“Violence” erupts from Parquet Courts’ Wide Awaaaaake! (2018) in a riot of barbed slogans, proclaiming and exclaiming over everything from the “blazer of the Trail of Tears” to prison TV shows, against a dark drums’n’organ funk. The band have drawn comparisons across their productive years to Pavement, Beastie Boys, the hyper-literate NY punk cognoscenti, but here … Continue reading “Violence” by Parquet Courts
The CD reissue spree of the early 1990s benefited those lonely, cobwebbed corner obsessives who thought the longhairs of 70s British Isles folk rock had something good going. Those of us who scuttled after the bones the sinister Shanachie label threw to the U.S. through the ’80s were conditioned to nonexistent liner notes and brainwashed … Continue reading “The Poet and the Witch” by Mellow Candle (1972) and Stephen Malkmus (2003)
Bob and Carole Pegg formed Mr. Fox in 1970 in the wake of Ashley Hutchings’ early rehearsals for Steeleye Span (having I suppose not passed that audition), made two eccentric albums that writers on the British folk revival still can’t really sum, and were done in both their marriage and the band by 1972. Critics claim … Continue reading “The Gay Goshawk” by Mr. Fox
The power in “O Fortuna” — last week’s entry on the infinite linear mixtape — is in its performative setting, the text from Carmina Burana, enlivened, engulfed, by Carl Orff’s score. Liquored- and sexed-up Goliards may have written it, may have given it a chant or two in its 12th-century time, but it was Orff who … Continue reading “Twa Corbies” by Steeleye Span
When your local symphony wants to fill seats, a good bet after the annual Star Wars night is a performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Its pop power lies in a percussion both brawny and nuanced, and the clean melodic lines of the 23 songs bracketed by the thunderous chant of the opening and closing … Continue reading “O Fortuna” by Carl Orff
Sonny Sharrock’s Ask the Ages (1991), with its depth-defying groove and meet-up of ambition and gravitas, is the portrait of a maturing artist hitting his stride. Sharrock was 51 and riding a creative wave — one foot in the free jazz he brought his guitar to in the 1960s, one in the “collision music” envisioned … Continue reading “Many Mansions” by Sonny Sharrock
Given his breadth of tastes, it’s reasonable to think that Jimi Hendrix‘s invitation to the Soft Machine to support him on his tour of the States in 1968 was a calculated act of subversion, upending the guitar god cult and the power trio temple he’d built along with Cream. The group was an underground darling, … Continue reading “Dada Was Here” by the Soft Machine
A worthwhile imaginary history: Eric Clapton doesn’t leave the Yardbirds in March 1965. He stays, compromised but successful, and the band’s psych-garage boilerplate “For Your Love” is the first in a clutch of similar vocal-fronted hits that eventually morph the band into a second string Moody Blues. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page never join the … Continue reading “Deserted Cities of the Heart” by Cream
The Doors built its finest work around straight-ahead rock’n’roll, adding a whirling, baroque jazz samba momentum from the alchemy of keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore, all schooled in the post-bop cool permeating, by the mid-1960s, the many stripes of a blossoming California pop music scene. Jim Morrison brought the goods … Continue reading “Light My Fire” by the Doors
When psychedelia and blues came together in Cream’s quickfire trio of studio albums in the late 1960s, it created a blueprint for blues-respecting bottom-heavy rock that would rule the airwaves for at least a decade. In their roots and early trajectories, the Winter brothers, emerging out of the heartland of Beaumont, Texas, were not unlike north … Continue reading “Frankenstein” by the Edgar Winter Group
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