IGGY AND THE STOOGES – Ready to Die

Posted on October 6, 2013 by kevinsmusicblog

40 years after Raw Power hit the streets and sold next to nothing, Iggy and the Stooges are back: new record, new (bass) line-up and a new chance to kill off their recording career.

Because that’s what’s on the cards, right? Failure. Get this wrong and they’re pretty much done for as a recording band.

Of course, it’s their own fault. Such is the esteem with which the Stooges, Funhouse and Raw Power are rightly held that it becomes impossible for them to release anything without baggage – reputation, legend, untouchable three-record legacy, all of this is churned about with hopes and expectation whenever anything new is mooted. The Stooges are among the most revered of all rock acts so when they got back together a few years back and flopped the anti-climactic Weirdness into our eager beaver hands, we felt burned. Not by the reunion itself but by the record. The Weirdness was a dud which did zip to ignite those Skull Ring sparks.

Since then we’ve had Ron Asheton RIP, Stooges RIP, and Iggy and the Stooges reborn featuring a guy who hasn’t played music in 30 years.

That guy is the guitarist.

What could possibly go right?

In some ways, it doesn’t matter. You can’t ignore a new Stooges album. If nothing else, IT’S THE STOOGES. And who can resist a peek at James Williamson to see if he still has those raw power kill city chops?

So here we are. Ready to Die, reunion record 2013.

Burn kicks it off.

Burn shocks.

Burn is a kick in the teeth.

Broken-glass sharp with guitars on guitars on guitars, Burn makes you feel alive – exactly what Iggy and the Stooges are supposed to do. Make you walk taller, spike your step with a swagger. Williamson’s lean production fires fast off the wax and Iggy’s voice has, at last, snuck into the right register for his lowdown cool. Iggy yelp no more. Iggy growl.

Burn is way more vital than a band of their age have any right to sound. Sure, there’s the chance that the initial listener euphoria is nothing more than post-Weirdness relief but, after many spins, Burn still burns. Just as the Stones’s Doom and Gloom this year was the sound of them somehow finding their source, so it is with Burn. Doom, however, was just one of a pair knocked up for a pre Glastonbury compilation. Iggy and the Stooges have a record to get through. Can they keep it up?

Sex and Money’s sax-driven hardrock soul, blaring along with handclaps and hip-shimmying falsetto back-up, says yes. Taut, lean and sassy, it tells you that this is the Stooges of riff AND song, not just riff. Asheton, Watt, Williamson and Mackay are up for it and Williamson, as producer and co-songwriter, surely has to take some major credit. The band sound a thousand times more alive than on the Weirdness. Coincidence? Maybe. But probably not.

Ready to Die‘s clipped chords punch through multi-axe tracks, Dirty Deal is rock ‘n roll Stooge-ified, and Job spits fuck-them attitude over a Loose steal. Yep, the band are ON. What about Iggy?

Singing lower than usual but sounding better for it, the Ig’s performance has drawn less than positive comments from critics and reviewers. Weak, they say. Half arsed.

I don’t buy that. Forgetting the dubious Pop lyrics that rear up (DDs, anyone? Great tune, but…), his voice is Iggy cool throughout. By the time you get to Unfriendly World and The Departed – tracks that could have lived on Avenue B – at the record’s end, you sense weariness. A wearied cool.

Then you check the lyrics and spot that in amongst the ‘I got a job and it don’t pay shit’ Ig-isms lie themes of loss, time running out, maybe even death.

So for all of its bomb-strapped artwork, Ready to Die isn’t twentysomething nihilism with nothing to lose. That was Raw Power. Ready to Die comes from the other end of life, sung by a man whose body has finally crashed from that biology-defying superfreak peak.

Is it a parting shot? I dunno, but if it is then it wipes over the Weirdness. It’s not Raw Power II but why should it be, how can it be? If that’s what people expect, it’s the wrong attitude.

Raw Power was 40 years ago. It’s already changed lives. They can’t do it again – not for anyone who’s lived with Stooges music long enough to have it wired into their circuitry. We can’t hear them for the first time again.

But we can hear them now, in 2013, and hope – like any fan would – that Ready to Die rocks hard with a bit of the old Stooges fire. And it does.

Honkeyfinger – Beasts E.P.

Posted on September 6, 2013 by kevinsmusicblog

If cassettes are making a comeback then this Beasts EP from industrial slide-blues manglers Honkeyfinger is the future. Lurid cheapo yellow, double wrapped in CARDBOARD – a rustic corrugated self-folding box – and stamped with only the most essential text, it’s a low-tech high-value pack that wholly befits the primal fuzz furled around the spools.

And primal is the word. Deranged might be another. Channelling a Blues-Explosion howl and laying it with max distortion over a moto kraut rhythm that POUNDS, opening track 21^st Century Man is this year’s best tribute to the Heads but without any of the Bristolians’ stretch, speed and infinite wah. No, Honkeyfinger packs it way tight.

Honkeyfinger packs the blues.

Not downbeat back porch unplugged blues but hotwired-into-the-mains blues. Fried blues, deviant slide guitar kill blues, screaming from a low-watt yellow-bulb basement-squat blues: THAT’S what we’re hearing here, for this track at least – Jesus Built My Hotrod blues, compressed by a shallow production that flattens all the air and space out of it.

Wiseblood slows the pace, lurching and heaving like a pissed cyborg, before Fever Rising wheels in the creeped-out carousel madness of Silver Apples. You know those rhapsodic gospel blues jams that go on and on and ON at a pace that fetches up your agitation, makes you feel twitchy with its hypermania? That’s what this points at. Which is probably why it’s got the name it’s got. Harmonica rips and clarinet strips, the latter peeled off by Duke Garwood who, if memory serves at all, did some time with the Archie Bronson Outfit a few years back. He also put a record out with Mark Lanegan this year … same Duke Garwood? Must be. I’d like to hear that. Bet it sounds nothing like this though.

Closing it all off is the sludge comedown: In the Realms of the Noble Savage, a gasping crawl through sewer stink while roadwork pneumatics hammer above on the topside outside, oblivious. Seedy slow underground … blues. Never forget the blues.

And there we have Beasts. Machine beats, no-depth underproduction, slide ‘n harmonica, distorto vox, lo-fi all the way. How Honkeyfinger fare over a full-length album is anyone’s guess and it might just be that an EP, short and sharp, is the ultimate shock dosage. Bring out the next one quick.

Honkeyfinger: Beasts (Greasy Noise Records, 2013)

Limited edition (100) cassette

Tracks:

21st Century Man
Wise Blood
Fever Rising
Noble Savagery

Arbouretum: live@Port Mahon, Oxford, August 2013

Posted on August 24, 2013 by kevinsmusicblog

Baltimore rockers Arbouretum follow their Green Man Festival date with a mini tour that takes in a mini venue: Oxford’s Port Mahon. Standing room only, surely.

Please, no encore. Don’t make this go on any longer. Make it stop.

And stop, they do. No encore. Arbouretum get it, and we can get out. RELIEF.

Which is not quite what we were expecting ahead of a gig that, let’s be honest, is a bloody exciting prospect. Listed on the posters as ‘the smallest gig of Arbouretum’s UK tour’, this has to be the rock event of the month bar none. Not even Eels and Nick Oliveri, who are both playing Oxford tonight (sadly not together), can top this one. My mate Si drove all the way over from Cardiff having seen Arbouretum 24 hours earlier in Bristol, declaring it one of the best gigs he’d ever been to. Cardiff-Bristol-Cardiff-Oxford-Cardiff in a day and a half is a pretty conclusive testimonial.

But back to tonight: history is written. Why?

HOTTEST GIG EVER.

Stupid-hot, it is. Pouring sweat and light-headed flakiness all round. The bassist does well to keep his eyes open and stay upright, and the only way to get through this high humidity hell-hole is not to move. At all.

More of this later though ‘coz before Arbouretum take the tiny stage, we have two local bands on the bill – Coma Wall and Listing Ships.

Coma Wall are the unplugged alter ego of the doom-laden Undersmile. They lay funereal Alice in Chains-esque harmonies (Sap/Jar of Flies) over sparse, almost-rustic acoustics and drag it all out at an Earth-paced crawl. A melancholic start for sure.

Listing Ships, by contrast, are all over the place. I mean that in a very precise, right-side-of-muso way – their instrumental math/post rock fusion is krautrock propulsive, bringing to mind Explosions in the Sky jamming on Battles or early-Foals. Or summat. Exhilarating stuff.

We wait for Arbouretum and feel the Ships-generated exhilaration slowly turn to perspiration. Equipment problems delay the headliner’s start and there’s a hint of agitation in the thickening air. Arbouretum look distracted, a bit tense. It’s getting hotter. Finally they start. They get it wrong, it’s a balls-up. They stop.

‘Well, we’ve never done that before,’ says frontman Dave Heumann. ‘You are witnessing a first.’

This error and frank admission somehow breaks the onstage tension and frees them, finally, to do what they came here to do – mesmerise us with their amplified Americana, fluid heaviness and out-there escapism. Arbouretum’s music belongs somewhere earthy and mystical, somewhere without boundaries. It rolls and surges. It’s unhurried but it still rocks. For some reason I start to imagine them playing in a bedouin tent.

But they’re not in a tent. They’re in an airless sweatbox which, by the time the set nears its end, is slowly forcing people out the door before the band call time on their set

Arbouretum still win though. They’re a class act, no doubt about it. We saw that, even if we were too beaten to fully realise it. Bristol next time?

Karma to Burn – live@Bullingdon Arms, Oxford, July 2013

Posted on August 19, 2013 by kevinsmusicblog

No-frills power-trio Karma to Burn bring guitar-bass-drums fury to the Bullingdon. Or do they?

As we know, Karma to Burn are all about the expected. End-to-end riffs, no vocals, no experimentation, no frills. They do not deviate, they do not change: certainty is their currency and you pretty much know what’s coming up – an hour or so of shit-kicking, dust-and-gasoline guitar hooks ground out by three grizzled road-dogs bonded by a volatile history of bad drugs, bad attitudes and band break-ups. Seeing the reunited Will Mecum-Rob Oswald-Rich Mullins line-up nail the Audioscope headline slot a couple of years ago was a proper treat, and now they’re back to give us more.

But before West Virginia headlines, Oxford must support. That honour falls to local heroes Desert Storm who charge the Bully with infectious, Clutch-inspired rhythm ‘n groove and supreme confidence. Immense.

Karma to Burn take to the stage almost without anyone noticing. And as the first notes crunch forth tonight, something’s not quite right.

Who’s the drummer?

And where is the bassist?

First question first. By not following Karma’s personnel moves last year, I missed the fact that drummer Rob Oswald left not just the band but music itself, sick of the lies and compromises at the business end of the music business. He got out.

As for the bass space … it remains a void. Rich Mullins never shows. Nothing is mentioned.

So for a band who trade in certainties and absolutes, this is an unsettling start. Does Will Mecum (guitar) plus a drummer (Evan Devine) count as a Karma to Burn experience?

Sonically, yes. As soon as those amps push Mecum’s Karma-sized riffs out, the doubts diminish and grins emerge. This music isn’t sophisticated, it’s as stripped down as you can get – there aren’t even any solos – and yet, live and loud in a small venue, it unleashes a very primal urge to just ROCK OUT. The Bullingdon back room does exactly that, whirling into a mosh as the wordless tracks blast past. Job done. And with job done, Mecum and Devine swiftly depart.

Whether this two-piece format is Karma to Burn’s future is something we don’t know yet. Losing Oswald’s unkempt wildman intensity is one thing but if Mullins’s genial cool is AWOL too … that’s a hefty personality deficit for a band who are pretty minimal to begin with. Tonight they pull it off – I think. Let’s see what happens.

Naam: live@the Wheatsheaf, Oxford, June 2013

Posted on August 14, 2013 by kevinsmusicblog

Source: http://www.teepeerecords.com

Rock action beckons when Naam take the Wheatsheaf. Beards optional.

You check the gig listings.

You see the phrases HEAVY PSYCHEDELIA and DRONE CORE BEHEMOTHS next to a band’s name in a preview.

You don’t know the band.

But this sounds promising.

No, this sounds unmissable – colossal drone AND transcendence? In the same night? At the Wheatsheaf?

No-brainer. Naam are a band I’d never heard of but there’s no way I was missing that.

Didn’t manage to see the first support band but the second support, Oxfordshire three-piece Caravan of Whores, made an immediate impact. Again, not a band I knew. The singer looked familiar. But that’s because I’d seen him unloading a van of gear (musical) on the High Street a few hours earlier.

Onstage, it’s muscular mid-tempo riffs they unload, riffs that reference 90s stoner yet are anchored by downer roots – less blues, more blackened. A few escapist psyche-jam flourishes and tasty time changes show that the Whores have the chops to shift their doom-riff devotion into something more textured.

And so to Naam, four unassuming fellas from Brooklyn signed to Tee Pee Records, the label that put out Sleep’s restored Dopesmoker record a decade ago.

Not for them the monolithic bludgeon of Matt Pike’s crew, though. No, these guys are a less singular musical proposition than that, preferring instead to embark on lengthy light-dark excursions that embrace Pink Floyd’s expansive moods but add a little heft.

With the odd nod towards post-Sleep mantra gods Om, as on Skyscraper, and an ever-present keyboard swirl, Naam craft some seriously free-flowing currents to carry you off and away. Tracks like Vow and Beyond bring the band’s tougher edge and Hawkwind pulse to the fore, while elsewhere they flit with ease between tempos, moods, density and space. Ebbing heavy prog with a psychedelic wash: that’s what fills the Wheatsheaf tonight.

Which makes the pre-gig drone core tag a bit … off. SunnO))) and Ufomammut they ain’t.

But classic spacerock trippers they definitely are. If Black Mountain at their Bright Lights heaviest or Crippled Black Phoenix at their most Floydian make it onto your playlist, Naam are well worth checking. Keep your eye on ‘em.

Errr… how does this work?

Posted on August 11, 2013 by kevinsmusicblog

Welcome to Amplifier Wordsmith, a blog that has been created by a professional (thanks Joanna!) and will be maintained, with immediate effect, by a TOTAL AMATEUR.

Me.

But we’ve got to start somewhere, right?

So let’s keep this intro short and set out what this blog is meant to be about: music. Rock music (mostly). Why? Because there’s tonnes of stuff out there and we can help each other to find it. That’s what music fans do, isn’t it? Share discoveries (and maybe obsess about them a bit too much).

Right then – time to finish and get started, Oxford gig reviews of Naam and Karma to Burn to appear very very soon.

The handover

Posted on July 30, 2013 by kevinsmusicblog

It’s official! After the birthday BBQ at the Butchers Arms and family celebrations on the day, the blog has been handed over to its rightful owner. No more silly posts, only serious music stuff for the truly committed.

But things are never as easy as you hope for. Life offers plenty of distractions (aka excuses) and unexpected twists and turns. Kevin had been planning to update his ancient laptop for some time, so having a blog to maintain was a very convenient trigger for actually visiting a shop and making the leap (for some getting new gadgets is an enjoyable experience, for others – a torment).

So far so good, but imagine the annoyance when shortly after he got back home someone nicked his bike from the garage! The perfect crime of opportunity: someone dumped the bike they were cycling on outside the neighbour’s house and went of on Kevin’s bike…

Understandably, the pleasures of blogging had to be pushed down the priority list. But no more! As we were walking into work this week (4 miles each way, I think I’m done for now, thank you very much…), Kevin was sharing his thoughts and ideas for the blog, features and regulars, some to do with the tapes we tease him about so much (a NEW tape came through the post this week. Long live the tape!).

And so without further ado, this is the last you hear from me. I am now sending Kevin login details and I leave him and you to enjoy the music.

Thanks again for making this happen, Birthday bloggers!

Joanna

Your wordsmith brother in arms

Posted on July 27, 2013 by kevinsmusicblog

Shaun and Kev are both from the North West, but it’s another thing they share that will keep their friendship going forever: their unconditional love for the mighty Zep.

Kev!!! My wordsmith brother in arms! (didn’t take me long to mention a Dire Straits track) 40 is the new 40 my man, and let’s not forget that Jimmy Page surmounted that barrier in a heroin-flecked hedonistic haze back in 1983, and he’s still going strong! Though I am not condoning the abuse of hard drugs, I AM pointing out that we are younger than we think we are, and have a few riffs residing within us yet to be scooped out of the cranium, so get the guitar out!

Once we are together (not often enough) it usually takes on average, less than 12 minutes for one of us to mention the mighty Zep, before we’re off on some ludicrously fanciful discussion. From there we tend to take in all points, from philosophical to pharmacological, before repairing to a decent “no football on the telly” boozer for a couple of foamers.

From pie quests in New Zealand and the endless ennui of immovable buses in the Grand Canyon all the way to long pointless rambles circumnavigating the BT tower, direction has never been our strong point, though its never mattered, cos we always have massive amounts of sh*t to talk!

I am gutted I can’t be there to get drunk with you dear boy, but at least we had The Who to keep us going till the next time. I hope you get so bladdered you look like a Fremont Crazy. LOTS OF LOVE KEV! Shaun.

Music for boys

Posted on July 26, 2013 by kevinsmusicblog

Even if there’s no certainty as to Sarah’s favourite band, there is no doubt about her preferred colour. Green. Green Day? Or a day on a green lawn, on the side line of an under 9 or under 11 football match. The rock-football mum, absolutely the best!

In the spirit of Nick Hornby I thought we should celebrate your birthday with “the collective boys” favourite compilation CD top 10:

1. Back in black: AC/DC
2. Georgie the Belfast boy: Don Fardon
3. Hey Joe: Jimi Hendrix
4. Thors Hammer: Tyr
5. Ace of Spades: Motorhead
6. Mickey: Spear of Destiny
7. Immigrants Song: Led Zep
8. She Sells Sanctuary: The Cult
9. A Hard Days Night: The Beatles
10. The Ladies Bras: Johnny Trunk et al

Gareth promises to make you the perfect CD when back from boy sitting in the Lakes!

Hope you have a fantastic party – looking forward to celebrating with a few beers.

This picture is in memory of our childhood. We will have to explain to the “spotify generation” what we were doing on Thursday evenings close to the telly while hissing “shut up” at our parents…

All our love – Sarah, Gareth, George and Joe x

Birthday Limerick

Posted on July 26, 2013 by kevinsmusicblog

According to Jenny, she’s Irish, but I’m pretty sure Fritwell, Oxfordshire, ain’t in Eire. She loves reading books and is the only person I know who is a match for Kevin in music trivia pub quizzes.

Kev’s a lifelong fan of the guitar,

Jimmy Page, Slash, maybe even Johnny Marr?

Led Zeppelin and Neil Young,

In his bedroom he’ll strum.

Rock on Kev! 40’s no barrier!

Keep on Strumming Kev and Happy 40^th to you

Jenny xx

amplifier wordsmith

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