The press release for Insides Out goes to great lengths to have Jordan say various things like “No matter how good Dad was, he was still my Dad and you’re supposed to rebel against your parents.” The line has to be drawn between Jordan and Warren, yes? Well, try as you might, he is his father’s son. And despite the obvious British influences that Jordan readily cites, his father’s songwriting influence is prevalent. But that could just be genes.

The album starts off well at establishing an alternative set of influences. “The Joke’s On Me” and “This Girl” are both near-perfect slices of Oranges and Lemons-era XTC pop, full of carefully constructed harmony-choruses and the sort of wry, deprecating lyricism that both that band and Jordan’s father had perfected over the years. It’s not a surprise that these are the tracks that seem to be leading the album’s commercial push - Zevon is set to perform the former on Letterman on April 18th and the latter is the free download over at New West’s website. They’re immediate and hooky, precisely the sort of thing that drives interest.

The rest of the album, though, does little to separate Jordan from his dad. Especially in songs like “Just Do That,” “Camila Rhodes” and “Payday,” Zevon channels his father’s sense of style and structure. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Warren Zevon’s pop style was acerbic without being over the top. It had an ultimate optimism that boiled below the surface, even in its darkest moments. Jordan’s songs don’t yet have the depth of his dad’s. That’s probably unfair to compare someone’s debut album against the high water mark of a brilliant musician’s career, but it’s the unfortunate and obvious comparison.

The bulk of the record’s tracks aren’t bad, they just suffer from comparison. So an unquestionable highlight is when Jordan takes on one of his dad’s own songs - the rarity “Studebaker,” which didn’t even surface on record until after Warren’s death. Jordan’s version is the fully-fleshed out version that Warren never had, being that the only version that exists is a piano-only demo. Jordan gives it a loving and reverential reading that makes it fit perfectly between the other tracks on the album. It doesn’t help the rest of the album, but it at least lends him creedance as an artist by making the musical connections between the generations more apparent and, ultimately, giving most listeners a reason to come back again when his second album comes calling. -j.neas

Download:
MP3: Jordan Zevon :: The Jokes On Me
MP3: Jordan Zevon :: This Girl
————
Amazon: Jordan Zevon - Inside Out

www.jordanzevon.com ++ www.myspace.com/zevon ++ new west records

+ Download your digital music via eMusic’s 25 free MP3 no risk trial offer
—————————————————————————————————————————–

Filed under: Jordan Zevon |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts

An iTunes exclusive (apparently not anymore), Nina Simone fans will want to investigate the recently released Protest Anthology collection (April 8th) that combines both audio and video artifacts culled from Simone’s career. Like the majority of Simone’s output, there is an undeniable weight to much of this material that transcends the music itself . Production notes below.

“Protest Anthology collects eight previously unreleased video interviews and 11 unheard live tracks of hit songs “Mississippi Goddamn,” “Backlash Blues,” “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” and more in one package. These very rare interviews and recordings are finally being unearthed, under exclusive license from her ex-husband Andy Stroud. The first volume of a five-release series, these tracks contain some of Nina Simone’s most political statements ever captured, and truly sum up her strong viewpoints on being black in America during the 1960s, viewpoints that surely would have been controversial in her time.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Nina Simone - I Put A Spell On You (1968)

In the middle of the Clinton ’90s, it was sometimes difficult to feel like there were hard times anywhere. Sure, we were involved in Bosnia, Somalia and ignoring Rwanda, but hey! Internets were booming and the Y2K bug was everyone’s biggest concern. But leave it to the Boss to spot the rot beneath the facade.

In light of this article, his chilling “Youngstown” from The Ghost of Tom Joad is even more revelatory. The boom gone bust. Hailing from an area whose two major industries were the now defunct Cannon textile mills (which took a long, slow slide into obscurity via the NAFTA and CAFTA agreements) and Phillip Morris cigarette manufacturers, I know a bit about the collapse of industry myself.

My home area has managed to recover, but in a lot of places that just isn’t the case. In those places, for native and immigrant workers alike, the lure of easier, better money is constant. In the North Carolina mountains, the profitable, but often lethal, production of crystal meth has become one of the ways people have sought out of the hard life. The Drive-by Truckers wrote about turning to dealing in “Putting People on the Moon,” but the Boss was at it earlier on ..Tom Joad with “Sinaloa Cowboys,” one of the saddest and truest songs he has ever put to tape. - j. neas

Download:
MP3: Bruce Springsteen :: Youngstown
MP3: Bruce Springsteen :: Sinaloa Cowboys
————
Amazon: Bruce Springsteen - The Ghost of Tom Joad

+ Download your digital music via eMusic’s 25 free MP3 no risk trial offer
—————————————————————————————————————————–

Filed under: Bruce Springsteen |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts

Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Live, San Francisco (1978)

Download:
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Sugar Mountain
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: I Am A Child
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Comes A Time
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: After The Gold Rush
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Thrasher
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: When You Dance I Can Really Love
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: The Loner
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Welfare Mothers
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: The Needle And The Damage Done
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Lotta Love
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Sedan Delivery
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Powderfinger
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Cortez The Killer
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Cinnamon Girl
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Like A Hurricane
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)
MP3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse :: Tonight’s The Night
———-

+ Download your digital music via eMusic’s 25 free MP3 no risk trial offer
—————————————————————————————————————————–

Filed under: Neil Young |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts

Who’s hitting up jazzfest this year in New Orleans? We’ll be there the second weekend presenting the Parliament Funkadelic show at The Republic. Details/Tickets to follow…

Download:
MP3: James Booker :: Tipitina/The Grass Looks Greener
MP3: Funkadelic :: Can You Get To That?
MP3: Aaron Neville :: Hercules
———-

+ Download your digital music via eMusic’s 25 free MP3 no risk trial offer
—————————————————————————————————————————–

Filed under: Soul/Funk/R&B, Funkadelic, Aaron Neville, James Booker |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts

SIRIUS 43: Magnetic Fields - Too Drunk Too Dream ++ Beach House - Wedding Bell ++ Bodies of Water - Here Comes My Hand ++ Feist - Sea Lion Woman ++ Destroyer - European Oils ++ The Dodos - Walking ++ Bowerbirds - In Our Talons ++ The Watson Twins :: Just Like Heaven ++ Horse Feathers - Walking & Running ++ Bonnie “Prince” Billy - Barcelona ++ Silver Jews - Smith & Jones Forever ++ Silver Jews - Send In The Clouds ++ Sonic Youth - Shoot ++ The Breeders - Only In 3’s ++ Pixies - Hey ++ Howe Gelb and Scout Niblett - I Want Candy ++ Ryan Adams - Operator, Operator ++ Chris Mills - Chris Mills Is Living The Dream ++ Pete Ham - Without You (solo) ++ Richard Swift - Dressed Up For The Letdown ++ Harry Nilsson - Me And My Arrow ++ John Cale - Paris 1919 ++ Peter Sarstedt - Where Do You Go To (My Lovely) ++ The Kinks - Do You Remember Walter? ++ Japancakes - Only Shallow ++ The Shins - One By One All Day ++ AC Newman - Come Crash ++ Beck - Nobody’s Fault But My Own ++ Ramones - 53rd & 3rd ++ Bob Marley - Interview ++ Ramones - I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement ++ Talking Heads - Don’t Worry About The Government ++ Television - Marquee Moon ++ Black Keys - Remember When

*You can listen, for free, online with the SIRIUS three day trial — just submit an email address and they will send you a password.

——————————————————————————————————————————

Filed under: SIRIUS |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts

Robyn Hitchcock and Nick Lowe are set to perform, tomorrow night, here in Los Angeles at the El Rey. AD NYC correspondent, adam mandel, reports from the Manhattan show last night, giving us a preview of what’s in store for L.A.

“Welcome to a previously unknown location in Manhattan,” said Robyn Hitchcock as he opened up his set in the rarely utilized Grand Ballroom, a venue above the more famous Hammerstein Ballroom. “Actually this used to be an air ship.” Hitchcock’s odd stage banter may have been off-putting for someone unfamiliar with his canon, but most of the crowd were thrilled to hear tales of cheese alarms and crying wax dolls. “I am very lucky, I get to see three Nick Lowe shows, get paid, and I get to travel the country.”

It was an all acoustic evening and Hitchcock set the tone perfectly. “I’m sort of like Nick’s younger psychedelic brother, but I’m a bit more fractured. When Nick starts to play you’ll see that the energy in the room becomes completely different. Much cooler.” Nick Lowe arrived looking much like a college professor and played songs from throughout his career with much emphasis on his latest At My Age which sounded excellent. He apologized for a sore throat that he managed to “smuggle from London into JFK” and mentioned that he would be hitting some bum notes. No one seemed to notice as they were completely charmed by Lowe whose swagger seemed to channel Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran for much of the night.

While hits like “Cruel to Be Kind” and “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding?” were the most well-received, the biggest surprise of the night came during the encore where Elvis Costello appeared out of nowhere to duet with Nick on “Indoor Fireworks.” The seated audience at the Grand Ballroom rose to their feet and continued to stay there snapping pictures throughout the entire encore when Hitchcock came back to join the two for a gorgeous cover of the Beatles “If I Fell” followed by “Mystery Train” made famous by another Elvis.

Related: Nick Lowe :: The Jesus of Cool (reissue)

Download:
MP3: Robyn Hitchcock :: Museum of Sex
MP3: Nick Lowe :: Shake & Pop
———

+ Download your digital music via eMusic’s 25 free MP3 no risk trial offer
—————————————————————————————————————————–

Filed under: Nick Lowe, Robyn Hitchcock |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts

Last week The Watson Twins performed at L.A.’s Natural History Museum as part of the museums ongoing First Fridays series. AD correspondents Jason and Ben were there and had a chance to catch up with Leigh after the show.

AD: Having played and recorded with Jenny Lewis, recorded your own album, and now on a national tour, you’ve come along way. How do you think you got this far?

Leigh Watson: We are originally from Kentucky and we moved to LA to pursue music. We moved to Silverlake where we met many like minded people. We weren’t afraid to leave home, and jump into it, which is what allowed us to get to where we are. Also, having a sister there with me for support helped a lot too.

AD: With the influx of female singer song-writers, such as Kate Nash, Feist, and Lilly Allen how do you distinguish yourselves? Or do you even try to distinguish yourself?

LW: Well, it’s a very exciting time for women in music. Rather than worry about the many other female singer-songwriters out today, we embrace the fact that women in general are doing so well in music right now. There was a lull for women in the early 1990’s and the early 2000’s, but now women are back on the map. As for distinguishing ourselves, we take pride in our strong harmonies and backing vocals. Growing up we were really able to hone our vocal abilities by singing in our church choir.

AD: You guys have a great sound, it’s unique, who are your biggest influences?

LW: Emmylou Harris sang with everyone, she had the perfect voice to harmonize with, but was distinct as well. This was what we tried to accomplish when we played with Lewis. We wanted to harmonize well with her, but distinguish ourselves at the same time.

AD: You guys seem pretty close on stage, are there ever any sibling rivalries?

LW: No, not really. When it comes to music, we have never been competitive. We rely on each other for help and inspiration. The only arguments come when one of us is working harder than the other. We like to share the workload, so sometimes we get on each other’s case about that. We both give 115 percent, so I guess you could say 130 percent goes into everything we do.

AD: Don’t you mean 230 percent?

LW: Ha yeah, that’s what I meant, I guess you can tell I’m a musician and not a math major.

AD: How do you go about your songwriting?

LW: We both write songs separately. After we have the general idea, we bring it to the other and work on it together. The improvements often involve strengthening choruses, re-working lyrics, and adding harmonies. In general though, we each write our own songs.

AD: This was a unique environment to play a show in, how did you feel about playing a concert in a museum, and how did it rank amongst past shows you have played?

LW: It was an amazing environment. Museums are cool. The coolest show we’ve played may have been Pabst Theater in Milwaukee. That was so cool. I also really liked playing at the Getty, yeah it’s great playing at museums it makes the show interesting.

Continue reading after le jump….

On these Friday nights, walking into the museum feels less like going on grade school field trip, and more like entering a trendy Hollywood club that features multiple bars, catered dinner, and a crowd of young Angelenos. The show took place in the African Mammal Hall exhibit, which was now set up as a fully functional live venue. This environment proved to provide the perfect ambiance for a performance by the native Kentucky sisters. Their set opened with an up-tempo folk original and was shortly followed by a cover of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven”. The set was kept dynamic as bright upbeat songs were woven in amidst mid-tempo folk ballads, while the twins each took their turn on guitar, harmonica, and lead vocals. The consistent and perhaps most impressive part of The Watson Twins sound was their angelic harmonies that only a sisterly instinct could create. In between songs the sisters relaxed dialogue and endearing crowd interaction kept the audience absorbed in the intimate performance. While separately these sisters could easily get lost in today’s crowd of female singer songwriters, as a pair they bring something new and refreshing to a genre that can easily get tiresome. - Ben Schwartz/Jason Mittleman

Download:
MP3: The Watson Twins :: Just Like Heaven (cure cover)
MP3: The Watson Twins :: How Am I To Be
———-

+ Download The Watson Twins via eMusic’s 25 Free MP3 trial offer.
——————————————————————————————————————————

Filed under: The Watson Twins |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts

“There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.” - Brian Eno

The very word, “Krautrock,” seems like a joke. And truly it has been used for both praise and derision. But its main architects have had an unceasing influence on rock and roll - from the mechanical dance of the various industrial movements to the swarming wash of shoegaze. Klaus Dinger was one of the most influential parts of that Krautrock equation. Initially a member of Kraftwerk, but most importantly a founding member of Neu!, Dinger was to drumming what William Carlos Williams was to poetry - within his work’s almost mechanical simplicity was the very essence, the heartbeat, of life.

Dinger created a drumming style that would become known as ‘motorik.’ As the name implies, listeners were treated to repetitive, workmanlike patterns, almost like the pistons on a motor. Dinger, himself, didn’t like the name. “[Motorik] sounds more like a machine, and it was very much a human beat,” he said. “It is essentially about life, how you have to keep moving, get on and stay in motion.” Indeed, if looked at from that perspective, Brian Eno’s quote makes even more sense. Alongside the life affirming, celebratory beats of Fela Kuti and James Brown, Neu!’s work was the propulsive breath.

Whether acting as a rhythmic twin for bandmate Michael Rother’s chugging guitar, as in their debut album’s opening track, “Hallogallo,” or as a foil for the noisy and deliberate chaos of Rother’s work on Neu! 2’s “Lila Engel (Lilac Angel),” Klaus Dinger was arguably Neu!’s defining characteristic. Through the band’s three proper albums, despite changes in instrumentation and attempts at tape manipulation, ambient, brash proto-punk and gorgeous synthesizer landscapes, Dinger’s work was there.

Though his work after Neu! was more popular (his first post-Neu! band sold over a million records by the end of their run), there’s no end to the influence his work with Neu! had on rock and roll and music is a much richer place that he was here. Judge for yourself, below. - j. neas

Download:
MP3: Neu! :: Hallogallo
MP3: Neu! :: Super
MP3: Neu! :: Hero
———

+ Download your digital music via eMusic’s 25 free MP3 no risk trial offer
—————————————————————————————————————————–

Filed under: Klaus Dinger, Neu! |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts

Building on the bones of their 2006 debut, Shadows Rise, Travel by Sea return April 2008 with their sophomore LP Days of My Escape, the third release on Aquarium Drunkard’s Autumn Tone imprint.

If I were writing a book on what I like most about music, I’d call it something literary and mildly pretentious like, “Of Landscapes and Storytelling.” I view those two items as a singular element - where stories exist within a delicately painted environment - where landscapes are a living, breathing thing that informs and sustains the sensibilities of the people living within it. An environment where you get a sense of place, and are able to exist there for a moment, within the story, outside of yourself. Travel by Sea’s sophomore release, Days of My Escape, achieves just that.

TBS’s Kyle Kersten lives in California, and his partner, Brian Kraft, lives in Colorado. They record their music in pieces over the Internet. This distant relationship somehow leads to incredibly intimate and contemplative music. Most musical collaborations find themselves recording in the same studio. When you’re face to face with someone, many of life’s details fall to the implied or understood and, are ultimately, overlooked — such is life. Conversely Kersten and Kraft, on the other hand, must create ever more vivid images for one another, to account for the miles between them.

Their debut, Shadows Rise, was an excellent and straightforward piece of alt.country, at once invoking Buckner, Oldham and Adams. With Days Of My Escape it seems they’re discovering the twists, turns, nooks and crannies of the genre. Before the country-folk blend was overt and unmistakable, surfacing with an immediacy. Here, Travel by Sea are using it as a foundation from which to grow. I suppose you could say, if alt.country was the framework of the story on Shadows Rise, it’s now the landscape on which the story is being told. With DOME, Travel by Sea have created something, sonically and lyrically, that stays true to their roots, but diverse and expansive enough to grow artistically.

Like any good writing in the folk realm — or any realm, for that matter — Travel by Sea continue to cut to the heart of the human experience. It’s emotional and insightful and, at times, incredibly astute — speaking candidly of our desperate nature without dwelling on the melancholy, but rather the hopeful — the ability to overcome through honesty. Pink Nasty (nee Sara Beck) adds to this, at one point offering a soft, subtle complement to Kersten’s willowy voice, while The Broken West’s Dan Iead lends his pedal steel, weeping in response.

And when I think about these things, and listen to these songs individually, as chapters in a book, the album’s title resonates more clearly each time. In Days of My Escape, you get a sense of place. You can live there for a moment, within that story, outside of yourself. You can escape. – joe crosby

Download:
MP3: Travel by Sea :: Truth Was
MP3: Travel by Sea :: Split Second Time
–
MP3: Travel by Sea :: Too Much Too Quickly
———-
Purchase: Travel by Sea - Days of My Escape

+ Download your digital music via eMusic’s 25 free MP3 no risk trial offer
—————————————————————————————————————————–

Filed under: Travel By Sea, Autumn Tone |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts