In the fall of 1966, San Francisco was the psychedelic capital of America. But the most psychedelic band in town that season was a visiting gang of acid priests from what was then the most dangerous state in the union for freaking out: Texas ravers the 13th Floor Elevators. One of the 10 discs in Sign of the 3 Eyed Men (Charly/International Artists) — a definitive audio history of the band, curated by Elevators biographer Paul Drummond and limited to 4,000 copies — catches the band live at the Avalon Ballroom, and those ‘66 performances are the electrifying heart of this sumptuous box. Local heads Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead were still coming out of folk rock. But the Elevators were already a juggernaut of enlightenment, preaching LSD as sacrament (”Fire Engine,” “Roller Coaster”) and making new weirdness out of Kinks and Beatles covers with the alien-soul bleating of a still-teenage Roky Erickson and an avenging-Stones rhythm section made wilder by Tommy Hall’s manic blowing on an amplified ceramic jug. (more…)

Led by guitarist-conductor Greg Tate, New York’s Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber is a fleet-footed big band, sliding and swaggering through galactic R&B, brawny jazz and electric funk like a Sun Ra-size spin on Miles Davis’ On the Corner band. Making Love to the Dark Ages (LiveWired) also comes with extra black rock: kinetic soloing by guest guitarist Vernon Reid of Living Colour.

Weirdly arriving just before a new Mars Volta album, Cryptomnesia (Rodriguez Lopez Productions) is nominally a side project by the band’s guitarist-composer. But El Grupo Nuevo de Omar Rodriguez Lopez are really a five-piece Volta, including singer-lyricist Cedric Bixler Zavala, pressing their precise fusion of rhythmic hysteria, Rodriguez Lopez’s circular-riff assault and Bixler Zavala’s bleating psychosis into something like pop-song length, like 2005’s Frances the Mute in high-voltage microcosm.

Here’s a shock: The mid-Sixties vixens on the hilarious and delightful retrospective Destroy That Boy! More Girls With Guitars (Ace) were bossed around by guys — Jack Nitzsche, Steve Cropper and Sly Stone among them — who produced these two dozen singles and wrote virtually all of the songs. But control of the mike is nine-tenths of the law on Karen Verros’ tough 1965 pearl “You Just Gotta Know My Mind,” the Debutantes’ sassy ‘67 gender reversal of “Shake a Tail Feather” and film kitten Ann-Margret’s ‘68 acid-pop swoon in “You Turned My Head Around.” The oddest daddy here: Miles Davis collaborator Teo Macero, who produced the What Four’s bizarre deadly-Shirelles flop “I’m Gonna Destroy That Boy” in 1966.

It is not patronizing to call the Cocktail Slippers — five women from Norway who make their own garage-rock racket and sing their you-done-me-wrong songs with avenging-angel-army harmonies — a girl group. It’s straight shooting. The line from Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit “She’s a Fool” and Connie Francis’ 1964 single “Don’t Ever Leave Me” to the Slippers’ robust covers on Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre (Wicked Cool) runs right through the no-pushover sugar of the Shangri-Las and, in Slippers singer Modesty Blaze’s challenging purr, Blondie’s Deborah Harry. The Slippers also draw, expertly, from the boys in love with that sound — the Ronettes-with-fuzz yearning of the Ramones; Bruce Springsteen’s way with Brill Building mini-opera — in the shiny charge of “Sentenced to Love” and the carousel-organ rolls in the title track (written by Springsteen guitarist and Slippers co-producer Steven Van Zandt). In full hosanna, in songs such as “In the City” and “Gotta Crush,” the Slippers sound a lot like the Go-Go’s but with gats instead of L.A. cheer, and a mule kick in their high heels. It’s all retro action but written and detonated with the study and delight of modern rock & roll women in constant touch with their inner filly.

Bluegrass bands are as rare in New Orleans as high ground, so the Jazz Fest debut of the High Ground Drifters was an opening-day surprise. The quintet come from the town’s Mid-City neighborhood but shuffled covers (Bill Monroe, Django Reinhardt) and originals (”Hellbender,” “Jack ‘n the Bull”) with plenty of Kentucky in the bravado and no slack. Get more of those good times on The High Ground Drifters, the group’s self-released first album.

Drummer John Vidacovich and bassist James Singleton are Jazz Fest vets. They played at the first one in 1970 (with the blind R&B singer Snooks Eaglin) and were back this year in their long-running modern-jazz quartet Astral Project with saxophonist Tony Dagradi and guitarist Steve Masakowski. But the hot set I got was at the Louisiana Music Factory (local-music experts and one of our nation’s great record stores) to promote a fine new album, Blue Streak (Astral Project). It was a special gas to see the group in such tight focus. Vidacovich and Singleton popped and weaved with spidery elasticity and rifle-shot second-line rolls. Dagradi’s knotty, charging “Blue Streak” and Masakowski’s “North Wind” epitomized the group’s unique resolution of earthy and airy — an ECM-style grace with New Orleans humidity that comes with the album too.

It was not their usual gig: outside under a lunchtime sun. But organist Joe Krown, singer-guitarist Walter “Wolfman” Washington and drummer Russell Batiste Jr. came to the 2009 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival with all of the chunky funk they put down indoors every Sunday at the city’s Maple Leaf Bar. Washington, who played with local R&B gods Lee Dorsey and Johnny Adams, was a springy showman (picking the guitar with his teeth) and sang Jimmy Hughes’ “Steal Away” and Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Feel So Bad” in a salty growl. Batiste, from the Funky Meters, was a steady engine, and Krown blended the rippling sustain of Jimmy Smith with the syncopated kicks in classic New Orleans piano. (Krown is a killer on that instrument too.) They closed with the comic grind of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “You Can Stay But the Noise Got to Go.” Like most of their fest set list, it is on the trio’s album, Life at the Maple Leaf (JK) — which will keep you satisfied until you get to the club some Sunday yourself.

History keeps repeating itself on Carbeth (Honest Jon’s), the intoxicating debut album by Trembling Bells. The English-Scottish quartet essentially revive an earlier revival: the rediscovery and amplification, in the Sixties and early Seventies, of traditional British balladry and country-dance tunes. In pub-hymn melodies like “Seven Years a Teardrop” and the hearth-choir blend of ale-fed male hurrah and Lavinia Blackwall’s righteous-damsel singing, the band — founded by avant-rock drummer Alex Neilson (he has played with Current 93 and Six Organs of Admittance, among others) — abides by the ruling echoes of Fairport Convention and Pentangle. The Bells also take a wide view of that antiquity, incorporating Renaissance brass music, medieval drone and acid-flecked rock. Jubilant mischief ensues in “The End Is the Beginning Born Knowing” (the Incredible String Band as an incredible garage band) and the steam-engine-Led Zeppelin freakout in the center of “I Took to You (Like Christ to Wood).” There is robust beauty, too. “Garlands of Stars” is a rattling bouquet of shooting-star guitars, lusty trombone and Blackwall’s arcing voice, driven by Neilson’s tidal drumming. The folk roots still show, but in fresh air.

Photo: Franks/WireImage

There are many ways to celebrate the progressive-folk invention and improvising sorcery of the British singer-guitarist John Martyn, who died on January 29th at age 60: the moving, precocious detail of his playing on 1967’s London Conversation and 1968’s The Tumbler; Martyn’s growling despair and echo-laden folk-jazz fusion on the 1973 masterpieces Solid Air and Inside Out; the frank heartbreak in his melodies and smoky vocal performances on the 1980 divorce-songs album Grace & Danger. Released shortly before his passing, the 2008 four-CD retrospective Ain’t No Saint: 40 Years of John Martyn (Island U.K.) is a peculiar overview: divided into two studio and two live discs, with more than half of the 61 tracks originally unreleased. The studio half of the set touches on every essential era, although the emphasis on rarities may flummox beginners. The version here of “Solid Air” — Martyn’s greatest song, written for his troubled friend Nick Drake — is not the perfect haunting from the original album but an early uncompelling sketch.

Yet there are revelations. (more…)

Photo: Greg Aiello

There are no off hours at SXSW. One morning, hours after finishing a late-night club set, pianist Marco Benevento was in the KUT-FM studios at the University of Texas with his trio, performing the exuberant redesigns of My Morning Jacket’s “Golden” and Deerhoof’s “Twin Killers” from his delightful new album, Me Not Me (Royal Potato Family). Benevento also demonstrated how, live and on record, he combines loops, distortion and the piano’s pure-ivory ring “to accent the color in the song,” as he said of “Golden.” Me Not Me is mostly covers, and Benevento revels in them: turning Jimmy Page’s raga-folk strumming in Led Zeppelin’s “Friends” into Indo-honky-tonk staccato; lifting the low spirits in George Harrison’s “Run of the Mill” with rolling flourishes and sharp, rhythmic accents. In one of his originals, Benevento puts a thoughtful John Lennon-style piano riff through a cheerful-circus mix of Mellotron, tack piano and fuzz. The tune is titled “Call Home,” which, Benevento noted at KUT, “I highly recommend you do today.” When you’ve done that, go to sxsw.kut.org to hear that whole session.

In a city of cacophony — Austin during SXSW — the sweetest sound is often the one you strain to hear. Fleet Foxes drummer-singer J. Tillman was a paragon of near-silence in his solo set at an afternoon party on opening day. Playing songs from his new album, Vacilando Territory Blues (Western Vinyl) — a compelling whirl of Laurel Canyon-echo balladry and desolate-psychedelia stomp — Tillman stunned a packed club to attention with bare-minimum versions of “James Blues” and “Master’s House”: acoustic brushed-chord guitar and a mourning tenor of falling sighs and bluesy diction, like a soft collision of Tims Hardin and Buckley. Stripped of its heavy dusk (dobro, cello, fuzz guitar) on the album, “Barter Blues” was stark, gripping ache, like something from an outtakes reel for David Crosby’s 1971 solo LP If I Could Only Remember My Name. Tillman, who has been making his own albums longer than he’s been a Fleet Fox (the first of his five, I Will Return, came out in 2005), deserved better than the setting for his later, official SXSW showcase: a ruthlessly noisy bar with bad disco bleeding through the wall from the club next door. But when Tillman sang “Barter Blues” again that night, in my head I could still hear a pin drop.

Headlining a post-SXSW metal-thon at the Austin club Red 7, the Pacific Northwest band Wolves in the Throne Room made their feral noise — double-guitar drone and machine-gun riff spray, mounting-thunder drumming, singer-guitarist Nathan Weaver’s burnt-throat bellow — in a dramatic half-light cast by candelabra onstage. The band’s third album, Black Cascade (Southern Lord), is distinguished, too, by the depth of its shadows: the outbreaks of melody and harmonic reach in “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” the creeping-dawn climax of “Crystal Ammunition.” Weaver’s vocals are all fury, no pronunciation. But the snarling om and peaking shriek of his and Will Lindsay’s guitars are eloquent terror.

Metallica were the biggest name in metal at SXSW ‘09. Reunited early-Seventies Japanese monsters Flower Travellin’ Band were the biggest thrill, playing at vintage strength on the final date of their first-ever U.S. tour. The set included flaming chunks of the band’s 1971 apex, the album-length suite Satori (originally on Atlantic Japan), with guitarist Hideki Ishima re-creating his searing-raga sustain on a sitarla (a custom guitar with a sitarlike neck) and singer Akira “Joe” Yamanaka still hitting the extreme highs in his operatic-samurai range. The group also played songs from a new prog-leaning studio album, We Are Here (Pony Canyon), but beginners should start with reissues: the brutalized Savoy Brown and King Crimson covers on 1970’s Anywhere and the guaranteed enlightenment of Satori.

Photo: bcoredisc.com

It was only 9 p.m. on opening night when I hit my first pay dirt of this year’s SXSW in Austin: Capsula a kinetic trio from Bilbao, Spain — singer-guitarist Martin Guevara and bassist Coni Duchess, the band’s founding couple, are originally from Argentina — who were supposed to be obsessed with the Velvet Underground (according to a newspaper preview) but were actually a high-velocity union of the Cramps and the Who, coated in corroded glam. Guevara attacked his guitar with a serious case of Pete Townshend, and drummer Alberto Diez was an improbable mix of Keith Moon and the Velvets’ Maureen Tucker: flash with heartbeat. In the last song of the set, a furious space-out that sounded like the Who doing Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” Guevara swallowed his mike Lux Interior-style and scraped his guitar strings along the edge of the stage. You don’t get those visuals with Capsula’s new album, Rising Mountains (BCore), but you get the idea — and everything I heard.