Thursday 31 January 2013

LaRM day 175 (Lowell George-Ghost)

With Little Feat taking an adventurous turn by incorporating jazz fusion elements into their R&B and southern boogie, leader Lowell George chose to go back to basics for his 1979 solo album, Thanks I'll Eat It Here.  Not particularly pleased with the direction that Bill Payne and Paul Barrere were taking Little Feat, the solo album was an opportunity for the ailing George to take a look back and make a record that in a relaxing rather than antagonistic atmosphere.  And relaxed really is the word for Thanks I'll Eat It Here.  A smoother piece of countrified, bluesy R&B it's hard to imagine, with covers of 'What Do You Want the Girl To Do' and 'I Can't Stand the Rain' sounding like the coolest things George had turned his hand to in a good five years. There's the sprightly Mexicana of 'Cheek to Cheek', the funky 'Honest Man', the Southern blues-riffing on a version of Little Feat's own 'Two Trains'.  There's only one bad moment on Thanks I'll Eat It Here and that's down to the peculiar inclusion of Jimmy Webb's silly 'Himmler's Ring', which sticks out like a sore thumb on the album.  But that's the only dip in quality as the rest of the album is great, a laid-back outing which just feels good throughout.  And it's got one of George's finest and most effecting tunes, the charmingly low-key love song '20 Million Things'.











During the brief indie-world domination enjoyed by bands in the Elephant 6 collective, one of the few who were pretty much ignored by everybody was the Gerbils, who released a couple of albums, the first of which was Are You Sleepy? (1998).  The title is a fairly nice way of referring to a lot of the Elephant 6 sound, a woozy, dozy indie shamble that charms and infuriates in equal measure.  Are You Sleepy? has a handful of fairly standard ramshackle indie tunes which ramble around in a cheerful manner, and apart from the pointless sound experiment of 'Wet Host' it's all amiable enough.  The real problem with it I suppose is that other Elephant 6 bands, particularly Marshmallow Coast and Apples in Stereo, were doing this stuff much more effectively and with much more character.  There are some good pop songs ('Is She Fiona' is great and 'Glue' is a good effort at a more serious sound) but it's not enough to lift the album out of the second tier of the Elephant 6 roster.











Emo! The first two albums by the Get Up Kids, Four Minute Mile (1997) and Something To Write Home About (1999) were for better or worse pretty influential records.  They effectively launched the careers of a million other spritely emo and pop acts from Sunday's Best and Jimmy Eat World to Blink 182 and sodding Busted and everything in between and although the whole second wave of emo now sounds appallingly stilted and corporate, there was something sparky in there, particularly in the Get Up Kids lively efforts at sounding "real".  Of all those indie-emo acts I don't mind the Get Up Kids records, I think that the heartfelt college kid yearning nonsense was all pretty genuinely meant and led to some records that sound warm and engaged.  It's all silly, adolescent and pretty weak in truth, but I don't mind it at all and it kind of reminds me of a fun time too so I have to cut it all some slack for that reason alone.  Four Minute Mile and Something To Write Home About are decent enough emo records, nothing on them particularly stands out but it's more the mood, the legitimising of indie-kid feeling, that struck such a chord, especially in the US and although the albums themselves are fairly forgettable they're still surprisingly appealing records.
 










There's a good chance that the reason I'm prepared to be forgiving of the Get Up Kids is because Pitchfork hated them so very, very much and anyone that Pitchfork goes out their way to slag off I'll likely defend because most of the writers for Pitchfork are utter morons.  However, nobody but nobody could defend most of the material on their third album, the rarities and B-sides collection called Eudora (2001).  This stuff is appalling.  Particularly noxious are the many cover versions the Get Up Kids recorded and which are, without exception, dreadful.  They mercilessly desecrate, amongst others, the Pixies 'Alec Eiffel', the Replacements' 'Beer for Breakfast', Dave Bovril's 'Suffragette City' and New Order's 'Regret', and this sacrilege is really quite horrible to listen to.  The rest of it is even limper original material, with a couple of minor saving graces (a decent version of Four Minute Mile highlight 'I'm a Loner Dottie, a Rebel' and 'Anne Arbour') and there's really no excuse for it.











And so on to something of a very different hue, the glorious majesty of Getz au GoGo, a live document from the height of Stan Getz's and Astrud Gilberto's collaborative period, recorded at two shows in 1964 and released the following year.  By 1964 saxophonist Getz was coming to the end of his "bossa nova period" (having been an key part of the global popularisation of bossa) and the two shows at the Cafe au GoGo in Greenwich Village capture his quartet at their absolute best, and Gilberto's presence just adds beautifully to the graceful performances.  Interestingly most of the material is not bossa but is American, but Getz's quartet plays it all out as bossa-lite and Gilberto's ever wonderful voice ensures the Brazilian feel throughout.  Every tune is superb, and out of a near perfect set particular highlights are samba standards 'It Might as Well Be Spring' and 'Corcovado', a great bossa reading of 'Summertime' from Porgy & Bess (which has some fine interplay between Getz, Kenny Burrell, Chuck Israel and Gary Burton), an utterly charming version of 'One Note Samba' and a lovely little bit of messing about on 'The Telephone Song', at the conclusion of which Gilberto lets out a heart-melting laugh. 











And so to finish it's 70 minutes of Japan's finest exponents of free-form psychedelic jazz freakouts, Ghost, with their 2004 album Hypnotic Underworld.  The opening 24 minutes are taken up with the four movement title track, which begins with almost quarter of an hour of spooky jazzed out atmospherics with distant wailing sax, bubbling bass and windy electronic noise.  This mutates into 7 minutes of gradually building fuzz-bass, eastern sax figures and frenzied piano bashing before collapsing into a total psychedelic rock monster.  The rest of the album is not quite up to the same standard as the title track but there's a lovely psych cover of Dutch prog rock act Earth & Fire's 'Hazy Paradise' and 'Piper' is a great psych rock piece (the title presumably complementing the brilliantly mutated cover version of Syd Barrett's 'Dominoes' which closes the album).  Overall it's an unusually accessible experimental psych album, never relying too heavily on abstraction or massive guitar workouts or trippy nonsense, instead always keeping an ear on melody (especially on the lovely almost straight rock song 'Feed') and keeping in control.  It's possibly a little overlong, but that's not unusual for albums that work themselves out in this sort of way, and for the majority of its running time Hypnotic Underworld is really great stuff.


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