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Bill Bruford: The Yes Man Cometh
Over the last few years, a lot of the musicians I’ve spoken with have uttered a simple one-word affirmative at some point in the conversation. That word is “Yes,” as in “my band is heavy into Yes” or “we wanted to be more progressive, like Yes.” In fact, recently in Crawdaddy!, even pop-rocker Matthew Sweet expressed his delight at having Yes guitarist Steve Howe come in to solo on a Yes cover he’d recorded for an upcoming installment of his Under the Covers series.
Some 40 years after they emerged from the London rock scene, Yes continues to be one of the most influential bands in rock. With so many of the new prog bands citing them as an influence, and prog rock itself the subject of newfound relevance—such as the BBC’s recent Prog Rock Britannia documentary—I found it fortuitous that original Yes drummer Bill Bruford, who recently announced his retirement on the eve of his 60th birthday, has written a detailed and witty account of his career entitled, simply, Bill Bruford: The Autobiography (Jawbone Press).
What better time, I assumed, to get his take on contemporary prog rock.
Everyday Visuals Ride the Pop/Indie Divide
Christopher Pappas, main songwriter for Boston-based, New Hampshire-bred indie band the Everyday Visuals, is well-aware of just how the indie/mainstream continuum works. In fact, Pappas blogged about this matter in a little entry entitled, “Pop is fucking (aka. Everything to all people? / aka. Coldplay is just as bad as Wavves” posted to his band’s website.
Elsewhere on the band’s pages, Pappas provided a helpful Venn diagram to illustrate exactly where the Visuals merge between pop and indie. Figuring out where their audience is poses a practical dilemma for the Northeastern band, whose recent self-titled and self-produced third album will likely appeal to Fleet Foxes fans for its downbeat, harmony-rich vocal sound while possibly alienating said fans by also veering into poppier, Vampire Weekend (or even Split Enz) territory. This dichotomy clearly weighs heavily on the bearded singer’s mind.
“The indie world,” Pappas explains, “is completely insular and self-satisfying, and the pop world is just as lame and just as self-satisfying. When I was growing up and first listening to music, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and the Breeders all had this really underground indie-rock aesthetic that critics loved, and yet they were all on MTV, too… and Nirvana was selling out stadiums! Nowadays, there seems to be such a schism between the pop world and the indie world. So the main point I was trying to get at [in the blog] was that often I feel like the Everyday Visuals fall in between the poppy, catchy world and the indie world.”
Tinted Windows Keep It Simple
When Tinted Windows, the new “power-pop supergroup” comprised of Adam Schlesinger, James Iha, Bun E. Carlos, and Taylor Hanson, officially “leaked” their song “Kind of a Girl” to the internet in February, the response was polarizing. Naturally, power-pop aficionados (such as myself) got it right away. After all, what’s not to love? Schlesinger hails from Ivy and the Fountains of Wayne, Iha wailed in Smashing Pumpkins, and Carlos has provided the thunderous Midwestern backbeat for Cheap Trick’s entire career. On the other hand, it appeared that, among the rock snob crowd, the main sticking point was Mr. Hanson, whom many only remembered as the longhaired, pretty boy singing lead on “MMMbop” on MTV over 12 years ago. Judging by some of the snarky comments posted on the Rolling Stone website, there were plenty of haters out there.
Speaking over the phone shortly after the band’s live debut at Austin’s SXSW, however, Schlesinger is frankly baffled by the thought of any enmity toward the talented Mr. Hanson.
“I guess people that haven’t heard him for a long time are gonna be surprised,” says Schlesinger, “but most people I talk to automatically assume he’s awesome. I don’t think anybody ever really questioned that he was talented. Even when he was younger, it was kind of obvious to everyone that he was an incredibly gifted singer and a great musician. Conceptually, maybe for some people, it may seem strange to have somebody from the Pumpkins and somebody from Hanson playing together because, in the mid-’90s, that just seemed like two different universes. In reality, it’s not. Now, it’s just a bunch of guys that have some overlapping tastes in music that wanted to do something together.”
New York Dolls
New York Dolls
’Cause I Sez So
(Atco/Rhino, 2009)
Typically, 90 percent of any successful comeback is just showing up. The presumption being that the artist or band in question has long since proven themselves and their reunion album is little more than a quickly forgotten souvenir to sell on some sort of victory lap reunion tour.
Thankfully, the New York Dolls are no typical band and have not, I repeat, HAVE NOT taken that cynical route on their loud-ass, confident new album, ’Cause I Sez So.
The Milk & Honey Band
The Milk & Honey Band
Dog Eared Moonlight
(Ape Records, 2009)
Being unfamiliar with UK singer-songwriter Robert White’s former band, Levitation, I had very little to direct me to his current outfit, the Milk & Honey Band, other than the implied endorsement of XTC’s Andy Partridge, whose label, Ape Records, has released their new album, Dog Eared Moonlight, just as they did the band’s prior offering, The Secret Life of the Milk & Honey Band. Happily, this bit of back channel knowledge not only resulted in my discovery of an extremely talented songwriter and his band, but it also helped me get past the band’s name, which (wrongly) seemed to evoke a bible-thumping Christian ministry.
Being a rather devout fan of XTC, I had of course assumed that White and his crew would sound exactly like the Bard of Swindon himself, Mr. Partridge, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. It happens to not be the case, however, and White not only avoids emulation of his label boss, but is possessed of an original voice that is entirely worthy of your unbiased attention.
Bill Nelson’s Red Noise: Sound-on-Sound
Bill Nelson’s Red Noise
Sound-on-Sound
(Harvest / EMI, 1979)
Like Robert Fripp, Bill Nelson has always stood out as a prime example of the thinking man’s prog-rock guitar hero. Coming straight out of Yorkshire, England in 1972 with his artfully blues-based rock ensemble Be Bop Deluxe, Nelson’s savvy way with a guitar riff made him the envy of bands better known than his own. Lyrically, Nelson imbued his songs with the kind of Bowie-friendly glam typified by “Jet Silver and the Dolls of Venus” from Be Bop Deluxe’s debut, Axe Victim. While subsequent BBD releases, Futurama, Sunburst Finish, and Modern Music all received wide critical acclaim (and some actual sales in the UK), shortly after the band’s fruitless attempt to clear the bases in the US market with Live! In the Air Age, a KISS Alive!-style retrospective concert set, in 1977, Nelson began to feel that the band had run its course. Newer acts like Talking Heads, XTC, Devo, and (John Foxx’s pre-Midge Ure) Ultravox were, despite being leaner displays of technical prowess, redefining what it meant to be cutting edge. Like Brian Eno, another old-school art rocker with an innate understanding of new wave’s boundary pushing potential, Nelson couldn’t resist plunging into the emerging tide. After a noble attempt at modernizing Be Bop Deluxe with the angular futurism of Drastic Plastic in 1978, Nelson withdrew to his studio with Be Bop Deluxe and XTC producer John Leckie to remake and remodel his sound.
He emerged in 1979, under the banner of Bill Nelson’s Red Noise, with Sound-on-Sound, a collection of short, sharp, and shocked rock songs that masterfully incorporated the zeitgeist of ’70s twilight. Arguably, the name change was cosmetic—Nelson had retained Be Bop’s Andy Clark on keyboards alongside brother Ian Nelson on saxophone, bass player Rick Ford, and drummer Steve Peer—and was merely following a musical direction already in evidence on “Possession” from Drastic Plastic. The clean break in Red Noise’s sound, however, was found in its hyped up, rambunctious arrangements, which now echoed the new sounds of Talking Heads, Television, and XTC. Gratefully, what hadn’t changed was Nelson’s gift for riffs, futurist lyrics, and Velcro-sticky pop hooks.
Sound-on-Sound opens with a fiery call-to-arms, “Don’t Touch Me (I’m Electric)”, in which Nelson’s Andy Partridge-ish vocal histrionics sound a warning over a track that wouldn’t have been out of place on XTC’s Go 2, but with more synthesizers. In less than two minutes, we’re on to the manifesto “For Young Moderns”, featuring Clark’s trebly Yamaha electric grand piano pounding away as Nelson declares:
Jason Falkner: Presents Author Unknown
Jason Falkner
Presents Author Unknown
(Elektra, 1996)
In order to put Jason Falkner’s 1996 solo debut, Presents Author Unknown, in the proper context, a little background may be in order.
By 1988, Falkner had become a member of the LA “paisley underground” band the Three O’ Clock during the waning days of that scene, and the band was dissolving shortly after they’d signed with Prince’s Paisley Park label. Undaunted, Falkner took a European road trip before landing in San Francisco and accepting an invitation to join Andy Sturmer and Roger Joseph Manning Jr. to form the seminal power-pop group Jellyfish.
The Shadow Gospel According to Ron Sexsmith
There’s nothing casual about the reference to “soul” in the title of Ron Sexsmith’s new album, Exit Strategy of the Soul. According to the Canadian songwriter, it’s a nod not only to his continuing admiration for soulful vocalists like Al Green and Bill Withers, but to his own ongoing search for spiritual meaning in a world filled with noise and what he calls “attitude.” Over Exit Strategy’s 14 emotionally direct tracks, two of them wordless, Sexsmith explores his singular (and secular) search for soulfulness.
“It felt like I was making a Gospel album,” Sexsmith admits over the phone from Toronto during a rare day off the road. “I’m not a religious person, but ever since I was a kid I’ve always been sort of a ‘God conscious’ person. I used to have this idea that God somehow was in the sun, because people always talked about this great light when you die, and, of course, how else would He be able to keep an eye on everything, you know? Even today, I don’t know what God is, but I don’t think it’s a man in the sky with a big beard or anything. Nobody knows for sure.”
Sexsmith, who ironically drew more heat than light from some evangelicals for his 2002 song, “God Loves Everyone”, after he included gay people in that “everyone,” insists that spiritual themes have always shown up in his work ever since his eponymous 1995 album with songs like “There’s a Rhythm” and “Speaking With the Angel.” Still, he was as surprised as anyone at how overtly, if poetically, these themes began to emerge as he wrote the songs for Exit Strategy.
AC Newman: Guilty Pleasures of a New Pornographer
It’s a long way from Vancouver’s Stanley Park to Brooklyn’s Park Slope, but for Carl Newman, who recently made such a transition, the journey provides a convenient geographical analogy for a musical expedition that has taken him from outsider status with Superconductor and the under-appreciated Zumpano to his current day job as vocalist and songwriter for the critically canonized New Pornographers. A couple of years ago, Newman fell in love with a Brooklyn girl and soon found himself house-hunting in one of young America’s hippest area codes. He has been there ever since. I recently dialed that area code on the occasion of the release of Get Guilty, Newman’s second solo album which, like 2004’s The Slow Wonder, is credited to “AC Newman.”
First off, I wondered (slowly) why the distinction between Carl and AC?
“I just thought,” Newman clarifies, “it sounded cooler, somehow. And I still stand by it, you know? AC Newman just has a better ring to it. Carl Newman just sounds like a guy. And besides,apparently there’s also a rockabilly guy from the ’50s named Carl Newman.”
XTC’s Psych Side Project Gets an Acid Flashback
by: Paul Myers
“At this point,” announces Andy Partridge over the phone from his Swindon, England home, “XTC is pretty much a memory, I’m afraid. I don’t think it’s ever going to be a going concern again. I certainly have a dislike of older bands that re-form; they really, really shouldn’t do it.”
For fans of the legendary British post-new wave group—who managed to survive a good 20 years longer than most of their contemporaries, with the possible exception of REM—this news comes not so much as a shock but rather a grim confirmation of the end of an era. Yet, as Partridge continues, it becomes clear that, while XTC the band may be strictly a historical concern, XTC the brand is in the middle of one of its busiest years in quite some time.
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by: Paul Myers
published: October 14, 2009
in column: Feature Story
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