Caity Shaffer.
Olden Yolk -
Cotton & Cane from Living Theatre
Arriving a year after the project's debut, Living Theatre continues to explore the intimate, electronics-tinged psychedelic folk-rock already established by Olden Yolk's Shane Butler and Caity Shaffer, with some subtle shifts in approach. Whereas Olden Yolk was borne out of a series of exchanged poems between the songwriters, Living Theatre expanded upon conversations in concentrated writing sessions. Also, Olden Yolk was recorded primarily as a four-piece with their touring band, and while Living Theatre returns to engineer/co-producer Jarvis Taveniere (Woods), its guests include percussionist Booker Stardrum, who features prominently on the album, as well as Frank Maston (flute), Eliza Bagg (violin/viola), and others. It's a more sprawling, cinematic set that at the same time retains a gentle, amber-tinted tone...
Dommengang are a Brooklyn-based, hard-edged post-psych and space rock trio whose chugging sound they describe as "Road Trip, Head Trip" music.
Dommengang -
Wild Wash from No Keys
On their two previous outings, Los Angeles-based power trio Dommengang traced the lines of '70s blues rock and psychedelic sludge. Fine as they were, both long-players (though somewhat different from one another) reflected the group's influences rather than their musical identity. 2015's Everybody's Boogie was wrapped in the roadhouse biker strut of Canned Heat, early ZZ Top, and the free-form spiraling psych of Hawkwind. 2018's Love Jail was somewhat tighter structurally, drenched in the acid blues grooves explored by Earthless, Endless Boogie, and Samsara Blues Experiment. By contrast, No Keys ups the ante. While Dommengang still draw abundantly from the deep well of hard rock and psych, their move to Los Angeles from Brooklyn facilitated real growth in the songwriting and in developing a dynamic, trippy sound of their own... "Wild Wash" is back to screaming, fast, post-psych riddled with distorted bass and blues vamps, wah-wah, and a drumkit playing a nightmarish groove to accent trancey vocals...
Former songwriter for psychedelic pop bands Apollo Sunshine and Yellowbirds, as well as a sought-after session player. Cohen spent some time working on other people's projects but still managed to write a new set of sundazzled synth-rock tunes for his first album under his own name, 2015's Cool It.
Sam Cohen -
Spinning Love from The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears
Sam Cohen's solo debut, 2015's Cool It, came after years of music from other bands that his warm psychedelic pop sat at the core of... Cohen penned blissful songs of dusky orchestral rock with nods to '60s influences. He continues working in this territory on second solo album The Future Is Still Ringing in My Ears, advancing his songcraft without straying too far from a well-established template of good-natured retro-pop... The lyrics are overtly hopeless, but much like the rest of the album, the song manages to blend pessimism with warmth. Even in the darkest moments, the inviting production and mind-bending twists are enough to distract from the sometimes bleak realities Cohen is fixated on.
A rock & roll true believer with a poet's heart, the Boss defined mainstream American rock in the late 20th century.
Bruce Springsteen -
Hello Sunshine
...His gorgeous new song “Hello Sunshine” takes place somewhere on the journey. Its friendly, country arrangement sits within a long lineage of radio classics: “Everybody’s Talkin,’” “Gentle on My Mind,” “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” all songs borne from quiet barrooms in the early hours of the morning. As if to prove his place among them, Springsteen spends an entire verse humming along, strings guiding the way like light from a jukebox. Amid the glow, he’s surrounded by pedal steel raining on the windows, a hushed honky-tonk piano in the corner, a brush-stroked rhythm section that feels like running in place on a soft dirt road. Bold but lived-in, it’s the most vivid his music has sounded in at least two decades...
Punk rock band, formed by childhood friends Marisa Dabice and Thanasi Paul, makes room for emotions other than anger.
Mannequin Pussy -
Drunk II
...“Drunk II” opens on guitarist and vocalist Marisa Dabice in a post-breakup mania, evading despair by drinking and partying to excess. But despite her best efforts to self-anesthetize, sadness breaks through. “I still love you, you stupid fuck,” she barks with a bittersweet grimace. Yet the song quickly reveals itself to be more than sloshed yearning: Atop a melancholic and measured riff, Dabice wrangles with her behavior, revealing vulnerability with an intimate wistfulness: “And everyone says to me/‘Missy, you’re so strong!’/But what if I don’t want to be?”...
The Mystery Lights, Alex Lahey, Nobody, Jimmy Webb, Brad Mehldau, Theo Croker, Greys, Olden Yolk, Dommengang, Sam Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Mannequin Pussy
