As AMG’s hometown tried to shrug off the clutches of winter, April became a fertile time for Southwestern rock & roll, reissued emo benchmarks, juvenile rap wars, and harmony-driven folk. It was a good month.
Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers — “Summer 39″ (from Turbo Ocho)
The bulk of Turbo Ocho was written in eight days, with the Peacemakers relocating to seaside Mexico and immersing themselves in a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants songwriting process. Recorded during one of the band’s practice sessions, “Summer 39″ takes a literate look at love, age, and passing time, with Steve Larson’s twangy pedal steel repeating the same riff like a gently ticking clock.
Good news on the horizon for fans of sad German electronic-influenced pop! The Notwist have plans to release The Devil, You + Me, the follow-up to their fantastic 2002 album, Neon Golden, this spring. The band has actually been putting out music since the late ’80s, but Neon Golden was the record that brought them out into the great shining beacon of relative indie stardom. It’s not that the members of the Notwist have just been sitting on their hands all this time — they collaborated with Themselves in 13 + God, Micha Acher is in Ms. John Soda with Stefanie Böhm and runs his own studio, his brother Markus plays guitar in Lali Puna — but there’s certainly been some anticipation in regards to their next output. Finally, a sign of life. And if it proves to be indicative of all that The Devil, You + Me is, good things are in store.
Though Markus’s vocals are half-whispered in “Good Lies,” and often sound as if he’s too forlorn to get all his words out, they carry the song; it’s their very fragility that makes them so alluring, and so strong. His lyrics are both thoughtfully detailed (”We carry them home with us/To our bedside table and our coffee sets”) and catholic (”Let’s just imitate the real, until we find a better one”), as they lay themselves out and repeat throughout the piece. While Neon Golden relied heavily on what soon became the prototypical indie-electronic percussion (the soft blip, the chirp), here the band uses a bass drum and bass guitar to keep the eighth notes constant and steady as the guitars and soft keyboards play above. “Good Lies” is immediately melancholic and distantly gorgeous, the kind of thing that strikes you unawares and, once it hits, is difficult to dislodge. If the rest of The Devil, You + Me is as strong as this, the Notwist may not have the leisure of taking six years before their next release appears. Which isn’t a bad thing at all.
“4 Minutes,” the first single from Madonna’s Hard Candy, her last album for Warner, has just surfaced. Produced by Timbaland & Danja and featuring Justin Timberlake on guest vocals, “4 Minutes” is a clear break from the disco-heavy Confessions on a Dancefloor, but is it any good? AMG Editors Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Heather Phares offer their initial take on Madonna’s return.
Akrobatik — “Put Ya Stamp on It” (from Absolute Value)
Boston’s Akrobatik has been in hip-hop long enough to know how to make a hot underground track: spit some decent verses over a Dilla beat and get another high-profiled MC to do the same. On “Put Ya Stamp on It,” Akro’s rhymes about his and his guest’s skills seem a bit empty until Talib Kweli comes in with some (surprisingly?) great bars. “…Should be authentic like the Gucci with the cereal/Number, this rap is fruity like the pebbles in your cereal/Wonder why…/You’re way off if you think I’ll take a day off, this ain’t Ferris Bueller, I’m not Cameron Frye,” which brings the whole song together, and proves Ak’s boasts to be true. www.myspace.com/therealakrobatik
Veteran MC Masta Ace already has experience with successful rap groups. In the late ’80s he joined up with the Juice Crew for the seminal “The Symphony,” a move which then helped to jumpstart his own solo career. So it makes sense that he turns back to the group format when rumors of his own retirement set in. Along with fellow Brooklynites Punchline and Wordsworth and Milwaukee native Stricklin, all of whom Ace had worked with on Disposable Arts and Long Hot Summer, the foursome came together as eMC in 2005. And what, do you ask, does eMC mean? The rappers are more than happy to answer that question in “EMC What It Stand For,” the first single from their debut, The Show (scheduled to be released in March), which features bass drum-heavy Nicolay production as well as some sick verses from each of the MCs (”EMC, Excellent mic controllers, each must come fulfill the quota/Every man can prove he’s a soldier, this ain’t chicken noodle soup with a soda,” “Each man can claim another victory/Why don’t you plead the Fifth dog, cuz you ain’t got shit to say/Your neck sore from vibing, blame Nicolay”), the track bounces without sacrificing lyrical content. The single came out way back in September, but as a lead-in to the full-length, it’s a relevant, exciting bit of work, and one of the better underground joints to surface in a while.
Although they only cut three little-known singles in the 1960s, the Tammys are still responsible for one of the oddest songs in the Girl Group catalog. “Egyptian Shumba” is a freak of nature, a song co-written by Lou Christie and sung by a trio of teenaged girls whose voices were higher and screechier than his own. Recorded in November 1963, it begins with a clarinet riff that might as well have been lifted from Jimmy Gilmer & the Fireballs‘ “Sugar Shack” (the highest-charting song of that year) before dissolving into a vocal madhouse. The Tammys sing tight, nasal harmonies that sound like a Brill Building equivalent of the Chipmunks, and they whoop it up in the chorus with grunts and monkey screams. Who cares if the lyrics are silly, focusing on a fabricated dream in which the girls shimmy with their babies while traveling down the Nile? “Eee eee! Ah! Ah!” goes the unforgettable hook, and those three seconds are perhaps some of the wildest, sex-crazed moments in the history of forgotten pop (or, at the very least, the wildest thing ever associated with Lou Christie). Forty five years later, the song still sounds electric; it must’ve sounded positively nuclear back then.
The frenetic bridge, brought to you by AMG.
(For the full version, try your luck at either of thesesites)
As the ’80s have already come back in full swing — causing thousands to curse selling their old electro mixtapes and Human League records at garage sales during the push to collect enough money to buy one of those new-fangled compact disc players — why not get an early start on the inevitable return-of-the-90s by listening to some songs you probably haven’t thought about since you packed away your flannel and combat boots for good (quick, it’s not too late, pull them out now, start the revolution!). Everyone remembers Nirvana and Pearl Jam and even that band that had that bee song (they’re getting back together, by the way…), but few remember the five-and-a-half-minute grunge masterpiece “Mighty K.C.” by the Gainesville band For Squirrels. Written in tribute to none other than Kurt Cobain, the track features anguished nasally vocals, simple guitar chords, and plenty of mood shifts, as singer Jack Vigliatura IV changes from a growl during “100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600 oh they have found dead, dead/And I am numb from watching TV” to a nearly-sweet croon during the chorus. Sadly, Vigliatura and bassist Bill White died in a car accident while the band was returning home from 1995’s CMJ Festival, which may be part of the reason For Squirrels never made much of a splash. Or, on the other hand, it might be why we remember them at all.
Cotton-Eyed Joe,
Where do you come from,
Where do you go?
Truthfully nobody knows where Cotton-Eyed Joe came from. The song itself, a feisty, irresistible dance tune, dates from before the Civil War, and was firmly established as a fiddle piece by the mid-1800s. It has been recorded countless times in endless variations by everyone from Doc Watson, the Skillet Lickers and the Red Clay Ramblers to Garth Brooks, Michelle Shocked and, in perhaps its strangest incarnation, as an urban dance number with sampled beats merging with fiddles and banjos in a fascinating (and for some, irritating) cultural collision by the Euro-dance combo Rednex. The lyrics vary considerably, aside from the “where do you come from” chorus, in the different versions of the song, no doubt due to years and years of square dance callers pulling in whatever floating verses fit their needs at the time. It is, after all, a dance tune, and has prompted dancers to fill the dance floor for well over two hundred years now, an amazing bit of musical survival.
Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers — “Summer 39″ (from Turbo Ocho)
Good news on the horizon for fans of sad German electronic-influenced pop! 
“4 Minutes,” the first single from Madonna’s Hard Candy, her last album for Warner, has just surfaced. Produced by Timbaland & Danja and featuring Justin Timberlake on guest vocals, “4 Minutes” is a clear break from the disco-heavy 
Although they only cut three little-known singles in the 1960s, 
As the ’80s have already come back in full swing — causing thousands to curse selling their old electro mixtapes and Human League records at garage sales during the push to collect enough money to buy one of those new-fangled compact disc players — why not get an early start on the inevitable return-of-the-90s by listening to some songs you probably haven’t thought about since you packed away your flannel and combat boots for good (quick, it’s not too late, pull them out now, start the revolution!). Everyone remembers Nirvana and Pearl Jam and even 