FRANKLIN SOULTS

Interview: Courtney Taylor-Taylor

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:58:42 GMT

Mission: control freak
In the 2004 documentary DiG! , the Dandy Warhols’ Courtney Taylor-Taylor reacts to the musical criticism of a Capitol Records executive by scoffing, “I sneeze and hits come out!”

In the 2004 documentary DiG!, the Dandy Warhols’ Courtney Taylor-Taylor reacts to the musical criticism of a Capitol Records executive by scoffing, “I sneeze and hits come out!” Touring Europe in that movie, the Portland (Oregon) four-piece lived up to his offhandedly clever boast by living up to their offhandedly clever name, making money and winning fans with equal parts ironic conceptual panache and bald pop moves.

Now it’s four years later, and the singer/songwriter/producer has reacted to the new economic relations in music by leaving Capitol to form the Dandy Warhols’ own label, World’s Fair. This Tuesday, the band come to the Wilbur Theatre to promote their first album on the new label, Earth to the Dandy Warhols.

The Dandy Warhols started as a guitar band often compared to the Velvet Underground, then moved through an ’80s phase with Welcome to the Monkey House [produced with Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes]. Now for two albums your music has been spacy, drony, reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine, maybe early Jesus and Mary Chain. Are you conscious of moving through music history decade by decade?
Only in retrospect. When we are working, we tend toward oblivion, both aurally and emotionally. Well, oblivion, but while avoiding current trends in mixing or production style. It’s been a chore avoiding all the current ’80s trends.

What happened with Capitol Records?
We had to get free. The last regime we had, there was meddling with our trip in a huge way: remixing our music without us and “fixing” photos by making us tan and crap like that. Between that and the movie DiG! we were put into the world looking like a band that I don’t think I really like very much. The records are lovely, but everything else grosses me out. Even myself. Especially in interviews. I was very confused by the pressure to be a celebrity, and I ended up being quite a little phony. . . . Really, the last five years have been the most depressing time of my life. For my own part I needed a drastic change.

Why did you call the new album Earth to the Dandy Warhols?
We see a lot of the world and it shows up in our music. This was part of it, and the other part is that we are often regarded as really “out there” or just plain fucked in the head. This strikes me as ridiculous, and being a person who loves language, having a phrase with two or more meanings usually trumps those without. Add even a tiny bit of irony and I find it album-title worthy.

Wussy

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:24:47 GMT

Left for Dead | Shake It
Wussy’s 2005 debut, Funeral Dress (also Shake It), was loved wherever it was reviewed, but it wasn’t reviewed much.

Bands of Gypsy

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 18:55:58 GMT

Gogol Bordello and Balkan Beat Box
The explosion of neo-Gypsy-hybrid music started, you might say, with a cleverly worded flyer spied years ago by Eugene Hütz.

BALKAN BEAT BOX: Nu-Med is a transnational jazz-dance album, rooted in hip-hop beats and DJ electronics.

The explosion of neo-Gypsy-hybrid music — one that hits Boston twice in the span of eight days in early October — started, you might say, with a cleverly worded flyer spied years ago by Eugene Hütz. As hordes of adventurous music fans from Kiev to Cleveland have learned, this Ukrainian-bred singer/guitarist/songwriter is the leader of the neo-Gypsy scene’s first and biggest band, Gogol Bordello, a multi-ethnic, multi-talented group of Brooklyn-based bombers who’ll drop their payload at the Roxy on Thursday October 11.

Of course, if Hütz sparked the neo-Gypsy explosion, it had been primed over decades by displaced artists joining their hopes and pride, their sadness and anger, to the creolized culture of the world’s greatest immigrant sanctuary, New York City. That includes not only the self-styled “Gypsy punks” in Gogol Bordello but also the wandering Jews at the core of the multi-ethnic Balkan Beat Box. This international musical kibbutz is a far different Gypsy-scene success story, connecting Gypsy-style music to its rich Middle Eastern heritage — as they’ll demonstrate when they transmogrify Gypsy punk into Mediterranean funk at Harpers Ferry this Wednesday, October 3.

In a way, though, even this story comes down to that flyer. “I saw a flyer that said ‘East Meets East,’ ” says the thickly accented Hütz over the phone. “It was a Hungarian and Ukrainian musicians’ night on the Lower East Side, and some kind of poetry reading along with that. So I just called the number on the flyer and said, ‘You gotta get me in, because I’m from the East!’ And they were like, ‘What the fuck? Did you just fall down from the moon?’ ”

Not far from it, actually. The 20-year-old budding musician moved to New York from Burlington, Vermont, where he had landed with his family in 1992, six years after they’d fled the Chernobyl disaster. Hütz arrived in New York with little more than his guitar, and he spent his first night sleeping under the boardwalk in Brighton Beach. But on seeing the “East Meets East” flyer, he managed to persuade the phone handler at the club, the Sidewalk Café, to book him for 10 minutes as “the opening for the opening act.” There he played music that joined his early love of Parliament-Funkadelic, Queen, and Jimi Hendrix to his grandmother’s traditional Roma music and to his devotion to second-generation hardcore punk from Fugazi to the Cro-Mags.

Outer limits

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:41:23 GMT

The return of Apples in Stereo
Sooner or later, most of us come to need at least some support in the mental world as well as the physical.

VIDEO: Apples in Stereo, "Energy"

Sooner or later, most of us come to need at least some support in the mental world as well as the physical, leaning on others to supply not just firm shoulders but also forgotten words. Unlike most mortals, however, some ripened artists have worked this debilitation into their deliberate personal style — even some artists who play rock and roll, a young person’s art form no matter how old it gets. Robert Schneider, the leader of Apples in Stereo (who play the Middle East downstairs this Monday), does it so well, he could turn “old” into the new “young.” On the group’s New Magnetic Wonder (Yep Roc/Simian), the 36-year-old indie-rock vet leans on everything that has ever rocked his world, from old friends to older musical forms, somehow melding it all into the most sustained set of joyous rock and roll I’ve heard this year.

It sounds like the end of a midlife crisis, one that Schneider’s pudgy, balding looks have always suggested but that his hyperactive singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer life has always belied. Schneider may have sensed some impending crisis in 2002, as he stripped back the Apples’ trademark neo-psychedelic wall-of-pop on Velocity of Sound (SpinArt), a rough, low-key CD that received mixed reviews. The following year, Schneider and Apples in Stereo drummer Hilarie Sidney divorced. In 2006, it was announced that Sidney had left the band. (She wrote and sings lead on two New Magnetic numbers.) Somewhere between these two events, the Apples also parted ways with their label of 10 years, SpinArt.

But these years were also a time of regeneration. In 2003, Schneider met actor and fellow music geek Elijah Wood, and the one-time Hobbit eventually made New Magnetic Wonder the first release on his new Simian label. There were also various side projects, like the band Ulysses, and ambitious recording sessions, some implementing “non-Pythagorean scales” that Schneider devised from his own mathematical algorithm, others working a 96-track digital recording program so hard that the studio’s computers kept crashing. On the face of it, these efforts mark a return to the Apples’ obvious namesake (I’m talking Lennon and McCartney rather than Steve Jobs) with the kind of woozy late-’60s experimentation that put Schneider on the indie-rock map as the founder of the Elephant 6 collective.

Gabel, Gabel, hey!

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:44:53 GMT

Against Me!’s new wave of political punk
New Wave ’s opening title track makes as much of its referential moniker as the Clash did of the phrase “London Calling.”

VIDEO: Against Me!, "White People for Peace"

Punks find their inner Americana: The altered aesthetic of punks playing folk. By Jon Meyer

Sire Records founder Seymour Stein helped expand punk into “new wave” by signing acts like Talking Heads and the Ramones, so no surprise he recently wanted to hear something from his old label’s hottest new release, New Wave, the major-label debut of a leftist punk quartet from Gainesville, Florida. As Against Me! founder, songwriter, and band singer Tom Gabel told Spin, “Afterward, he [Stein] was kind of quiet. Then he says, ‘Well, Johnny Ramone would have either loved it or hated it.’ Then he got up and left.”

First Johnny’s love-or-hate, then the world’s — it seems that’s Against Me!’s goal. New Wave’s opening title track makes as much of its referential moniker as the Clash did of the phrase “London Calling.” With the tolling of a bell, a thin rhythm guitar is joined by a quick rolling wall of clean, dense anthem rock, over which Gabel hoists himself to “ride the crest of a new wave” and rally a generation to “wash these shores away,” sounding as stirringly confident as Joe Strummer on the Clash’s 1980 manifesto.

There are differences: in contrast to Strummer, so loose and triumphant, Gabel affects a drill sergeant’s bark and howl, a delivery more in tune with Strummer’s circa-’77 cockney snarl or Joey Ramone’s nasal “Hey Ho!” on the Ramones’ 1976 debut. It’s a divisive subcultural marker, a sign of youth whose emotive overkill, like it or not, has as much to do with emo as with punk. But unlike all too many late-emo neo-punk discs, the nine songs that follow “New Wave” are almost as waste-free and commanding as the lucky 13 that follow “Blitzkrieg Bop” on Ramones or “Janie Jones” on The Clash. The Ramones would spend the better part of their long career wondering why the world wouldn’t take the delicious bait; the Clash opened up, traipsing the world for radical sounds before fatefully daring to combat rock on its home turf. As befits Gabel’s principled radicalism and these very different times, Against Me! search for a storied third way, sounding more defiantly punk — perhaps more stereotypically punk — even as they reach out to the rock mainstream.

New kids on the rock

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:57:59 GMT

The Click Five struggle with the new world disorder
Back on June 20, three tour buses were lined up like impregnable traveling fortresses behind the House of Blues in Cleveland.

VIDEO: The Click Five, "Jenny"

Back on June 20, three tour buses were lined up like impregnable traveling fortresses behind the House of Blues in Cleveland. All were unattended, but the shiniest two were locked, with shades drawn and front doors and windows stuffed with pillows. In one of these two, I assumed, I was to meet the Click Five, a teen-targeted power-pop band comprising five former Berklee College of Music students. With worldwide tours and a Top 20 debut album under their tightly buckled belts, the Click Five, who return to Boston to play a free lunchtime concert at the Prudential Center next Thursday, were in Cleveland as part of a pre-release tour for their second Atlantic Records album, Modern Minds and Pastimes, which came out on June 26. I knocked at the two shiny buses; no answer. I didn’t hold out much hope as I tried the third — it was far less pristine, with unblocked windows and an unlocked door. But when I opened it, I was greeted by the Click Five.

The other buses, it turned out, were for Pink Martini, a world-music/lounge act on the Portland (Oregon) independent Heinz Records. Pink Martini have sold well over a million CDs — three times the Click Five’s total, despite the help of MTV’s TRL, spots on Ashlee Simpson and Backstreet Boys tours (not to mention the JC Penny “Rock Your Prom” Fashion Show), Click Five lunchboxes and hair products (no joke), and “high priority” backing by the once mighty Atlantic Records. The cutesy-quirky Pink Martini were playing the House of Blues’ main stage, of course; the mainstream-ready Click Five were booked into a side room. Welcome, once more, to our millennium’s music-scene-scrambling new world disorder.

Said disorder could also explain why five competent Berklee musicians would stoop to conquer the much derided teenage-girl audience. Of course, there are other explanations. “We all wanted to wear tight pants and pick up chicks,” quips the group’s new lead singer, Kyle Patrick, to the laughter of everyone on the bus. That includes the two “Cleveland friends” who are there when I arrive, sporting skimpy party dresses almost as satiny as their bronzed legs.

“I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep doing the composition thing or if I secretly really, really did love pop music,” says effusive keyboard player Ben Romans, a little less glibly. “I was a nerd, yeah. But that’s why, you see, Berklee wound up saving me, because if I didn’t do music . . . I would be a mess, still not getting laid, you know what I mean? It would be terrible.”

Floating on

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:30:24 GMT

Modest Mouse survive their own shipwreck
Like so many indie-rockers raised in the shadow of Northwestern clouds Isaac Brock knows a thing or two about gray skies.

GOOD NEWS: We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank is the band’s most miraculous album yet simply because it’s so normal.

Like so many indie-rockers raised in the shadow of Northwestern clouds — or, for that matter, like so many artists raised in the shadow of the 20th century — Isaac Brock knows a thing or two about gray skies. But the Modest Mouse frontman also knows the somewhat forgotten art of backlighting those clouds with streaks of sunlight. So on the 2004 album Good News for People Who Love Bad News (Epic), Brock and his three mates included a song where they backed their car into a cop car and the cop just drove off because sometimes we just “Float On” past impending doom. It was a perfect(ly) Modest moment, romantic and dramatic but vocally unkempt, even a little unhinged, like life itself. Then something surprising happened: this temporary reprieve from the bad news sold like the Good News of the Bible.

Actually, “surprising” is an understatement — the cops didn’t just drive off, they dropped a bundle of unmarked bills from the bank robber they’d just caught. Now 31, Brock has been making music with Modest Mouse since he was 14 and living in a shed behind his folks’ trailer in the Seattle-area sticks. In 1997, the band released The Lonesome Crowded West (Up), “a high watermark of ’90s indie rock,” as Spin recently put it, and that led to yet another major-label bidding war for a Seattle-area indie outfit. In 2000, when everything “alt” had dried into a Puddle of Mudd, Modest Mouse finally released their major-label debut, The Moon and Antarctica (Epic), a sprawling, arty album whose commercial prospects were as dark as Brock’s writing. “I really wanted to have the chance to make just crazier albums, you know, much to the chagrin of Epic,” Brock said when I interviewed him during the The Moon and Antarctica tour. “Probably the next one is going to be really fucking odd, and probably completely unsellable, which suggests what kind of writing we’ve been doing lately. Maybe not completely unsellable, but I definitely haven’t been writing any Top 40 songs, you know? Thong! Thonga-thonga thong! I’m working on it.”

Elixir of youth

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:19:32 GMT

Fountains of Wayne push their expiration date
After 11 seesaw years in the pop music marketplace, Fountains of Wayne return on a fourth studio album as an unparalleled American pop-rock phenomenon.

ANOMIE BROTHERS: The price of parody is distance.

After 11 seesaw years in the pop music marketplace, Fountains of Wayne return on a fourth studio album and third label as an unparalleled American pop-rock phenomenon. The quartet’s music is a golden mean of pop-rock history, as homy and basic as meatloaf made from leftovers (or leftover Meatloaf). But the songs are conceived as sly, terse, open-ended portraits of average Joes and Janes whose lives might be nourished by the same musical leftovers; it’s a black-comic gravy that’s almost as rarefied as the elixir of the Fountain of Youth.

“You know, there’s been so many zillions of records made, the hardest thing to do is figure out something that doesn’t quite sound like anybody else, even though it sounds like it’s maybe influenced by lots of people,” says group co-founder Adam Schlesinger when I reach him by phone at his Manhattan home. “It’s like, you might hear a song that reminds you of, whatever, whether it’s the Doobie Brothers or the Cars or Blondie or the Beach Boys, but you know, maybe we’re singing something slightly different from what you would expect with that kind of musical bed.”

Which is why the first time the chorus kicks in on “Someone To Love,” the bouncy lead single off Traffic and Weather (due this Tuesday on Virgin), something seems slightly wrong — that is, everything is too right. Over a sweet and bouncy dance-rock beat, the verses tell the story of two lonely strangers, Seth Shapiro and Beth Mackenzie (he listens to Coldplay, she watches The King of Queens), but the chorus smoothes it out with the pat hope that “One of these nights/You might find someone to love.” Sure, it fits the music’s cheesy synth-pop brightness to a T, but that’s exactly the problem — it makes the song predictable, campy, as disposable as Eiffel 65’s Italo-disco hit “Blue (Da Ba Dee),” which it vaguely recalls.

It’s not till the last verse that Schlesinger and his mates pull off their “slight difference,” bringing Seth and Beth together in the pouring rain as they try to hail taxis: “Beth Mackenzie sees one just up ahead/She cuts in front of him and leaves him for dead.” The music stops on a drumbeat, the rain softly pours, and then the chirpy synths and “uh uh yeah” background vocals swoop back in for the coda. And suddenly, this familiar musical bed seems as cold and alien as Beth and Seth are to each other.

K-OS

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:26:19 GMT

Atlantis: Hymns for Disco | Virgin
In American hip-hop, nice guys don’t just finish last — they’re lucky to leave the starting gate.

Size matters

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:50:53 GMT

The Shins tend to a growing fan base
The Shins’ third album, Wincing the Night Away (Sub Pop), is as good as any rational mortal should expect an indie-pop album to be in the winter of 2007. The Shins, "Phantom Limb" (mp3)

TOO POPULAR?: “You’re finally golden, boy,” James Mercer sings, “perched on the handlebars of a blind man’s bike.

The Shins’ third album, Wincing the Night Away (Sub Pop), is as good as any rational mortal should expect an indie-pop album to be in the winter of 2007. For the sizable fan base of this Portland-via-Albuquerque band, however, that summation is damning with fine praise. In 2003, singer-songwriter James Mercer defied all expectations on the Shins’ second album, Chutes Too Narrow (Sub Pop), laying out 11 tuneful, sensitive, yet often hard-biting songs with a delicate oddness that seemed to transcend rationality as it plumbed his youthful, lonely, romantic alienation to the depths of mortality itself. As almost every review of the new album has noted, the following year Natalie Portman both defined that achievement and won Mercer his huge audience in the surprise hit Garden State. In a crucial scene, she passed her headphones to writer/director/main character Zach Braff as the soundtrack played “New Slang,” from the Shins’ 2001 debut, Oh! Inverted World (Sub Pop). “You’ve got to hear this one song,” exclaimed the bright-eyed object of every lonely alienated romantic boy’s dreams. “It’ll change your life, I swear.”

For me, the change had already happened, but it took more than the iconic passing of the iPod earpieces. I spent months unpeeling the layers of Chutes Too Narrow to get at why a friend and unflappable fellow critic gave the album a rare A-plus. By the time I’d gotten to the core of my pleasure, I’d discarded all my doubts. Personally, I didn’t like Garden State much at all. (And I wouldn’t miss the lovely Ms. Portman for a second if I never saw her perfect eyebrows again.) Yet I’d rank Chutes Too Narrow and the Postal Service’s Give Up (also released by Sub Pop in 2003) and Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise (Asthmatic Kitty, 2005) as the greatest indie-pop albums I’ve heard in this strange decade, a time where vague phrases like “indie pop” are damning by oxymoron.

Vietnam

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 23:14:44 GMT

Vietnam | Kemado
“We just wanted a name that had power,” says co-founder Michael Gerner in Rolling Stone.

Willie Nelson

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 17:20:01 GMT

Songbird | Lost Highway
At a secure 73, Willie Nelson’s not about to change to please a hot young alt-country buck, his taut touring band, or the sizeable audience of hipsters they might bring along with them.

Veruca Salt

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 22:32:37 GMT

IV | Sympathy for the Record Industry
If the alt-rock/grunge revival has to begin — and it does, sooner or later — both simple justice and looping irony would be served if it began here.

The Hold Steady

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 19:29:39 GMT

Boys And Girls In America | Vagrant
Like many of America’s smartest rock bands — from Fountains of Wayne to the Drive-By Truckers — this Minneapolis-to-Brooklyn quintet are an anomaly. The Hold Steady, "Killer Parties Remix"

JeknowwotI’msayin?

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 14:19:49 GMT

Lady Sovereign sets her sights on the US
“People have this kind of problem with me,” says Lady Sovereign over the phone from her London home. “They think they know me, and they don’t know me — and it’s dis gustin ’.” Lady Sovereign, "Gatheration" (mp3)

TEEN TAUNTS: “If you love me, then thank you/If you hate me, then fuck you,” Sov chants on the electro banger “Love Me or Hate Me.”

“People have this kind of problem with me,” says Lady Sovereign over the phone from her London home. “They think they know me, and they don’t know me — and it’s disgustin’.”

Oddly enough, that’s the adjective jealous wanna-bes might use to describe this British 20-year-old’s meteoric rise. A few years ago, the one-time Louise Hartman was a high-school dropout from a suburban London housing project selling doughnuts. But then she hooked up with DJ Medasyn and took on the name Lady Sovereign (Lady Sov, or just Sov, for short), and soon she was performing with renowned British rappers the Streets and Dizzee Rascal, and electronic dance music’s celebrated Basement Jaxx were asking whether they could produce a song. Then about a year ago she was invited to freestyle before Def Jam’s head honcho, Jay-Z, and it’s reported that she signed to his label on the spot.

Yet even now, as she prepares to headline at the Paradise next Thursday (October 26), in advance of the Halloween release of her Def Jam debut, Public Warning, Sovereign remains an outsider. In the commercial rap game where Def Jam and Jay-Z rule, she’s a novelty, not just British but female (obviously) and white (not so obvious, especially if you hear her before you see her). Equally important, this major-label rookie was never accepted as a full-fledged player on her erstwhile farm team, the underground London rap scene that invented grime. She knows it too. When I suggest she’s the first grime artist to be signed directly to a major US hip-hop label, she protests, “But I’m not a grime artist!”

That kind of disavowal is not supposed to happen. From the Beatles to the Sex Pistols, successful English acts define their own sizzling scenes first. And grime isn’t just sizzling; it’s the most captivating hip-hop genre ever to ricochet back to America. Although it’s a direct descendant of British electronic dance styles (2step and UK garage), it resembles New Orleans bounce and Atlanta crunk, only knocked off-kilter by dancehall rhythms and black British accents rooted in West Indian patois, and often sped up to double time, if not faster. Where crunk swaggers with a bully’s insolence, grime sprays and staggers with a contender’s anxious fury.

No success like failure

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:41:04 GMT

The Roots and OutKast step into the future
The wild, idle guessing game over the Roots’ Game Theory and OutKast’s Idlewild is finished.

BLEAKNESS: The Roots forgo crossover dreams for ghetto solidarity.

The wild, idle guessing game over the Roots’ Game Theory (Def Jam) and OutKast’s Idlewild (LaFace/Zomba) is finished. Although OutKast are the biggest, most critically beloved duo in hip-hop, their first new CD in three years got mixed reviews and dropped out of the Top 20 within four weeks, and the Idlewild Hollywood movie, to which the album is the erstwhile soundtrack, fared even worse. Despite massive pre-release publicity, this quasi-musical — starring Andre “3000” Benjamin and Antwon “Big Boi” Patton as musicians in a 1930s nightclub in the fictional town of Idlewild, Georgia — had opening-weekend receipts of around $12 million. That was about the same garnered by End of the Spear, a Christian parable released in January’s doldrums and marketed mostly to Mormons.

Less was expected of the Roots, especially since their expensive 2004 Geffen one-off, The Tipping Point, was a poppish gambit that did less than nothing to break the group out of the bohemian hip-hop underground. Yet the veteran Philadelphia band (with real live instruments!) were personally signed to their new label, Def Jam, by head honcho Jay-Z. It raised hopes that Game Theory might return them to the creative and commercial apex they had reached on their first label, MCA, when consecutive landmarks Things Fall Apart and Phrenology went gold in 1999 and 2002. But though the reviews have been strong, sales have not. In its first three weeks of release, Game Theory plummeted from #9 to #53 on the Billboard 200, 10 spots below the not-so-landmark Kidz Bop Ten, which has been on the chart twice as long.

These commercial shortfalls matter because, as anyone reading this knows, OutKast and the Roots are hip-hop leaders as much as hip-hop artists. Grounded by the somber, introverted flow of Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, the Roots became a central force in the rebirth of hip-hop’s alternative subculture in the late ’90s, trading alt-rap’s Daisy Age lightness for a grim “realness” that could hold its own against any gangsta brutality. Atlanta’s OutKast went even higher. Although they were originally a part of gangsta’s Southern campaign, they mingled their speedy, druggy boasts with an organic, expansive attitude and musicality reminiscent of prime Prince and George Clinton’s P-Funk heyday, transcending their base without alienating it.

Chris Knight

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:35:01 GMT

Enough Rope | Emergent/92E
Chris Knight began writing this album aiming for a hit on country radio, the only mass arena left for his blend of 1970s-’80s rock, folk, and country.

Young, gifted, and blonde

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 12:20:38 GMT

Christina Aguilera stripped down to basics
What starts as a tribute to ‘Aretha and Miles’ ends as a far more loving tribute to Christina Aguilera’s first and greatest inspiration, Christina Aguilera.

SOLD!: The easy explanation for Aguilera’s success starts with simple marketing and deteriorates into cynicism.

If Christina Aguilera’s new album is her idea of getting Back to Basics (RCA/BMG), what does this pop princess do when she when she wants to get fancy? It boggles the imagination. As this executive producer, principal songwriter, and back-to-blonde bombshell explains in the package’s “Back to Basics Bonus Video,” her album is a tribute to the “blues, jazz, and soul artists” whom she’s loved since she was a little girl, divided into two CDs. The first features 13 hip-hop-inflected updates of classic soul styles, produced primarily by DJ Premier, of hip-hop’s long-running and deeply respected duo Gang Starr; the second rummages among styles even older, from boogie-woogie to big-mama blues, in nine tracks produced and co-written by Linda Perry, the former 4 Non Blondes alt-rocker who’s recently helped shape the careers of tween-pop sensations from Pink to Aguilera herself.

Of course, this tribute to R&B from the late 1930s to the early 1970s is what the former “Xtina” means by “the basics.” But you also get oh so much more. The first disc does indeed feature many numbers in which Christina deep-throats soul styles that recall Little Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, and, uh, Aretha Franklin. But then, midway, she detours into “Oh Mother,” a minor-key contemporary pop ballad recalling the hard times she and her mom went through at the hands of Christina’s abusive dad; that’s followed by “F.U.S.S.,” a hip-hop dis to former producer Scott Storch. She also sidesteps her retro program for “Still Dirrty,” a staccato hip-hop strut that defends her infamous single and video “Dirrty,” and a couple of big, shapeless, crossover R&B ballads that recall her most pernicious musical inspiration, Mariah Carey. And she closes with “Thank You (Dedicated to Fans),” in which DJ Premier remixes snatches from Christina’s first hit, the 1999 teen-pop smash “Genie in a Bottle,” with telephone messages from members of her official fan club. (“My name is Jessica Cavanaugh. I just wanted to let you know that you are truly one of the best artists that I have ever come across.”) What starts as a tribute to “Aretha and Miles” ends as a far more loving tribute to Christina Aguilera’s first and greatest inspiration, Christina Aguilera.

Jurassic 5

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 21:29:25 GMT

Feedback | Interscope
Major-label “positive” rappers like this decade-old crew have defended the old school like schoolmarms upholding the five principles of hip-hop as if they were as much fun as the three R’s. Jurassic 5, "Work It Out" feat. Dave Matthews Band (Quicktime)

Oh brother, where alt thou?

FRANKLIN SOULTS — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:05:52 GMT

A popular cult genre searches for its lost highway
In the summer of 1995, Grant Alden was documenting “the tail end of the grunge years” as managing editor of a Seattle music weekly, the Rocket . Alejandro Escovedo, "Broken Bottle" (mp3 via MySpace) Drive-By Truckers, "Feb. 14" (mp3 via MySpace)

ON THE RISE: The Drive-By Truckers’ string of Southern-rock-steeped releases has amassed fans as steadily as accolades.

In the summer of 1995, Grant Alden was documenting “the tail end of the grunge years” as managing editor of a Seattle music weekly, the Rocket. Then in the mail came a compilation by Chicago’s brand new Bloodshot Records that included “She Took a Lot of Pills (And Died),” a cynical hillbilly romp by oddball bluegrass vet Robbie Fulks. As Alden explains by phone from his current home in eastern Kentucky, “I played it all day, every day, at high volume, for a week at a time.”

By that fall, Alden and business partner Peter Blackstock had published the first 2000 copies of No Depression magazine. Its title referred to the 1990 debut by Uncle Tupelo, a band who symbolized the hopes of a scene that No Depression named in its tag line: “The alternative-country (whatever that is) magazine.”

Eleven years later, “alt-country” is an industry commonplace, Bloodshot has released some 135 discs, and No Depression has grown from a 32-page quarterly into a 128-page bi-monthly with a circulation of 34,000. As for Robbie Fulks, last year he released his best album yet, Georgia Hard (Yep Roc), finally balancing his joky/sneering side with his talent for writing first-rate country songs.

Even so, all’s not well down on the alt-country farm. A few weeks ago, I went to see an upbeat Fulks perform before an audience that was significantly downsized from years past and made the 43-year-old look young by comparison. More troublesome, the singer’s quips about both mainstream Nashville and pop suggested the double bind that has caused some major alt-country acts to leave the fold, like Wilco, Uncle Tupelo’s far more popular descendant, or just fold up, like the Jayhawks, whose sales never matched their reputation. On July 16, the Sunday New York Times ran the feature “Recalling the Twang That Was Alt-Country.” As the article noted, No Depression has dropped its “alt-country” tag for something much vaguer: “Surveying the past, present and future of American music.”

“Let me explain about ‘alt-country,’ ” says Alden. “We chose the phrase because it was funny. Nobody ever got that part of it. . . . And then of course it became a marketing tool. And then it became a tool of derision.” He blames that derision on the late-’90s major-label consolidation that cost alt-country acts their star shot, the impatience of rock musicians who never had the chops to master country, and the artists’ natural resistance to being typecast, “and so you end up with Wilco sounding like Radiohead.”