The Stones Roll Back, Kacey’s Rich ‘Pageant’ & More
The Rolling Stones: From The Vault: The Marquee Club Live In 1971 (LP/CD/DVD/Blu-Ray) (Eagle Rock) It’s a very tough call, empirically speaking, to select the week’s best and most innovative album when—as the cliché would have it—thanks to the world of streaming music, every brand new album is competing against the best music ever made. But here’s an out: This new Stones set, available in nearly every possible configuration, fits the bill, and it was recorded almost 45 years ago. Drawn from a live performance in front of maybe 150 people at London’s famous Marquee club, videotaped and rarely seen, the set features the Rolling Stones just a month before the release of Sticky Fingers, with new guitarist Mick Taylor now not so new and fitting in superbly, and a brief set drawing from Let It Bleed, “Bitch” and “Brown Sugar” from the as-yet-unreleased Sticky Fingers, and even including “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” It is all very good, lively and as intimate as you’d expect in such a small venue, featuring band, players and the then-untarnished history all at their respective peaks. The From The Vault series continues to be fascinating—there’s a lot of great Stones stuff in the can, and there’s got to be much, much more—but this captures the band at precisely the right time, before they became the touring juggernaut that would dominate their way of doing business for the next 40 years or so. An unexpected, joyful look backward with nary an ounce of flab in evidence.
Kacey Musgraves: Pageant Material (Mercury Nashville) Breathtakingly substantial, character-filled, non-cheeseball and freakin’ good, the second album by Kacey Musgraves, who won two Grammys a while back, is what’s known as a brilliant follow-up. The songs roll out smoothly, one after another, dropping random lines about the “ghost of Gram Parsons,” noting in the album’s title track that she’s “always higher than my hair,” and doing precisely the opposite of what many in her shoes might do—and that would be pandering to the lowest common denominator in order to achieve & retain maximum audience. I’ve seen at least one review that’s dropped the name of ‘60s icon Bobbie Gentry when discussing Musgraves—though one thinks that’s a physical comparison more than anything else—but there is a sense of maturity, sophistication and cultural enlightenment on display here that plays against many of current Country’s most lamentable clichés without sounding too deliberate. Which means Kacey Musgraves is one of the coolest chicks to wander our way in many a year–and we should all be listening.
Leon Bridges: Coming Home (Columbia) You have to love how there are certain “breakout sensations” at various events and festivals, be it Coachella, South By Southwest, or Woodstock, where I understand the Santana Band went over like gangbusters. Know now that the highly skilled Leon Bridges, an R&B singer from Fort Worth, Texas, was that kind of thing at the recent SXSW-fest in Austin, where he was the talk of the town, and on the evidence of this album: Yeah, that makes sense. Unlike those projects where modern-day chameleon-like artists are plugged into heavily produced sessions deliberately intended to replicate the sound of Stax Records circa 1964—which sounds inspiring, thrilling, but still, sort of fake—what we’ve got here is a production style where Bridges is singing atop a background that might’ve done the trick for a second-tier artist of the ‘60s (no slight on Arthur Conley, say, or further down the line), which sounds, unexpectedly, that much more contemporary. In fact, on the lovely, melodic, early-‘60s inspired “Lisa Sawyer,” I hear no one so much as Garland Jeffreys, an artist whose categorization has always been equally as puzzling as Bridges’ own might be. But he’s always been great. I like what I hear of Leon Bridges very much, and you will too.
Bully: Feels Like (StarTime International/Columbia) There are very few records that grab you from the very start, the first 10 seconds or so, but the howl of energy projected by singer Alicia Bognanno during the opening bars of “I Remember” are all you need to be convinced that she’s offering us something special. A Nashville quartet whose topical name would surely be admired by President Theodore Roosevelt, were he still living, Bully have that fascinating blend of power, melody, catchiness and…weirdness, in terms of the personality Bognanno projects and the lyrics she sings. There is an odd tradition—at least as far as I’m concerned—of bands fronted by women who are one step removed from the really weird stuff—and here I’m thinking of the first singer from that band Flyleaf, have you seen them?—and I am thinking this band isn’t quite there, but the potential exists. Really big, loud and appealing energy here.
Richard Thompson: Still (Fantasy) If every good review was worth a million dollars, Richard Thompson would be a deity right around now–but instead he’s still making records instead of eating bon-bons while laying on the couch, and that’s a pretty good deal for us. His latest album—figure since his ‘60s career with England’s Fairport Convention he’s made about 900 or so—happens to be exceptionally good, as most of them are, and this one has the added advantage of being produced by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, which should attract a larger audience than usual. Aside from being a witty, literate and overall exceptional songwriter, Thompson is a freakishly tasteful guitarist, and what’s more notable than usual on Still—should we thank Tweety?—are the understated fills and riffs that are magically precise, tasteful and all over the place, sort of like Thompson himself. Guys like Thompson—and there aren’t a lot of them, but there are at least a few—tend to get less interesting as their career progresses, but not so here. If you listen, he will blow your mind.
Lyfe Jennings: Tree Of Lyfe (RAL/Sony Music Entertainment) He’s been at it for a while, but there’s something Lyfe Jennings does—it’s been more than a decade now—that touches on the best traditions of R&B and soul, and it’s getting better by the minute. There’s a warmth in his tone, his manner, his songs, which seems genuine and believable, and it’s amply evident here on Tree Of Lyfe. Which drives home the rather serious points made in the very memorable “Hashtag”: Now I don’t know what the f**k you think is gonna happen/ But n****s is out here trying to get money /How long do you think it’s gonna be/ Before the poor have nothing left to eat/ Nothing left to eat/ But the rich? It’s not a light song—little here is light—but it is seductively easy to listen to, which means Jennings’ memorable message slides right in. Which makes this one of the year’s most profound albums, and Jennings, yet again, one of contemporary R&B’s most fascinating artists.
Breaking Benjamin: Dark Before Dawn (Hollywood) Anyone who paid attention to hard rock during the turn of the century knows of this band, who managed to score predictable hittage on those same radio stations that programmed Linkin Park, Korn, Limp Bizkit and all those other groups who apparently were combining rock with rap, even though, er, they weren’t. Some of those bands came and went, and many of us thought BB did as well, but in fact—personal hassles, disputes, etc.—they merely went away from a bit. They have since returned, with band founder Benjamin Burnley—the original “breaking” dude—and they rock in a tidy, loud, nice, polite way, maybe in the same way Linkin Park did a while back, but not quite as deliberately strait-jacketed. They’re hard to love, but equally hard to dislike, and they’re exactly the band you’d want to hire to play over the closing credit of your movie about space monsters devouring all of San Francisco were you inclined to make one. And who isn’t?
Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, Made The Stones, And Transformed Rock & Roll by Fred Goodman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) A well-researched and fascinating look into the life of Allen Klein, the man who…well, check out that book title. Fred Goodman is a superb writer, with a background in both the trade and consumer press, and his account here of one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most polarizing figures could not be more readable. The even-handed tone, the supposition that readers are moderately intelligent and sophisticated, and the rather astounding involvement Allen Klein had with pop music’s largest legends—put all that together, and you’ve got one highly engrossing read. And one unlikely to be duplicated in the future, because there simply aren’t that many music biz titans left in the world to chronicle. Highly recommended from start to finish, and another triumph for the man who wrote The Mansion On The Hill.
