WITH A WIFFLE BALL BAT

Monday Morning 20:
New Kingdom, "Terror Mad Visionary"
Beastie Boys, "Paul Revere"
Cream, "Badge"
Pentagram, "Broken Vows"
Ted Nugent, "Where Have You Been All My Life"
David S. Ware, "The Chase"
The Obsessed, "Lunar Womb"
Andrew Hill, "Symmetry (Alt. Take)"
Ghostface Killah, "Josephine (Feat. Trife Da God & the Wire Cottrell Band)
Napalm Death, "Worlds Apart"
Antaeus, "Gates To The Outside"
Hawkwind, "Lord Of Light"
Jimi Hendrix, "Purple Haze"
Maaya Sakamoto, "音楽"
Jimi Hendrix, "Little Miss Strange"*
Meshuggah, "Concatenation"
Black Flag, "Six Pack"
Saint Vitus, "Look Behind You"
Razor X Productions, "Kill Version"
Judas Priest, "Parental Guidance"



*my absolute least favorite Jimi Hendrix or Hendrix-related song, period. Why was it necessary to fuck up Electric Ladyland with this three-minute splat of audio dysentery?

THIS MONTH IN THE WIRE

EARTH
Hibernaculum
Southern Lord
The second release from the rejuvenated, country-fried incarnation of original sludge rockers Earth is similar in spirit to its predecessor, 2006's Hex, Or Printing In The Infernal Method. Earth here are centered around Dylan Carlson's guitar and Adrienne Davies's drums, augmented by piano, organ, trombone and occasional bass from Sunn O))) co-leader and Southern Lord label head Greg Anderson. "A Plague Of Angels," previously available on a tour-only 12", spans nearly half of the EP's 35 minutes, and the first three tracks are reworkings of old album cuts.
Carlson's simple riffs work just as well in a twanging Ry Cooder style as they do under waves of amp-frying sludge, a shift in direction which has retained the support of the doom-loving masses. The next Earth CD is rumored to feature Bill Frisell, which could either be startling or the patience-tester of all time.
The DVD that makes up the second half of this package is certainly something of an endurance test, however. A document of the band's post-Hex European tour, it offers interview footage - Carlson speaks faster than he plays, but not by much - some performance clips and lots of highways seen through rain-streaked windshields. The documentary reflects the music it depicts - a long journey to a melancholy destination - but intertia gives the journey a magnetic pull and eventually something between resignation and fascination sets in.

DAVID TORN
Prezens
ECM
Guitarist, composer and producer David Torn is a master of both technology and his instrument. This album finds him fronting a pre-existing group: Tim Berne's Hard Cell (with Berne on alto sax, keyboardist Craig Taborn, and drummer Tom Rainey). There's a longstanding friendship and musical relationship at work here - Torn has produced, mixed or mastered several albums for Berne's various ensembles.
All four players are working in extremely tight mental sync, at least in the parts where you can hear what was actually being played. The rest of the time, Torn performs radical reconstructive surgery on the music, which emerges like a man with a third leg and extra arms in the middle of his back who still manages to dance like Fred Astaire.
The opening cut, "Ak," is a laptop-era blues, with Torn chunking out wiry, Steve Cropper-esque lines before erupting in a manner similar to Gary Smith's "stereo guitar" pieces, or Rene Akhan's work with Burnt Sugar. For most of the album, though, he plays in a subdued, Bill Frisell-like style, while the music is relentlessly shredded, chittering and clicking away in a mass of glitches and whooshes. Passages Torn likes are looped, stuttered and layered; aside from a few brilliant, unaltered solos from Berne, the group performance is simply fodder for the later electronic shredding. But bravo to Torn for getting his hands dirty.

LEARNING LATIN, PT. 9

I haven't posted a new Learning Latin entry in awhile, but...well, I've been busy with jazz (got an obit for Andrew Hill running in the Village Voice I think next week) and metal (interviewed French doom metal band Monarch for Metal Maniacs magazine) and other, non-Fania Latin discs, too. I got three amazing compilations in the mail recently: New York Latin Hustle!, a typically great 2CD set on Soul Jazz; ¡Gozalo!: Bugalu Tropical Vol. 1, a terrific pile-up of rare Peruvian tracks mixing bugalu, jazz, psychedelic rock and more, all from the late ’60s, on Vampisoul; and Colombia!, a compilation of tracks from that country’s Discos Fuentes label, on Soundways. (The relentless deployment of exclamation marks in all these album titles might seem silly, unless you’ve actually heard the records.) Plus putting together one more issue of Global Rhythm...But anyway, I finally had some time to return to this project this morning, on a leisurely walk around town, and based on advice from someone who knows way more about salsa than me, I picked this album off the pile.

Ismael Rivera's got a great voice. He kind of makes me think he could be Tego Calderón's uncle or something; they've got similar vocal timbre and share a thick Puerto Rican accent, though Rivera's about 1000x more comprehensible than Tego - I can pick out whole lines of lyrics on this album, whereas El Subestimado is pretty much a brick wall of macho mumbling. The band on this record is tight, without seeming tense or jumpy. The relatively small horn section (one trumpet, one trombone, one saxophone) doesn't have the gleaming blare of some of the other records I've been listening to, offering more of a jazzy, blurry warmth, without sacrificing the punch that salsa depends on. The guy playing the tres is really good, too; not as jagged as the guy I called out earlier on the Celia Cruz et al. disc, but still cutting right through the group sound with that weird barbed-wire jangle that only that instrument seems to produce. (Avant-jazz guitarist Joe Morris should get himself one of those; he could do amazing things with that sound, I bet.) Anyway, this album is the sound of a guy completely at peace with himself and his style. He doesn't seem like a performer - you never hear him sweating, or striving to convince you, the listener, of something he's not convinced of himself. He's got a kind of...proletarian mixture of gruffness and placid joy to his voice that's really captivating. He's not going over the top, but he's not talk-singing either. I guess I'd compare him to a saxophonist like Hank Mobley, a guy who was regarded in his time as kind of middle-of-the-road and even decried as bland by folks who wanted more fire 'n' fury from jazz, but whose work stands up incredibly well 40 or even 50 years later. I could listen to Hank Mobley all day, and this album makes me feel the same way about Ismael Rivera.

TMHC

THE HIGHLIGHT OF TODAY'S MAILBAG

Lou Reed, Hudson River Wind Meditations (Sounds True). The sticker on the cover says "Soundscapes For Meditation, Bodywork, and T'ai Chi." The quote on the back of the CD says "I first composed this music for myself as an adjunct to meditation, Tai Chi, bodywork, and as music to play in the background of life - to replace the everyday cacophony with new and ordered sounds of an unpredictable nature. New sounds freed from preconception...I hope you find as much use for this music as I have in both writing and listening to it and exploring inner spaces. - Lou Reed, NYC, October 2006"

So, basically, Metal Machine Music II.