Burl Veneer's Music Blog

New Martha and the Muffins!

Martha and the Muffins' 1980 song "Echo Beach" was a staple of New Wave radio and is assured of a spot in the New Wave Hall of Fame if such a thing ever comes about:

"Black Stations, White Stations" from 1984 tackled the issue of radio segregation with a catchy tune; it was not as big a hit as "Echo Beach", but still achieved some popularity:

There's something really quaint about a song that exhorts people to get with the times because "this is 1984!" That was from the Mystery Walk album, issued as by "M+M" instead of Martha and the Muffins, since the group was no longer a real band but two M's (Martha Johnson and Mark Gane) backed by a cast of session players. That is where I lost track of them; there were a couple more albums, a long hiatus, and now in 2010 they are back (as Martha and the Muffins again) with a new album, Delicate. I haven't heard enough of it to know how I feel about it, how about exploring it along with me? Here it is:

Delicate - Martha And The Muff...

Metro Music

Martha and the Muffins

New Bamboos!

As my vacation looms, I'm going to be a lazy blogger and just embed whole albums of note. The one I'm excited about today is the new one from the Bamboos, the fantastic deep funk band from Australia. It's called 4, being their fourth album, and here it is for your listening pleasure:

4 - The Bamboos

4

Bamboos

Two paeans to the night

Blue Oyster Cult are best known for their rockers, but their 1977 album Spectres contained the wonderfully atmospheric, proto-Gothic "I Love the Night":

I Love The Night - Blue Öyster...

Michael Keane's occult-infused recordings as The Royal Family and the Poor are a grossly underappreciated treasure of the Factory Records catalog. The LTM label has reissued many of Factory's lesser-known albums (including all of RFTP's), signing up some of the bands for new releases in the process. Such is the story of RFTP's 2004 album North-West Soul, the centerpiece of which is the haunting "Sweeter Than the Day":

Sweeter Than The Day - The Roy...

North-West Soul

Royal Family & the Poor

Two great songs that go great together

The late 90s were a musical dry spell for me, in that I didn't hear much new music, so I didn't hear Mansun's 1996 song (and UK hit) "Wide Open Space" until my wife played it for me a few years ago. It was groovy, expansive, inspirational, and reminded me of "Everybody's 1" by Gods Child, a 1994 alternative hit that I did manage to hear way back when, somehow, but Mrs. V. hadn't. Now when we listen to one of them we always follow it with the other, because they're just perfect together:

The Gods Child album has a lot of genuine Mellotron on it, which is always good.

Everybody

Gods Child

New Elephant9: Walk the Nile

Speaking of Norwegian jazz, the new album by Norway's Milesian drums-bass-organ trio, Elephant9, came out last month. It has some really hot playing on it, but a couple of the long tracks seem to meander a little. (They are true to Miles Davis in that regard, too.) I haven't found a complete track to stream, but here's a widget with one-minute samples of each song (my favorites are "Fugl Fønix" and "Hardcore Orientale"):

Walk the Nile

Elephant9

Norwegian Skronk: The Thing

It's always satisfying when two long-running threads intersect, and with this post the Skronk and Norwegian Jazz threads converge in... The Thing! Actually The Thing are only 2/3 Norwegian, saxophonist Mats Gustafsson being Swedish, but that's good enough for a tag. The Thing join The Band, The The, The Music, and Him in the ranks of Least Searchable Band Names. They have another distinction, according to Wikipedia:

The group are the only free jazz ensemble working today who wear stage uniforms. They perform clad in t-shirts from Ruby's Barbecue Restaurant in Austin Texas.

My favorite track from their latest album, Bag It!, is the rip-snorting "Drop the Gun":

1-02 Drop the Gun

The Thing

Which turns out to be a cover of a song by Japanese band 54 Nude Honeys:

Skronk is alive and well

I don't know how I got on a skronk kick again, but I did. It must have the cacophony of some of the Electric Miles groups I was listening to that reminded me of one of my oddball records from the 80s, One-Two Punch by Don King. They were a New York skronk trio of Mark Cunningham, Arto Lindsay, and Lucy Hamilton, then became a five-piece and recorded One-Two Punch, released in 1984. The A side of the 12" record was a single track, "Revelry", mixed by J.G. Thirlwell and Roli Mosimann (the two members of Wiseblood); it played at 45 rpm, while the 4-song B side played at 33. An expanded CD edition of the album was released on the Atavistic label, but Cunningham writes:

...[U]nfortunately there was a mistake in the remastering and the first song, Revelry, an original Clint Ruin remix, was mastered from vinyl at 33 rpm instead of 45, this being a label printing mistake on the original vinyl issue. Hopefully a future edition will stand corrected.

I can attest it has not been corrected for the download release (even though it would take less time than the length of the song to fix it in any audio software). Here is what it is supposed to sound like:

But that's old skronk, here is some of more recent vintage. Pandora introduced me to London band Acoustic Ladyland (on one of my dance-punk channels, I think). They started out playing moderately straight jazz, but for their second album, Last Chance Disco (2005), they punked it up for an all-out skronkfest. Since Lala makes it just as easy to embed a whole album as a single song, here is Last Chance Disco in its entirety. In this case the best track is the first, "Iggy", a rollicking tune totally worthy of its namesake:

Last Chance Disco - Acoustic L...

Last Chance Disco

Acoustic Ladyland

Two Skeletons

Ben "Nostalgia 77" Lamdin's Afrobeat album, Smile by "Skeletons", is out! Here is what Lamdin has to say about it:

Skeletons is a made up band. I kid you not – it doesn't exist. These musicians never stood in the studio together, they just passed through my house or left some scraps of sound behind after sessions we were working on.  This record is like a guy, pieced together and ready for the bonfire. Some of the music here started life as commissions for a library music company, pastiches and forgeries paid for by the current vogue for a certain style of African jazz. Once I'd done a few though I couldn't stop, it was my default preoccupation, something for me once I'd finished working on other people’s albums. It was relaxation, something that didn't matter whether it worked or not. The whole LP was made like that, done in the time between recording jobs. To me the whole thing has been a self indulgent forgery, an act of mindless fun. If it sounds good then it's because I just enjoyed the music and enjoyed myself.

I can't find the original source for that quote, but every other music blogger has quoted it, so I figure I can too. Whatever its origins, it's as fine an album of neo-Afrobeat as you'll find:

Smile - Skeletons

Unbeknownst to me until I searched for Skeletons on Lala, there is another band called Skeletons, an indie-rock band from Ohio. Lala has their fifth album, Money (2008), available for listening. It is supposedly their first jazz-influenced album, and on several tracks there is some really interesting music behind the typical indie-rock vocals*. At times "The Things" sounds like it could be by Ben Lamdin's Skeletons:

The THINGS - Skeletons

Smile

Skeletons

* You may know that it takes something special to make me listen to typical indie-rock vocals.

Electric Miles roundup part 2

I was reminded by a friend that I should include Nils Petter Molvaer and Burnt Sugar (a.k.a. Burnt Sugar: The Arkestra Chamber) in my Electric Miles roundup, and rightly so. I have only recently learned of Burnt Sugar, a sprawling ensemble that averages about fourteen players per song. I like the concept, but I am not yet sold on their musicianship; specifically, they rarely seem to be in tune with each other. Here is an excerpt of "Thorazine/81" from Making Love to the Dark Ages:

Burnt Sugar - Thorazene_81

Burnt Sugar

For Nils Petter Molvaer, I'll recycle a track I posted last year, "Friction" from his then-new album Hamada:

04-Friction

Nils Petter Molvaer

I'll also recycle the song "Friction" reminded me of, Jon Hassell's "Voodoo Wind":

Discover Jon Hassell!

At the time, I wrote "For now we will ignore the shadow that Miles Davis casts over both of them." Today we acknowledge their debt to Miles by including them in this Electric Miles roundup.
 
While I'm recycling tracks from old posts, here is a scorcher from Omar Rodriguez-Lopez:

And an Electric Miles tribute track from Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood:

Miles Behind - Medeski, Scofie...

Some high-octane action jazz from Elephant9 (which they have possibly surpassed on their brand new album Walking the Nile):

01 Dodovoodoo

Elephant9

And while I have posted some Squarepusher before, I have not posted anything from his most Milesian opus, Music Is Rotted One Note, so here are the first two tracks from that.

There, together with yesterday's post, I think that's a pretty comprehensive look at the Electric Miles genre. Additional suggestions are always welcomed.

Electric Miles roundup

Where are all the Electric Miles genre bands? Well, here are a few of them. They mostly hew pretty closely to Miles' catalog. Henry Kaiser put together a band featuring Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet to for the sole purpose of covering Electric Miles in a series of concerts and concert recordings:

1-05 Improv

Henry Kaiser

Miles from India features players from Miles' bands collaborating with Indian musicians on new interpretations of classic tracks:

Miles Runs The Voodoo Down - P...

Children on the Corner is another project of Davis' former band members, playing both covers and original compositions in the Electric Miles vein:

04 - New York Girl Part II

Children On The Corner

And I stumbled upon another one just last night while listening to the latest album by the New Mastersounds (Ten Years On). The super-groovy track "Dusty Groove" has some awesome Rhodes playing by guest keyboardist JD73; a quick search turned up his album Zeroes and Ones from 2008. "Swing 'Til It Hurts" sounds like something straight off of Jon Hassell's Earthquake Island, in other words, Electric Miles with ARP strings:

Swing 'Til It Hurts - JD73

So there are a few of the Electric Miles revivalists. Who else is there?