RL Burnside
A Bothered Mind
FAT POSSUM
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A Bothered Mind opens with the heaviest riff you'll hear all year, a Caterpillar-tracked live recording that churns majestically for about half a minute before fading out. Halfway through, a surly voice asserts: "I do what I want!" And you can believe it: although RL Burnside is nearer 80 than 70, you wouldn't want to cross him. There he is, in the inside photo, taking a leak at the roadside, with disdain for politeness, and the brazen confidence of the true survivor.
The later stages of RL's career bear out his claim to do whatever he wants. Few bluesmen of any age have demonstrated his kind of artistic freedom, most notably in the Theremin-laced blues squall of his collaboration with the Blues Explosion on 1996's A Ass Pocket of Whiskey [sic]. With A Bothered Mind the process is partly retrospective: new tracks, some involving guests such as Kid Rock and the rapper Lyrics Born, rub shoulders with older pieces refurbished by Martin Tino Gross, who brings a modern lustre to Burnside's classic boogie stylings.
The most impressive such exercise is "Shake 'em on Down", a twitchy, powerful, techno-blues groove, akin to ZZ Top's Eliminator period in the way it yokes authentic blues feeling to new technology, with RL's sampled vocal soundbites echoing through a funky clavinet riff laced with slide guitar. "Goin' Down South" is a similarly propulsive funk-blues devised by Lyrics Born, with the rapper's trenchant invitation to the dance riding a strutting bassline and waspish guitar hook, and another haunting soundbite hook from Burnside adding depth and mystery. Elsewhere, a John Lee Hooker- esque boogie provides the rapper with a brusque backdrop for a loping rap on "Someday Baby".
Kid Rock adds his brash persona to "My Name Is Robert Too", but still can't compete with RL's commanding presence. For all his snotty bravado, the young punk carries no convincing threat, while Burnside's eerie murder ballads, such as "See What By Baby Done" [sic], and penitentiary blues such as "Bird Without a Feather" have the matter-of-factness of truth filtered through time. And who'd dare argue with the clearly inebriated soul roaring profanities through "Stole My Chick"?
As it turns out, the song is less about sexual rage than an extension of an old rural blues theme, Burnside apparently referring to one of his chickens - although this may be purely metaphorical. The blues is like that, a deep, rich seam of versatile imagery and turbulent emotions; but too often, aficionados seek to restrict its presentation to some notion of purity that the genre's pioneers would have scoffed at. And as A Bothered Mind shows, the blues is often at its most compelling when infecting modern forms and methods with those images and emotions.
William Shatner
Has Been
SHOUT! FACTORY
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There's a trend for young(ish) stylish stars such as Morrissey and Jarvis and Polly to lavish their street cred upon some older cultural icon such as Nancy or Sandie or Marianne. At least with William Shatner, the kitsch element is squarely upfront. Or so you'd think. But ironically, while those other collaborations mostly fail to persuade us of the deeper artistic merits of some 1960s kitsch popster, one's low expectations for Has Been are blind-sided by the appealing qualities of Shatner's work with Ben Folds, which is genuinely moving in its own way. It starts shakily, with a version of "Common People" done in the Captain's notorious "Lucy in the Sky" style; but thereafter, the pair settle into a series of enjoyable music-and-poetry pieces that recall the experiments of Charlie Mingus and Ken Nordine. Folds' settings range from cod-cowboy to cool jazz, gospel to R&B; and although Shatner's no Larkin or Eliot, his poetry does share a similarly world-weary mindset, leavened with a self- deprecating humour. In "It Hasn't Happened Yet", he's an old man lamenting the failures of his life; and in "Familiar Love", a tired roue thankful for the familiarity of true love. Best of all is his duet with Henry Rollins, ranting amusing grumpy-old-git complaints over Folds' explosive jazz bricolage. It's poetry, Jim, but not as we know it.
Stina Nordenstam
The World is Saved
V2
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Stina Nordenstam is the kind of pop musician who bares all emotionally in her songs, yet always seems to be trying to avoid contact. It's there in the way she looks away from the camera in all but one of the sleeve photos, and it's there in many of the songs on The World is Saved, which deal mostly in crumbling relationships and futile attempts to make human connections. The break-up songs are all passive-aggressive in tone, the desire to make a clean break scuppered by shyness or an equally powerful desire to avoid confrontation. "You're safer with me here, and you there," she observes in "Winter Killing", the link broken at distance rather than face to face. Stina's always had a half-empty attitude, and even the few shafts of light that break through the emotional shadows in the album are tempered by her pessimism. In "From Cayman Islands with Love", she is "the only one around I know who can't stand the heat", while the bright new day heralded by the strings of "The Morning Belongs to the Night" inevitably gives way to dusk and darkness. Just add penumbral strings and crepuscular woodwind behind scratchy percussion and guitar, with only marimba or vibes bringing a touch of lightness. Interesting, but you wouldn't want to attend her parties.
Paul Westerberg
Folker
VAGRANT
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Recorded entirely solo in his basement, Folker is described by Westerberg as a sort of acoustic rock'n'roll, akin to the light but punchy style Rod Stewart devised for his early solo albums. Westerberg has always had a soft spot for folk music - one of The Replacements' albums was called Hootenanny - and here the jangling 12- string guitars offer compact settings for his wry observations and classic pop melodies on tracks such as "What About Mine?" and "Looking up in Heaven". The latter is quintessential Westerberg, with a catchy chorus carrying a neat lyrical conceit; like most of his output, it's a hit waiting to happen, but whether it'll happen in his lifetime remains a mystery. While he shares some of Rod and The Faces' good-time loucheness, there's a more downbeat melodic approach: the chorus melody to "$100 Groom", for instance, echoes back, through his Singles soundtrack hit "Dyslexic Heart", to several Replacements songs. The mood is mostly downcast here, including an affectionate portrait of his father watching the big-screen TV Paul bought him ("My Dad"), and a regretful reflection on a ship he shouldn't have let pass in the night ("23 Years Ago"). But, as "Gun Shy" affirms, he's still spirited enough to play the teenage wolf, "Chasin' middle age/ And I'm pacin' in my cage tonight."
Death in Vegas
Satan's Circus
DRONE
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With several tracks titled in German, and one called "Sons of Rother", it doesn't take a genius to figure that this is Death in Vegas's Krautrock album - a surmise immediately confirmed by the pretty synth layerings of "Ein Fur Die Damen", which do resemble the solo work of the Neu! founder Michael Rother. "Zugaga", which follows, is clearly aiming for the sinister majesty of "Trans-Europe Express" - but only achieves something more on the scale of the Swanage Steam Railway - while the chugging guitars of "Sons of Rother" do indeed effect the mantra-like manner of Neu!'s hypnotic motorik grooves. Elsewhere, heavy dub basslines pull "Heil Xanex" and "Black Lead" closer to PiL's Metal Box, even to Massive Attack, but it's a fair old plod, overall. One of the defining characteristics of Krautrock, and of the new-wave "Industrial" scene that it helped to inspire, was the sense of risk that brought such excitement to the genre's most notable creations. Sadly, that's entirely lacking in these stiflingly polite, albeit sometimes pretty, pieces. There's never a suggestion on Satan's Circus that you might visit virgin sonic territory, or wind up somewhere you least expected. Which renders the whole exercise a bit pointless.
Evil Nine
You Can Be Special Too
MARINE PARADE
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