Kinks

The Kinks’s impact on the world of rock and roll music is incalculable, with artists from The Who’s Pete Townsend to The Killers citing the band, especially Ray Davies’s songwriting, as a massive influence. Their career was as prolific as it was enduring, from their early hits like “All Day and All of the Night” to the thoughtful, subtly satirical masterpiece The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and onward, into a successful period in the 80’s that was far more critically respected than similar periods by other classic rock bands of the 1960’s.

The Kinks legacy continues today. Davies is often credited as the grandfather of entire movements of music (Britpop, in particular, regards him fondly) and far more recently they have reached the charts again, due to the inclusion of the classic “A Well Respected Man” on the soundtrack of the hit film Juno.

The Kinks’s debut album, simply called Kinks, is a great insight into their beginnings and a fun album all in all. In many ways, it’s a typical 1960’s rock-band debut, but at the same time, you can hear the beginnings of something great. Perhaps most impressive is the number of original songs by Ray Davies in an era where most bands began, if not built, their career on blues covers.

The album has a fair number of the standard covers, from Chuck Berry’s raucous “Hey Delilah,” and “Too Much Monkey Business” to the hilariously cocky “Long Tall Shorty.” The recordings are fast, loose, and enthusiastic – fun, but fairly typical of the rock and roll records coming out of the UK at the time. It’s loose in a lot of ways, with the recording of the music deliberately unpolished as an affront to the clean-cut generation that came prior.

The whole album is fun, but it’s Davies’s early forays into songwriting that really show off the band’s diversity. “So Mystifying” has a Stones-esque riff and protracted vocals. “Just Can’t Go to Sleep” has brighter, clean-cut sounds more suited to the stage of American Bandstand. “Revenge” is a bawdy, harmonica-fueled blues instrumental, and “Stop Your Sobbing” is softer, reminiscent of the Motown covers being performed by their contemporaries.

Then there’s “You Really Got Me,” a key cut in rock history. Ragged vocals permeate the album, but when combined on this track with a fast-hitting guitar riff and Dave Davies’s slashed speakers, it creates its own sonic world, a world that became crucial in the eventual development of harder rock movements like punk and metal. In some ways, the song is aggressively ugly – at least it’s easy to hear how it would sound that way to parents at the time – but its infectious hook and groundbreaking sound cement it as one of the all-time classics in rock and roll history.

Kinks sounds at first like a typical record from the era, but the stylistic shifts, though subtle, are far-reaching for a band in this early stage of development. They hint at the future greatness the band would come to display, and make a record that is not only fun, but very diverse.

River – The Joni Letters

When his latest album, River – The Joni Letters, received the Grammy for Album of the Year, it sparked a fair bit of public outcry. The general assertion was that singling this record out for album of the year was an indication of how out-of-touch the Academy is with reality. Whether the album is deserving of the Grammy or not is immaterial, honestly: What matters is that it is a spectacular work in an already-outstanding catalog. While River doesn’t contain any of the cutting-edge genre-bending that Hancock’s work is known for, it is still a subtly powerful musical achievement

Hancock gained national attention in the early 1960’s as a composer as well as an instrumentalist. Songs like “Watermelon Man” and “Cantaloupe Island” garnered him acclaim early in his career, as did his position in Miles Davis’s quintet. However, it was his adventurous streak that proved to be his legacy. He pioneered the use of chords seldom if ever used in jazz, guiding the genre out of the bebop era and into new territory.

His 1973 album Headhunters, which perfected a jazz-funk fusion sound that many people had tried and failed to make work, was the first jazz album to go platinum, with a fifteen-minute jam called “Chameleon” finding incredible popularity. Fans at the time accused Hancock of selling out, but the album turned out to be a landmark in the worlds of jazz and funk music alike, and due to frequent sampling is seen as integral to the origin of hip-hop.

After an incredibly prolific ten years, HH released Future Shock, whose lead single “Rockit” became a smash hit in the early days of MTV. Like Headhunters before it, Future Shock was astonishingly avant-garde, blending hip-hop influences with his typical jazz style, and featuring Grand Mixer DST on turntables in a performance that helped popularize turntablism as a legitimate form of instrumental expression.

After such an  illustrious career, River seems on the surface to signify a slowing down or mellowing out for Hancock. However, while the album may not be as cutting-edge as some of his previous work, it is still a masterfully constructed piece of art.

As a tribute, the album works beautifully on many levels. Hancock and Mitchell have been friends since a  1979 collaboration with Charles Mingus, and their friendship lends River a decidedly personal touch. Hancock approaches the material not merely with one musician’s respect for another’s work, but with the care that one would take in handcrafting a gift to a friend. For instance, careful attention is paid to the context in which Mitchell’s lyrics are placed, with Hancock deliberately drawing attention to the them by placing them in unusual settings or framing them in new and unexpected ways. Everything about the album evokes Joni, from its loose, jazzy, interpretative approach, to the selection of other artists on the record, including noted Mitchell influence Leonard Cohen. Not just content to record an album of covers, Hancock also includes two songs that, while not notably recorded by Mitchell, are songs that she cites as crucial in her musical development. The album clearly is an earnest tribute in every possible respect.

Working with a number of outstanding artists from up-and-coming Corinne Bailey Rae to Mitchell herself, Hancock showcases a wide array of talents, but also illustrates his uncanny ability to match an artist to a song or style, and to coax the best out of every collaborator he approaches. Tina Turner’s turn on “Edith and the Kingpin” shows that at age 68, she’s still capable of giving one of the most soulful performances of her career, while “Court and Spark” intersperses Norah Jones’s smoky vocals with instrumental moments of abstract tension, for an unexpected but memorable re-imagining. Leonard Cohen delivers “The Jungle Line” like a poetry slam, drawing attention to Mitchell’s lyrics, singer-songwriter tendencies, and jazz roots simultaneously. The album also features numerous instrumental works, including a wildly divergent take on “Both Sides Now” that is really more of a meditation on the song than it is an interpretation thereof. Hancock’s keeps little from the original piece, instead fully exploring the possibilities presented by Mitchell’s framework.

River is a strong album for Hancock in a career full of them, but it’s also notable for the way in which it showcases its subject. Joni Mitchell may be a fixture in the world of singer/songwriter folk-pop, but she has always had jazz in and around her life. Her voice, her delivery, and her own musical tastes have always been firmly rooted in the jazz world. Aside from the fact that the music stands so well on its own, what makes River truly phenomenal is that it takes these tendencies in Mitchell and brings them to the fore. The result is an engaging experience in terms of the music and the goal of the album overall.

The White Stripes – White Blood Cells

I know that I’m a little late to the party, but I picked up 2001’s White Blood Cells by The White Stripes the other day. The White Stripes are Jack and Meg White, (widely believed to be) a divorced couple that combines spontaneous, off-the-cuff recording with hard-hitting rock riffs with a strong sense of rootedness. Their aesthetic is carefully composed and instantly recognizable, and the meticulous control that they exert over their own image is almost as well-known as their music. From the stark colour scheme of their album art and clothing to their surreal, Michel Gondry-directed videos, The White Stripes look and sound like The White Stripes, and it’s hard to mistake them for anything else.

The band uses older instruments and recording equipment almost exclusively, for an incredibly lo-fi sound that hearkens back to the early days of the blues. For a lot of their more stripped-down numbers, where the band eschews distortion and more modern-sounding riffs, their sound evokes early blues greats like Howlin’ Wolf or Robert Johnson. At the same time, their exuberance is reminiscent of old-school garage rockers like MC5. Yet at the same same time, it’s something completely unto itself. The simple recording style connects them sonically to the early days of American recorded music, but it also lends the songs a certain spontaneous joy, as though upon writing the song the band couldn’t wait to share it with everyone. (The band spent three weeks recording their most recent album – the most time they’ve ever spent in the studio.) What their records lack in polish, they more than make up for in enthusiasm.

White Blood Cells definitely fits into that mold, bringing the band’s unique perspective to a surprising range of musical styles. “We’re Going to be Friends” is a lighthearted, acoustic folk tune about going to grade school, while “Fell in Love with a Girl” is a loud, hard-hitting rocker. The album also contains “Aluminum,” perhaps the bands only instrumental, a largely abstract freak-out track reminiscent of The Flaming Lips or Pink Floyd in one of either band’s trippier moments.

Despite the strong sense of style the band has, there’s enough variety on the record to keep it from getting monotonous, and even in its darker moments, it’s somehow refreshing. All in all, it’s fun, which is, ultimately, what a White Stripes record should be.

Post coming soon

I’ve written most of the post for this week’s blog entry, but I am experiencing some difficulty with my computer audio – everything sounds horribly distorted and static-y. It’s not the speakers-when I plug my headphones into the computer, I hear the static through my headphones, and when I plug my iPod into my speakers, that sounds fine. This has been going on for awhile. I went so far as to buy a new sound card, and I haven’t had the problem for a few days, but I guess that wasn’t the problem. If anyone out there has any ideas as to what the problem might be, please let me know. In the meantime, I need to charge my iPod before I can play that much of an album on it, so I’ll try to find another way to listen to the album as soon as possible, but the post is going to have to come later.

Sorry.