Someone Is Watching After All: Attack of the One-Man Bands
March 31st, 2008 | 8:00 am est |
Read the rest of this entry »
Attack of the One-Man Bands is exactly that, 58 different one-man bands spread over two discs of raw, crude and fascinatingly brilliant blasts of sonic madness, most of it so ragged and urgent that it makes vintage punk sound like Air Supply. So unhinged that it’s probably a serious health risk, this set delivers cut after cut of glorious bedlam with all the subtlety of an amplified jackhammer set loose in a glass house, and anyone sane should probably hate it, but like a child’s tantrum, it’s impossible to ignore, and like the child that throws that tantrum, it’s impossible not to love. Each of these one-man bands is currently active, and while most are decidedly lo-fi, even the ones who wandered into real studios seem to treat them like giant boom boxes, creating a clatter and din that shoves the needle into the red from note one. While a good deal of what is here is vicious punk rockabilly like Phillip Roebuck’s crude, spare and dangerously kinetic “Jackass Blues” or Pete Yorko & the One Man Music Band’s “Like Me” assault, some of it, like Royer’s One-Man Band’s version of the fiddle classic “Train on the Island” or 1Man Banjo’s deconstruction of “Mole in the Ground” (simply called “Mole” here), is seriously bent and skewed bluegrass mountain music. Train Wreck Washington’s banjo piece called “Walked All Night” sounds like an old wax cylinder field recording, and feels like it was recorded a hundred years ago. Uncle Butcher’s “No Judge No Trial” is as raw and frightening as a running chain saw thrown on a feather bed — chickens flying everywhere, as they say. Then there’s The Amazing Elephant Man’s primal “Can’t Go Outside,” which is literally a child’s frustrated rant given rhythm and electricity. Scary, unsettling, fascinating, delightful, vital, urgent and insistent, these 58 tracks are somehow — for all their abrasiveness — oddly comforting. Just like that one vigilant dog barking away relentlessly down the street late at night, it means someone is watching after all, and they ain’t gonna keep quiet about it, even if the rest of the world is trying its best to sleep.
Although she’s moved steadily towards a more roots-oriented style over the years, 
Mike Smith died on February 28, 2008, just two weeks before his group, the Dave Clark Five, was due to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Smith had a hard life. The keyboard player and main singer in the band, his later years were haunted by tragedy, including the death of his only son. A fall in 2003 left him with severe spinal injuries and he spent the last five years of his life paralyzed from the rib cage down. Still, he had plans to attend the induction ceremony before complications from pneumonia robbed him of the chance. It’s a life story with a sad ending, but it’s worth remembering the glory years, too, because at one point in 1964 Smith’s group actually toppled the Beatles from the top of the pop charts with their infectious “Glad All Over” single, going on to hit the Top 40 seventeen times between 1964 and 1967 with solid songs like “Bits and Pieces,” the beautiful ballad “Because,” and a commendable cover of Bobby Day’s “Over and Over.” It’s a nice little legacy and it’s a shame that Smith won’t be able to be there when his peers and the music industry honors it. Here’s hoping they run a clip of Smith smiling and belting out “Glad All Over” with his band. I’m sure that’s how he would want to be remembered. And it will be.
The Mountain Goats are, for all practical purposes, the endlessly clever and prolific John Darnielle and whatever musicians he surrounds himself with, which means that while the soundscape may change from project to project, the overall tone and feel of Darnielle’s work remains remarkably consistent — an impressive achievement, really, since Heretic Pride is his umpteenth album (and fourth for 4AD), and, as luck would have it, one of his most finely balanced ones at that. Darnielle at his best writes finely observed, slightly surreal, impressionistic vignettes that manage to mix life as we live it with life as we wish we could live it, and as such he has more in common with a short story writer than he does with the typical singer/songwriter. At his worst, he sounds glib, wordy, overwrought and ultimately unbelievable.
The calendar is relentless, spinning its fixed cycle of days and dates without prejudice or foresight as the numbers whirl by on their annual trek to yet another new year, and each of those numbers, each of those dates, has its own set of events and associations that travel with them, accumulating like stars in the heavens or grains of sand on the grand beach of time. Today is February 8, a day deep enough—if you happen to live in the Midwest—into the heartless grip of winter as to be just another drab, meaningless day to slush through without freezing or ramming your car into a tree on the drive home. This year February 8 falls on a Friday, which makes it a little better (Mondays being the worst), but it pales beside the twin poles of Super Bowl Sunday (February 3 this year, meaning Groundhog Day, February 2, and a Saturday, was clearly overshadowed) and the love-it-or-hate-it faux holiday of Valentine’s Day (February 14 rolls up on a Thursday in 2008, a red-letter day for doghouse roses), but it is hardly a day of particular distinction. But oh, it is, for like every other day and date on the great spinning wheel, things happened (and continue to happen) on February 8 that give it its own special history. 
Thanks to films like Deliverance and the rise of bluegrass since the mid-’50s, the banjo has come to be associated with white Appalachia in most people’s minds, but the instrument actually has its origins in West Africa, arriving in the New World via the slave trade, and consequently became a dominant factor in early African-American song styles. A simple instrument with tremendous modal possibilities, the banjo, particularly in its five-string version, also has a much wider range of tones, approaches, and styles in its repertoire than most people only familiar with the slash-and-burn speed style of modern bluegrass are likely to realize. In this regard, the title of Otis Taylor’s ninth album, 
The Eagles were one of the most calculated bands in the history of American rock, and were undoubtedly one of the smartest as well. They didn’t invent country-rock, but they certainly put it on the map with their early singles, easily outstripping musically purer bands like Poco and the Flying Burrito Brothers in the commercial arena. Glen Frey, Don Henley, and company knew exactly what they were doing, and while Gram Parsons may have championed a seamless blend of country, rock, and soul that he termed “Cosmic American Music,” the Eagles actually pulled it off and landed it on the charts to boot. This was a band that not only represented the drug-fueled hedonistic lifestyle of mid-’70s Southern California, they also had the balls to comment on and be socially critical of that same lifestyle in their songs, the musical equivalent of having one’s cake and eating it, too. Their legacy is immense, and it’s virtually impossible to listen to a contemporary country station without hearing traces of the Eagles everywhere. Think “Lyin’ Eyes” and you’ll get the picture. No, this band knew what it was doing from the very first, so it should come as no surprise that the group’s first new album of studio material since 1979’s The Long Run, the double-disc Long Road Out of Eden, is such a savvy example of precise content, exact timing, and shrewd marketing that it ended up being the top selling album in 2007 from a U.S. group.