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Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS, channel 26 Left Of Center, can now be heard twice, every Friday - Noon EST and then an encore broadcast at Midnight EST. Below is this week’s playlist.
SIRIUS 41: Phosphorescent - A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise ++ Sandro Perri - Everybody’s Talkin’ ++ Bon Iver - For Emma ++ J. Tillman - Steel On Steel ++ Megafaun - Find Your Mark ++ Bowerbirds - In Our Talons ++ Horse Feathers - Finch On Sunday ++ Devendra Banhart - There’s Always Something Happening ++ Arif Sag - Osman Pehlivan ++ The Dodos - Walking ++ White Hinterland - Dreaming of Plum Trees ++ Liz Durrett & Vic Chestnutt - Somewhere ++ Jean-Michel Bernard - Generique Stephane ++ Jacques Dutronc - J’ai Mis Un Tigre Dans Ma Guitare ++ Grizzly Bear - He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) ++ Destroyer - Blue Flower/Blue Flame ++ Bonnie “Prince” Billy - Barcelona ++ The Vaselines - Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam ++ Midlake - Mornings Will Be Kind ++ Sam Amidon - Saro ++ The Microphones - I Want Wind To Blow ++ UNKLE - Rabbit In Your Headlights ++ The Velvet Underground - Who Loves The Sun ++ Peter Sarstedt - Where Do You Go To (My Lovely) ++ Silver Jews - I’m Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You ++ Pavement - Cream of Gold ++ Ham 1 - Clown Shoed Feet ++ The Modern Lovers - Dodge Veg-O-Matic ++ Violent Femmes - Never Tell ++ Lou Reed - Andy’s Chest
*You can listen, for free, online with the SIRIUS three day trial — just submit an email address and they will send you a password.
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In 1995 and 1996 I was lucky enough to catch Morphine, live, three times during the Yes tour. Truly a club band if there ever was one, Morphine’s noir musical vision was all blue cigarette smoke, beat poetry and style. Below, J. Neas reflects on the last great Morphine album - the third in their canon - 1995’s Yes. - AD
The ’90s. Fabled land of mirth where all sorts of things went right for indie-rock. That may sound a bit odd to say, but there really hasn’t been a more commercially open time for music, before or since. (Feel free to argue with me about that in the comments.) The early ’90s paved the way for record labels to start grabbing all sorts of names out of the local scenes and granting them national contracts. Sometimes it paid off and sometimes it didn’t. But think about it - record stores actually had sections labeled ‘alternative,’ as if it were some sort of defined genre. You had all sorts of weird, random bands lumped together. It was everything music should be. For awhile.
In the midsts of this golden soup of bands was one in particular who repeatedly stood out in style and substance: Morphine. Armed with a two-string slide bass, a baritone sax, drums and the languid, cool vocals of Mark Sandman, Morphine was unique. By the time their third album, Yes, came about, they had built a sizable cult audience on the back of their previous album, Cure For Pain, selling more than 300,000 copies. Not bad at all for an indie release.
Continue Reading After The Jump…..
I remember first hearing Morphine (as is the case with a lot of bands from that era for me) on MTV’s 120 Minutes. Specifically it was the video for Yes’s lead track, “Honey White.” A driving, mildly frantic piece of rock, rooted in the rumbling horn-driven beats of early rock and roll, “Honey White” is an amazing opener. Sandman’s detached vocals come in with a wink and a sly smile, radiating cool out of every pore. Dana Colley’s baritone sax is the thing of legends. Given a larger stage to stand on thanks to the lack of guitars, the saxophone becomes, in addition to the bass, the driving force of the songs’ melodies. Sandman’s bass is as essential to the force of the songs as the sax. “Scratch,” the second song on the album, is primarily driven by the sliding bass lines, echoed in the chorus by the saxophone and paving a primal, post-blues that is fueled by the driving melancholy of the lyrics. “Testify,” you hear Sandman call out to Colley right before the sax solo.
Defining Morphine’s sound as a post-blues isn’t a bad starting point, but skipping, jazz rhythms are peppered throughout as well. “All Your Way” has the jazzier rhythms, as does the single, “Super Sex,” a song featuring almost free-association lyrics amidst the driving bass line. Here also are songs like “Sharks,” a stop-start song with skipping beats, wailing sax and one of Sandman’s most righteous and raucous bass lines, growling in distortion as it slides and rails beneath his warnings about the titular animals. “Free Love” comes on towards the end of the album, opening with an almost Melvins-esque crawl. Murkier than any of the other vocal tracks on the album, Sandman’s voice is nearly obscured beneath the sax and vocal reverb. When the song reaches full catharsis, it sounds almost like a no-wave song, recalling songs like the Stooges’ chaotic “L.A. Blues.”
Horns are often seen as a liability at best, a cheesy throw-back at worst, and when a band can distinctly and uniquely use them to their advantage, it’s a miracle of sorts. Morphine would only manage two more albums before the untimely death of Sandman in 1999, but their cult status carries on, bubbling right below the surface for music fans to discover andbecome enraptured with again and again. - j. neas
Download:
MP3: Morphine :: Honey White
MP3: Morphine :: Scratch
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Amazon: Morphine - Yes
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Is there an unfair, uphill battle that female artists face in rock and roll? The battle I refer to is the race to find another female artist with which to compare them to. While we certainly pull out the big, comparative guns for male-fronted rock bands, and solo artists, there isn’t quite the sheer vehemence that seems to come out in reviews of female artists. Pity the poor women who were endlessly compared to Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morrisette, or, in the wake of alt.country’s peak years, Lucinda Williams. Is it that these artists are really that much alike, or are we just that tied into our notions that women sound like women and therefore must be compared to other women?
Enter Sera Cahoone. Sera, a veteran of the Pacific Northwest music scene, having played with Carissa’s Wierd and drummed some for Band of Horses, has crafted her sophomore album, Only as the Day is Long, in a gorgeous and haunting country and folk inflected tone. You can almost see the critics salivating the words: Neko Case.
But let’s back up for a minute and, at the risk of sounding somewhat hypocritical, let’s talk about Gillian Welch. If there’s an artist, voice wise, that Cahoone can be compared to, it’s Welch, and indeed, the timbre of Cahoone’s voice is rich with the aching emotions that Welch has been so adept at conveying. But I’m not trying to box Cahoone in - the depth of her background is enough to prevent that. Only as the Day is Long is filled with moments that play to type and escape it.
Opener “You Might as Well” plays to type and does it beautifully. It plays as the doppleganger of A.A. Bondy’s “Vice Rag,” the stomping rhythm, fueled by the guitar’s intricately picked melody, echoing classic blues and folk traditions with an obvious sense of pop construction. The bridge is the song’s most beautiful moment, small bursts of chords emerging from the melancholy. The title track echoes the soaring choruses of Welch, banjo, harmonica and others falling in to build an absolutely uplifting song. Songs like “Shitty Hotel” and “The Colder the Air” use the pedal steel of Jason Kardong to build up dusky sounds reminiscent of the earlier, mesmerizingly dark work of Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter.
When Cahoone works out of the album’s general feel, on songs like the shimmering, shuffling country-pop of “Happy When I’m Gone,” she’s as uniqueand independent as the artists I’ve stacked her up against. I may have played into critical stereotypes by comparing her to other female artists, but the names I invoked are artists who, while starting in a genre that is well-worn and hollowed, have carved out a unique place for themselves and their sounds. I like to think that my comparisons aren’t pinning Cahoone down, but rather, are evaluating all the many places she is likely to expand on her talent. Here’s hoping I’m right. - j.neas
Download:
MP3: Sera Cahoone :: Baker Lake
MP3: Sera Cahoone :: Only As The Day Is Long
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Amazon: Sera Cahoone - Only As The Day Is Long
www.myspace.com/seracahoone ++ www.seracahoone.com ++ www.subpop.com
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