NEW LOST CLASSICS
Music Reviews
BY STEVE de SEVE
The thing about hard-to-find music is that while it may be rewarding to track down that out-of-print jazz album, or obscure import of the Sex Pistols when they were still called the Sex Pocketknives, it makes the music that is easier to obtain seem cheapened by contrast. In the past, the only way you could get that hard-to-find satisfaction from a new release was to pay a friend to hide it for you. But I recently stumbled on a machine that will do this without your friend's help. It's called the 200 CD changer. Put your CD's in one of these babies, and you might never find them again. What follows is a review of some recently hard-to-find favorites:
Liz Skillman's CD In the Middle (hermione records, www.hermrec.com), takes her handpicked acoustic tunes to a different level. A middle level. She is still making friends with a band, which is called Joaquim. Her first song has a very Liz rhythm to it. The second song is beautiful. "It will take all night to finish this," is a featured line from this tune. While I don't like to hear this in a conversation with a girlfriend, the song keeps you listening. If you are good at housekeeping, and can eventually find the liner notes, it turns out this song is about a case of champagne. It wasn't easy to find the liner notes, though, and they were promptly lost again. The third song is a postpunk hoedown. Something about blame. And blame is important these days. Nice distorted vocals on this song are among the many cool but subtle touches. All kinds of things can happen during a recording session, and you can almost hear the band saying, "let's do this, it's cool," and then someone turns it down when nobody's looking. Her version of "House of the Rising Sun" makes me feel worried for Liz. I had no idea she had been a prostitute, or that she had a sister. But she should have listened to her mother. Fortunately, she lives in the capital city of therapy, so she is over it. The reason this song keeps coming back on today's record albums is a general lack of moderation. When a mom tells her daughter, "don't become a ho," of course she's going to do the opposite thing. Moms could say, "don't be a ho in Amsterdam," and the girls would be in a safe town where prostitution is legal and unionized. That's moderate. "Don't go to the House of the Rising Sun," is just asking for trouble. The next song is about denial. I would tell you what it is called, except the label is again lost in the apartment, and the CD is lost in the 200 CD changer.( It finally came on, so I'm reviewing it now). Anyway, I just saw In The Mood For Love last night, and I didn't get that movie either. So the song is kind of like that. The next song, something like, "Money Don't Buy You Everything," is half way to hiphop. And it could have gone all the way. The vocal was great, but a fresh beat would be cooler than a band beat. Save that for the remix. The next song has some of Liz's guitar rhythms. And the one after that has something that sounds like a pedal organ or an accordion. Anyway, there are hands or feet involved and it sounds great.
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Another CD that sometimes pops up in the 200 CD changer is John Pinamonti's, high wide and handsome. (www.pinamonti.com) "Black is the color that I choose, yeah, it's my favorite hue, cuz it looks good with my blues," sings John in the second song. Why is a nice Italian boy feeling blue? It turns out the third song is none other than "House of the Rising Sun." In it we find out that John was the blind banjo player in that same famous ho house. I don't know if he overlapped with Liz Skillman's tenure there, but if you listen to both their versions back to back and close your eyes, you can picture John and Liz sitting on the velvet overstuffed sofa in the front parlor, picking and squashing crabs and cooties and flicking them at the madam. All of Pinamonti's songs are great. And the production and musicianship clearly benefited from his years of pleasing the paying customers back when he was known as "banjo viagra" at the Rising Sun. The next song is my favorite. It's called, "The Ballad of Biggie Smalls." Biggie has long deserved a ballad. We hear about his rise to fame, driving his Range Rover high, and his friendship with Tupac. At one point in the song Biggie and Tupac are at a soda counter, and we are told, "they both liked egg creams, and they hated Vanilla Ice." Musical references on the album range from Twin Peaks to Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. And if you like pictures of children with vintage cars and guns (as I do), then you'll love the cover as well. I just wish I could find it. Or the CD for that matter.
Frustrated with the 200 CD changer, I accepted an invitation from my friend Lisa to actually leave my apartment and check out some live music. She chose the Lee Scratch Perry show at Irving Plaza on March 24. Now, it is always good to check out music by artists who have never worked in the sexual services industry from time to time, just to keep perspective. Scratchy's opening band was a lame newfangled reggae band from Brooklyn. I won't tell you the name of the band because I promised a poster of Bob Marley that I would do nothing to aid in the promotion of reggae bands that exhibit any contemporary boy band influence. And this band had it in spades. So fuck em. But the Scratchy show, mixed by the Mad Professor, was great. I didn't have to go looking for any CD covers, or wait around for the CD changer to find the show, or anything. He just came out on stage and started doing his thing. Now Scratchy has been around for a while. And his new stuff has little or nothing to do with the early reggae he is known for producing. Imagine if Bob Dylan was insane and smoked enough blunts until he turned black, and you would have the Lee Scratch Perry of today. And Scratchy likes to take the time onstage to preach his message of hope and harmony. At one point in the show he took off his hat and showed the crowd a) his new Sisqo haircut, and b) the lining of the hat which was filled with dollar bills. A, shall we say, stoned, guy in the front row got Scratchy's attention and gave him a $100 bill for his hat. Scratchy shouted to the crowd and the guy, "Where did this bill come from?" To which the man yelled out, "COLORADO!" "That's RIGHT," Scratchy told the crowd, "It came from the love that's in your heart." Scratchy doesn't have any trouble finding the good things.
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Issue: April 16 - April 22, 2001
Doyle, Part II
BY CHRISTOPHER CURRY
The Real Girl Fight
AN INSTANT MESSAGE
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