frances chang – ‘Bad zen’
Songs often seem to call out in the absence of a lover, whether that person is next door or in the next town over or even waiting somewhere ‘Beyond the Sea’. I want you, I need you is what so many love songs tend to say whether you’re really quite close and perhaps have already been intimate or whether the object of your desire remains frustratingly out of reach.
frances chang though captures something more rare, not longing nor quite a sense of absence in presence. It is the experience of having somebody else’s head right next to yours on the pillow while you still feel hopelessly stranded or in an elliptical fog of your own thoughts. There’s no distance at play and you might caress their back or breathe the scent of their hair, but you’re still reaching out through that somehow swirling fog with a groping hand that feels totally ungraspable.
‘The truth is a lie, I pray you by my side / But when the end is here, who will care about the way / I want to hold on to’ chang begins in that intimate spoken word on ‘Bad zen’ the opening song from been thinking bout confession. The album is billed in the genre tags as devotional music and blends gauzy ambiances with bedroom pop melodies and what can almost sound like chiptune beats, with a jazzier feel emerging by way of the acoustic instrumentation. AndrĆ©a Schiavelli is an especially effective contributor through their downcast bass which paradoxically (at least in terms of its emotional register) allows the other musical elements to ascend into a quavering orbit.
‘Bad zen’ also features sawing and seasick drones from chang’s synthesizer and Shaleah Feinstein on the violin plus skittering spurts from a drum machine and a solitary turn from Liza Winter’s steadying drum kit. There are spare keys and hollow winds that seem to merge into the synths as chang sings ‘But the air across your neck I mistake for the work in my head’ in the middle section. Finally the drum machine skips and mixing realisation with revelation or perhaps just sheer acceptance, she liltingly ascends while admitting the truth at least as it appears to her which is ‘My fantasy space is a death bed’.
Squirrel Flower – ‘Cleveland’
Should the word ‘longitude’ have a hard or soft g sound? Personally I’d rather not feel like I’m sucking down a lozenge in the middle of it, but everybody’s different and that’s the theme of ‘Cleveland’ the second track from Squirrel Flower’s new album Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going. The first verse is especially redolent, as she sets up a juxtaposition or fundamental difference of opinion between presumably romantic partners with the guy feeling that ‘all trains end in Chicago’ while she doubting thinks ‘I don’t know if that’s true’.
She is already envisioning ambery sunsets in the bustling Cleveland streetcar suburb of Lakewood, nights that involve gazing out with a glass in hand over the expanse of Lake Erie from a cosy ‘back porch with a lakeside view’. Then the guitars twang and throng into the chorus and Squirrel Flower with great powers of compression summarises the diverging outlooks by contrasting a Saturn return as a tough but hopefully rewarding passage of self-discovery with the habitual pleasures of Saturday baseball. So perhaps neither is wrong but the drums even as they slap in lagging and lackadaisical fashion do suggest a certain intransigence from one party as the singer concludes ‘guess I’ll go east on my own’.
Squanderers – ‘Theme for the Casino at 5 A.M.’
‘Theme for the Casino at 5 A.M.’ – the latest rambling outing from Squanderers, the tandem of David Grubbs and Wendy Eisenberg alongside the multi-instrumentalist and producer Kramer – carries then the last sliver of moon shine whether we’re talking about something shaken out of the night sky or imbibed liquor of the high-proof and makeshift variety. It has that staggered quality, stepping out blearily into the thin and tenuous morning light perhaps with a few dregs still in the bottom of one’s glass or with a certain sentimental precariousness.
While it is therefore well within the Squanderers purview, in this way the short tune reminds me of ‘Catalpa Waltz’ the achingly tender title piece from Jolie Holland’s sterling debut album. Stumbling home from somewhere way out west, Squanderers with a short turnaround will follow their own debut If a Body Meet a Body and its worthy follow-up Skantagio with Bright Madness their third record which is due out near the end of September.
Faith Coloccia & Tashi Dorji – ‘Short Lived Echo’
‘Short Lived Echo’ the first offering from Faith Coloccia and Tashi Dorji’s latest collaboration And Their Power Was Alive opens with something of a parlour tune on the piano, a plangent and upright air. It calls to mind hymnals or country gospel songs like ‘In the Garden’ or the wonderful ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’ as performed by Iris DeMent. It has that down home quality as Coloccia takes a resonant approach to those unaccompanied keys.
Then her voice comes in, soft and flat-toned as wispy choruses ascend to become pure vapour. Dorji’s guitar meanwhile seems like a spectre in the background, something growling or revving its engine from far across the field. Gradually it comes to stand opposite the lovely lilting vocal, a luminous or diaphanous thing which holds the night at bay. And then they start to congeal, these two disparate souls now aspects of one and the same phantasm. The hollow roar or tender howl of the guitar suggests a werewolf breaking out under the silvery light of la lune while all sorts of organ spectres flicker – redolent of its use as a fairground instrument or spiritual succour or perhaps of its abiding presence in the cult film classic Carnival of Souls, swelling and dissipating like the rise and fall of one’s breath just as one torpidly drifts and embraces a night full of slumber.
Helen – ‘Linda’s Head’
Helen the trio helmed by Liz Harris of Grouper on vocals and guitar, Scott Simmons on bass and Jed Bindeman on drums released The Original Faces more than a decade ago and have toured since beyond their base in the Pacific Northwest, yet the announcement of a new full-length record entitled Linda’s Head still comes as as welcome surprise for eager listeners.
With their roiling but warm sound where the interlaced distortions of guitar and bass embed soothing harmonies and choruses, the trio evoke all sorts of musical references. Reverb-drenched with crashing percussion, Helen might be a commingling of surf rock with garage rock or the crustier end of the punk spectrum or smear jangly melodies into the misty obscurities of shoegaze, as though you’d stuck Phil Spector and the Beach Boys, the Mamas & the Papas and the Shangri-Las, the Troggs and the Ramones or perhaps Talulah Gosh, My Bloody Valentine and the Sundays into one big blender. But the result is neat and discrete and ever so pleasant.
Of the two shorts they have released to coincide with their album announcement, the title track ‘Linda’s Head’ sees those crashing waves or that wall of sound slosh and rev against cosmic noir vocals (whose layered harmonies remind me of the somewhat overlooked Interstellar by Frankie Rose) while ‘Dead shark II’ takes the jangle pop approach to winning effect before diving under the waves in a lengthy (at least for a two minute song) coda. Linda’s Head is due out on kranky come 8 October and is set to feel like a fond remnant of a balmy summer.
Kris Davis Trio – ‘The Ballerina’
If your notion of the ballet is all tutus and pirouettes then ‘The Ballerina’ by the Kris Davis Trio seems to tease you in through some trepidatious piano keys and percussive scrapes. Robert Hurst bows a tense and eerie drone while Johnathan Blake splashes lightly over his drum kit or drags the end of his stick in pooling motions across the tops of his cymbals before this most tenebrous of rhythm sections drops out of the mix.
The pianist Davis begins to set up something, playing with more steadiness or rocking with a note of insistency in the middle keys before Hurst returns on the double bass with a more pronounced though still pensive beat. This is perhaps more of a Black Swan conception of Swan Lake, residing in the shadows or glinting out of the darkness but even before the composition begins to glide and pick up the pace – which it does over the final ninety seconds courtesy of bright piano runs, a more bounding bass pattern and some crashing percussion – there’s a kind of lilting or sashaying quality to the piece, which teeters and jetĆ©s and appears ever so nimble while remaining deftly poised or thereabout. This is another probing voyage from the Kris Davis Trio, following ‘The Subtext’ and the title piece ahead of the full release of Lost In Geneva at the end of September.
Brandon Seabrook Utility Modern – ‘The Guitar is a Weather Event, Even’
‘The Guitar is a Weather Event, Even’ opens through a briny coastal passage, which might conjure the image of seagulls loitering against the headwinds just a short way from stubborn cliffs and rocky outcrops. The tone and the locale is redolent of some of Brandon Seabrook’s past work like on the utterly captivating Hellbent Daydream from earlier this year.
It contains the same strange admixture of almost self-vaporising circuitousness or angularity – a penchant for experimentation and abstraction which sounds angular in terms of its shape and texture but leaves the listener with a sense of pensiveness or amorphousness, as though the music with its jagged lines was always on the cusp of receding into the atmosphere – with a kind of pioneering spirit that gestures towards certain strains of Americana and folk.
Here though Seabrook is traced by Bill Frisell on what promises to be a coarser album than Hellbent Daydream with its shimmering ambiances and rustic hoedowns, where smeared chromaticism gave way to sloshing surf rock or ripe pastoralism as Seabrook on the guitar and banjo was joined by Elias Stemeseder on piano and synthesizers, Erica Dicker on a violin-cum-fiddle and Henry Fraser on the double bass.
Fresh off some of his own work – including the celebratory In My Dreams a live and studio compendium on Blue Note and the duo effort For All Your Flowers with SkĆŗli Sverrisson – Frisell staggers after Seabrook’s opening melody as Rashaan Carter and Marcus Gilmore join the guitarists on bass and drums. That’s a quartet with lots of varied experience whether in experimental or crossover contexts or in more traditional or straight-ahead settings, with Frisell in theory the elder statesman though his grin in the video which accompanies the single release and album announcement belies any sense of separation as the musicians seem to revel in their irreverent, make-do fun.
Carter imbues his bass with a funky squelch while Gilmore has this capacity for making quite busy actions and skittering propulsions seem like the easiest of glides across his drums. As they shift and land on uneven moments of emphasis, Seabrook and Frisell give ‘The Guitar is a Weather Event, Even’ a tangled rhythmic choppiness before they begin to insert little peals like ice cream jingles courtesy of a series of slides and effects.
They break then for a chorus, which strings together soft rock chords almost in the manner of early seventies Beach Boys before falling into a slow post-rock groove which steadily incorporates more abrasive elements, a fusion that sometimes veers towards Minutemen punk. If this is a weather event it entails no storm nor any precipitation but perhaps the formation of steep cumulonimbus clouds or the first outline of hazy grey nimbostratus clouds or at the other end of the spectrum heat mirages and other turbulences or distortions of the air.
The performance video for ‘The Guitar is a Weather Event, Even’ duly appears to have all sorts of interlacing or encoding issues before it returns to a blue screen. The song ends on a few crashing strums before ceding to the static. Utility Modern where Seabrook leads a quartet comprised of Carter, Gilmore and Frisell is due out on 2 October on Out Of Your Head Records and features a striking orange cover, a late study by Josef Albers for his long-running series Homage to the Square.
