Month: August 2019

Shattered but Strong: Sleater-Kinney dips a toe into chaos

.Reading time 11 minutes.

center wont hold

Maybe it was never if, but when. Almost from the beginning, Sleater-Kinney’s breakneck speed and throttling urgency have portended collapse; in terms both romantic and political, the band has warned us that stability is transient, that sooner or later things always fall apart. In their famous song “One More Hour,” they voice two lovers who’ve long given up on eternity; in a world of impermanence, they’ll settle for a few precious minutes. And throughout the War on Terror-era One Beat, they remind us how quickly the moral calculus can change for a country on the brink of the abyss. The arrival of a new album called The Center Won’t Hold feels less like a warning than a prophecy fulfilled. After so many years of staving off entropy and erasure, there’s a notable shift in Sleater-Kinney’s apocalyptic outlook. Call it acquiescence to the inevitable. “And if the world is ending now/ then let’s dance the bad dance/ we’ve been rehearsing our whole lives,” one song suggests. This is the explosive finale they’ve been preparing us for. Least we can do is hit our marks and remember our cues.

As for what’s setting off their alarm bells, you can probably hazard a guess. The 45th President looms large over the album, even if he’s never mentioned by name; there is nothing here as courageously specific as One Beat’s valiant “Combat Rock,” but also nothing as schlocky as the Trump-baiting songs Corin Tucker wrote with her other band, Filthy Friends. The writing here is more impressionistic in nature, a blur of images and feelings to suggest a loss of social cohesion and a general sense of things coming unmoored. The title song almost sounds like a narcotic update to “Dig Me Out,” but where that earlier anthem wailed for transcendence, “The Center Won’t Hold” lurches toward a quick fix, be it money, drugs, or “something holy,” whichever is closest at hand. And in “The Future is Here,” Tucker summarizes the current state of disorientation: “Never have I felt so goddamn lost and alone.” Call it a wartime prayer. A song of lament.

Sleater-Kinney proves their own point about entropy, allowing a certain level of unpredictability into their creative process. Certainly the album is distinct from the athletic No Cities to Love, in which the world’s most essential punk band ratified their muscularity and terseness after a decade of silence. But if that record consolidated the fundamentals, The Center Won’t Hold scuttles them for spare parts. There are still molten blasts of raucous fury here, but they’re interspersed between icy synth-scapes, heavy-machinery beats, disembodied voices, and guitars that thrum like buzzsaws. It’s their Achtung Baby moment, and in the title song they hurtle headlong into Zoo Station, the creak and clamor of industrial percussion building into a cathartic jolt of three-piece electric mayhem. “RUINS” totters through a haunted house of trip-hop beats and flickering, low-rent static and fuzz. “Bad Dance” sounds like musical theater that’s rusted over, kitsch that’s congealed into something hard and mean. “Reach Out” combines the spiked pop of Cyndi Lauper with echo effects worthy of The Edge. “Dip your toes into the chaos,” one song counsels. Let it never be said that Sleater-Kinney can’t take their own advice.

Assisting in their industrial revolution is producer Annie Clark, better known as St. Vincent, on hand with plenty of arthouse effects that sound like they could have fit on her own 2017 MASSEDUCTION (merely one of the most gloriously dark, demented pop records of the last decade). Her involvement proved divisive before The Center Won’t Hold was even released, but what’s most striking about the sound of these recordings is how acutely Clark understands what makes this band special. She wrestles their innate queerness into some of the most playful, borderline-campy material in the Sleater-Kinney canon; listen to “Can I Go On,” a frazzled showtune with a New Wave pulse. Elsewhere, she pushes them into some of the extremes of the Sleater-Kinney sound— “Restless” is their best (only?) slow song since “Modern Girl,” and the five-minute “RUINS” is relatively loose and jammy— but even scuffed up with weird sounds, these songs all have their finger on the Sleater-Kinney essence: They’re tightly-coiled and razor-edged; they bristle with tension that never quite abates, no matter how many times they erupt. It’s arguably less revisionist than The Woods, which ransacked the classic rock playbook to turn those taut little Sleater-Kinney songs into widescreen features. This one feels closer in spirit to the band that made Dig Me Out, albeit dressed up in fancy new duds. 

The Center Won’t Hold apprehends the void, but it doesn’t surrender to it. These performances are too hungry, too ferocious to feel like Sleater-Kinney has thrown in the towel; a band that can wrest existential anguish into howling vaudeville (“Bad Dance”) or sweet-and-salty synth-pop (“LOVE”) clearly hasn’t given up on punk’s street-fighting spirit. As critic Alfred Soto notes, Sleater-Kinney has long taken a position of “contempt for ‘centers,’” and maybe that explains the thread of anarchic glee that runs through these raucous recordings: Having seen just how far the monoculture has gotten us, the band isn’t entirely heartbroken to see it implode. 

Still, there’s real darkness. Like Titus Andronicus on An Obelisk, Sleater-Kinney turn the genre’s rabble-rousing inclinations inward, not just lamenting society’s collapse but also the rot of human depravity. “My heart wants the ugliest things,” Tucker sighs on “Restless,” an admission that trouble on the outside usually points to trouble on the inside. And in “RUINS,” she and Carrie Brownstein realize too late that they offered safe harbor to a monster who’s outgrown his cage, and hulks before them now as an unstoppable evil: “You’re a creature of sorrow/ You’re the beast we made/ You scratch at our sadness/ ‘Til we’re broken and frayed.” What these songs suggest is that we’ve nobody to blame but ourselves for the decay we see. The Center Won’t Hold teems with whirlwinds reaped; chickens come home to roost.

The principalities they name here aren’t necessarily political agendas nor even world leaders, but rather the slow creep of dehumanization. That’s certainly the vibe in “Hurry on Home,” a harrowing slice of devious kink. Over the clank and grind of what sound like haywire kitchen appliances, Brownstein sets a grisly domestic scene punctuated with monotonous violence (“you know I’m hair-grabbable, grand-slammable”). In Tucker’s “Reach Out,” salvation is framed both as physical autonomy (“my body is my own again”) and as validation from someone else (“reach out and see me, I’m losing my head”). It’s a song made sweeter, more powerful by its grounding in Sleater-Kinney’s long-standing commitment to indefatigable yet inclusive feminism: They have done the hard work of defining for themselves what a nourishing, empowering community looks like. They’ve never needed it more, and neither have we.

Alas, as critic Carl Wilson notes, even Sleater-Kinney’s skillfully-cultivated feminist utopia is subject to collapse; shortly before the release of The Center Won’t Hold, boon drummer Janet Weiss announced her departure from the band, citing creative differences and casting a shadow over the album’s release. It’s hard now not to think of Sleater-Kinney as another casualty of entropy, but they soldier on. The album ends with “Broken,” the most unswerving piano ballad they’ve ever put on a record. It’s a song of solidarity with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, in whose plight Brownstein and Tucker discover new depths of indignation and despair. “I thought I was all grown up right now,” admits Tucker. “But I feel like I’ll never be done.” Maybe we’re never supposed to reach a point where this world’s cruelties make sense; maybe persistent revulsion is a sign of conscience at work. Thank God for Sleater-Kinney, who even in fracture show us what it looks like to feel shattered and still be strong.

Bluesmen Next Door: Familiar pleasures from Jimmie Vaughan, The Cash Box Kings

.Reading time 8 minutes.

hail to the kings

When Adia Victoria released her album Silences— a chilling, modernistic reworking of Southern blues tropes— she framed it with a simple statement of purpose. “I want to make the blues dangerous again,” she told The New York Times. (Mission accomplished.) You just barely have to read between the lines of that manifesto to find the implicit critique of her chosen idiom, an insinuation that contemporary blues records have largely become comfortable, anodyne, and predictable. 

But what if predictability has its own rewards? Listen to Baby, Please Come Home, the latest album from stalwart bluesman Jimmie Vaughan, and you just might be persuaded. In a relaxed set of quasi-obscurities from the blues canon, Vaughan leads a crack band (complete with brass) through rolling, after-hours ballads and prickly, Chicago-style raves. All of it has the easy flow of a weeknight set at the local juke joint, to the point that you’ll hardly notice when Vaughan slips a couple of live recordings in with the studio cuts. 

It sounds basically like it could have been released at any point over the last 50 years, which happens to be how long Vaughan has been making music. His depth of expertise plays out in songs that follow familiar beats, and where rough edges have been sanded down into smooth contours. That’s not to say the record wants for electricity, but Vaughan is enough of a pro to understand the difference between showmanship and showboating: In the opening title cut, he inserts barbed-wire electric guitar frills between cheerful outbursts from the horn section, his pyrotechnics never threatening the song’s supple groove; when he does erupt into a solo, it’s clean, tuneful, and dexterous. 

This is blues as comfort food: Because you know all the marks well in advance, it’s easy to appreciate how ably Vaughan hits them. And if there’s tremendous power in Adia Victoria’s blues-as-exorcism, there are humble but nourishing pleasures in the way Vaughan transmutes the agony of love and the desolation of heartache into songs so casually, stoically joyful. In “Just a Game,” he’s content to croon rather than wail his blues, a mode he sticks to for most of the album; he’s more at ease playing the seducer than the shaman. In “Midnight Hour,” when he tells you he cried the whole night long, you’ll believe him, but you’ll also believe he’ll get over it. And in “I’m Still in Love with You,” amid humming organ and brushed percussion, he professes romantic devotion in terms that are convincingly ordinary and everyday.

Blues music can be the most conservative of genres, often entangled in ideals of purity and authenticity. But it’s also an idiom that rewards connoisseurship; the more you know the tried-and-true playbook, the more you value refinement of craft when you hear it. Vaughan’s professionalism helps him to smoothly unfurl a catholic vision of the blues, one with enough space for both sly curveballs (simmering organ and crisp snare pops make “Hold It” a soulful instrumental vamp in the “Green Onions” vein) and feats of interpretation (Lefty Frizzel’s twangy “No One to Talk To [But the Blues]” is reimagined as moaning doo-wop). But the most substantial delights come from the warm chemistry of the band, nimbly navigating rhythms they know by heart. The closing “Baby, What’s Wrong” snarls and struts, swings and sways; it exhibits the deftness of bluesmen whose joy just gets deeper with time.

Another album to ratify the familiar pleasures of Chicago-style blues is Hail to the Kings!, roughly the seventh album from the Windy City’s own Cash Box Kings (give or take some live releases). This is a homegrown blues posse that’s happily devoid of mystique; they’re never anything less than friendly and unpretentious, and when they title a song “Bluesman Next Door,” it sounds like the perfect summary of their innate modesty. But don’t take their amiability for toothlessness: Hail to the Kings! is a loud and raucous good time, the beer-soaked, after-hours barnburner to Jimmie Vaughan’s elegant showstopper.

Like Vaughan, the Kings view blues music as the mouth of the river, but are unafraid to trace its various tributaries. Opener “Ain’t No Fun (When the Rabbit Got the Gun)” kicks off with a Church Berry guitar riff that quickly morphs into a jostling jump blues, complete with gritty Little Walter-style harmonica blasts from Joe Nosek; it sounds like both a faithful adaptation and a gentle remix of golden-era Chess Records. But if The Cash Box Kings are respectful of tradition, it’s never at the expense of good humor. Shemekia Copeland stops by for a bawdy duet called “The Wine Talkin,’” where two lovers scramble to make boozy excuses for their questionable decisions. Over the greasy grind and barroom piano of “Smoked Jowl Blues,” singer Oscar Wilson gets frisky about breakfast food, and leans into down-home ad-libs (“it ain’t nothin’ but bacon from a hog’s jaw, baby”). And in “Joe, You Ain’t from Chicago,” a jaunty Bo Diddley jam, Wilson and Nosek compete to see who’s the realest Chicagoan; would it surprise you to know that their points of contention are largely related to the city’s hallowed eating establishments?

The Cash Box Kings are faithful stewards of a lineage, but they also know how to accommodate modernity in ways both clever and courageous. In the former category there’s the album-closing “The Wrong Number,” an old-timey shuffle that chronicles text message (not landline) miscommunication. And as for the latter, listen to “Bluesman Next Door,” a study in not-in-my-backyard syndrome; Wilson bears witness to the hypocrisy of white audiences who celebrate black musicians on stage, but go deaf and blind with regard to real-life injustices that surround them. The song’s documentation of American racism is pointed enough to include the words “plantation” and “slavery.” Most blistering of all is “Jon Burge Blues,” a hometown protest number about a dirty cop who tortured the city’s black residents; it’s withering enough to cast a shadow over the rest of the album, contextualizing the rowdy good times and the downcast numbers alike. It’s why they sing the blues, and evidence enough that even a “predictable” blues album can pack substantive surprises. 

In Times Like These: Troubadour triumphs from Hayes Carll, Todd Snider

.Reading time 9 minutes.

what it is

The sixth Hayes Carll album, What it Is, includes a song called “Fragile Men.” It’s about exactly what you think it’s about, and it’s even better than you might hope. “It must make you so damn angry they’re expecting you to change,” he sings, faux-commiserating with the eternally privileged and the permanently embattled. The subtext, of course, is that Carll (much like your humble critic) is a straight white male, the very demographic that’s high-risk for fragility. But God bless him, he’s doing what he can to stop the virus from spreading, using all the tools endowed to him by the folk tradition to put his privilege in its place: satire, storytelling, whimsy, historicity, some good old-fashioned protest tunes and some even better love songs. Does it need to be said that this is the richest Hayes Carll album yet?

He’s not the only member of his genus to inoculate against entitlement and apathy. Todd Snider— roughly the same level of straight, white, and male— draws from a similar battery of folk-tradition tools  on his casually brilliant Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3. (Naturally, it’s the first entry in the series, a catalog joke borrowed from the Traveling Wilburys.) Together, these persuasive albums offer a welcome reassurance: There’s still plenty that dudes-with-guitars can do to speak a prophetic word into a world short on sanity. Long live folk singers.

For Carll, What it Is feels like a full flourishing; the snark and wiseassery of his early records are very much present, but they’re tempered with more empathy than ever before. It follows on the heels of Lovers and Leavers, a downcast and introspective divorce album that Carll made with Joe Henry, taken by some fans as a sign that Carll had gone soft; he hadn’t, but you know how people talk. Since then he’s married the singer and songwriter Allison Morrer, who co-wrote many of these new songs and co-produced the album with Brad Jones. It seems like a grounding partnership for Carll, who opens the record with a fiddle-led tune called “None’ya,” where two lovers take cheerful little digs at each other, their gentle jabs betraying obvious affection. It’s not performative happiness, but rather the natural glow of a couple who’ve found at long last a domesticity that suits them. It’s not a red herring, either; “Be There” is even more earnest in its devotion, a country love song that builds into orchestral elation.

There are tributaries of humility and empathy that flow through even the shit-talkingest songs on the album. “Fragile Men,” with its eerie backdrop of junkyard percussion, is Carll’s most strident note of moral witness-beating, and surely it’s no coincidence that it’s followed immediately by a swampy blues called “Wild Pointy Finger,” where the singer deflates his own knack for sanctimony. Elsewhere, on “Times Like These,” Carll rides a driving Chuck Berry groove and tries his best to downplay swiftly-escalating temperatures– maybe literal, maybe symbolic (“it’s sure gettin’ hot around here in times like these”). 

Pitched somewhere between the romantic songs and the topical ones are a couple of bona fide Hayes Carll classics; songs that speak to the times from a place of weary wisdom and battle-tested compassion. In “Jesus and Elvis”– a song way too good for Carll to leave it all for Kenny Chesney– the Lord and the King strike a truce in behalf of all who are heavy-laden, offering sweet salvation in multiple flavors (“so if you need a shot of Dickel or redemption…”). And in “American Dream,” written with Moorer, Carll remembers that beneath all the outrage and all the issues there are people who are just looking to find their slice of heaven, often getting trampled in the process. Carll, like so many dudes-with-guitars before him, sings for them.

Snider doesn’t have a guru like Allison Moorer in his corner, though on at least one of his new songs he gets a supernatural assist from “The Ghost of Johnny Cash.” It’s not as surprising as you might think. After all, Snider recorded Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3 in Cash’s old bungalow, and it’s mostly just him singing and plucking at a guitar or a banjo. (Jason Isbell, who recently produced a fine Josh Ritter album, shows up to sing and play on “Like a Force of Nature,” and he and Amanda Shires roll into the hootenanny spirit of the album-closing “A Timeless Response to Current Events.”) The songs crackle with live immediacy, and the set flows with the easeful grace of an impromptu open-mic set, right down to a brief spoken-word “Dedication” for one song and what sounds like an unscripted “Explanation” for another.

The economy of these recordings leaves Snider nowhere to hide: The charm of Cash Cabin Sessions is purely in his formal command, his rich imagination, and his impish humor. You can hear a little of all three on “Talking Reality Television Blues,” a historic survey of how the entertainment industry’s been slowly eroding our ideals and our norms at least since Milton Berle. Snider has it both ways by ratifying a familiar form and also breaking the fourth wall to comment on it; go along with his art-as-criticism and criticism-as-art and you’ll be rewarded with a devastatingly pithy summation of the rise and fall of Michael Jackson (“reality killed that video star”). And if you like that one, just wait til he gets to the part about the 45th President.

Not every song is so barbed; “Like a Force of Nature” ennobles the aging process, and the harmonica-puffin’ “Watering Flowers in the Rain” empathizes with an Elvis roadie who dreams of seeing his own name in marquee lights. But the songs that define the album are the ones where Snider brings his wit to bear on the state of our fracture, which happen to be the album’s most formally sophisticated. He plucks away at “The Blues on Banjo” to trace dark money’s influence from the French Revolution through the Iraq War, but also to comment on an American minstrelsy tradition that responds to real evil with artificial sanguinity (“so zippity-doodah, motherfucker, zippity-ay”). “A Timeless Response to Current Events” is a bravura showcase for free-associative rhymes and dense allusions, but it turns out the most eloquent protests are often the simplest: “Ain’t that some bullshit?” goes the sing-along chorus.

These sharp Snider songs may put you right back in Carll’s headspace, and particularly the state of mind he conjures in What it Is standout “If I May Be So Bold.” The title portends bloviation and the jostling rhythm suggests a con man’s hubristic hustle, but actually it’s a straightforwardly aspirational rallying cry for troubadours everywhere. “There’s a whole world out there waitin’/ Full of stories to be told/ And I’ll heed the call and tell ‘em all/ If I may be so bold.” It’s a statement of purpose that both he and Snider live up to, and it’s never seemed more badly needed than in times like these.