Author: james-hopkins

 It took an Australian label to bring back the early recordings of a New York band that thrived in the ’70s and ’80s punk scene and yet was never really of it. The Fleshtones—unlike many other garage revivalists—were not interested in finding common ground between decades or in creating a “pure” authenticity. They had to tightrope dance between surrender and ecstasy, while keeping a firm grasp of the beat.

In over 30 years the Fleshtones have refined their moves, but have seen no reason to radically rebuild a genre that still lifts us out of our cool. A group that wise about music deserves an American label daring enough to reissue all their classics.

F.J. McMahon’s exhausted yet intense murmur was not bred in ’60s folk clubs but in Vietnam, where his tour of duty did not inspire him to write songs boiling with rage. Singing as if from a distant dimension surrounded only by discreet drums and dual guitars, McMahon instead recreates the state of mind of a vet bone tired of struggle, but nonetheless determined to see beyond his isolation. 

Popular music in America seldom gives space to the kind of working men who left the textile mill of Gaston County, North Carolina, between 1927 and 1931 to record the kind of laughter made to keep them from crying over too little pay and too much work. This kind of humor—supported with guitars and banjos played with a light touch—was for them a necessary precursor to the labor struggles that reached a peak in the years following the Crash.

Old Hat has done more than get clear sound from those thick vinyl slabs. The music’s restoration gives us some well-tested ways to subvert the masters of our own hard times.

On Middle Cyclone, Neko Case refines and deepens lessons learned from country, the singer/songwriter tradition and the off-center pop art of her sometimes band, the New Pornographers. With a terseness that nonetheless gives room for metaphor explorations and her discreetly eloquent musicians, Case twists the usually sleepy singer/songwriter style, lacing its romance with verbal timebombs that only explode in your brain once your pleasure centers have been seduced by her welcoming voice and warmly flowing melodies.

Case is no crooning pushover, intoning lullabies for anxious middle-agers. She restores a multi-dimensional craftsmanship to the much abused concept of folk-rock.

Often, roots music like the a cappella gospel found on Como Now is approvingly described as raw, when in reality its perfect pitch and apt use of harmony could be more accurately categorized as sophistication that takes risks. The various soloists and ensembles of Mount Mariah Church push their voices to ragged extremes to make plain the joy and danger of a God so present in them only extreme sounds can communicate the essentially incommunicable.

The funk label Daptone deserves credit for capturing a world so outside of music business timelines it blows away our mediated realities.

This economically priced collection of Big Dipper’s indie works give us even more proof of the wealth of left field music made between punk and Nirvana. Born from the ashes of Volcano Suns and The Embarrassment, Big Dipper crafted albums steeped in the slashing guitars and hoarse panic of a garage punk that they knocked off balance with surprising rhythms and slyly surreal lyrics that should have deflated the guts in their pop. It was Dipper’s special talent to realize a well-edited clash of opposites actually enhanced the power of both the sophistication and crudeness.

In a 2008 alternative world where calculated cool is often confused with intelligence, Supercluster proves we can have both the primal and the smarts.

As proudly goofy members of the punk-pop church, the Black Kids have neither profound gloom nor shocking musical innovations to impress the sort of hipsters mildly amused by musicians supporting their tales of temporary passion with big beats, old-style synthesizers and background singers echoing their leader with deadpan sarcasm.

Rather, the Kids’ sarcasm is a clue to the difficult balancing of contrasts accomplished on Partie Traumatic. They use just enough of it to safely distance themselves from teenage confusion while still admiring that time’s willingness to settle for nothing less than ecstasy. Only the best subversives can convince audiences that they too can enjoy both maturity and the memory of sheer silliness.

Although best known for supplying the sample beat for Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines (Don’t Do It),” downtown New Yorkers Liquid Liquid left behind a catalog that deserves as much praise as that seminal rap hit. Like “Sex Machine”-era James Brown, Liquid were determined to melt rhythm down to its purest essence. Unlike the funk showman, however, they stripped away the expected guitar/vocalist relationship, creating instead carefully composed layers of crisp percussion and bass that dominated the foreground while singer Salvatore Principat howled and muttered in an echo-laden distance, seemingly unconcerned about whether or not he was the center of attention.

Liquid Liquid were not pretending to be alternative until they got a better offer. They sacrificed such mundane matters to the beat, and every piece on this compilation proves it.