…so, this little series just shines a little light on what we’re spinning on the office stereo. We’re pretty ravenous, and we are listening all the time. Sometimes just a quick spin, sometimes putting it on repeat and leaving it there all week. It’s all kinda unpredictable and arbitrary. This isn’t meant to be a review or assessment: just a response, a reaction. Hopefully by reading these posts, you can get a better feel for what we enjoy at Casa Nueva and what music excites us – in terms of sound, story, presentation, and how it fits into what has happened and/or is happening.
No shortage of music these days…finally arising from the fourth-quarter doldrums, when new releases slow to a trickle and the used bins are picked clean. Nice to be out of that desert.
Various Artists, Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas: There’s plenty of Brasilan pop/psych/tropicalia compilations out there today, and a good many of them are interchangeable. This one is refreshing, though: far more obscure than anything that has come yet, compiled by Joel Stone, who has equal roots in Brasil, America, and record geek-dom. He knows the joys of stumbling on a 45 that he knows nothing about, dropping the needle, and going to another world instantly. He conveys that brilliantly both in the music he selects and the sumptuous notes of this compilation. A successful compilation, to us, needs to make the listener feel like (s)he is discovering an entirely new genre – even if that’s not the case. We got the vinyl version, and it was worth a few extra bucks: big gatefold, huge 11x11 booklet, trippy artwork in full effect…it also comes with 3D glasses, the use of which is unexplained.
Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me: The big got bigger. We were a bit put off by the last Newsome disk, which stretched out epic songs to a point that perhaps outgrew our patience. In a way, this new disk got bigger and smaller at once. Shorter songs, but spread out over three disks. Pleasant and warming. We’ve only spun it the once, but we will again…the quirkiness feels less forced, more fun and sincere. Who knows if repeated plays will awaken more wonder, or lose its luster.
Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels: Some of us saw this in high school, when we were precocious music nerds treading the predictable well-traveled path that leads from Zappa to Beefheart to the Residents to Cage, etc. That doesn’t make this thing – finally on DVD – any more comprehensible. It still seems random and chaotic, but with a few decades behind us – playing in bands, working for labels, etc. – it’s easier to see the subtle jabs at the absurdity of music as a vocation; particularly at the ridiculousness of both attaining rock stardom and the state of stardom itself. The music is neat, too. Imperfect, but sometimes that’s more interesting, right?
Geoff Muldaur, Beautiful Isle of Somewhere and Texas Shakes: We need to dig deeper into this guy’s oeuvre. These recent disks are really impressive: former blues-besmitten Cambridge folkie overcomes the nauseating minstrelsy that seems to linger over white blues singers and enters a new world populated by a very personal, sincere extension of the blues. He’s melodic and cunning and a little sarcastic, and it all feels honest and personal. Not “authentic” by the standards of the surprisingly rigid blues purist (who tend to be politically liberal, but bafflingly narrow when it comes to expression), but a pure extension of the man. Isle is a live album in front of a reverent German audience and is probably the most bewitching of the two. Sheiks finds Muldaur leading an all-star stringband, ceding the vocals on nearly half the tracks, but whenever he does step up to the mic, he’s in wonderful form.