320 kbps | 94 MB | LINKS
An artist’s final album always sits heavily on the shelf, and even more so when that life has been cut abruptly short, becoming an unintended epitaph to what was a still flourishing career. Thus, Living in the Fast Lane has a weighty burden to bear, one that Michael Bloomfield never meant it to shoulder, yet the set does so with remarkable ease. There’s a definite joie de vivre found within, partly, one presumes, a reflection of the happiness of reuniting with myriad former cohorts, among them Mark Naftalin and Bob Jones, who both played on Bloomfield’s debut solo album back in 1969, and ex-Electric Flag Roger Troy. A gospel choir and an entire band provide backing vocals and a horn section, which hints at the many styles showcased within. The set kicks off with “Maudie,” a classic R&B number that brilliantly highlights Naftalin’s piano skills, Bloomfield’s own keyboard talent, and even more spectacularly his emotive, fluid guitar style, as his leads wind round vocalist Frank Biner, almost engaging him in conversation. On the indeed ragtime-flavored “Watkin’s Rag” Bloomfield plays everything flawlessly, of course, even as he attempts to outdo himself in places. That’s an instrumental, while on “Big C Blues” he also picks up the mike, defiantly determined to have a good time, as his piano and slide guitar vie for attention. Bloomfield sings out his own frustration at himself on the autobiographical “Used to It,” a funk-drenched self-pummeling. “Roots” is equally funky, but in a slicker Temptations style that stresses the importance of knowing where you come from. Bloomfield certainly does and is keen to highlight all the styles that so influenced him within this set. With gospel-flecked blues, country-speckled blues, lavish soul, jazzy ragtime, R&B, and on “Andy’s Bad” even a touch of hip-hop, Bloomfield and company showcase blues of many shades, progenitors, and descendents. The musicianship is sensational, the vocalists superb, and Bloomfield is on fire, yet there’s no struggle and strain to succeed, just a sublime atmosphere. Fans will insist he made much better sets, and they’d be right, but regardless, this album remains a magnificent achievement, one that’s lost none of its power over the years.
320 kbps | 102 MB | LINKS
Tracks:
01. Paradise
02. Something in the Dark
03. Wonderman
04. Nothing
05. Empire
06. Crystalline
07. Black Days
08. Silver Night
09. Delirium
10. Dragons into Dreams
11. Teardrops (Bonus Track)
12. Supernova (Bonus Track)
13. Drum (Bonus Track)
320 kbps | 82 MB | LINKS
Canadian garage cult hero and occasional King Khan collaborator Mark Sultan returns with his new solo album, Let Me Out, and produces a wonderful blast back to the original purveyors of that US garage rock sound.
There are albums that are clearly of their time, ones that could never have been made during a different decade. Then there are those that are totally timeless, albums that you could never pinpoint when they were released. Finally there are those albums which are totally out of time, albums that hark back to another era in such a way that they sound as though they are a lost classic preserved in a time capsule to be opened at some undefined future date. Mark Sultan’s Let Me Out falls squarely into this last category.
He opens the album with lead single Coffin Nails, drenching the song from the off with a classic fuzz guitar sound and jabbing Farsifa over rolling drums. Layered through it all are sweet little chiming guitar licks that creep out more with every listen, while he preaches over the top like a modern day soul-infused Sky Saxon or Roky Erikson. The music is a rocking yet woozy affair that treads a tightrope between dream and nightmare in much the same way as The Electric Prunes did. It’s equally sweet and urgent and the slightly drifting out of tune organ sound serves to add to the dizziness. It’s a great start to the record, and from that he launches into one of the album highlights, The Other Two, a longing lament to the desire to be loved. “Three out of five people looking for love. I wanna be the other two.” Simple and sentimental without the saccharine. The song has a psychedelic groove that whisks you away and on into current single Everybody Knows which slows down and floats along on a wistfully winding rhythm and rounds off an opening trio that together set the tone and ideas for the album.
Much of what follows fits perfectly into that dripping garage-psych sound that the likes of The Seeds and The Chocolate Watchband developed at the tail end of the 60s and is pulled off with such aplomb that it’s difficult to pick songs that stand out above the rest, although the wonderful Don’t Bother Me certainly tries. The fuzz adds doses of menace and it sets up the following Last Chance, a gorgeous whirling lament, perfectly. However, when Sultan picks up the pace on Heed This Message and drops in a cheeky twanging acid-punk guitar riff, the album takes on a whole new hue and that is what does make the song stand out. Were it not for the more raucous Black Magic that follows, it would take the crown for best song on the record, but as such the title is still up for grabs.
On Let Me Out Mark Sultan has written a classic garage-psych-rock record that will satisfy classic diehards and continue the journey of those falling down the rabbit hole. He has taken his clear love for the US Nuggets/Haight Ashbury hippy garage sound to its fruition and created a fantastic collection of songs that transports you to another era. One third garage, one third psych, one third star-gazing-from-the-gutter tripping hippy. The perfect mix.
320 kbps | 104 MB | LINKS
Named for the famous female sharpshooter and member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Annie Oakley is actually an Oklahoma trio comprising twin sisters Sophia and Grace Babb, who took up music as an outlet after their father’s death, on guitars and vocals with Nia Personette, who also lost her father shortly before joining, on violin and harmony.
Their second full-length album charts a personal journey from youth to womanhood, opening with the waltz-time Pomp and Swell and its unbridled air of youthful daring and optimism only for the glow of love to fade (“You just look so bored, you can’t sit still with me”) in the circling patterns of Recognition.
The realities of the 9-5 life weigh heavy on the sweetly harmonised and banjo-flecked folksy Brother and the tribulations (“A cold hard-wooded floor/A mattress set up there/A pocket of pocket change/A few beers to help me bear”) when you find yourself “walking against wind.”
Good Thing has a bluesy slow and sluggish groove to underscore lyrics about emotional numbness (“I just want to feel something/I just want to feel anything”) while, returning to an acoustic strum, a languidly waltzing Did You Dream circles the doubts that can creep upon a relationship that one may not be as committed as the other (“Did you dream about me as much?”).
The electric guitars cast more threatening, harder musical shapes with Into The Light, Grace’s response to being consumed by an overwhelming sudden sense of love but with lyrics again concerned with whether the timelines of a relationship run parallel or diverge, continuing to tread the path of self-blaming unease (“Sometimes I lack the courage/To look straight in the face/Of mistakes that deserve recognition”) even though “Your mouth tastes like mercy/Even when I fail to try.”
One of the album’s most striking tracks is If I Were a Ghost, spare plangent guitar chords anchoring a wrenching lyric of regret and loss, written by Sophie from the experience of living with a grief-stricken mother, as the sisters sing of haunting “the hallways that I used to love”, recalling how “We used to spend all our nights talking now I just wander, wanting to find the voice that I left in our doorway saying goodbye.”
The aftermath of a separation continues into Missed Connection with hushed vocals, brittle piano notes and melancholic violin, baldly contrasted by the deep, echoey guitar notes that underpin the subsequent Nothing To Say and its return to the death throes of love (“I’m just trying to find the reasons why/We make each other feel alone/You lick your wounds, I open mine/We can’t hold our own”) with its suggestions of mental isolation.
Sometimes poking the wounds or picking the scabs is all you have to remind you you’re still alive, and that seems to be the idea behind the softly sung The Curse, a deceptively light and drifting musical tone that stands in stark relief to the confession of how “Now in each city, every goddamn city I remember/And I’d like to say I avoid them/But I won’t, and I couldn’t just the same/In fact, I love the bitter memories/Of when I spoke sweet your name.”
The album finally gets round to the circling metronomic guitar notes of the title track and its central theme of how relationships can rise or fall because, scared of being taken the wrong way, we don’t say the words we mean only to often say the ones we don’t, ending with the bittersweet line “I can’t help but hurt you/When I say I have to go, again/So we’ll never say the words we mean.”
It ends, though, with the brief but fluffily chugged strum, chiming guitar and jubilant violin of Sweet Time, striking a closing upbeat note of resilience with “I don’t/Know where this will go/But I will follow.” The original Annie Oakley never missed her target. This is a bullseye too.
