The band of musical boasters, herders, and nut-breakers known as Cracker are singer and guitarist David Lowery, guitarist and keyboardist Johnny Hickman, drummer Frank Funaro, and bassist Sal Maida; and their influences include British rock and America’s southern music. Listening to Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey, one can hear musicians ready to claim any sound that appeals to them, whether it’s the roughness of punk or the slickness of new wave.
Tag: music
The Persistence of Memory: Streisand’s The Way We Were/All In Love Is Fair album and the television program “Live in Concert”
Streisand is bitterly ironic (sad, frightening, funny) in “The Best Thing You’ve Ever Done,” in which she uses an actress’s sense of drama, and offers the most ageless singing imaginable. “The Way We Were,” a song of contemplation and remembrance, may contain too many strings, and drumming that lacks conviction, but Streisand’s voice saves what might otherwise be nothing more than deplorable nostalgia, and she emphasizes a fact: we often remember and wonder if our lives might have been different.
A Bristling Exuberance: Shirley Horn, You Won’t Forget Me
Shirley Horn’s way with a song does much that I love in different arts: it expresses and interprets, it goes beyond eloquence and creates elegance, and it gives pleasure. Shirley Horn (1934-2005) had a long career, but she is one of the singers—along with Abbey Lincoln, to name another— whose work many could hear more clearly in the last years (rather than the prime years) of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, singers whose reputations did not leave a lot of oxygen for the breath of others.
The Power of Musical Rhetoric: The Decemberists, The Hazards of Love
The album The Hazards of Love begins with ominous organ tones—are they serious or merely melodramatic? Yet, the music that follows is sturdy, formidable, although some of the songs may be only fragments, parts of a larger story and theme, a story of love and separation. It is notable that the voices we hear are not connected to the blues, which has influenced much American and English rock.
The Crazy Pride of a Free Man of Color: K’naan, Troubadour
In light of hip-hop’s materialism, narrow perspectives, prejudices, violence and vulgarity, it can be hard to know whether hip-hop is worth critical attention (and many rappers reject the value of critics). Who is paying (perceptive, thoughtful) attention, to artists, to critics? It is fascinating, if not perplexing, that the blackest of genres—hip-hop—has found acolytes around the world, in places such as France and Israel and Russia and Japan—and Somalia. I suspect that what many hear in it is self-affirmation, a toughness of sensibility equal to the toughness of the world.
Nature and Art, Music and Criticism: Andrew Bird, Noble Beast
One of the intriguing qualities of Andrew Bird’s work is what seems to be a core of serenity, beyond joy or sorrow, isolation or community; and I wonder if the quality of his attention—dispersed among his creativity and his responses to the beings and things of the larger world—is a key to that serenity: no single thing is his focus.
Musicians in the Poor Man’s Provence: fiddler Cedric Watson, triangle player Christine Balfa, and the band Feufollet
While playing some of the traditional music of the American south, the Creole and Cajun music of Louisiana, the creative artists Cedric Watson, Christine Balfa, and Feufollet, render that music as the exciting music of the present, of now: these musicians choose to honor tradition but are more inclined toward improvisation and invention than imitation.
Sorrow, Solace, and Sense: Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan’s Sunday at Devil Dirt, The Dears’ Missiles, and Death Cab for Cutie’s Narrow Stairs (with U2’s No Line on the Horizon)
Sorrow sometimes comes to us out of our aching need, but more often it comes to us out of loss: it can be rooted in frustrated hope and yearning; and it can be stoked by our having held and lost something we wanted, barely understood, and wanted to know much better, something we wanted to hold for years—with the pain of separation and memory and regret following in its absence. Sometimes the beloved and lost thing is love, and sometimes it is youth or youth’s pleasures and possibilities.
Journeymen: Over the Top or Under the Weather, by the band Last November, featuring Luke Pilgrim
Critic: The first couple of times I heard Over the Top or Under the Weather, I was surprised by the energy and topicality, and the last few times I wished that it had a deeper, more resonant purpose. Musician: Our real goal with Over the Top or Under the Weather—We weren’t trying to write the best record ever or to re-invent rock and roll… we just wanted songs people could relate to and songs that wouldn’t sound dated in a few years.
Adrian Thaws, alias Tricky, Delivers Complexity You Can Dance To: Knowle West Boy
The dynamic, fun, imaginative, and thus far well-received album Knowle West Boy features the genre-bending collaborations of Tricky with members of his own boutique label Brown Punk. Tricky is great at presenting complexity, including personal and social contradictions, for which he has found a musical language, mixing very different sounds.