…shining a little light on what we’re spinning on the office stereo.

It seems like we’ve had our heads buried in one thing or another these days – gearing up for the release of No Great Lost by researching media outlets, digging through old press clips, researching similar or related artists, etc. It’s perhaps the most tedious part of the process, but if we uncover just one new lead or contact, it could mean a great deal to the success of the project. So we soldier on…

So much in the foreground, but there is much in the aural background, too. Most of what’s below are first impressions, as we’ve been plowing through a lot of new music lately – well, “new” meaning “new to us.” Without further ado…

A couple of us went out and saw Ralph Towner last night, and now we’re subjecting everyone in the office to his music – with positive results thus far. We can’t claim to be experts on what he does, but it holds immense fascination. It’s jazz. It’s classical. It’s improvised. It’s composed. It’s folk. It’s swing. All of those apply, but none of them stick…what awed us about the show was they way he pulled so much tone and clarity from his nylon-string guitars (both standard-tuning and baritone models); it was almost pianistic in its resonance and depth. Add to that a rich harmonic sense and the quick wit of a master improviser, and you have a major voice on your ears. His first solo album, Trios/Solos (ECM) , is spinning now. From there we’ll go to the recent, masterful solo recital Timeline, and then maybe an ensemble disk like Batik. Nothing quite like him…not sure everyone agrees, though!

Being a Will Oldham fan is hard work. He releases a lot of music. Too much? Hard to say. Seems to average out at about 2-3 full-length releases a year, plus various singles and compilation appearances and such. And you gotta act fast – quite often the first runs of his releases include some sort of little bonus. 2006’s The Letting Go included a bonus disk in the first run that disappeared quickly…his new one, The Wonder Show of the World comes with a bonus seven-inch single (in the LP format) of two songs not available elsewhere. Our local indie store had three copies with the bonus single, and six or seven more without, and the bonus edition was sold out within an hour. No matter the edition, the album is really extraordinary: hushed and darkly passionate, but not without traces of humor and an abundance of warmth. Not a hard rocking outing, by any stretch…more peaceful and ruminative, but never lost in its own navel-gazing. Very well recorded and mastered, too…

There are a pair of longtime Residents fans in the office, and this past week we revisited one of the more maligned items in the eyeball catalog, Title in Limbo, which was recorded as a duet with the oddball English duo Renaldo and the Loaf. It’s rare that the Residents undertake a whole project – writing, recording, and performing – with a full-on collaborator. This may be the only instance, really, unless you count the early Schwump and Snakefinger sides. It’s an album long slammed by critics, and yet we really like it. It’s more acoustic (many of their synths were still in transit back from the European Mole Shows when it was recorded), and feels a bit more hand-hewn than a lot of their stuff from this period (1983). “Monkey and Bunny” is pretty horrifying, and was performed live a bit by the Residents, but the rest of the album is equally intriguing. Still has that funhouse mirror quality, but more tempered and introspective. One of the guys in Renaldo said that there was a guitar handy that had every string tuned to E, and they used it a lot on the record…that explains some things…we also went back and revisited Renaldo and the Loaf’s still strange debut LP, Songs for Swinging Larvae.

There’s a new Mose Allison, his first in ages, produced by Joe Henry. Henry seems to have graduated from being T Bone Burnett, Jr., to having his own sound: more woody and dark than his mentor, with less of the sonic grit and haze. We like it. On first listen, Mose sounds a bit craggy – his voice having descended a few steps in the ten or twenty years since his last recording – but his writing and shrewd, sparse piano playing remain tack-sharp. Special note to the playing of Greg Leisz here. Usually considered a steel guitarist, he’s playing acoustic on this and sounding fantastic – he even takes the first solo on the record, and nails it.