Photo: Hale/Getty

In this country, the British singer-songwriter Roy Harper is best known as a song title — “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper,” on Led Zeppelin III, was named in tribute to him — and a legendary accident: In 1975, when Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters had trouble nailing the vocal on his record-biz satire “Have a Cigar,” Harper — a friend of the Floyd, making his own record next door — sang it to scathing perfection. Harper knew the sleaze and insult in Waters’ lyric more intimately than the Floyd or Zeppelin. His first albums of Dylanesque invective and pastoral sensuality — 1967’s Sophisticated Beggar and Come Out Fighting Ghengis Smith; 1969’s Folkjokeopus and 1970’s Flat Baroque and Berserk — came out on four different U.K. labels, and most of his nearly three dozen studio and live records were never formally released here. (more…)

Photo: Denholm/Getty

the Pigeon Detectives are five young pop ruffians from Rothwell, England — near Leeds, the Kaiser Chiefs’Kaiser hometown — with a batty name and Sixties-vintage pudding-bowl haircuts, except for singer Matt Bowman. He has a mushroom cloud of light-brown curls that bounce around his head as he zips across the stage, doing Pete Townshend-style scissor-leg jumps. Bowman, lead guitarist Oliver Main, rhythm guitarist Ryan Wilson, bassist Dave Best and drummer Jimmi Naylor also have colossal gall. At the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, during a recent North American minitour, the band’s intro tape was the opening Moog-and-power-chord swagger of the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” Then these brassy birds started their hour-long set with two of their biggest British hits, the tight, fast knockouts “This Is an Emergency” and “I Found Out.” Most bands would have saved that dynamite for a big finish. But the Pigeon Detectives, who formed in 2002, have two U.K.-only albums of slicing twang and pub-choir hooks, 2007’s Wait for Me and this year’s Emergency (Dance to the Radio), to back up that bravado. (more…)

Singer-bassist Jack Bruce was a superstar for just two years — as one-third of Cream, with guitarist Eric Clapton and drummer Ginger Baker — from the summer of 1966 until the fall of 1968. But as a solo artist, collaborator and pillar of every rhythm section he has passed through, the Scottish-born Bruce, now 65, has been a crucial figure in British rock, electric blues and forward jazz since the early Sixties, making more than enough important, often masterful music to justify the six CDs in the new career anthology Can You Follow? (Esoteric). Bruce’s spell in Cream accounts for 14 of this set’s 110 tracks, none rare (barring some mono mixes) but all highlighting his distinctive strengths in the band’s convulsive democracy: that sharp, operatic-blues tenor (”I Feel Free,” “We’re Going Wrong”), the poignant, avant-pop ingenuity of his songwriting with lyricist Pete Brown (the haunting “As You Said”). Cream, in turn, left deep marks on Bruce. He returns to the power-trio format over and over here, in cherry-picked Seventies, Eighties and Nineties recordings with half of Mountain (Leslie West, Bruce and Corky Laing), ex-Procol Harum guitarist Robin Trower, Frank Zappa (the sizzling 1974 instrumental “ApostrophÞ”) and even Baker (in a not-quite-supergroup with guitarist Gary Moore).

But Can You Follow? goes deep where it counts, opening with an extended study of Bruce’s formative experiences as a sideman (often with Baker) under blues-boom elders Alexis Korner, John Mayall and Graham Bond. (more…)

Johnny Flynn is a South African-born, U.K.-raised singer-songwriter in his mid-20s who makes a British folk rock that sounds almost twice as old as he is. The buoyant, spindly blend of fiddles, fingerpicking, soft-brass fanfares and pub-choir harmonies on Flynn’s marvelous American debut, A Larum (Lost Highway), made with his band the Sussex Wit, is a direct descendant of the pot-smoke, minstrelsy, real-ale purism and gently electric modernism of the early-Seventies Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention. Flynn’s voice is a similar mix of then-in-now, with flashes of a less-weathered Bert Jansch and a cocky, Celtic Beck. That would all be enchanting mimicry if Flynn was a lesser songwriter. But Flynn — who toured as a young Shakespearean actor before he started singing for his supper — knows how to draw and inhabit a scene: the humor and flinty pride amid the detailed poverty in “The Box” and “Leftovers”; the mocking contrast of jaunty rhythm and imprisoned spirit in “Tickle Me Pink”; the passion and challenge Flynn packs into the stark title image and chorus of “Cold Bread.” Flynn’s lyrics sometimes strain their settings. But even when his images and exchanges don’t quite jell into stories, the jigs and jangle are natural magic. As a first, giant step, A Larum (the title is Old English for “alarm”) is a dramatic entrance.

[From Issue 1059 — August 21, 2008]
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The singer sounds uncannily like Eddie Vedder, and the guitars snort and whine in a dirty tangle, like Radiohead’s “My Iron Lung” played by one of Captain Beefheart’s early Magic Bands. Where are we and when? Greece, 1973. Socrates Drank the Conium were a quartet from Athens popular enough to make a few albums. But on a recent trip to Greece, I was assured by the guys at the High Fidelity record shop in the seaside town of Nafplio that Socrates’ ‘73 album On the Wings (Polydor) — a collector’s item that fetches hundreds of euros on vinyl — was their best. It sounds like it. English was obviously the band’s second language (”Death Is Gonna Die,” “This Is the Rats”), but the rock is gnarly and prescient: “Breakdown” and “Who Is to Blame” sound like jagged art-rock Pearl Jam. The CD reissue will be tough to find and pricey outside Greece. Write to High Fidelity for help (highfidelity.com.gr). Tell them I sent you.

[From Issue 1059 — August 21, 2008]
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Before it was in workshop, off-Broadway, then on Broadway, the electric musical Passing Strange was a life story: the already rich, then brilliantly embroidered autobiography of the singer-songwriter Mark Stewart, a.k.a. Stew, who wrote and starred in the show. He rightly won a Tony this year for Best Book of a Musical — Passing Strange is his funny, unsparing dissection of growing up weird, gifted and black — but he and his co-composer, bassist Heidi Rodewald, deserved more. Recorded in April before an audience at New York’s Belasco Theatre, the original cast recording (Ghostlight) arrives a little late — the Broadway production closed in July — but preserves the songs’ acerbic sting and dynamic whirl of New Wave snarl (”Sole Brother”), skewered vaudeville (”The Black One”) and shape-shifting soul (”Keys”). You only get the voices of the superb cast and none of the show’s visual, ingenious rock-gig pow, but this album will eventually double as a movie soundtrack: Spike Lee filmed one of the final performances.
[Photo by Walker/Getty]

[From Issue 1059 — August 21, 2008]
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Wild Life (Three Lobed) is a two-track EP by heavy-Seventies explorers Howlin Rain that emphasizes the band’s long-jam chops and reunites singer-guitarist Ethan Miller with members of his other band, Comets on Fire, including guitarist Ben Chasny. In the guitar-inferno parts of “Wild Life,” a Paul McCartney cover, Miller and Chasny sound like they’re soloing inside Big Brother and the Holding Company’s “Ball and Chain.” “Black Sangria,” an improvised instrumental, is simply howlin’ fire.

Like Ike and Tina Turner, the Austin trio White Denim never do anything nice and easy. Singer-guitarist James Petralli, bassist Steve Terebecki and drummer Josh Block record in a customized trailer and issue the results in a blizzard of formats: vinyl, CD-R’s, free downloads and finally a conventional album, Workout Holiday (Full Time Hobby). No matter how you get it, the band’s chopped-funk delirium is effortless sorcery, evoking Talking Heads’ dancing-bones rock, the dervish thrash of the Minutemen and the Strokes’ pneumatic-guitar pop. Some Workout tracks are brazen ideas, not quite tunes. But White Denim cohere when it counts, in “All You Really Have to Do,” an MC5-style rouser with guttural-treble bass, and “WDA,” which updates the Afro-modernism of the Eighties King Crimson and the jump and tumble of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band. Collecting White Denim is not simple work, but everything you get is nice and rough.

Boris opened their July 10th show at New York’s Webster Hall the same way the Tokyo ultrapower trio start their new album, Smile (Southern Lord): with a cover of “Flower Sun Rain,” by the Seventies Japanese band PYG. On record, the song begins in a boxy mono, as if the band is in an atomic-era bunker. By the end, the track is — as it was in concert — unholy majesty, with distended fuzz-ball chords and corrosive mourning cries by guest guitarist Michio Kurihara, who did the honors live too. Drummer Atsuo, singer-bassist Takeshi and guitarist Wata make a Blue Cheer-quality noise onstage and on their many records since 1992. They are also one of extreme metal’s most dynamic bands, and Smile packs their gamut into an action set of thrash-on-steroids (”Buzz-In”), devil’s wah-wah (”My Neighbor Satan”) and heavy elegy (”You Were Holding an Umbrella”). The untitled closing track was also the show’s finale: a fierce cleansing grandeur, with Kurihara, of flattening power chords and choral feedback that, as I walked out of the gig, made me smile — wide.

[Photo: Miki Mtsushima]

There was a time, in the first half of the 1900s, when boogie and blues pianists were as urban and commercial as Jay-Z, making black pop and party music about no money, mo’ problems. Classic Piano Blues (Smithsonian Folkways) stars Meade “Lux” Lewis, Champion Jack Dupree, James P. Johnson, Sammy Price and other masters in later recordings, many for the Folkways label, when the music was treated more like vanishing folklore. But there is no shortage of rolling dynamite or hurtin’ truths.

Photo: Smithsonian Folkways Records

Indie rock was still called college rock when the Individuals of Hoboken, New Jersey, released their 1981 EP Aquamarine and ‘82 album Fields. They are now on one CD, Fields/Aquamarine (Bar/None), but it doesn’t sound like a reissue. The pop-smart union of taut guitars and spidery rhythms in songs like “Dancing With My Eighty Wives” (on Fields) is a direct road map to the new New Wave of bands like Vampire Weekend (minus the varsity sweaters). The Individuals broke up in 1983, but singer-guitarist Glenn Morrow went on to run Bar/None Records — which is still thriving and still independent.

Photo: Bar/None Records

Indie rock is not a genre or a sound — it is a mission, a commitment to go your own way, the hard way. And in Michigan in the late Sixties, Hugh “Jeep” Holland was one of the zealots, a record-store boss in Ann Arbor who decided to make wax, not just sell it. If Detroit’s Motown label was the self-anointed “Sound of Young America,” Holland’s A-Square imprint was, briefly, the sound of hysterical young Michigan, part of the high-energy rock scene exploding at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom and a leaping point on record for hell-raisers such as the MC5, the Scot Richard Case (the future SRC) and the Prime Movers (with a teenage Iggy Pop on drums). Holland, who died in 1998, had the nerve to issue the MC5’s insane ‘68 single of “Looking at You,” basically distortion with a band somewhere inside. And Holland’s final triumph, before A-Square collapsed in debt, was the lone single by his charges the Up, the 1970 radical-warrior anthem “Just Like an Aborigine.” Both blasts are on A-Square (Of Course) (Big Beat), a survey of Holland’s spell as a garage-rock Phil Spector, along with a Prime Movers demo, snarling Pretty Things covers by the Scot Richard Case and “Get Down,” by the mysterious Half-Life, which sounds like a night at the Grande packed into two and a half minutes. Missing here: A-Square regulars and white-soul killers the Rationals, who are getting their own anthology.

Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story (Big Beat) tells a similar tale, down in Memphis, on two CDs. Ardent was closer to Motown than A-Square in all but the hits: a studio-label enterprise, co-founded by engineer John Fry, with a core gang of players, writers and producers (including the now-legendary Jim Dickinson) that, in the early Seventies, fused Beatlemania and Dixie R&B into a crackling power pop epitomized by Ardent house legends Big Star. Disc One covers Ardent’s late-Sixties search for that sound in near-misses by garage-rock and psych-pop hopefuls like Icewater and the Goatdancers. Disc Two is practically a new Big Star album: more than a dozen worthy rarities by the band, along with contemporary gems by Cargoe, the Hot Dogs and Tommy Hoehn (his great 1977 candy grenade “Blow Yourself Up”). Ardent remains an active studio and label, but Thank You Friends captures a remarkable time when it was the new Sun and Apple Records combined, the sound of a bright young South.

Photo: David Fenton

During a trip to Australia in 1986, I spent a day with Midnight Oil at a mixing session in Sydney for their single, “The Dead Heart.” Part protest, part celebration, with a railroad rhythm and haunted-chant hook, “The Dead Heart” was the oils’ response to the Australian government’s return of the sacred monolith Uluru (a.k.a. Ayers Rock) to aboriginal custody. Singer Peter Garrett, drummer Rob Hirst, guitarists Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey and then-bassist Peter Gifford were also invited to play in remote aboriginal settlements. At the mixing session, the Oils suggested I tag along.

I should have gone. (more…)

Incorrigible and indestructible, Seattle’s real supersonics, Mudhoney, celebrate 20 years of naked garage rock with a shotgun blast. Their 1988 six-song EP, Superfuzz Bigmuff (Sub Pop), named after a pair of popular distortion pedals, is now two out-of-control CDs with extra singles (such as the seminal grunge grenade “Touch Me I’m Sick”), demos and live cuts. There is also a new studio assault, The Lucky Ones (Sub Pop), which opens with singer Mark Arm howling “I’m Now” and, in that song’s chorus, rewriting the Rolling Stones’ version of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” like the ‘69 Iggy Pop (”The black light was my baby/And the strobe light was my mind”). The band cut the album in three and a half days. It shows — in the right ways.

[Photo: Shawn Brackbill]

The Byrds were still a year and change from their messy end when they played the newly unearthed London show on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971 (Sundazed). This is the (Untitled)-era Byrds — singer-guitarist Roger McGuinn, drummer Gene Parsons, bassist Skip Battin and lead guitarist Clarence White — in sparkling last-hurrah mettle, mixing space flight and prairie dust in jangle and repertoire, and singing, at the very end, a short, wonderful “Amazing Grace” in backwoods-chapel a cappella harmonies.