Jad Fair & Kramer - 'Roll Out the Barrel' (Shimmy-Disc)

Recently, Jad Fair released a 99-song CD set called Beautiful Songs, a career retrospective. That's a pretty apt title, as both words seem to describe the man's output: beauty is a strange one, his not a traditional notion of it by any means, but nonetheless evident in his naive, gentle subject matter and constructed idiot-savant delivery. And "songs" indeed, for even in Half Japanese's most frantic and anti-melodic early work, a dedication to songcraft can still be heard. This collaboration with Kramer hails from 1988 and it's an often overlooked record, at least by me - its been on my shelf since I was in high school but I rarely give it a spin. It's a strong collection, though, as Kramer uses Fair's songs as a framework on which to hang various production and arrangement techniques. These are sometimes spooky and ethereal; he mostly avoids Galaxie 500 reverb on Fair's voice, but Don Fleming's guitar playing is atmospheric and searing on cuts like 'Bird of Prey', 'Best Left Unsaid', and 'When Is She Coming'. Other tracks are a surreal cornucopia of sound techniques, often deconstructing cover versions in that Shockabilly manner. This is around the time Bongwater was releasing Too Much Sleep and that same style of kitchen-sink addition is evident in how these are put together; and honestly, listening to Kramer's most recent release The Brill Building, as tough as I found it to get through, his approach hasn't really changed. Roll Out the Barrel, while diverse and curious, is never slick; even more clean electronic-tinged songs, such as 'Better Safe than Sorry', support rather than overpower Fair's tenor wails. The covers are possibly meat to be ironic - 'Help!', 'On the Sunny Side of the Street' - and the Penn Jilette-assisted 'Twist and Shout' and 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' are all pretty great. I fear that Jad Fair's presence might push this into 'novelty music' territory for many, who would then overlook what's a great collection of late 80's art-rock. Despite being NYC-based for so long, the Shimmy-Disc scene sounds so different now from other avant-leaning artists from that place and time, though they were all part of the same gang. Now that we've gone through a few iterations of the hip ebb and flow around song-based work from NYC (with Thurston Moore somehow remaining central to so much of it, present here too) this feels strangely contemporary in the post-everything era, or whatever a more educated cultural commentator would view the 2013 soundworld. My point: blow the dust off this and enjoy it as much as I just did.

Amon Düül II - 'Dance of the Lemmings' (United Artists)

Sometimes I think 1971 was a high point in the cultural ooze, though I'm fully aware that we always fetishize the impossible, and this blogspotter was not yet alive so I guess I'm guilty as charged. Maybe '71 smelled really bad or everyone was itchy, but I think there was something good in the water because first-rate records and films kept shooting out like inchoate meteors. We've had to skip Yeti and jump to Amon Düül II's masterpiece, Dance of the Lemmings. The band is honed down to only four people (since Phallus Dei's covershot suggests it was once quite the party) and they've never been further away from their roots (see our review of This is Amon Düül for more on that). Side 1 is given to the 'Syntelman's March of the Roaring Seventies' suite, and the Krautbuzz rarely has hit peaks like this. 'Pull Down your Mask' is just one of the four parts but the one most memorable for its haunting creepy vocals.  Until the end, it's relatively genteel and clean-sounding, yet still trippy, psychedelic, and whathaveyou.  At some point in my salad days I figured out that just turning on distortion and volume does not alone make music 'heavy'; weight comes from the spaces between the notes, the timings, and that which cannot by automated.  I think 'Syntelman's March of the Roaring Seventies' taught me the same thing about psychedelic music.  It's postively barren and sparse when compared to today's hordes of knob-turning  noise kiddies,  but more 10th dimensional and mindbending than most 'psychedelic' dross.   And it's a bad trip, indeed.   It's like the band has reinvented itself from  prog nerdlers into utter bummermongers, and nothing could be more perfect to usher in the decade of bad vibes that was to follow. Even the back cover, with scary goat-skull-tree-man on a comfy sofa, screams 'stay the fuck away'. And the scythe-wielding Amon Düül logo is rendered in a way that would make even the most hardened suburban metalheads skip a breath and force out a "cool". But can they keep it up over the course of a double album? Of course they can, and they do, and it's the second side where we get the walls of burning solder, sawing folk fiddles and klassic kosmische edges.  Plus, for a few bars they kick this perfect hip-hop beat.   The third side is a soundtrack that is obv. more improvised than the first half but still has some insane movement.  There's a lot of piano and some swell bass drones; it all feels a bit edited together, but that's okay cause I'm not a purist about those things.  This may be the closest to 'jazz' we've seen from AD2, though it's really space-jazz.   Bonus points for the records being split into sides 1+4, and 2+3 -- a testament to the olden days of those record flipping contraptions.  I believe we could press a 2xLP like that today and call it a "throwback".  Side four brings us back to the 'songs'.  This side is instrumental, in the classic rock rifftastic arterial way.  Some weird editing at play:  halfway through, one track fades out on a flange-heavy drumbeat and then after a moment of silence, fades back in with the same beat.   A bit of conceptual brilliance or the only way to cover a mistake?  Also, is it just a bit stereotypical to make side 3 your "extended jam" side and return to songs at the end?  Though maybe this defined the trend.  I feel like I should say something about lemmings, who are thought of in popular culture as suicide-prone little creatures and thus an appropriate metaphor for the dark vibes of this album.  But actually, lemmings have no such inclinations  - this is just some murderous lies spread by the Disney corporation.  And I've also made it through this whole review without mentioning the amazing spaceship gatefold, complete with primitive PDA and space-elephant.