Posts Tagged ‘Jeff Giles’

Basement Songs: 100 and Counting

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Two years ago I quietly began writing the Basement Songs posts on my blog, Thunderbolt. At the time I didn’t know who my audience was, as I honestly believed that ten, maybe twenty readers were checking out Thunderbolt on a weekly basis. Inspired by some of the finer music blogs I’d come across, I thought that Basement Songs would be an interesting alternative to the daily confessionals I was posting. At least it could be fun. As I’ve written before, the early months of 2007 were tough. I believe that the 2005 death of my friend, Matt, and a laundry list of regrets and unresolved issues finally caught up with me. Coupled with the ongoing stress of worrying about my son, I sunk into a deep funk (and not the kind of funk that involves the groove of Duck Dunn). Despite those dark months, I found great pleasure in writing the Basement Songs. A friend used the term “therapeutic communication” once, and I believe that’s a sound way of describing what I was doing. Again, I had no idea who was reading; I just needed to get some things off of my chest, and I wanted to share my love of certain music.

One person who was reading happened to be Jeff Giles, whose Jefitoblog was one of the best written and enjoyable sites I visited daily. Jeff and I became friends thanks to a comment he made about Springsteen and my response. This led to the exchange of some choice bootlegs, an Idiot’s Guide to Journey, and then one of the kindest gestures I’ve experienced this decade: Bloggers for a Cure, in which Jeff and some other fine bloggers (most of whom write for this site) joined together to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Jeff was also a strong supporter of the Basement Songs and would link each new post in his weekly “Friday Linkfest.” (more…)

You Again?: Kansas, “There’s Know Place Like Home”

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The American music industry has never been particularly interested in — or good at — pursuing slow, sustainable growth models. Americans in general are obsessed with speed, and that’s reflected in our rock folklore — from Elvis striking God’s perfect chord during his first Sun Studios take to Taylor Swift writing hit songs while she was still in high school, we love a fast, out-of-nowhere success story on the pop charts. There’s a whole world outside the spotlight, however, and even though it doesn’t seem to happen as often as it used to, the major labels have occasionally functioned as impatient and/or semi-unwilling incubators for artists who, for one reason or another, take a little extra time to achieve mainstream success.

Like, say, Kansas.

Needlepoint violin solos aside, pretty much everything about Kansas is slow. The first of the band’s many lineups formed in 1970, but it was 1974 before they got around to recording an album, which flopped, as did the two that followed. It wasn’t until their fourth album, 1976’s Leftoverture, that Kansas was able to claw a toehold in the marketplace — and by 1982, when original singer Steve Walsh took a hike and the band briefly morphed into a terrifying CCM/prog hybrid, they had already slid back into commercial irrelevancy. Kansas’ last major label release, In the Spirit of Things, came out in 1988, and their last overall studio effort, Somewhere to Elsewhere, was released almost ten years ago.

While contemporaries like Boston, Styx, and REO Speedwagon managed to retain various degrees of dignity during their commercial dotage, Kansas has given off a sad, flat-footed vibe for the last 25 years or so — Walsh’s departure kicked off an era of multiple breakups, grimy club tours, and long silences punctuated by bargain-priced archival live albums. During the mid ’90s, Kansas attempted a comeback with Freaks of Nature, an album recorded for Intersound, a label widely believed to be a Mafia tax shelter; three years later, they were recording live symphonic covers of their greatest hits for another shady indie outfit, River North. During an interview to promote 2002’s live CD/DVD project Device – Voice – Drum, drummer Phil Ehart admitted that the band had been dumped by not only its last label (prog champions Magna Carta), but its booking agent — a horribly galling admission for a band with evergreen AOR hits in a touring marketplace that always has room for everyone from Air Supply to whatever jiveass live package Alan Parsons happens to be peddling. (more…)

CD Review: John Mayer, “Battle Studies”

513p6Hdew9L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]One of the earlier “name artist” interviews in my writing career came when I spoke with Peter Cetera about the release of his fourth solo album, World Falling Down. During our talk, he complained about the way he’d been pigeonholed as a soft rocker, and blamed the label for continually releasing ballads as singles when he really wanted to mix things up with more uptempo tracks. It was the fall of 1992, and I think Cetera understood the shift that was taking place in music; he joked about not being on MTV anymore, mused about strapping on his bass and going back on tour, and said he missed the “yuks” of being in a band like Chicago.

As it turned out, World Falling Down was Cetera’s final album for Warner Bros., and when he resurfaced three years later with One Clear Voice, his debut for the short-lived indie label River North, I expected to hear the sound of an artist freed from his corporate shackles — not a rock album, certainly, but something that would reflect more sides of his personality. If you’re one of the few people who’s ever listened to Voice, you know this isn’t the case; it’s as mannered an album as Cetera’s ever released, as is its 2001 follow-up, Another Perfect World. As ambivalent as he might have seemed about his image, Cetera’s either unwilling or unable to break it. For the sake of his emotional well-being, I hope it’s the former — and I can’t help but think of Cetera whenever I listen to John Mayer. (more…)

CD Review: Norah Jones, “The Fall”

61diFLFzdpL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]When Norah Jones wafted onto the airwaves in 2002, her smoky, jazz-tinged piano pop was a startling breath of fresh air; after four years of Americanized Europop, the idea that the Top 40 still had room for someone singing and playing without artifice almost felt revolutionary. Which is a joke, really, because there’s nothing the slightest bit revolutionary about Jones’ debut, Come Away with Me — but it did herald a macchiato-scented tsunami of exquisitely tasteful artists whose ubiquity threatened to turn Jones into a joke before she really got started.

This would be a lot to deal with for any artist, but it seemed like even more of an annoyance for Jones; she had bigger ambitions than a lifetime of “Come Away with Me” clones, but she looked and sounded like a girl who belonged behind a piano, crooning tasteful ballads. It didn’t help that her first tour seemed to find her in a perpetual state of stage fright, or that her voice wouldn’t let her get away with sounding anything but beautiful.

She’s certainly been willing to try, however, both on her own albums — 2004’s Feels Like Home and 2007’s Not Too Late represented subtle variations on the theme of her gazillion-selling debut — and in a series of increasingly bizarro side projects and cameo appearances. The past few years have found Jones singing (occasionally profane) hooks for a wide variety of artists, including Q-Tip, the Lonely Island, and Mike Patton’s Peeping Tom, as well as recording with country/folk hooligans the Little Willies and her punk band, El Madmo. When word got out that Jones had mostly abandoned her piano and taken up guitar for her fourth release, The Fall — and worked with a cast of characters including Ryan Adams, Will Sheff, Marc Ribot, and producer Jacquire King — it was pegged as her “rock album,” and maybe even the full-on gonzo record she seemed to be hinting at. (more…)

CD Review: Sheryl Crow, “Tuesday Night Music Club: Deluxe Edition”

419EvNEi4bL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]She’s released six studio albums in the last 16 years, and none of them have sold fewer than half a million copies. Regardless of how you feel about Sheryl Crow’s music — and my own feelings aren’t terribly warm — in purely commercial terms, she’s one of the most important artists of the last decade and change, and whatever her own artistic merits might be, her success helped open the floodgates for other female singer/songwriters during a time when the pop landscape was more male-dominated than ever. It all started with 1993’s Tuesday Night Music Club, which receives the deluxe reissue treatment from Universal this week, adding a disc of non-album tracks, B-sides, and unreleased material to the original album, plus a DVD containing every TNMC video and a new documentary.

She’s pop/rock royalty now, but in the early ’90s, Sheryl Crow was teetering on the edge of becoming a music business casualty; her greatest claim to fame was her stint as a backup vocalist on Michael Jackson’s Bad tour, and her intended debut album had been rejected by her label. Add all this to pop music’s generally jaded vibe at the time, and it isn’t hard to see how Crow could fall in with a group of ferociously talented burnouts looking for a little low-stakes jamming between dispiriting corporate gigs. Thus was born the Tuesday Night Music Club, a loose confederacy consisting of David Baerwald, Bill Bottrell, Dan Schwartz, Brian MacLeod, and Crow’s then-boyfriend (and future cult legend), Kevin Gilbert. Crow wasn’t the best songwriter in the bunch, but she was the best singer, and by far the most easily marketable, so it also isn’t hard to see how the sessions quickly turned into woodshedding for Crow’s second pass at her solo debut. (more…)

CD Review: Wale, “Attention Deficit”

51S6dCFKjWL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]You’ve heard of West Coast, East Coast, Detroit, and Dirty South rap — and now, if Wale earns the kind of success he seems poised for, you can count on the next platinum wave in hip-hop coming out of Washington, D.C.

He’s been around for a few years, putting out mixtapes and making cameo appearances on other artists’ albums, and has been a fixture on the D.C. scene since he scored a local hit with 2006’s “Dig Dug (Shake It).” For the national audience, though — particularly casual mainstream listeners — Attention Deficit is Wale’s coming out party. Like a lot of parties, it has its dead spots, but not many — it’s a lot more like House Party than House Party 4: Down to the Last Minute.

Wale’s part of the go-go subgenre, which blends hip-hop with elements of the workout funk pioneered by Chuck Brown, expanded by artists like E.U., and pulled into the sampling era by DJ Kool, whose “Let Me Clear My Throat” gave the genre its last real breakout hit. Anyone who’s been paying attention to artists like Wale will probably bristle at the word, but go-go has been making a sort of limited comeback over the last few years, popping up in the work of artists as diverse as Gym Class Heroes and the Roots (whose “Rising Up” features a guest spot from Wale). Through singles like “Dig Dug” and “Breakdown,” Wale has identified himself with go-go, but don’t go into Attention Deficit expecting it to sound like Trouble Funk — or even DJ Kool; he’s always had more on his mind than one style of hip-hop, and as alluded to by this album’s title, he does a fair amount of hopscotching through Deficit’s 14 tracks. (more…)

Blu-ray Review: “Kevin Smith 3-Movie Collection”

51SfBURrv-L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]Anyone who’s ever seen a Kevin Smith movie knows he isn’t a filmmaker whose work screams out for hi-def. From the beginning, with 1994’s Clerks, Smith’s been at his best when he’s forced to do more with less; he’s a director who’s more about heart than aesthetic, and that focus tends to create an emotional disconnect in his bigger-budget work. A triple-disc box of Kevin Smith Blu-rays, in other words, might seem like just about the most useless investment a person could make — popping Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back into your Blu-ray player is a little like driving a Lamborghini to the grocery store: It’s a gross misapplication of technology.

To be certain, Miramax’s Kevin Smith 3-Movie Collection does feel like a pretty senseless cash grab on Disney’s part. For one thing, the studio has taken two of Smith’s finest films (Clerks and Chasing Amy) and bundled them along with one of his weakest (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back); for another, of the three, only Chasing Amy contains an appreciable amount of new bonus content. But before you write it off completely, understand two things: One, these movies are all available separately, and two, the collection is available at a fairly steep discount. If you’re a Blu-ray owner and a Smith fan who somehow doesn’t own these movies yet, this box should be an instant purchase. If you do already own them, on the other hand, you’ve got some thinking to do. (more…)

Blu-ray Review: “Brüno”

51VwAoltfsL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]You wouldn’t think a movie featuring a talking penis could be boring, but you’d be wrong. I have proof, and that proof is Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno.

Cohen proved himself a blazing pioneer of 21st century guerilla comedy with 2006’s Borat, in which he played a mustachioed, childlike misogynist who travels to America as a cultural ambassador from Kazakhstan, wandering the country with a camera crew as he insults women and Jews, stalks Pamela Anderson, and embarrasses unsuspecting bigots. It was a shocking, deeply offensive film — one that left you doubled over and gasping for air with laughter even as you intellectually recoiled from what was unfolding on the screen, and the kind of phenomenon that really can’t be repeated.

He had to try anyway, of course. It didn’t work, but you can’t fault him for the effort. (more…)

CD Review: Bon Jovi, “The Circle”

Trends may change and empires may crumble, but at least one thing always seems to stay the same: Bon goddamn Jovi can’t take a dump without it coming out platinum.

During the great hair metal die-off of the early ’90s, Bon Jovi didn’t exactly seem like the first band that should have seen its career fade into an unpleasant, acid-washed memory — they were huger than huge at their peak, and unlike a lot of their peers, they were always more of a straight-ahead commercial rock band than a metal band toning down its act for the Top 40 — but neither did they seem like they had any real long-term commercial viability. When was the last time you watched the video for “Bad Medicine”? It featured dialogue, enough quick cuts to make you throw up before the one-minute mark, trendy saturated colors, and Sam Kinison. The ’80s should have clamped down on Bon Jovi like a bear trap:

But Bon Jovi didn’t tank in the ’90s. No, you know what they did? They released an album in 1992, just as grunge was building momentum and their name recognition was enough to sell two million copies of Keep the Faith. Then they smartly hid out for the rest of the decade, releasing a greatest-hits compilation (1994’s quadruple-platinum Cross Road) and one studio album (1995’s platinum These Days) before re-emerging in the broken musical landscape of the 21st century with 2000’s double-platinum Crush. (more…)

Blu-ray Reviews: “Logan’s Run,” “Heat,” and “The Taking of Pelham 123″

Once upon a time, fashioning an action epic movie took more than just a big budget — it required some real imagination, not just to come up with the ideas for the storylines, but to figure out how to bring larger-than-life situations to life onscreen. The results were often laughable, but just as often, they introduced some real visual thrills and filmmaking innovations — stuff that really made you wonder how it was made. These days, all the world’s a digital playground, and although filmgoers can still be dazzled by CGI-fueled stuff like Roland Emmerich’s upcoming 2012 or James Cameron’s Avatar, we’re a lot more jaded now; as incredible as things can look, we know, in the back of our minds, that it was produced with more mouse-clicking than elbow grease. Action movies, in particular, seem to have devolved; technology definitely helped to a point, but they’re often built from such simple materials that anything that speeds up their journey to the screen feels like a net loss.

That’s how I felt, anyway, as I watched the new Blu-ray transfers of Logan’s Run (1976), Heat (1995), and Tony Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009). (more…)