Some groups have such an effortless way with a breezy pop song that you‘re completely dumbfounded as to why they’re not yet household names. Then you realize that they’re far too eclectic, and esoteric, to fit into neat little pop boxes. The Mabuses is certainly a better band for it. Enigmatic group leader Kim Fahy has returned from the elysian fields of masters degree pursuing to reconvene this oddball, category-defying group after 13 years of relative silence (side-projects notwithstanding).

While Fahy & Co.’s genial, lilting, big-hearted pop songs are occasionally hijacked by flights of absurdist whimsy, they’re ultimately grounded by the richness of their lyrical conceits. They always end on exactly the right note, no matter how many styles this restless, musically omnivorous group may flit through along the way.

I first discovered them via Lida Husik, who collaborated with Mabuses percussionist Jamie Harley on her Kramer-produced albums Your Bag and Return of Red Emma. (The first Mabuses record came out in 1991 on Kramer’s label Shimmy Disc; Lida covered their song “Bustop” on Red Emma.)

At any rate, Lida credited Jamie with much awesomeness, so I had to give the Mabuses a try. And, lo, I was not disappointed. Their new album is SO good that I’m having a hard time choosing tracks to post. I’ll leave it at the dreamy and bittersweet “Sugarland” and the jaunty instrumental ditty “Tiger Lilies.”

“Mabused” is the group’s first album in 13 (or so) years, and they’re playing a (very rare) live show at NYC’s Knitting Factory on September 22nd. I wouldn’t miss it if I were you.

A Mabuses fan page on MySpace | Official Site | Stream the album in full over at Stereogum

The Mabuses, “Sugarland”

The Mabuses, “Tiger Lilies”

IMAGE: “MEMENTO WREATH” BY JULIANNA SWANEY AT OH MY CAVALIER

Posted by Andrea at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Belgian singer Catherine Jauniaux’s fascinating vocalizations run the stylistic gamut from traditional French chansons to breathy folk to Dadaistic glossolalia. Music for the Merzbau, her colorful Cabaret Voltaire sensibility is fearlessly expressionistic, melding avant-garde techniques and lyrical inventiveness with a robust (and Surreal) sense of humor. Well known for her work with her late husband Tom Cora (she appeared with the Ex on their 1991 album Scrabbling at the Lock) and collaborations with Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson, she’s playing a rare NYC show tonight at 8PM. It’s at the Issue Project Room ’s new(ish) space in the OA Can Factory, 3rd Street, Brooklyn.

I’ll be there in spirit, if not in actuality.

There will be two sets: 1st set at 8PM with Hahn Rowe (Hugo Largo) and Ned Rothenberg on guitar, electronics, and reeds; 2nd with Marc Ribot and David Linton, again mixing guitar, electronics, and projections.

“A Divine Image” is from Jauniaux and Hodgkinson’s 1983 collaboration Fluvial. “Naiwabi” was originally released on Hodgkinson and Bill Gilonis’s own Woof imprint; both albums have been re-issued by ReRUSA subsidiary Ad Hoc.

Friday August 24th 2007
Issue Project Room
The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215

8pm | $15 both shows

Issue Project Room Events Calendar | Buy Catherine Jauniaux at the Downtown Music Gallery | Buy Fluvial via Ad Hoc/ReRUSA

Catherine Jauniaux, “A Divine Image”

The Lowest Note, “Naiwabi”

Posted by Andrea at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

L-R: PETER SAVILLE, TONY WILSON, ALAN ERASMUS

Anthony H. Wilson
1950-2007

Tony Wilson was a divisive, Jeckyll-and-Hyde sort of character. There were so many different Tony Wilsons: preening, occasionally buffoonish public figure, arch commentator, egomaniacal blowhard, canny marketer of unlikely pop music, tireless booster of Manchester’s fortunes, prophetic club impresario —the list could go on and on. However improbably, each of these personae (some more dominant than others at any one time) strengthened, rather than weakened, him. He was like Antaeus, and Manchester was undoubtedly the place from which he drew his considerable strength.

Did his unerring talent for sniffing out genius make him one by proxy? Hardly. But it certainly wasn’t a skill to be taken lightly. While he was often derided for being a terrible businessman —as if cold, hard profit was the only value worth aspiring to— his goals were more complicated than that.

We prefer our indie heroes to be slightly awkward outsiders —slouched, aloof, and hardly camera-ready. If anything, Wilson was too camera-ready, and it made us wonder about him. His televisual flair —honed by years as a Granada TV presenter— gave him a Teflon-coated, slightly oily aura. It was all a bit too used-car-salesman for some: the toxic pairing of Armani flash with the occasional overreaching reference point —Boethius, praxis, any Latin quote— made Wilson immediately, eye-rollingly suspect. (Paul Morley once described him as “so full of life, and so full of himself.”) Equally suspect, too, was his quick-change double life: television presenter by day and punk iconoclast by night. (Bastion of the square establishment on one side, anarchist intellectual on the other.) As a career strategy it seemed not only audacious but downright impossible —how could anyone possibly play both sides of the fence like that? Even a world-class bullshitter like Anthony H. Wilson?

And yet, he did it, and he thrived on the challenge. He drew fire and admiration in equal measure through the years, but forged his path to spite everyone. He was a catalyst of the first order —someone who challenged people and sparked their best work, often through his own bloody-mindedness and sheer force of will. To paraphrase Factory partner and artistic director Peter Saville, “To make the analogy of the solar system, [Tony was] the bundle of energy that fed the whole thing. Without Tony’s energy, commitment, love and passion, you couldn’t have fuelled it.”

Interview with Tony Wilson | Factory Records Catalogue | Cerysmatic Factory [Tribute Site]

Joy Division, "Decades"

New Order, "Mesh" "Cries & Whispers" [Thanks for the correction, aTom Ten!]

Posted by Andrea at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Barton Lee Hazlewood, 1929-2007

American songwriter Lee Hazlewood died late Saturday night after a long battle with renal cancer.

At the heart of his marvelous, ineffable, and very lengthy pop music career was a contradiction: here was a man who, seemingly effortlessly, wrote pop hit after pop hit for singers as disparate in style as Sanford Clark, Duane Eddy, Dean Martin, Ann Margret, and Nancy Sinatra. But even his breeziest pop confections had bittersweet depths.

A reclusive and sometimes enigmatic singer-songwriter who played up his image as a hard-living, tough-as-nails troubadour —a kind of existentialist cowboy with a sparkle in his eye and a ready, ribald wit, Hazlewood’s cracked pop universe was one of acute highs and lows, of endless heartbreak met with tenacity and sheer contrarian ballsiness.

He was a weather-beaten, prickly sort, was Lee, but every song —no matter how profane— also had an improbably old-world, gentlemanly quality. All these (seeming) contradictions, and the truth of the matter was that Lee never failed to be true to himself, through and through. In the end, he was a tough old bastard, a heartbroken jester, and a deadpan iconoclast who wrote songs with a hell of a lot of heart. Listen to the music and you’ll hear it all, more eloquently than I could ever catalogue.

There are some lovely retrospectives and touching obituaries floating around the internet, but for a real treat, listen to some unedited audio of Lee, taken from Thomas Lévy’s upcoming documentary film about him, which is currently in the editing stages. (Thanks, Leslie, for the permission to link.)

There’ll never be another Lee Hazlewood. He’ll be missed.

If you would like to leave a message for the Hazlewood Family or for Jeane Hazlewood in particular, you can email them at HeMovesAround@gmail.com.

***

I haven’t yet heard his final solo album, last year’s Cake or Death, but I leave you with two of my favorites: “Dolly Parton’s Guitar”, and a joyous duet with Ann-Margret, “You Turn My Head Around,” from 1969’s The Cowboy and The Lady. (This song was also covered beautifully on this year’s Dean & Britta album, Back Numbers.)

Unofficial Site | Back Catalogue via Smells Like Records | Cake Or Death [2006] | La Vache Qui Lit + The Lee Hazlewood Documentary

Lee Hazlewood, “Dolly Parton's Guitar”

Lee Hazlewood & Ann Margret, “You Turn My Head Around”

Posted by Andrea at 07:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of my favorite secret labels of the late 90s was Glasgow-based Vesuvius. Run by Pat Laureate (Melody Dog, Pastels), the label’s releases had a very particular, hand-drawn look —from the rough-hewn logo made to look as if it had been carved using cuneiform wedges to the stylized, colorful illustrative covers, you could always tell a Vesuvius record at thirty paces. Whether vinyl, CD, or cassette, each release came packaged with extra goodies such as zines, comics, or badges, and wrapped in deliriously Surreal Technicolor cartoons (some by in-house illustrator John Bagnall, or —in the case of Spooky Sounds of Now, David Sandlin).

Vesuvius operated mysteriously and under-the-radar, stealthily releasing fantastic records by the likes of The Yummy Fur, Jad Fair, and Lung Leg. They also put out some stellar compilations, which not only offered up a cannily astute snapshot of the Glasgow scene (including bands like Ganger, the aforementioned Yummy Fur and Melody Dog, the Pastels , Pink Kross, and Mount Vernon Arts Lab), but included some fine stateside ensembles, like Yo La Tengo , Two Dollar Guitar (less an ensemble than one guy, but who’s counting?), Dymaxion, and Half Japanese. Their Halloween-themed Spooky Sounds of Now even included a Tim Gane-Pete Kember-Andy Ramsay collaboration and a High Llamas track —for the Stereolab and/or Spacemen 3-obsessed types out there.

I don’t know what happened to Vesuvius. Pat could still be putting out records for all I know, but a quick Google search turned up precious little information (not even a complete discography). So, if anyone has any more info about this unique and beloved tiny dynamo of a label, please let me know!

I’ll leave you with a few goodies —Yummy Fur, Blips (AKA Gane/Kember/Ramsay), and Yo La Tengo tracks from Spooky Sounds of Now, and a PDF of Pamfletti, a one-off (?) zine put together (typed, scrawled, and hand-written) by Tim Gane & Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab), Bob Stanley (St. Etienne), Pat Laureate (Vesuvius), Lucy Mackenzie (Ganger), and Stephen & Aggi Pastel (and bought from Stephen himself —sorry, now I’m veering dangerously close to Cahiers du Smarm territory…)

While this short-but-sweet ‘zine is a great read from start to finish, whatever you do, don’t miss Katrina and Tim Gane’s Top Ten Lists. In this era of encyclopedic blog posts and regular nostalgic exhumations of undersung recordings from Cahiers du Smarm (AKA P-fork), most of these are probably old news. But back in 1993 this was pretty revelatory (and very welcome). I don’t think I’d ever heard of ESP Disk before I read Gane’s piece about the Fugs and Patty Waters…

The Yo La song, “3D”, is a shimmery-shimmy little syncopated number that’s feather-light and sun-kissed to a tawny golden. The Yummy Fur track, “Saturday Night Mo-Mo,” has a darker, more conflicted tone, the chintzy plink-plonk of the synths barely deflecting the track’s overall ominousness —here, this very chameleonic group come off like a slightly goofball Suicide. Blips, as befits a Stereolab-Sonic Boom collaboration, has a very Turn On-sort-of immediacy to it –it’s slight but charming. (It may in fact be a Turn On track —I don’t have the CD here with me to check.) I know nothing about Supermalprodelica, except that their name is a tweak in Bobby Glsp’s general direction. The song’s lovely, though.

Pamfletti [PDF Download, ~16 MB]

The Yummy Fur, “Saturday Night Mo-Mo”

Blips, “Blip^/Blip~”

Yo La Tengo “3D”

Supermalprodelica, ”L'Etat de Grace”

IMAGES FROM “PAMFLETTI” [1993] & “SPOOKY SOUNDS OF NOW” [1997]

Posted by Andrea at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)