#recordreviews

Kenji Kariu, Sekai (Bruit Direct Disques, 2020)

It’s not easy to come across information about Kenji Kariu. I just know he plays guitar in a band called OWKMJ, which, from what I can tell from the videos I found online, is a completely bonkers math-prog-jazz DMT trip of a band. Sekai, though, his 3rd solo album and his debut on French label Bruit Direct, has a very different vibe.

The first feeling you get is that the record isn’t even meant for you to listen, such is the intimacy and fragility that emanate from the songs. They’re all built on very essential drum machine beats and a few, sparse chords played on synths or guitars. The star of the show is Kariu’s voice here. Everything revolves around simple, almost childish, melodies that are sung in an understated, middle-of-the-night hush tone. Then there are layers of more vocal sounds, used as back up for a 60s pop vibe, or mangled by weird effects for a more contemporary and slightly eerie left-of-center feel.

The more you listen to the record, the more you realize it’s not as low-key and demure as it seems, and you really appreciate Kariu’s depth of vision: for example, “Atelier” is really an amazing pop song of the 80s throwback variety, shimmering with chorus-laden guitars and with a bassline that’s as simple as it is groovy. But then you have stuff like “Birthday”, with its very raw home recorded feeling, or “YanaKotori”, sounding like a children’s TV show theme. I can’t help being reminded of Kevin Ayers when I think about this approach.

To add to the weirdness, the record is complete with a lyric sheet translated from Japanese. I didn’t read the lyrics through the first few listens, but when I did I was really fascinated: they all seem to operate through a dreamlike, hallucinatory state (dare I say hypnagogic?) with a lot of synesthesia and sometimes funny connections: “The rabbit came out of the ATM / I left the line, I was confused / It was a good old day, I used to have a centipede.” Maybe there’s a cultural barrier there, or maybe Kariu is just a genuinely strange and very interesting guy.

Click here to listen to “Atelier” on Bandcamp or buy the record from Bruit Direct’s website.

Crate Digger’s Corner…by DJ Musically Rich

Today in Crate Digger’s Corner, I’m going to string another series of albums together for you that will give you another set of albums to check out during these times while stuck at home! The journey starts out in Nashville, TN with an album from the mid-‘70s Outlaw Country movement. From there, we will go to California, hop over to Jamaica, and take a detour through England before coming back to America for some hip-hop and jazz.

Waylon Jennings- I’ve Always Been Crazy > Jimmy Buffett- A White Sport Coat And A Pink Crustacean- Waylon puts out another classic Outlaw Country album with a set of Nashville’s best sidemen. Jimmy Buffett’s second album still has him focusing on a folk/country sound with a set of players that also include some top notch players including Steve Goodman and Memphis-born Reggie Young who plays guitar in the backing band on both of the above albums!

Buffett > Old & In The Way- s/t- The one notable player I didn’t mention above in Buffett’s band is the carryover to Old & In The Way, fiddler Vassar Clements. The great bluegrass fiddler joins the supergroup including Jerry Garcia, John Kahn and Peter Rowan for a great, one-off live, bluegrass album (2 later albums came out that contained 2 full shows that went into the creation of this album).

Old & In The Way > Peter Rowan- Reggaebilly!- Peter Rowan goes from Old & In The Way to his solo album, Reggaebilly!, which combines reggae and bluegrass in both the musical content and the players!

Rowan > Lee Perry “The Upsetter” presents- Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Corn Bread- One of the reggae artists that were part of the Peter Rowan album is extremely well-known guitarist, Earl “Chinna” Smith. He is one of the most recorded reggae musicians ever and was also on Lee Perry’s album “Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Corn Bread”, which also contained drummer…

Lee Perry > Peter Tosh- Bush Doctor- Sly Dunbar. Best known as half of the duo Sly & Robbie he also played drums for many other reggae artists and on a ton of albums. That includes the album “Bush Doctor” by Peter Tosh. This album was made shortly after Tosh befriended the Rolling Stones and had The Stones down in Jamaica for the making of the album which is how it included guitarist…

Tosh > Keith Richards- Crosseyed Heart- Keith Richards. Obviously, best known as the guitarist for The Stones, Keith Richards played with Tosh and I’m following that with one of his recent solo releases “Crosseyed Heart”. This album also features some backup vocals from…

Keith Richards > Q-Tip- The Renaissance- Norah Jones. She not only is working with Richards, but she also shows up on Q-Tip’s “The Renaissance” singing the hook for the song ‘Life Is Better’.

Q-Tip > Kurt Rosenwinkel- Heartcore- Q-Tip is the holdover into my final album on this trip. He is going from his solo album here to produce the amazing jazz guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and his album “Heartcore”. A laid back album, overall, Q-Tip shows that he can venture far away from the world of hip-hop and dives headlong into a jazz album from an (at the time) young and upcoming guitarist who has sense proven to be one of the best modern jazz artists we have.

I hope you have the chance to check out some of these albums and find a new favorite or two!

Enjoy the music!

Triple Negative, God Bless The Death Drive (Penultimate Press, 2020)

I’d been thinking about this record lately. I’d bought it on a whim in the Summer, and after listening to it a lot for a month or so, the Triple Negative LP had fallen to the back of the pile as I kept accumulating new purchases. And I missed it. So when I saw it in some year-end best-of list (things I peruse riddled with anxiety, thinking I suck for not having listened to enough music this year) I immediately went to the shelf and put it back on the turntable.

Triple Negative sound like a radio playing in a comic book. Fragments of sound pop up like fishes’ mouths in a pond of static and tape hiss, sometimes speaking the language of a 1930 Greek folk standard, or of tortured muzak mixed with trance-like chants and the sound of banging on metal, or of a sweet ballad for voice and a weary, huffing organ.

It’s one of those impenetrable sort of records, one could only tentatively connect it to a vague atmosphere, a Russian novella feeling, a quiet, composed sort of tale of black magic, the nautical theme of the comic on the record’s sleeve only adding to this impenetrable narrative fog.

Having been recorded on tape over the course of 15 years, God Bless The Death Drive sounds like layers of dusty recordings on top of older, dustier recordings. Tape loops, winds, things that squeak, grind and squall interact with muffled vocals, guitars, and percussions building trembling, precarious songs that are as unpredictable as fascinating.

I wasted a lot of your time on GRRAWR trying to understand why I enjoy free, abstract music, and there isn’t a real reason, at least not a fixed one. Maybe today I feel like listening to God Bless The Death Drive because I want to be challenged. Or I want to close my eyes and feel like I’m on a ghost ship, floating on a sea of tape glistening with shards of punk sensitivity. Or I just feel like annoying my partner. In any case, this is a challenging, freeing, puzzling and inspiring record. Dive in.

Click here to listen to God Bless The Death Drive on Bandcamp.

Komare, The Sense Of Hearing (Penultimate Press, 2020)

This is not for everybody. Or any time. If you thought the music of Mosquitoes was indecipherable, brace yourself for Komare, a project involving two of the three members of the aforementioned band with an even more minimalistic, abstract and puzzling sound.

The ideal setting to experience The Sense Of Hearing, I guess, would be a sensory deprivation tank. The idea being that, as the title suggests, you would rely strictly on your sense of hearing to enter a completely alien world, probably similar to a fever dream or a particularly dark psychedelic experience.

While listening to this apparently meaningless mishmash of pulsating drones, electronic squeals and primitive, inarticulate voices in a daylit room, one might even find it occasionally funny. The two sound like children playing around with a couple microphones and various machines, breathing and clicking their tongues and mumbling and speaking gibberish over layers of static.

At the same time, there’s a whole different dimension to it: the idea of reaching the very source of sound and communication, a primordial soup of bubbling electronic chaos, taking away every foothold and letting your brain roam free between alternate universes. When the last, epic excursion between hissing blades of sound and distant calls on side B ends, you’re left confused, with a tangy taste in your mouth, as if you’d been licking a sheet of aluminum for the last forty minutes, and a new appreciation for the wooden, earthly warmth of music. It resembles an intense DMT trip, where the real sense of bewilderment and awe comes after the experience, when your brain starts processing reality normally again.

Like I said, it’s not for everybody. It’s a journey, an exploration and a reflection on the chaos that is life on Earth. It may also just be two people having fun with the raw materials of sound and I may be forcing meaning onto something that has none. It may be what we do all the time with everything. If everything is fiction, might as well take a trip into the grey, barren, but unique landscape of Komare.

Click here to listen to side A of The Sense Of Hearing on Bandcamp.

Oso el Roto, Pop de Cuchillo (Bruit Direct Disques, 2020)

Music is cool and all, but sometimes I get the feeling that we need something more. Not sure if it's the truth or just nostalgia, but I feel like until a couple decades back music used to be a much more collective experience. Well everything used to be a much more collective experience. Now it's so hard to talk to people, because you always have an escape pod in your pocket. And music’s in there. It’s just a great excuse. Eyes meet on the subway and they immediately go: sorry, can’t talk right now—I’m listening to something. 

So if you’re an artist that has had an oblique approach to music for a long time, like Oso El Roto, who’s been experimenting with sound since the mid-90s, you might feel the same uneasiness I feel and you might think to use that to make a record like this one here, Pop de Cuchillo. From what I understand, he composed these songs live on YouTube while people sent him suggestions about what to do. Most of the record is made of collages of audio messages from his friends or song ideas people wrote to him while he was doing it live. Now, you might think this sounds like a cool gimmick, but you don’t need to hear the record. Wrong!

This Pop de Cuchillo has bona-fide hits. The title track, a more or less straightforward hip-hop song with a mean sneer; “Amigo”, my favorite, which reminds me of Sun City Girls and Faust; and “Cerca de Ti”, a sweet sad song with sharp claws. And the rest of the record sounds really alive: just a messy bundle of leftfield rap, samples, found sounds, alien voices, things that sound like old traditional melodies and a unique weirdo sensibility.

In the accompanying notes, Oso El Roto says the subject of the album is “the comic absurdity of wanting to be a rock singer in poverty and capitalist horror of the Chilean reality”. Unfortunately no lyrics are included, but it’s fairly easy to infer Oso’s message. The grotesque landscape we live in makes it harder and harder to let your freak flag fly. Records like this are the bastion of weirdness we need to remind ourselves to be free.

Click here to listen to Pop de Cuchillo on Bandcamp.

Crate Digger’s Corner…by DJ Musically Rich

(If you’d like to listen to a track from the album as you read, go to the end of the post to start the song)

Steve Grossman (saxophonist) brings together a great band consisting of Gene Perla (bass), Don Alias (drums/percussion) and Jan Hammer (keyboards) that bring this magnificent jazz/fusion album to life! Steve Grossman got his start (in recording) with the electric Miles Davis albums of the early 1970’s including “Bitches Brew” and this, his debut album, stays very close to that expansive jazz/fusion sound.

Side 1 opens with ‘WBAI’, a short dissonant/free track. That leads into the seven minute ‘Haresah’, which opens with a grooving bass line and syncopated drumming. The song uses mid-eastern modes within its construct, which allows Grossman to play a laid back melody to open the main theme of the song. From there, as with most of these songs, they go into extended jams and melodies. ‘Zulu Stomp’ is a heavy funk track with some African rhythms integrated into the gritty music. The first side ends with ‘Extemporaneous Combustion’, which starts off very minimalistic, then builds to a glorious jam. During that jam, the bass player starts to modulate keys first by staying on a static bass tone, then as he starts to move the tone around in conjunction to what the others are playing you get the sense that he is briefly flying through different keys until he comes back and settles into the regular key and groove.

Side 2 starts with ‘Alodian Mode’ and the churning rhythm section gets a groove going with African-styled drumming and has solos from both Grossman and Hammer flying all around. ‘Pressure Point’ is the one track that takes a detour from the fusion sound, I believe. To me this sounds like something closer to the “sheets of sound” period of Coltrane. It’s a great track, but feels slightly off in this setting. Finally, ‘The Sixth Sense’ drops back into some heavier funk with bassist Gene Perla and drummer Don Alias setting a rock solid foundation for Grossman and Hammer to attack.

This is another of the many great fusion albums by former Miles Davis band members, and it is of the high quality that has been expected of those in general. This is a great album that dives down the world of funk, world and jazz music and mixes them seamlessly.

Stars: 4.5/5

Available on: LP/CD

RIYL: Miles Davis- Black Beauty/ Weather Report- Live In Tokyo/ Wadada Leo Smith’s Organic- Heart’s Reflections/ Powerhouse- In An Ambient Way

To see photos of other albums in my collection follow my IG: djmusicallyrich

To listen to a track from the album…

Sorry for the delay on the blog this week. I took my day off yesterday to go to the MN State Fair, for which we had beautiful weather. I met my family there, including both of my brothers (including one who traveled from WI with his wife to be here for it). I do want to make sure that I give my crate diggers’ something to look for over this Labor Day Weekend,so, I thought for a quick list, I’d list some bands that include brothers/sisters and include an album that shows off their skills. In a lot of cases, I’m picking artists who have notably better material than when they split and go solo, or form other bands. A few are just great bands that I feel the kinship is essential to the sound. I know there are many others that I haven’t included some for specific reasons and some just because I’m only going to put so many into today’s list. Maybe I’ll do some more volumes of this in the future. Enjoy and happy hunting!

The Allman Brothers Band- At Fillmore East (at the height of their playing, before they started losing band members)

The Black Crowes- Freak ‘N’ Roll...Into the Fog (a live show, from a run when they were just getting back together after one of their many extended break-ups)

Creedence Clearwater Revival- Live At Woodstock (a ferocious live set, you can see more on this one on my IG @djmusicallyrich. I recently wrote about it as my Album Of The Day)

North Mississippi All-Stars- Hill Country Revue (a live set from Bonnaroo that has a lot of high profile guests, but never overshadow the core band)

Neville Brothers- Authorized Bootleg: Warfield Theater, San Francisco, CA -- 2/27/89 (a killer live set recorded just before their great “Yellow Moon” album was released)

Meat Puppets- II (a couple songs that Nirvana made famous are on this early album from a great band that  has continued to put out  very good albums)

Cowboy Junkies- Long Journey Home (a live album from the one band where we have two brothers and a sister. A  mix of dusty country, blues and strung out rock is put together in a great live show.)

The Secret Sisters- Put Your Needle Down (only sisters could have voices mixing this perfectly on an album full of a wonderful collection of songs)

Crate Digger’s Corner…by DJ Musically Rich

Here is the fifth part to my 2017 list. For those that missed the first part (and haven’t taken a look at it yet), I’m giving a quick list of albums that I heard from 2017 in 7-10 at a time. There will be a few more parts to the list over the coming weeks. I may do a listening to some of the ones that I know I like, but want to revisit, and use that as an opportunity to review some of those more deeply (If there are any you see that you would particularly like to see a review of, leave a note). This list does not include reissues, live material or compilations.

Artist- Album (general genre)- and brief description

 Steven Wilson- To The Bone (rock/prog rock)- The Porcupine Tree founder continues to put out wonderful albums under his own name as well. Following the brilliant “Hand. Cannot. Erase.”, “To the Bone” continues in the same vein and has beautiful melodies and top notch playing all the way through. If you aren’t familiar with Steven Wilson, Porcupine Tree and the other bands he leads it is a wonderful path to go down.

 Gov’t Mule- Revolution Come…Revolution Go- (blues rock)- The late ‘90s side project for the Allman Brothers’ new guitarist and bass player has continued on through the death of said bass player (Allen Woody), and not missed a beat. On their most recent studio effort the band revs up and delivers an album full of hard rockers that cover political, personal, life on the road and ends with a wonderful traditional song, “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground”. An excellent album from this, now, veteran band!

 Kamasi Washington- Harmony Of Difference (jazz)- The Kendrick Lamar sideman (from the album “To Pimp A Butterfly”) puts out his second album, and it is a delight. On this EP, the Coltrane influenced player lays down 5 very nice tracks on side 1, but the prize is in finishing off this album on the second side. Side 2 consists of Kamasi and his band taking the 5 individual songs from the first side and creating a track that uses those tracks as the basis for the entirety of his Side 2 single track. This track does an amazing job of working in all of the major melodic motifs from Side 1, while creating a new, brilliant composition.

Ty Segall- s/t (garage rock)- On his 2017 self-titled album the sometimes lo-fi, garage rocker seemingly fuzzes everything he possibly can on the album to good effect. The two guitarists, the bass player, the vocals, if he could I’d assume he’d fuzz out the drums. However, it doesn’t cover up the melodies and playing that he and his band display on the album. This is a recommended selection especially for fans of his recent albums.

 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard- Polygondwanaland (prog/psych rock)- The Austrailian collective (I covered the other 3 albums they released this year on an earlier part of this, and the fifth will follow) delves as deep into the prog rock subgenre as they have on any of their releases (at least the ones I heard). Another excellent 2017 release from this group

 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard- Gumboot Soup (psych pop/rock)- On this album it sounds like they are combining the sounds of Frank Zappa and the Canterbury Scene and do it with wonderful results. Yet, another album to check out by this collective.

 Margo Price- All American Made (Outlaw Country)- Margo Price picks up right where she left off on her debut album with outstanding songwriting and performances. You can still certainly hear the influence of Dolly Parton and other earlier female country stars in her work and she won’t disappoint fans of ‘70s outlaw country music or fans of the revival going on now with stars like Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, and Sturgill Simpson among others.

Here are 7 albums I heard in 2017, there will be more from this list coming in the future, and this isn’t necessarily a ranking, just in the order that I was writing them down. I hope you enjoy and happy hunting!