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10.25.2009

My October Rotation

I'm home for October, watching playoff baseball from afar. I'm already starting to rethink my rotation as we head into the Hot Stove season. In this month's installment, I'm getting ready to say goodbye to former heroes who've tried to hang on too long, I'm looking at familiar veterans with the need to prove themselves again, and I'm puzzling over heralded but inconsistent young talent.

The Rolling Stones, Live in Brussels 1973: I'll start by saying that for most of my adolescence, the Stones were my favorite band. When my friends and I gathered to debate who was the greatest of the British Invasion, I always took the Stones. I can still listen to Beggars Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street over and over again, and that's hard to say about albums you've been listening to for nearly 30 years. But venture beyond those albums, and to my adult ears, the Stones have long since begun to crumble. Whatever tiny vestige of myth I retained about these guys being at any time the Greatest Rock N Roll Band in the World (as they like to bill themselves) was destroyed by listening to this now-legendary concert. The guitars are slashing and riff-perfect, there are great supporting cast members filling out the sound, but Charlie Watts is often too fast, pushing songs like "Gimme Shelter" at a tempo that sours the mood. And Mick...oh Mick. He sounds terrible. Awful. At times unlistenable. He barks out phrases like a dog running in his yard from fence to fence. He was never a great singer, but on the best studio tracks he put a lot of thought and muscle into his craft -- the sneer of "Street Fightin' Man," the winking loucheness of "Live With Me," the spirit-moves-you of "Shine a Light." He knew what the song needed. In this concert, at the peak of the band's powers, he sounds no better than he does today. And that's not good at all. 

Ron Carter and Richard Galliano, Panamanhattan: If you can get your ears around an entire album of jazz tango with just acoustic bass and French accordion, I guarantee this is the best album you've never heard. I probably found it in some bargain bin, drawn by Ron Carter's name. It was recorded live twenty years in a FNAC, a French media and electronics store with loads more class than, say, Best Buy (obviously, as they held a concert in one) and, for some reason, a travel agency. The melancholy songs have a startling crispness -- you can hear Galliano's fingers click the accordion keys and Carter's hand slide up and down the neck of his bass. The audience members are few enough to become recognizable by their claps and whoops of appreciation between songs. The only live recordings I've ever heard to match Panamanhattan's intimacy are the earliest cuts from the sprawling Bruce Springsteen live box set, in which it sounds like he's playing in a tiny roadside bar.

Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha: He's clever, he's mellow, he's wonderfully inventive. He sings about complex science, which warms my nerdy heart. But what's with the whistling? I could deal with one or two tracks, but Bird is determined to make his jaunty, out-for-a-stroll whistling a key component of nearly every song. Some folks love it, I guess, but for me it'll take some getting used to.

Kristin Hersh, Speedbath: Hersh has become a female Neil Young, constantly recording, constantly shifting her sound and her instrumentation. She's not as experimental as Young, who has veered from country to folk to swing to metal, inhabiting other genres like costumes. Hersh is a more subtle, occupying a mellow-alt-guitar-rock middle ground only to dash out for a quick foray into, say, the crunch of her punkish trio 50 Foot Wave, or an all-acoustic collection of traditional Appalachian murder ballads. (The former I love, the latter not so much.) But I'm old and grouchy enough to realize that I'm not going to love or even like a good deal of the output from my favorite artists. It's more about the effort, the progress, the ideas.

And so to Speedbath: a full-length, online-only album of some of Hersh's freshest material in years. You can listen all you want for free, or you can contribute a few bucks via PayPal as you listen. I love the gesture, first of all, but I love the songs even more. Her songs can sometimes feel stiff, as if she crafted different tempos and textures and fused them with a lack of...suppleness, perhaps. The songs on Speedbath shift gears and bring in odd (for her) choices of instrumentation, but the overall arc is always propulsive and fluid, not stiff at all. If you don't like or care about Hersh, you probably haven't read this far, but if you do, or at least you're curious about her work, I highly recommend Speedbath. And give her some money, too.