|
 A
Head of His Time
By
Mike Hotter
Bonnie
“Prince” Billy
Beware
(Drag City)
A
recent career-encompassing profile of Will Oldham in The
New Yorker hinted that the Bonnie One was pulling out
all the stops for this, his 14th full-length studio album
(that number more than doubles if you count EPs and compilations).
There does seem to be some sort of “summing up” going on:
The Nashville sound of Sings Greatest Palace Music returns,
leavened with the country-folk toughness that was once the
bread and butter of Oldham and his compadres. Jennifer Hutt
on violin and Emmett Kelly on guitar and keys, both of whom
perform (and sing) spectacularly throughout, go a long way
toward restoring the strong instrumental counterbalance that
has been missing when a David Pajo or a Matt Sweeney wasn’t
around.
But this album also goes new places: Cornet and sax
solos accentuate a couple of tunes, while exotic instruments
like bass guimbri and marimba give the music a sensuality
that’s been missing since Ease Down the Road. Closing
number “Afraid Ain’t Me” is simply one of the best things
Oldham has recorded in a decade, some sort of testament before
God and humanity sung over a simmering Eastern-tinged groove
and modality, with achingly beautiful flute playing by one
Nicole Mitchell.
The ribald lyrics of the past are for the most part absent,
though love as a puzzle to be figured out is still the overriding
theme. Carried over from 2008’s Lie Down in the Light is
a deep appreciation for familial bonds and a grand generosity.
“There Is Something I Have to Say” is this album’s “Black”
or “Grand Dark Feeling of Emptiness,” a staring down of the
darkness that comes at 4 AM. “I Am Goodbye” could conceivably
get some mainstream radio airplay; the corresponding video
of Oldham walking the streets of Los Angeles in full hobo
beard, and star-and- crescent T-shirt, is a characteristic
nose-thumb at the fact that this almost certainly will never
happen.
It is far from perfect, and not a masterpiece, but Beware
proves a worthy addition to a canon brimming over with perplexing
beauty.
 Pearl
Jam
Ten
(Legacy Edition) (Epic/Legacy)
One
of the biggest-selling “alternative” albums of all time is
finally ripe for reissue, and, 18 years after its release
and subsequent explosion, Pearl Jam’s Ten may finally
be in a position where hindsight can treat it fairly. For,
particularly if you were a teenager with any feelings of disenfranchisement
in the early 1990s, you most likely hold a special place in
your heart for this record. Unless of course you were one
of those who decried it as overdramatic, bombastic, or “classic
rock” (the latter of which would later be used in the album’s
defense).
Well, yes. Ten is overdramatic, and bombastic, and
pretty much everything you could want from a debut rock record.
It’s got chutzpah! It’s also got strong performances across
the board, from that so-familiar mega-solo over the coda of
“Alive” to the dynamic, free-for-all jam on “Porch.” And some
really good songs, too: While some of the lyrics read like
angst-by-numbers (though they sounded so deep at the
time), there’s a reason tunes like “Jeremy” and “Black” are
irreplaceable entries into the rock lexicon. This music helped
define the 1990s in part because it was palatable to
traditional rock audiences.
The Deluxe Legacy reissue of Ten pairs the original
album (produced by Rick Parashar) with Ten Redux, which
finds the 11-song tracklist remixed by longtime producer Brendan
O’Brien, plus a half-dozen outtakes from the original sessions,
and a DVD of the band’s now-classic appearance on MTV Unplugged.
The bonus material is negligible: Much of it has circulated
for years, or appeared in superior forms elsewhere. The remixes
offer an interesting conundrum: While they’re technically,
sonically very clean and clear, the reverb-laden original
mixes still come out ahead. Because half the fun of listening
to Ten as a teen in the pre- Internet age was trying
to figure out what Eddie Vedder was talking about.
—John
Brodeur
 Black
Moth Super Rainbow
Eating
Us (Graveface)
In addition to making consistently enchanting music, Black
Moth Super Rainbow make a music writer’s job easy. In naming
their tracks things like “Bubblegum Animals” and “Gold Splatter,”
and singing choruses like “Iron lemonade, eat my face away,”
they save everyone the trouble of trying to devise complex
images and metaphors that describe their lysergic soundscapes.
Eating Us (due out May 26) is the next in a string
of spacious psychedelic records the band have created, but
this is by far their most sweeping and hi-fi. In maintaining
the integrity of a rock band, the drumming is live and powerful,
the bass is heavy, and sugary synthesizers keep everything
glowing, even in the darker nooks of the fever dream. The
band have long toured and been equated with the Flaming Lips,
but the connection has never been more apt than now. (Especially
considering longtime Lips producer Dave Fridmann is at the
helm.) Every track is an electro-futuristic fairy tale that
remains consonant, infectious and comforting until you wake
up and consider with a sober mind the sick shit you were just
dreaming. Opener “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise” seems
lyrically portentous, but it moves—like the bulk of the album—in
a sun-glazed, dissolving-in-the-back-seat-of-the car (with
your hand out the window) way. As anyone who caught their
show last year at RPI knows, the band are best when they have
a full multimedia arsenal and a captive audience at their
disposal, but even limited to a strictly sonic arena, Black
Moth Super Rainbow are about as cinematic as they come.
—Josh
Potter
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