And then it was sitting there on the CD player when I woke up.

Through Low Light and Trees is like some blissed-out combination of English folk and American roots music, like Maddy Prior and Sandy Denny and Bert Jansch and The Be Good Tanyas and Liz Durrett and Vic Chesnutt participated in a highly successful in-vitro program and produced from their own musical DNA these lovely musicians who are all of them combined and themselves at the same time.

Take a  breath, reviewer, you’ll have people wanting to buy it and maybe they won’t like as much as you.

-They should buy it!

Look, it’s not often you find something out of the blue like this that really takes your fancy, so you’ll have to excuse me for getting a bit breathless. Have a listen to these three tracks to get the idea.

Now here’s the backstory, which I nicked from Wikipedia:

Blamire and Davies met at school in Sussex during the mid-late 1990s. They began singing together in the school choir, picking up their parents’ guitars and obsessing over Jessica’s mum’s vinyl albums collection, dominated by American ‘70s classics. A year spent in New Orleans in 2002 also helped shape their sound. Back in England, they discovered British folk at the Sidmouth Folk Festival while working as car park attendants. They later spent a year living in Vancouver, Canada, before returning to London. With their band name in place – Smoke Fairies alludes to the summer mist that collects in the hedgerows of Sussex’s narrow country lanes – the duo started gigging. In 2007 they supported Bryan Ferry on a tour of the UK and later toured with The Handsome Family in the Spring of 2009.

In December 2009 Jack White’s Third Man Label released a 7″ single “Gastown/ Riversong”. The track was produced by Jack White III and featured him on guitar and drums.

I’ve purposely embedded the songs above — even though there are YouTubes available — just because I reckon it’s better to hear the music without the visual interference. But if you really want a clip, here’s one of them doing ‘Hotel Room’ live (love this song).

And here’s another song, though this is from an earlier EP, not the new album.

Okay, the playing isn’t brilliant; the guitar, especially on the solos, lacks a bit of attack, is just that bit too delicate, though I realise this is a bit of a boy thing to say.  Still, this sort of music is very forgiving of technical skill if you get the feel right and to my mind, they do that in spades.   And the guitar sounds are awesome.

The songs also have to be good and these songs are.

What I really like about the songs is that, especially given the folk/roots form, Blamire and Davies don’t just settle for strum-along arrangements.  Nearly every song is built around a riff of some sort and it gives a real edge to the music.  It doesn’t quite kick over into rock, but the songs have that folk/rock feel about them.  I guess it’s most notable on ‘Hotel Room’, but it’s there throughout.

And then there’s a the vocals, which really are top notch, especially when they harmonise.  In fact, it is the voices that give the Smoke Fairies their distinctively English sound, and it probably isn’t going too far to say that vocally they are English, while instrumentally they live somewhere closer to the American South.

So yeah, there you have it: a real find.  A joy of an album and I wish them a long and fruitful career.

CODA: This is also my last review for Johnny’s in the Basement.  Sad to be finishing up, but glad to be able to go out on such a fine album.  I’ve enjoyed talking about music with you all and I think Johnny’s brought something a bit different to music reviewing; I certainly tried to make the site something more than regurgitation of the stuff you get on other sites.

So thank you all for reading and contributing, here and on Twitter and through emails, and I’ll no doubt be in touch through other writing such as that at The Drum and B-Sides.  (Maybe even the odd post here in a guest capacity.)

Also, a big thanks to all the labels, distributors, managers and bands who provided the albums for me to review.  Special thanks to Will Alexander, Blake Price and Lou Ridsdale who were particularly generous with their time and support and who, I think, got what we were trying to do here.

It’s been a hoot!

When I came to in the post-op room the pain was excruciating, but the docs quickly pumped me full of some blessed opiate — the sort we keep behind lock and key, the doctor told me later when I asked what it was — and I was wheeled into the recovery room about thirty minutes later, with the drug taking effect, though still with a throbbing pain — as if someone was digging their thumb into my knee — right underneath my kneecap. So I was somewhere between pleasure and pain as I plugged in my iPod earphones and found myself listening to this album.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that this is not the sort of album that you enjoy. It’s all a bit too dark and grinding for that, but it nonetheless does deliver a sort of pleasure, a form of satisfaction that you might get, say, from reading a difficult book or recovering from successful surgery.

The music is simply Liddiard accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, singing long songs with clever lyrics documenting the political and the personal. Not that you can always understand the lyrics given the singer’s tendency to slur lines together, but somehow he imparts the general idea of what he is saying and net effect is that you feel like you are following what he is singing about. At the very least, that moany groany voice delivers a particular mood and there is no mistaking who you are listening to.

Bottom line is, the album is great. And I don’t think you are going to need knee surgery in order to appreciate it, which is probably good news from a marketing point of view. It’s the sort of music that some will dismiss as pretentious and laboured but to me such an assessment is merely a species of tall poppy syndrome. Liddiard, in other words, is taking a bit of risk here, trying to deliver an artistic vision and thus making himself a bit vulnerable to easy criticism.

But listen to, say, ‘Blondin Makes An Omlette’ or ‘Did She Scare All Your Friends Away’ and tell me they aren’t just really good songs delivered with skill and even passion. Liddiard’s voice is always going to be a challenge for some people, for me too on occasion, but it really is a fine instrument within the framework of what Liddiard himself (or the Drones) produce. He is certainly a talent worth supporting, so I’ve got no hesitation in recommending you take a listen.

Ben Folds, in case you don’t know, wrote the music and performs the songs, while novelist Nick Hornby provides the lyrics.

Basically, I don’t like what they’ve come up with.   Ben Folds’ music, steeped in Beatles’ influences by way of the Electric Light Orchestra, is, on most tracks, over-produced and cloying. It is full of key changes and time signature changes and instrumentation and vocal overlays that, to my ear, interfere with some potentially nice melodies. Yes, yes, I know that’s just the way he is, but an album full of it drives me a bit nuts.

There are a bunch of musicians around at the moment who do this sort of thing, who can’t leave a good tune alone and feel the need to insert funny vocalisations, odd noises, keyboard fiddlings, strings and harps and other bells and whistles (sometimes, literally, bells and whistles).   I’m looking at you Regina Spektor and you Tori Amos and probably even you Kate Bush, even though you aren’t really around at the moment but I suspect that you — I can sing like a big girl/I can sing like little girl too — are probably the source of this sort of thing.

Anyway, I wish they’d stop. I wish Ben Folds would stop. It’s all a bit self-consciously clever.

The best tracks on this album are undoubtedly ‘Picture Window’ and ‘Practical Amanda’ and guess what? They are the tracks with the least embellishment, the songs where the beautiful melody is allowed to shine through almost unadorned and where Folds’ voice is at its absolute best.

‘Picture Window’ in particular is a classic song, one for the ages, and probably the best lyric on the album too.

Which brings me to the lyrics.

As you would expect, Nick Hornby has a way with words. He’s also funny and thoughtful and intelligent but somehow it doesn’t quite work.  It’s all a bit self-consciously clever.

Take the opening track, ‘A Working Day’. Nick obviously wanted to get something off his chest:

Some guy on the net thinks I suck
And he should know
He’s got his own blog

Cringe factor worthy of The Australian. I don’t know, maybe we should all be reassured that a writer as successful as Hornby is still filled with enough self-doubt to feel the need to write a song like this. Or maybe we should tell him to grow up and laugh off insults from people who will never come anywhere near matching his achievements.

Build a bridge, Nick, and get over it.

Just as I wish Folds would tone down his songs a little, kill some of the effects and embellishments, I wish Hornby had a bit more confidence in his ability to express emotion. The songs are littered with expletives and colloquialisms and I guess you can see their use in two ways. The positive reading is that they inject a bit of realism and humour into the songs and serve to undercut what could become saccharine and sentimental.

The other way to read it — and the way that I think is closer to the mark — is that Hornby is just that bit too uncomfortable to express genuine emotion straight and so feels the need to distance himself from something that otherwise might be too raw.

I guess it could be a bit of both.

At the end of the day the album sounds like the soundtrack to a Broadway musical, not a bad thing necessarily, but it tells you something about the net effect.  Folds writes big, clever tunes that dance and play all over the place in precisely the way the music for a Broadway show does, while Hornby has provided a set of storytelling lyrics that are conversational enough to have been translated from dialogue: you could easily imagine any of these tracks inserted into the pregnant pause musicals provide so that the characters can burst into song.

Maybe they should adapt High Fidelity for the stage?

Anyway, I had big problems with the album, despite the fact that there is some great stuff in there.  If they ever release an unplugged version, I’d certainly give it a listen.

BRING ME THE HORIZON ALBUM DEBUTS AT #1 ON ARIA CHARTS

In an industry where times are tough and naysayers are plentiful, Shock Records has recently seen stalwart acts, defiant of trends and gimmicks rise to the forefront. Just three months ago Byron Bay band Parkway Drive stormed the ARIA charts to arrive at a number two debut. To many it was an unexpected ambush but at Shock we have no reservations about the power of the punk/hardcore releases that we have become so well known for.

So it is with great delight that we announce that Sheffield metalcore band Bring Me The Horizon’s THERE IS A HELL BELIEVE ME IVE SEEN IT, THERE IS A HEAVEN LETS KEEP IT A SECRET has secured the NUMBER ONE position on this week’s ARIA Chart, thus delivering Shock Records it’s third ever ARIA number one album (The Offspring’s seminal punk rock release Smash, being the first).

Quite right that they should acknowledge this success, but it is interesting to note a news story this morning that kind of redefines what “success” means in the music industry these days.

The article notes:

RECORD sales in Australia have hit an alarming low with a British metal band hitting the No. 1 spot with just 3600 album sales.

British hardcore metal band Bring Me the Horizon made a surprising debut at No. 1 on the ARIA album charts yesterday, with just 3600 copies sold nationally.

This is the lowest sales to achieve a No. 1 album in Australia. The figure highlights the impact illegal downloading has had on record sales.

This is kind of breathtaking.  Back in the late seventies and early eighties when I was in music retail, working in a large record shop when the music industry was in rude good health, we would’ve sold 3600 copies of a number one album all by ourselves.

I mean, that would be a lot of copies for a single shop to sell, but we would’ve done it pretty easily on any number of albums, the obvious ones being various Floyd albums (Dark Side, The Wall); Rod Stewart’s Atlantic Crossing; Stardust by Willie Nelson; Dire Straits first album; various number ones by The Eagles or Linda Ronstadt or Fleetwood Mac and even Silk Degrees by Boz Scaggs.

The idea that the entire retail sales of a number one album in this country amounts to 3600 units almost does my head in.

As to why this is happening, well, I guess illegal downloads, as the article says, must have something to do with it, though I suspect it is much more than that.

Watching my fourteen year old son consume music, it is simply a fact that owning an album is far less of a priority for him than it was for an earlier generation.  It’s not that he is illegally downloading, it’s just that he is quite happy to watch a YouTube clip or stream a song from a MySpace page or one of any number of other of legal online outlets.

When he wants songs for his iPod, he might download a couple of tracks from iTunes, maybe even a full album, but this is fairly rare. Even rarer is when he will go into JB and buy a CD.  He does it, but only for artists he absolutely loves and not that often.

There was a particular mindset and a set of technological limitations that drove earlier generations to buy albums and/or singles that simply doesn’t exist any more.  In fact, it is quite interesting to think about that relationship — between the extant technology and the way that translated into particular consumer choices.

I guess it boils down to basic economics: the new technologies mean that labels/distributors simply can’t control the supply of their product in the way that they used to.  Demand is being met in a way that they can’t make a big buck out of any more.

You can’t help but think it’s a crappy time to be a musician but a great time to be a customer.

Thirty-six hundred copies to get to number one?  Amazing…

PS: The other thing about all this is that it renders the very idea of a “chart” meaningless.  I mean, how many copies to the number twenty album sell?  The industry needs to think of a better way to generate excitement.

For me, the stand out track is ‘Black Smoke’, a scary chant of a song with a mesmerising melody that suits Davis’s voice to a tee.  But it is far from the only good track on the album, I was pleased to discover.

Fortunately, I recently got a chance to ask Joni some questions and I hope her answers give you some insight into her music.  I also hope you dig up her album and have a listen for yourself.  (Try CD Baby or iTunes.)

Tim: My first question might seem a bit from left field, but I was wondering about the piano you use on A Bird’s Heart. I might be completely wrong, but it has a sort of honky tonk sound to it and I was curious to know if it was a piano you owned that might have a bit of a history or whether it just happened to be the instrument that was available when you recorded? Either way, I really like the sound of it.

Joni: Great question! I am glad you like the piano sound we got… My husband and I recorded the whole album in the small apartment we were living in at the time in Santa Rosa, CA. We worked pretty hard to get a piano sound we really liked which was a little difficult because our living room was pretty small. The piano we used is an old family heirloom. It was given to my Grandparents on my Dad’s side as a wedding present from my Grandfather’s parents. So my Dad grew up with it in his house, and my Grandmother taught piano lessons on it. It is the piano that I had throughout my childhood, the one that I learned on, and wrote my first songs on, so it is a special little thing to me. It is a small upright piano with a lovely touch and a really good sounding bass. I have a soft spot for that piano, but I have my own now which is treating me pretty well so far.

Tim: I’m guessing you won’t be well-known to my readers in Australia, so it’d be great to hear something about your background, where you live, where you grew up, how you got into music and how you ended up as a songwriter.

Joni: Well, right now I live in Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, California. We are about 60 miles north of San Francisco, nice and close to the ocean. I was born and raised here and will probably live here for the rest of my life because we love it here and a lot of my family lives here. I started playing the piano consistently when I was about 12; that is when we inherited that little piano I was talking about. I played mostly on my own, by ear, and was so happy to have found music when I did. It really pulled me along through the tough school years – junior high and high school. When I was 16 I started taking lessons with an amazing woman named Anne Berry, and she really opened my eyes up to just exactly what music could be for me, which was a real gift. I started singing around 18, not really knowing that I had any kind of voice, but just kind of rejoicing in that great thing that the human voice can do. Because I always really loved a good song, and admired songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, and Kate Bush and had grown up listening to songwriters like John Lennon and John Denver, it seemed like the natural progression of playing the piano and discovering singing. I started writing songs when I was 17 and that is that. In 2001, I moved to London to be with my boyfriend (who is now my husband). I lived in London for five years, and found it a pretty inspiring place in a lot of ways, and I think my time there has had great impact on the songs I write and probably always will. There is not a whole lot more in life that is better than a good song. Except for a good piece of cake or pie. But a good song really is a treasure. Especially if you wrote it yourself!

Tim: How much touring or live performance do you do? And do you have preference for live work over studio work, or vice versa?

Joni: Since I am an independent musician with a life outside of the music, I don’t really tour or perform much. I used to play shows a lot more, but lately haven’t felt compelled to do so. It takes a lot of time and energy to set up, promote and play a show. The performing side of things I quite like, but the other part of the equation I could really do without. There are a lot of things I love to do, and would rather spend my time doing those things instead of tending to a Myspace page or trying to get a good gig or radio play or whatever. I used to really work hard at that stuff, but now I just feel like life is way too short! I do love to perform though, and will probably start playing out a bit when I am done with my new record. You know my favorite thing is how I got on your blog. I don’t know how you heard about my music, but I think that if I just put it out there, people may find it and they may like it. If that happens, that is the best!! It may not be the best way forward for my music sales but really, it is hard to care about that stuff too much when there is the living to do. I am going to make music whether or not people will be buying it because I love to make music and I love to play music live. I love the exciting spaces you can enter into when you are recording in your studio, and when you are performing live.   All of it is GOOD.

Tim: I love the imagery of the ‘bird’s heart’ and was wondering where that came from?

Joni: The cover art was made by our good friend and very talented artist Chris Dennis. It was kinda cool how the whole thing came together actually. A lot of the imagery of the songs is tied to water I think because I grew up by the ocean, and it has always been an important place to me, full of all sorts of mystery. I wrote both the songs ‘A Bird’s Heart’ and ‘Silent at Sea’ really quickly, one of those kind of divine moments of inspiration which happens very very rarely. I decided soon after I wrote them that they would be the bookends to the album. I always knew I wanted Chris to do the artwork so when I was telling him about those two songs he told me about a painting he started working on and it was completely perfect. So it was really cool how our ideas came together without any directives – we were both kind of working with the same themes and man I was so pleased with the result.

Tim: The album has a sparse sound with not much instrumentation outside your voice and piano. I love that aspect of the music, but was curious, as I always am with independent artists, to what extent this result was driven by artistic or economic considerations? That is, if you had a bucketload of money to devote to recording, would you be tempted to a ‘bigger’ sound, or is the approach taken on A Bird’s Heart simply your preferred way of performing?

I do like to make music that isn’t very complicated. Part of that could just be a reflection of my limitations as a musician. If I had the ability to write some string sections and some brass sections, and could get players and space to record them, that would be so fun! Like the Tindersticks! I love their music. As a general rule, though, I like to stick to simplicity. I feel like since my craft is writing songs, I like to keep the piano/voice at the forefront of anything I do. I just want to write good songs. Lyrics are really important to me, as important as the music. Having said that, I am working on a couple of instrumental tracks for my new album and they are good fun… they have voices, but no words and it is pretty great getting into that world of writing. I don’t find it as easy to tell a story as I do when I can use words (I love language!) but it is a very rich world to experiment with. If I had a bucketload of money to devote to recording, I would get a good string player and good drummer and rock out. I would pay Jim White from Dirty Three to be my drummer! I love that guys drumming so much.

Tim: Just on the instrumentation, three cheers for the use of the saw! It works really well and it is such mesmerizing sound…

Joni: Isn’t the saw great?!  Such a creepy sounding parallel to the singing – it is so evocative and adds so much to a song. It is played by the very very talented Quinta who I was fortunate enough to meet and play with while I was in London.

Tim: Final question is what happens next? A new album? Touring? A bit of both? And would it be too ridiculous to wonder if you might ever make it to Australia?

Joni: Yes, I am working on a new album. It is really taking shape now and we are going to start recording it this winter. I am really excited to get some of my new stuff down and begin the process of making another collection of songs. After I get my album out, I would like to play some shows, but I am not sure how I will go about that yet. There is a great place that I like to play in the Netherlands called The Green Swan which I would love to return to. As far as Australia goes… I would love to come and play over there if you all would have me!

Have a listen to some of Joni’s songs here.

I’m talking about Generation Jonesers who had Zeppelin as a staple of their musical diet and who have, through their own investigations, found their way into the folkways of the roots and alt.country scene that Plant is now involved with. What’s interesting to me is that the stories of these Gen Jonesers are often the same.

They were fanatical about whatever music they were into in their teenage years, were immersed in it so that it was a central part of their life and their identity, a state of affairs illustrated by the image of them moving into their first post-parental accommodation (generally a group house, often in another city) and taking with them — ahead of any other possessions — a milk crate (or ten) filled with LPs.

After that, moving into their twenties and thirties, getting jobs, maybe getting married, music was pushed more and more to the background.  Other things, like air, became more central to their lives, though catching up with old friends, now flung to the four corners of the world, inevitably involved breaking out the old LPs, or maybe the repurchased CD versions of the old albums, and reminiscing endlessly about how great those bands were.

In fact, the advent of CDs was probably the first thing in the world of music that really grabbed their attention since…well, name an arbitrary date in the 70s.  Of course, it was more a geeky interest in the technology rather than a rediscovery of music, and sure enough, the CDs we bought pretty much mirrored the LP collections we already had.

Good news for the likes of Robert Plant, no doubt.

I don’t know anyone who resented repurchasing the albums on CD, which probably says a lot about our immersion in a consumer culture, but it is also interesting to note the tremendous goodwill involved in such an uncomplaining financial commitment, a goodwill largely trashed by the music industry even since.

I also suspect there was an air of stupid, wide-eyed technophilia involved too, as if we expected the new format would offer up hitherto unnoticed magic within the music.  Many would argue that, sonically, the opposite was the case.

But it is also true that buying the CDs of albums we already loved was a substitute for finding new music, and I wonder how that pans out in the greater scheme of things and how many new bands were neglected by record companies as they poured resources into reselling old rope?

Regardless, during these reunion sessions, any mention of “today’s music” was generally dismissed with a knowing scoff about all today’s bands being a pale imitation of the ones we grew up with, and that there hadn’t been any decent music released since…well, name an arbitrary date in the 70s.

Sure, we sometimes found an album we liked, though it was generally a solo album by someone from one of the “great” bands.  (The one that comes to mind for me is the early 80s release of Robbie Robertson’s first solo release.) But by and large, music as a total immersion, life-affiriming part of existence was dead to us.

The LPs, if we hadn’t left them at the last group house, were relegated to the proverbial attic, and the milk crates went the way of, um, bottled milk in crates.  There was a new-music shaped hole in the centre of many of us. And we felt the frustration.

For some of us, this meant trying to get into some new thing that someone had recommended, sometimes even pretending that such and such was good, but we never really felt it in our hearts.

And I don’t really blame us: for one thing, you can’t reproduce the shock-of-the-new that happens in your teenageish years when you hear everything for the first time.  It stands to reason that any new music you do hear is competing against the old music, not just musically, but viscerally as well.  How could it measure up?

There were exceptions, of course.  Somewhere during this limbo period I came across Fiona Apple’s album Tidal, for instance, as well as a bunch of jazz and classical music that resonated in that marrow-tingling way, but even then it wasn’t quite the same.

I’m not trying to suggest that everyone’s experience of music is like this.  Obviously it isn’t, and your mileage may vary.  But I’m struck by how many people I know have gone through a twenty or thirty year trajectory of this nature, and who then, as I’m about to describe, arrive bewildered and delighted in the wonderful world of roots music.

That’s the thing about this next stage: it tends to happen in a manner that is both unpredictable and inevitable.  That was precisely how America writer Flannery O’Connor (a Southern native, appropriately enough) described what she thought made her best stories good, and I must admit the combination of predictability and inevitability certainly does leave a satisfying feeling.

So now I go from the general to the specific.

My unpredictable moment came when I was living in the U.S. and read a review in No Depression magazine of Lucinda Williams then-new album, World Without Tears.

The real mystery in this series of events is why I was reading No Depression in the first place.  I suspect I picked up a copy at the Borders near our place in DC because of something on the cover and then had a read of it in their coffee shop.

Regardless, somewhere within those pages I read the review of the Williams’ album and something it said made me risk the money and go and buy it.

Begin the revelation.  And yee-ha! the revolution.

I’d heard of Williams and was vaguely familiar with some of her work, but World Without Tears cut through.  It instantly roused in my middle-age self feelings similar to those Led Zep and others had in my teenage self.  Her voice filled up my head and in Doug Pettibone I pretty much instantly discovered a new guitar hero.  Not of the Page/Clapton/Blackmore sort, but a master nonetheless.

And so Lucinda Williams became my gateway drug to the whole alt.country/roots movement that was in lots of ways reinvogorating music world wide, especially, I suspect, for that older demographic of which I was part.

Of course, the big breakthrough was the soundtrack for the movie, O Brother Where Art Thou?, an album (and associated video) that mainstreamed what was already a thriving and immense subculture, though subculture undersells it.

I’m trying to provide a timeline for how this music swept over me, but it isn’t really possible.  Suddenly it was there, at the forefront of my musical consciousness, and I immersed myself in it.  To find out friends were, at the same time, going through a similar experience, was a great and surprising discovery that added to the thrill of it.

The artists came tumbling into my consciousness.  Vic Chesnutt, Buddy and Julie Miller, Hem, Liz Durrett, Whiskeytown, Son Volt, Lambchop, Nico Case, The Hanson Family, and on and on and on, including, sitting above them all, that two-piece band called Gillian Welch.

The fact that I happened to be living in the US at the time certainly helped me appreciate the music, and it was great to be able to visit Nashville and New Orleans and the Appalachians and the Smoky Mountains and other places that were the home of this music.

Though the highlight of this particular adventure was, by fluke and by far, arriving in Nashville at the same time Lucinda Williams was playing there, at, of all places, the legendary Ryman Auditorium.

I’d still say that concert was the best show I’ve ever seen.

This is pretty much the seat I sat in for that concert, and Al Gore was sitting behind me

So if that’s the ‘completely unpredictable’ part of the equation, where does the ‘inevitable’ bit come in?

It seems inevitable that this music found an audience in my particular demographic because, when you look at the music we were listening to — that Jones Generation who discovered sixties music in the seventies — it is easy to see that a lot of it was built on the very roots music that I have been describing.

Sure, rock’s major influence was black American blues and related forms like Gospel, but folk music ran through its veins too.

Whether it was bands like Fairport Convention or Pentangle or Steeleye Span or more crossover rock/folk acts like Jethro Tull or Zep themselves, our ears and our hearts had been well trained in the form, and so when we heard it in its alt-country incarnation it fitted perfectly into the new-music shaped hole that I described above.

But it went deeper and wider than that.   I mean, pick a band.  Anybody who knew the Stones probably new Gram Parsons and Keef’s obsession with country.  We were all Dylan tragics which meant Band tragics which meant, even if we didn’t know it in those terms, roots tragics.   And we all loved Neil Young and he probably more than any other artists embodied that crossover between American country/folk and the sort of rock n’ roll we had always been obsessed with.  His album Tonight’s the Night probably still stands as the classic alt.country album, a release that pre-dates the category by about two decades, and that is truer to the roots part of the equation than anything by, say, the likes of Poco or the Eagles, bands that are often cited as influential in such matters.

Plant himself entered the equation (or re-entered) when he and Page did an MTV unplugged concert, the so-called Unledded show, where, apart from showcasing classic Zep numbers — including folk/roots songs like ‘Battle of Evermore’, ‘Gallows Pole’ and even ‘Kashmir’ — they dipped into their own growing fascination with folk music from around the world.

Songs like ‘Yallah’ and ‘City Don’t Cry’ showed them mixing their talents in a new folkways environment, and in a way that is relevant to Plant’s latest album, as we will see.

Anyway, that barely scrapes the surface of the interconnections.  But was it any wonder we were ready to hear what we heard?

Discovering rock music in your formative teenage years was like discovering the world – especially in somewhere like Canberra in those pre-internet days when the sense of isolation was almost the defining characteristic of living there (and please don’t feel free to lecture me on what a great place Canberra is; I’m not saying it isn’t; I’m just making the point that in 70s it was very easy to feel that you were precisely nowhere) — it was like discovering everything, it was the shock of the new writ large in our little lives and it changed how we viewed ourselves and the world.

Discovering — or, as I am really saying, rediscovering – roots music in our forties, although it had a similar impact, lit a similar flame of musical joy, was quite a different experience.  If sixties rock was the shock of the new, then alt.country and associated forms was a fall back into the warm embrace of something familiar.

Rock spoke to revolution and newness and even destruction; roots spoke to continuity and community and recognition.

So when Robert Plant showed up on an album singing with Allison Kraus and produced by T-Bone Burnett it was as if our Generation Jones musical world had come full circle.  Suddenly, unexpectedly but perhaps inevitably, here was the figure that as well as any typified the times and music we had lived through now in partnership with the people who were god-like figures in the form we had just ‘discovered’.

The fact that Krauss/Plant worked so well together on Raising Sand was almost a bonus in this scenario, because their very presence together on the album was enough in itself, at least in terms of appropriateness.

But it was a great album, though it took me a while to realise it.

It combined Krauss’s bluegrass roots and Plants rock roots and met in a sort of fifties flavoured netherworld that brought out the best in both of them. Plant learnt to sing again, while Krauss affirmed her own position as the sweetest vocalist going and showed a bigger audience than usual why she had won more Grammy’s than any other artist.

For those who had travelled the musical route I’ve described, it was hard to think of a more fitting outcome.

All of which means that when it comes to the Band of Joy, Plant is trying to follow up not just his own rock-legend career, but an unusually successful foray into roots/alt.country music, and the temptation is to judge this new album by those standards.

I’ll resist as best I can, because I think that way lies unfairness.

Band of Joy, I suspect, will appeal more to those who were fans of Plant’s unledded period than it will to those who are out and out roots fans or who come to this album via Raising Sand.

Tracks one and three — ‘Angel Dance’, ‘Central Two-O-Nine’ — could almost come from that 1994 unplugged album, and I even found myself kind of wishing that Jimmy Page was there playing guitar. The same could be said for track 11, ‘Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down’, a kind gospelly blues with gorgeous harmonies.

Beyond that, though, the material is straight from that netherworld of fifties-tinged rock n’ roots that distinguished Raising Sand, though I have to say I think the production here misses the magic touch of T-Bone Burnett.

Still, the band is fantastic, and I really do love the guitar sounds they get. Having said that, the actual playing is pedestrian: none of it sizzled in the way I would expect.  There was none of the blistering precision you associate with bluegrass nor even slower stuff that might give you an achy-breaky heart.

Which is another way of saying that Buddy Miller is a bit wasted here and I wonder why that might be. (Though it’s worth bearing in mind that Buddy Miller at his least impressive is still better than ninety percent of the competition.)

But Plant’s vocals are up to standard and his voice works well with Patty Griffin. By and large I think they’ve chosen/written good songs, the only real exception to my ears being ‘Cindy, I’ll Marry You Someday’. Not a fan of the original and this version brings nothing much to the table.

Like Raising Sand, this one took a while to grow on me, but now that it has, it has.

But as you can tell, I’m almost genetically pre-disposed to like an album like this, so you might want to take that into account.

Me, I’m just happy Robert Plant is still making music, especially music like this, and I’m hoping the journey is far from over.
Enjoy…

Like many contemporary television dramas, the story slowly unwinds by following disparate characters doing their thing, so that it is fair to say that it is more a show of subplots than a central narrative, a series of intertwining stories where the lives of the characters crisscross, sometimes meaningfully, sometimes tangentially, as they get on with rebuilding their homes, their city, their lives after the disaster of Katrina.

It is a wonderful form of storytelling that is perfect for this sort of long-form drama.

From the opening theme — a snappy tune by New Orleans’ local, John Boutté (who sounds inordinatley like Stephen Stills) — it had me hooked.

The show is broadly political, commenting through the stories on the New Orleans police department, the (mal)administration of George W. Bush and the local New Orleans government. But the politics is not the point and is never allowed to dominate.

Which I think is fair enough, though I must admit I agree with criticisms of the show that suggest there is also no sense of where the blame ultimately lay for the disaster that befell the city.  The idea that this in itself might be a political statement, that the impossibility of assigning blame and therefore responding to effectively is itself a political statement, has some merit too.  But as Nicholas Lehmann points out:

Simon traffics a bit, especially in the later episodes of Treme, in another, less externalized theory of the disastrousness of Katrina, but it amounts to a general cultural, rather than a specific institutional, explanation. The idea is that New Orleans’s lack of Babbitry may be deeply appealing, but that it comes at a price: in exchange for being free of the standard all-consuming American preoccupation with progress, you get an excess of lassitude and inefficiency. LaDonna struggles for months to have the roof of her tavern repaired; finally a young guy appears, announces “I’m from Texas, and y’all got a deficient work ethic around here,” and completes the job in a couple of days. Janette, the chef, loses her restaurant and decides to move to New York and pursue her career ambitions there. “This town beat me,” she says. Davis, in the course of a day spent fruitlessly trying to persuade Janette to change her mind because life outside New Orleans is always unpardonably pallid and routinized, says, “Which would you rather have, a healthy economy or a four-hour lunch?” Exactly! I’ve had that conversation myself, back when I was in my early twenties and was spending a lot of time deciding whether to wrest myself away from New Orleans.

Neither form of generalized blame—of unsympathetic outsiders like Bush or unreliable insiders like Davis—is as useful as the story of what actually happened would be.

What the series does brilliantly is represent the broad range of cultures that make New Orleans the place of legend that it is. Whether it is black jazz musicians, the Cajuns, the Mardi Gras Indians, the endless buskers, the long-time white residents, whomever, the sheer diversity of the place seeps into the fabric of the show so that you are left with this very satisfying representation of a city loosely united by a shared tragedy.

The ensemble cast are stunningly good and some faces will be familiar from Simon’s other productions.

Of course, the thread that stitches it all together is the music. Like a walk around New Orleans itself, you cannot go far in the show without hearing people play. Never over-used, the music is deployed with skill and always with a fine regard to the needs of the narrative.

This is aided and abetted by the fact that many of the key characters are in fact musicians, so we see them jamming and busking, scamming for work, recording, or just belting out a tune for the hell of it. Several well-known musicians show up in the program, too, and it is fun to spot an Elvis Costello, a Steve Earle or a Allen Toussaint, for instance.

In fact, one of the joys of the series is hearing the musos talk to each other about the music.  The clip below is a rehearsal involving Allen Toussaint, though I wish I could find the start of the sequence where he explains to the band how he wants them to play.  That sort of interaction adds a whole other dimension to the show, especially for music fans.

I should also mention that another aspect of New Orleans life that comes through is the food.  This is chiefly through the story of Janette Desautel, a local chef and friend-with-benefits to key character Davis McAlary.  There’s a lovely scene where four big-time New York chefs (played by four actual big-time New York chefs, including Tom Colicchio) show up in her restaurant and she impresses them with the food she serves, improvising on the spot for their benefit.  The fact that her business is collapsing around her in the aftermath of the storm adds poignancy, not to mention tragedy, to the moment.

I love that scene, though that clip only shows the first half of it.

There are many scenes of exquisite beauty in this epic production, individual moments that, even by themselves, make the hairs on your arms stand up. The moment when Big Chief Lambreaux gives his jazz-musician son a lesson in how to play swing is a classic, but I couldn’t find a clip.

There is an exchange between trombone player Antoine Batiste and another musician as they discuss “who’s going home” as they prepare to play a funeral parade that looks so natural that you’d think it was a doco.

And watch that parade!  Talk about a funeral to die for.

Another brilliant moment is when Antoine’s ex-wife, LaDonna, finally lets go as she marches in the second line of a different funeral:

And there is the confrontation between two Indian tribes as they perform in the night-darkened streets.  On the subject of which, I must admit the whole Mardi Gras Indian subculture was one I knew little about and I found the whole thing mesmerising, the unexpected combination of native American culture and African, as you can see in this clip:

But really, all such selections are arbitrary.  The series is peppered with fine moments.

If there is a better more enjoyable television drama than this, David Simon hasn’t made it yet.

The show ends as Steve Earle sings his song ‘This City’ over the final credits.  Best thing Earle has ever done, I reckon.

Their own blurb describes their music thusly: “Bringing a fresh new approach to blues ‘n’ roots, FisherKing’s captivating brand of pop-laden acoustic blues and coastal roots has caught the eye of music fans and critics alike.”

It’s a description I don’t entirely buy, largely because the “fresh approach” mentioned is so fresh that I don’t reckon most people hearing it for the first time would think blues and roots.  I certainly didn’t, though I can see that that’s where their influences come from.

What I hear is actually a pretty sophisticated rock/pop sound that if I had to find a point of reference I would offer American Music Club, the San Francisco-based band led by singer-songwriter Mark Eitzel.  They have that same lush spareness and an ear for unconventional melody, and there is even more than a passing similarity between Sam Stephenson’s vocals and Eitzel’s.

Anyway, forget the comparisons, that just a shorthand way of putting you in the musical ball park.  For the most part, the songs are guitar-based ballads, the pace is fairly gentle (though a few songs kick it up a notch), and the band genuinely do try to push the limits of that format.

The thing to note here is that this is a classy album and that there isn’t a bad song on it.  The production is also great, nice and clean and spacious, and producer Maynard even gets her Molly Meldrum on during the second-last track, ‘Will I See Your Face Again’, a five minute canon that descends gracefully from gentle acoustic ballad into a swirling, crescendo-building epic in the ‘Real Thing’ mould.

My favourite tracks are ‘Be By My Side’ because I’m a sucker for a good melody, and ‘Circles’, which is the song that most brings to mind (for me anyway) American Music Club.  But the song at the top of my list is ‘Together We Are Best’, a first class ballad that was the track that opened up the whole album for me.

You know how when you listen to a new album and it all takes a while to settle down and make sense to you, and that there is just one song that clicks for you and that acts as a gateway into the album?  Maybe you don’t, but I often find that with a new album there’s one track I keep going back to while I get my bearings, a Rosetta Stone song that unlocks the rest of the album for me. Well, on this album that song was ‘Together We Are Best’.  The beautiful understated harmonies on the back of the gorgeous melody had me thinking that there might be something special about this album.

In Cirlces, Fisherking have produced an ambitious and satisfying debut album.  If I have a criticism, I’d say it still feels like they are still finding their musical feet, are not yet at the height of their songwriting powers.  But that’s hardly a criticism, is it?  It just means, that all going well, this is a band that is likely to go from strength to strength.  I hope they do.

I love Ella’s voice, and the previous Verses’ EP showed some promise, but this album just falls flat.  I’m not going to spend a lot of time picking it apart because, to be honest, there isn’t much to say once an album annoys you as much as this one annoyed me, but let me see if I can justify my hostility.

Apart from the flat production and the, by and large, uninspiring and unmemorable songs, I think what really got up my nose about this outing was its pretensions to be something it wasn’t.

What I detected was a band trying to latch onto the alt.country/roots movement without really understanding how that music worked.  A bit of twangy guitar and the odd lick of lap-steel a roots album does not make.

I can accept this might be an unfair assessment.  Maybe the guys really are into roots music and have a genuine desire to produce a radio-friendly version of it.  But if they are, they haven’t yet learned how to write it or play it.  This music has all the authenticity of Dennis Walter singing ‘You Make Feel Like a Natural Woman’.

Sorry, but it’s back to the drawing board, I reckon.

This book is kind of like a rock music, book version of that game. It lists a vast range of the major popular music artists from the 50s to the naughties, and then it uses a range of textual devices — stylised coloured picks, timelines, ‘play buttons’, numbered arrows etc — to link one entry to another.

It’s a bit confusing at first, but after a while, you start to happily follow these links from one page to another and the net effect is to give you a pretty decent overview of how the various artists are linked to each other.  Who influenced whom; who has recorded whose songs; who has shared time in a band with whom; who has played a gig or recorded an album at a given venue, and the like.

In fact, it isn’t just artists. There are entries on music labels, venues and festivals as well, and that adds another layer of interconnection that fleshes out the whole six-degrees-of-separation thing nicely.

I was a bit dubious when I first looked at this book, concerned that it was a bit of a gimmicky, lightweight coffee-table tome, but those concerns proved, largely, unfounded. Yes, it does offer a fairly cursory glimpse of some bands, but it is still a hell of a lot of fun.

On the down side, I should point out that no major entry — whether an artist, a venue, a label or whatever — gets more than two heavily illustrated pages, and so these overviews are rather cursory.  I’d also point out that the colour coding used to connect information can sometimes make the text very hard to read and I’d like to throw in a particular jeer for the white text on black background pages, or the black on hot pink, of which there are far too many.

On the upside, the most pleasant surprise I got was that the author allows his personal opinions to seep in.  At first, the book presents like a bit of a dry take on the various artists, trying hard to be serious and authoritative, but every so often you find a line like this, from the Black Sabbath entry:

Purists hated Born Again (1983) for no good reason other than the singer Ian Gillan was not Ozzy Osbourne or Ronnie James Dio.  The album itself is very heavy and very excellent.

Truth be told, I had a lot of disagreements with the interpretation of Sabbath (and other artists).  The albums highlighted are not the ones I would’ve focussed on and, without really knowing, I’d guess it’s because the author is younger than me and so picked up on Sabbath at a different point in their career and so maybe he doesn’t understand the effect Sabbath’s debut had on those of us who were there (or maybe this is incredibly unfair), but at the end of the day a fan is a fan is a fan and comments like the extract above convinced me I was in the presence of one.

So look, overall, this is a pretty good book.  Dip in and dip out and you’ll while away a pleasant few hours.  I was also happy to hand it to my son.  He’s thirteen, so the bulk of the book doesn’t cover the music he is into, but the very nature of  it meant he found references to stuff he likes and was able to find some connections, between, say,  Tori Amos (whom he loves) and Joni Mitchell (to whom he will now pay more attention).

That’s a very excellent thing.