Rahsaan Roland Kirk ‎- 'The Art Of Rahsaan Roland Kirk - The Atlantic Years' (Atlantic)

The cover of this compilation makes this seem like a fairly average cash-generating release, with forgettable graphic design and all previous released material. But as someone who doesn't own any of the original Atlantic records this culls from, The Art Of is a real treasure. It's well-assembled, and shows an incredibly diverse range of Kirk as a composer, bandleader and player. Like most of his records, the tunes are pretty evenly split between his compositions and covers, and there's raucous takes of songs like 'Sentimental Lady', Dvotrak, and Bacharach and Davis-via-Dionne Warwick ('I Say A Little Prayer'). We get a medley of Coltrane songs at the end of side two, from a live concert (as so much of this set is live, it really adds some energy to the mix). The Coltrane takes are fine enough, but they aren't anything I'd go back to; however, the medley at the beginning of side four, which is Kirk playing two instruments at once, is pretty great, with a wooly fidelity and occasional bursts of applause. I don't have any of these Atlantic LPs but I used to have a dub of The Inflated Tear which I would listen to while driving. That title track and its followup Ellington cover open up the second record, just as they opened side two of the original. It's a hell of a composition, sharply focused on its theme but then letting it's own weight break into the more melodic sections; it conveys pain, magic and relief while always in pursuit of beauty. I like Kirk's compositions a lot, whether they be spry, pinprick soundtrack jazz ('A Laugh for Rory'), or the Afro-centric colours that open and close the whole 2xLP set. 'Volunteered Slavery' is catchy, driving, and manages to quote 'Hey, Jude' though maybe that's just an accident - Kirk's voice is echoed by a rocking chorus and actually nothing else on the two LPs lives quite up to its potential. Side four ends with 'The Seeker', a suite of poetic improvisations which are the closest to AACM-type material I've ever heard from Kirk. Behind the verbal intonations of its 'Black Classical Rap' we hear extended technique and enough percussion and little instruments to at some points, actually sound like some electro-acoustic/concrete mix. The hard bop sounds from earlier in his career are spread throughout this record, but even in, say, 'The Seeker' movement of 'The Seeker', they are just passages of colour among a more beauteous whole. His own voice pops up throughout all four sides enough times that he starts to feel like a crazy companion. Singing a barroom drawl on 'Baby Let Met Shake Your Tree', informing about how the audience doesn't know about enough great jazz saxophonists during the Charlie Parker tribute in 'The Seeker', or just hollering and shouting in the backgrounds of other tracks - it infuses a great deal of personality into a record which already has it dripping off the music itself, no small feat for a record with a lot of covers, and standards as well. I'm not familiar enough with Kirk's overall work to know how his Atlantic Years stack up against everything else, but I would grab any of the LPs whose tracks are featured here if I came across them, for sure.

Burning Star Core - 'Everyday World of Bodies' (Ultra Eczema)

Who would have thought that Burning Star Core would release a record layered with references to 1994's post-hardcore/indie classic Rusty, by Rodan, a band that came from just down the river from Spencer Yeh's own Cincinnati? And you can hear the same hard/soft balance, between agressive and elegiac, even if on the surface, his Everyday World of Bodies is a world away from their chugga-chugga guitar anthems. But what do we, the listeners, get? Well, 'Shoot Me Out the Sky' begins the record with hiss, eerie voices, and unraveling tape noise. It's dense, but the clouds slowly overlap and let light through at just the right places. As the side goes along we never quite leave that fluttering insectoid feel, though there's more traditional singing than we've heard from Yeh to-date, and various layered unindentifiable field recordings. This might be the 'eclectic' BxC album, which shows his Nurse with Wound influence. This feels like a series of interrelated plateaus, a patchwork that overall blends into something cohesive. 'This Moon Will Be Your Grave' incorporates a very horizontal (yet wavering) electronic tone throughout itself and eventually blends into a glissando of crackling melodies. We get tortured, dying underwater vocals beneath what sounds like cymbals or maybe heavy machinery, and a whole lot of grabbing. But then suddenly we get a strangely rigid electric piano instrumental, by far the most clean, straight-ahead musical sketch I've ever heard from Yeh. Stuck right in the middle of this album, it feels like a bizarre interlude and gives the album a cinematic vibe. And of course the second it ends, we get violin scraping and noodling. Everyday World of Bodies ranges from lo-fi to the carefully recorded constructions Yeh is capable of -- and this mixed bag somehow works because of the way it's all blended together into a suite of six pieces. The man put out a lot of CD-R and cassette releases before the vinyl onslaught and this feels a bit like a throwback to those days (probably because of the mixed fidelity), but with the confidence and schizophrenia (not mutually exclusive terms, you know) that can only develop with time and discipline. Dennis Tyfus' usual intense artwork is here a giant fold-out two-sided moire-trance poster.

Bingo Trappers - 'Sierra Nevada' (Shrimper/Sing, Eunuchs!)

My copy of this 1997 unheralded masterpiece still wears its $2 discount bin pricetag, and I'm still grateful for the bargain. These Dutch lo-fi folk-rockers formed in the mid-90s and spat out a bunch of tapes and a few full-length releases over the next 6 years or so, but this debut LP is the one I hold closest to my heart. It certainly helps that this was released on the two flagship labels of the "bi-fi" scene (or whatever it was called) during the pinnacle of my own interest/passion in such things. At the time I first heard this, I wasn't schooled enough in Bob Dylan or the Band or the Flying Burrito Bros or any of the other antecedents to this sound, but I knew I liked it. These are songs based around earnest melodies, simple guitar chords and arpeggios, cloppy drumming and occasionally steel guitar or organ when it needs to be particularly delicate ('Walkin' Through the Clouds' being a highlight of restraint). 'King in Exile' remains an all-time favorite bummer-rock tune, and when I saw these guys live in 2002 or so, they opened with it! There's a magnificence to the 4-track sound here, though it's not used to experiment as much as for mood. I would call this vaguely psychedelic music - 'Let's Hit the Road Again' reminds me of Syd Barrett, and 'Michael George' has a demented neo-psych feel. The songwriting is amazing - thankfully they sing in English so you can get all of the nuances of "Well I'm passing through" (in 'Deerhunter') and the very strict viewpoint of 'Pure Intentions' (which is actually a Mountain Goats cover; icing on the cake for me in 1998 when I bought this). Most of this mess comes from just two guys, who remained the core of the band throughout it all. 'Bastardizin' the Poet' veers into more popular 90s guitar fuzz sounds, but Neutral Milk Hotel this is not. Even behind the major chords, a European misery hangs over everything. The vocals get pretty dour, but there's some incredibly human guitar leads behind everything, poking through 'King in Exile's gloom like a flashlight. 'Joseph' could be a hymn, but instead it's a weighty meditative tune with a melody recalling traditional folk from the British Isles. 'Slice of Time' warps through the homespun drummin' and strummin' with a ghosty accompaniment; the slightly sing-song lyrics take on a creepy vibe that resembles a snake eating its own tail. It all wraps up with the sentimental 'Dream Horse', a carefully chosen act of sequencing that brings Sierra Nevada to a sweet conclusion. Weirdly, a band called Guv'ner released a record around the same time as this with the same cover photo. I don't think I've ever met another Bingo Trappers fan, but if I ever get around to writing that book about the Shrimper scene that I've always wanted to write, I'll hopefully encounter a few. Until then, it's nice to have this pleasure in solitude.

Bardo Pond - 'Lapsed' (Matador)

It was my freshman year of college and this merging of my two big interests -- Matador-label indie rock and minimalist drone -- seemed irresistable. I remember going to the record store after class and buying this for $8 or maybe $9, which is how much new LPs cost back in 1997. When I got home I discovered a strange, weird smear on side 2- and the shrinkwrap meant it was a factory defect, not the sign of a curious record store owner -- so I emailed Matador. At the time their website was a weird web address like www.matador.recs.com -- actually, that address still works which is pretty weird -- and their customer service rep apologised and offered me a new copy if I would send the old one back. I thought that was pretty nice of them but I never got around to mailing it back. The thing about Lapsed is that I never really got past the first track, so some aberrations on side two were forgivable. Sure, there's some other great jams on here - 'Pick My Brain' has a nice sunny strum-bake;;; 'Anandomiche' is Bardo's great take on 'Til the Morning Comes'. Not to mention the super long closing jam 'Aldrin' which is in some ways the perfect Bardo Pond song, as equally momentous as their big long 'Amen' track on Bufo Alvarius. But it's the opening track here, 'Tommy Gun Angel', that I've worn out on this LP. Not that you can really tell since everything is so murky and fuzzy anyway. Even though I gave this LP the usual once-over with the anti-static brush before playing (and it looked clean), after each side the stylus had scraped a big ball of dust out of the grooves. What a perfect metaphor. Is that a metaphor? But yeah, 'Tommy Gun Angel'. To say this is my favorite Bardo Pond song is an understatement. It actually is the only Bardo Pond song that matters. I used to have Amanita and Bufo Alvarious and some later stuff I think, but I ended up selling them all during some money-hungry purge, because when it came down to it I just wanted to listen to 'Tommy Gun Angel' over and over. This song is huge and thundering, yet concise. It's actually catchy, meaning you are caught in a net you can't escape from; the indistinct, moaning vocals are the perfect counterpart to the snaking guitar riff. It meanders along as probably the world's laziest hook. This is both a pop song and a testament to everything that can be illegible in the world. Maybe they have bettered or bested it, but I have little desire to hear anything else (and that is not a slight upon this band in any way). I saw them live a year or two after this came out and I fidgeted through the whole set waiting to hear 'Tommy Gun Angel'. The sound was terrible (being in some college auditorium) and everything was out of balance, almost like a dub reggae mix. They played it, but it was disappointing. Maybe that was when I sold the other stuff. I saw them a few years later and it was better but by that point I figured I should get over this song. So it's lingered for some years, unplayed until now, and I find that despite my technical appreciation of 'Aldrin's brilliance I'm still hung up on the side-1-track-1. It's nice to know that I can approach art-rock (or artistic rock music at least) with the same attitude of a spoiled Top-40 radio fan, just wanting to hear the hit song. But stop reading this and go hear it yourself.