DR. JOHN - Locked Down

With The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach in the producer's seat, Mac Rebennack's newest finds an adventurous yet accessible middle ground between what each of these frontmen is known for, resulting in a record that exceeds expectations and succeeds at satisfying fans of both camps.    

"There are moments when Locked Down conjures up some old ghosts, such as on "Revolution," which brings together Dr. John’s pop, political, and garage sides; and "Ice Age" and "Eleggua," both of which work in some of the African funk elements that were a major part of Dr. John’s Night Tripper era. None of this is frozen in amber, though. If Locked Down has a mission statement, it’s embedded in the intro to “Big Shot,” which transitions from what sounds like a sample of an old Cab Calloway record to a spirited new rendition of that same style. The implication? This ain’t retro; it’s now." - A.V. Club

"If the album's components are retro, the pastiche has a 21st-century sensibility. Ghostly backing vocals waft through "Big Shot," which sounds like a Tom Waits-meets-Gnarls Barkley jam. The album is flush with dub-reggae effects and the grooves of Nigerian Afrobeat and Ethiopian funk, styles that have become memes for a new generation. Lyrically, the Doctor brings the confusementalism, diagnosing the present through the past in a more weathered version of his trademark nasal growl." - Rolling Stone

SPIRITUALIZED - Sweet Heart Sweet Light

"Well, it sure sounds like Spiritualized."

This kind of shrugging admission, which accompanied the first few listens to the latest LP by Jason Pierce's long-running space rock outfit, hardly seems to be an enthusiastic one. After all, at first glance Pierce has done little to change the original MO he set for himself upon the release of 1992's Lazer Guided Melodies—namechecking Jesus; taking drugs; wrapping his perpetually bruised heart in yards of gauze; and swigging on a cocktail equal parts blues, krautrock, and psych, with a dash of punk, chamber music, and gospel.

But as much as that is fairly true, Spiritualized has never quite done the same thing twice. The adjustments may be subtle, but every album has carried with it a conscious twist on Pierce's favourite themes. From the orchestra-powered experiment of 2001's Let It Come Down and the way that 1997's immediately classic Ladies and Gentlemen flexed the muscles grown during 1995's Pure Phase to their fullest, to the broken-teeth punk gospel of 2003's Amazing Grace, every record has a distinct accent that tweaks Pierce's language just so. (For great proof of this, examine how 1992's "Take Your Time" had grown from a gorgeous barely-there seance into a full-blown rockout by 1999's Royal Albert Hall.)

From a distance though, there was a sameness in the material that, when combined with the nearly impossible-to-shake legacy of Ladies..., rendered each subsequent Spiritualized album as less and less of an event. After some twenty years (if one included his incredibly groundbreaking work with Spacemen 3) of singing about a seemingly interminable loop of getting fucked up and finding redemption, it appeared the guy had reached something of a creative endgame—one that both he and his audience were increasingly aware of.

That all changed in 2008, however. Following on the heels of a vicious bout with double pneumonia, Songs In A&E was a harrowing and relatively stripped-down effort that was Pierce's best record in a decade. The disease may have literally nearly killed him, but the resultant experience rejuvenated his brand. It was impossible to divorce the real life from the art, and suddenly all of the same themes about which Pierce had always sung—death, love, sin, God—meant that much more. Even when very much sounding near death, ("Death Take Your Fiddle" even went as far as to feature the sound of an artificial respirator similar to the one that kept Pierce alive), it had been a long time since Pierce sounded so vital...both to us and himself.
 

Sweet Heart Sweet Light builds off of that career-rekindling momentum with the closest thing to a classic Spiritualized record since 1997. Unlike so many of his recent albums, there is no discernible premise to differentiate it from others in his catalogue (i.e. no self-composed scores, or amps turned up to eleven). Instead, it pulls liberally from the template built by Pure Phase and perfected by L & G (minus the free jazz)—big gospel, widescreen love songs, scuzzy confessionals, and kraut blues, all with key contributions from horns, backing vocalists, and orchestras. But if it deviates the least from Spiritualized's set parameters, it also seems the least embarrassed about doing so. Just as Dylan has parlayed an obsession with mimicking old-time radio and 12-bar blues into a late-career winning streak, Sweet Heart Sweet Light is the sound of Pierce taking what's his in a way that makes no apologies. It simply enjoys the hard-won fruits of his hard-lived labours.

Whether our own distance from those aforementioned albums has created a nostalgia that also allows for this to occur is certainly debatable. But from the way that "Hey Jane" shifts from jumping rave-up to chugging modern-day devotional; how "Headin' For The Top Now" essentially doesn't change much for eight plus minutes, yet always sounds shimmeringly potent; or the manner in which he makes an atheist like me wanna hitch a ride with Jesus on "Life Is A Problem," it's clear that after so much searching and tweaking (in both senses of the word) his music still matters for all the right reasons. Over time, Pierce has managed to distill a full century's worth of American and British music into a concoction that sounds like Spiritualized. And if he's been burned or gotten lost along the way, it only makes an album like this all the sweeter, for him and us.

VA - LateNightTales by Belle and Sebastian (Volume 2)

B&S's first contribution has now sadly fallen out of print; what better time, then, for these Scots to submit a whole new set of cross-genre finds? Another solid entry in this mix series.

"Their scene-straggling 2006 LateNightTales included pure pop, '60s psych, '70s rock, West Coast harmonies, beat groups, folk balladeering, punk, indie, girl groups, and bossanova; this new selection only delves deeper into their shared influences and inspirations, along with a subtle nod to digging for rare sampled beats, not perhaps a trait usually associated with B&S. Worldwise psychedelic breaks thread the mix together, with two tracks from Broadcast bookending a first half that includes late-'60s dreamers The Wonder Who? and Joe Pass, father of Ethio-jazz Mulatu Astatke, harpist Dorothy Ashby and the 21st-century beats of Gold Panda." - LateNightTales

MOE TUCKER - I Feel So Far Away: Anthology 1974-1998

Lovingly packaged and compiled by Sundazed, I Feel So Far Away is a must-listen for Velvet Underground fans—this set's opening tracks, taken from Tucker's debut solo LP Playin' Possum, are particularly brilliantly ramshackle.

"While her bandmates would go down many different roads with widely variant results, Tucker's sounds retained the ragged beauty and youthful sense of possibility that were at the heart of the VU, and rock & roll in general." - Allmusic

"Following her tenure with VU, Moe emerged as a solo artist, building a body of work that stretched over three decades. Ranging from home recordings to collaborations with members of Sonic Youth, Violent Femmes, Half Japanese and her former band, the songs cover a gamut of styles but all bear the unmistakable thumbprint of their creator. Released by various independent labels on LPs, EPs, singles and compact discs, collecting her catalog has been a daunting task. This compilation finally gathers those far-flung tracks in one place." - Sundazed

HEAVEN & EARTH - Refuge

Another fine female-fronted, harmony-rich '70s folk reissue to perhaps check out alongside that Roches record mentioned a few entries below...

"We’re happy to finally be able to announce the re-release of this psychedelic folk/funk beauty from 1973, featuring the gorgeous voices of Pat Gefell and Jo D. Andrews (and produced by Space Age percussionist/composer Dick Schory for his short-lived but influential Ovation Records imprint). At one time this was an album completely unknown outside of Chicago, where the label was based, but these days, word gets around, and tracks like 'Feel The Spirit; and 'Jenny' have been making the rounds on the DJ circuit." - Light In The Attic

"Heaven & Earth provide the most wonderful harmonizing since, I dunno, Wendy & Bonnie? There are light psychedelic swirls throughout, and the occasional folk-funk flourish (the legendary Phil Upchurch plays on here) makes the trip even more magical." - Other Music

TY SEGALL & WHITE FENCE - Hair

Not to be confused with the hippie musical of the same name, Californians White Fence (a.k.a. Tim Presley) and Ty Segall have cooked up a noisier and trippier psycho-delic experience.

"If it sounds a little underwhelming to say that Hair pretty much sounds like what you would expect a collaboration between broadly similar garage rockers Ty Segall and White Fence to sound like, let me assure you that it's also what you would probably want and hope it to sound like...These two artists spend half an hour playing to their pre-established strengths, staying in their comfort zones and riding their fun, sloppy, rockin' sound to its effortlessly entertaining destination." - Drowned In Sound

ATOMIC FOREST - Obsession

Given the abundance of Eastern influence in Western psych-rock, India gives back with a heavy dose of acid-tinged originals and bent covers.

"Atomic Forest’s mix of blistering, fuzzy rock and synth-lead funk inspired collectors the world over to fork over thousands of dollars for original copies of their solitary release, Obsession '77. Part of the interest certainly stemmed from its liberal doses of searing fuzz guitar. Part of it sprung from the oddity of it all: had India, a country that, quite literally, churned out tens of thousands of albums during psych and hard rock’s heyday, only produced this one, lonely psychedelic album? Part of it sprung from the album’s rarity: unknown for years, Obsession '77 suddenly became a top want on every global-rock collector’s short-list." - Now-Again

"We first got wind of Atomic Forest via Academy Records' excellent comp OBSESSION, a brilliant mixing of some of the rarest and most choice psych and funk gems from around the world. The comp opens and closes with two versions of  "Obsession '77" by Atomic Forest, easily one of the most fierce tunes on the record. I've occasionally tried to find more of Atomic Forest, but with out much luck, so it's pretty exciting to see the release of this collection of searing psychedelic funk from various incarnations of Atomic Forest, 1973-77." - Primordial Sounds

VA - Looking Back: 80 Mod, Freakbeat & Swinging London Nuggets

Sixties British Mod sounds encompassed hard-edged r'n'b and swingin' blue-eyed soul, as well as Who-ish freakbeat power pop. Looking Back provides an excellent and comprehensive overview of all these styles over the course of three CDs.

"A mammoth eighty-track compendium of the finest (mostly) British Mod sounds of the '60s, housed in a clambox with a 48-page booklet, Looking Back boasts a smattering of previously unissued gems from the likes of A Wild Uncertainty, Tony Rivers & The Castaways, The Thoughts, The Trekkas and The Knave, compiled and annotated by Paul Weller biographer and long-time Mod observer John Reed and designed by Andy Morten (Shindig! magazine, Rev-Ola)." - Cherry Red Records

KIM JUNG MI - Now

When Light In The Attic compiled Beautiful Rivers And Mountains this past fall, an anthology of tracks led by/produced by/featuring Shin Joong Hyun, many of us on staff here were especially struck by "The Sun," a track featuring the vocals of psych-folk songbird Kim Jung Mi; we're glad to now have the chance to listen to this reissue of Now, Mi's 1973 full-length effort produced by Shin.

"At the dawn of the 1970s, South Korea’s rock music scene was at its zenith. Much of the reason for this was the god-like musical touch of guitar wizard, songwriter, producer, and arranger Shin Joong Hyun. For this album, he took a young girl named Kim Jung Mi, and transformed her from a wallflower student into a folk-psych chanteuse in record time (if Francoise Hardy is the Marianne Faithful of France, then Kim Jung Mi is, I suppose, the Francoise Hardy of Korea)." - Light In The Attic

"Kim Jung Mi's Now is probably one of the oddest albums I've ever heard. That's not because Now sounds especially exotic, though. On the contrary, it's because it doesn't. The point isn't that the album is derivative. It's that it's familiar. When I listen to 'Lonely Heart,' for example, I feel like I'm hearing something for the thousandth time, even though I can't exactly put my finger on where. It's too psych for Sandy Denny, not bluesy enough to be Janis Joplin, not smoky enough for the pop cabaret of Julie London, not over-carbonated enough to be Serge Gainsbourg—but it's somewhere in a world where all those things are on the jukebox." - Splice Today

VA - MGMT LateNightTales

The latest in LateNightTales' DJ mix series finds MGMT currating a mix of downbeat tracks expertly sequenced to be be the perfect soundtrack to your very own late night tale. Includes an exclusive cover of the Bauhaus song "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" performed by MGMT.

"With choices from the some-of-these-people-may-be-on-something area of pop history, there’s the likes of The Chills, Television Personalities and Disco Inferno nestling alongside The Velvet Underground’s 'Ocean' and a cut from Felt’s full-on Cocteau Twins phase, Red Indians. Martin Rev and Suicide crop up with the menace-haemorrhaging 'Cheree' and slightly more upbeat 'Sparks', while Julian Cope’s 'Laughing Boy', from his own disowning-pop-era masterpiece Fried, is a welcome selection." - BBC Music

"The Late Night Tales albums usually consist of their fair share of older tracks but this is even more so the case here, with tracks from The Velvet Underground, Suicide, Julian Cope and the Durutti Column amongst others. The mixture of tracks is, however, pretty spectacular. The album opens on Disco Inferno's ghostly and lost sounding 'Can't See Through It' - a track by a band I had not heard before but that perfectly kicks off this floaty, folky mix." - Black Plastic

MGMT Late Night Tales Minimix by LateNightTales

THE WAR ON DRUGS - Slave Ambient

Like a lot of people my age, I grew up in a home where a lot of Bob Dylan was played. Dylan can sound like a lot of things to a kid, what with that voice and all. But as much as I remember my mother ribbing my father over Bob's weird cadence and strained drawl, I remember thinking of it as two things: smart and comforting.

Long before my six year-old mind could actually understand the complexity, abstraction and clever metaphor of his lyrics, albums like Highway 61 Revisited gave off a vibe of intense thought and intelligence. All of this was delivered—and ironically so, given his actual prickly nature—with great warmth to my young, eager ears.

Adam Granduciel—the lead singer/songwriter of Philadelphia's War On Drugs—certainly has a voice that makes for an easy comparison to Dylan. But then again, so does nearly every male singer with an unconventional, half-spoken singing voice. What has been most striking in listening to his new album, the gorgeous Slave Ambient, is how much it immediately evokes for me those feelings of intelligence and warmth that I so associated with Dylan as a child—something that is far from true for just any old band sporting a vocalist with a nasal, Midwestern drawl. Instead, The War On Drugs own something very particular to themselves.

The key in this case is the music itself. On Slave Ambient, the quite slight three-piece manages to articulate a wide sound that is as fond of the past as it is the future. A not-so-bizarre, yet still-unique amalgam of time-honoured folk/pop songwriting and digitally fueled aural wanderlust. And so it is that the group is just as comfortable on the gentle harmonica-laced shuffle of "I Was There" as they are on the short ambient interlude "The Animator."

But the most thrilling moment on the album is one where all of these approaches come together. The sustained rush of "Your Love is Calling My Name" is a stellar six-minute drive along the "freeway" and the "harbour" and urged forward by a "strong wind through my mind." The song both flies by and passes by in slow motion, like the way those sped-up films of cars on a highway at night begin to morph from warp speed into something entirely different and perceivable. Ultimately, this song acts as a microcosm for the small victory that is the whole record. It is an album that is smart without ever feeling condescending or exclusive—familiar without ever feeling cloying or lazy.

It's a record that is a perfect soundtrack for a long walk, late at night, to nowhere in particular—the kind of accidental private moments where, as Granduciel sings on "Brothers", you find yourself, "wondering where my friends are going, and wondering why they didn't take me." 

UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA - S/T

One of my most favourite feelings in listening to music is that moment when, without any expectations, I press play and the connection is immediate. Like some unsolicited audio eHarmony date, I get it and it gets me: Ssssh, don't speak. Let's just dance, OK?

That's about all you need to know about me and these guys...and there's very little else that you can know about them, really. As the name suggests, much of Unknown Mortal Orchestra's bio is cryptic and slight. What we do know (if you take their bio at face value) is that it's the brainchild of a New Zealander named Ruban Nielson who transplanted himself to Portland, Oregon and made this home-recorded little gem. 

The album's sound matches this description—it has clearly been realized in a quick and dirty fashion, but it also features the kind of cohesion that tends to come from a single mind. Instant hits like "Ffunny Ffriends" and "Thought Ballune" have more in common than poor spelling. A little psych, a little pop, and a ton of reimagined funk, the songs are catchy, chunky and dripping with syrupy fuzz. And these dudes are tight. The drumming, courtesy of some teen whizkid, Julien Ehrich, is insidiously groovy and rich, while Nielson is one heck of a guitar player. 

Altogether, Nielson's creation kind of does for funky indie-pop what fellow Antipodeans Tame Impala already did for psych-rock with their exceptional Innerspeaker LP—the record may borrow shamelessly from other artists, but it does so with great panache, intuition, and joy. And, also like that band, UMO is cunning enough to be able to wriggle away from a clear definition just as you think you have them pegged.

A prime example of this is one of the shortest (and best) tracks on the record, "Nerve Damage!" After a sequence of tunes that all tow the party line of boxy breakbeats and foxy pop hooks, "Nerve Damage!" slams a heavily effected, giddily dexterous flurry of solo guitar headlong into a slice of druggy punk that sounds ripped from the lost demos of Sebadoh's original loon, Eric Gaffney. It as unexpected as it is exhilarating and it packs everything it can into its 2:15 running time. Most impressively, it manages to blend into the rest of record despite being a bit of ugly duckling.

You can ultimately chalk this up to the overall sound of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, which is a great reminder of the benefits of a good lo-fi recording. The record is hazy, but purposefully done. Whether these guys had very little money or not, make no mistake: it is very intelligently constructed and clearly sounds they way they intended it to.

So, will Unknown Mortal Orchestra end up being a fun little fling or a more lasting relationship? It's still a little up in the air. But right now, I'm having too much fun reveling in that kind of excitement that can only come from the surprise of the new. Just when I least expected it, I think I'm in love.

CLOUDLAND CANYON - Fin Eaves

One of the most fun things about the last half-decade or so of music has been listening to a brand new generation of players modernize the so-called shoegazer movement of the 1990s. Back in the day (you know, fifteen years ago or whatever), bands like Ride, Lush, Slowdive and the canonical My Bloody Valentine used effects and processing to make their guitars sound like anything but guitars. But they still came at their music from the mentality of a rock band—no matter how mutated, the basic language was still voice, guitars, bass, drums.

Now an even greater fluency with the computer and its possibilities has allowed solo artists and duos to create something akin to this music but in a slightly tweaked fashion. Here, the primary engine driving the music is the model perfected by another brand of '90s acts such as Underworld and Chemical Brothers—the IDM DJ duo. I don't mean this to be a particularly novel observation, but hearing the combination of swerving MBV-style chords and loop-based grooves of Fin Eaves track "Pinklike / Version" is one of those moments when you can really see the fruits of evolution. Like an equation in calculus, Cloudland Canyon are a problem wherein finding any 'x' variable in their chain of influence is just a matter of puzzling over it for a little while—obscured and refracted, sure, but it’s all there.

This duo pulls from more than the aforementioned template (there’s a heavy '60s psych undertone, for example), but it's most thrilling taken as a update of those early shoegazer albums—the ones made before bands like Ride or Lush allowed their rock instincts to push the gauzy FX aside and reveal themselves as the more conventional rock/pop bands they always kind of were. This record drifts everywhere and nowhere all at once—shards of pop songs and hooks float around in an amorphous jumble, and it's ultimately up to your ears to assemble it in a form that makes the most sense. In keeping with their model of 'engine', Cloudland Canyon really don't write songs as much as mobius strip suites that relive their brief lives over and over until they fade out. Which, more than anything, is actually somewhat conventional music in today's world...and it pleases me to no end that we've evolved to the point where this style of expression is as normal as picking up a guitar, setting up a drum kit and counting to four. 

BLACK MOUNTAIN - Wilderness Heart

I still remember first hearing about Stephen McBean's early project, the oddball indie outfit Jerk With A Bomb, from a friend. It's some decent stuff, but in no way did it hint on the grand scope of music this man had the potential to unleash on the world in the coming decade. Since then, between Black Mountain and his always evolving "solo" project, Pink Mountaintops, McBean has taken on Spector pop ballads, minimal electro bedroom excursions and hairy psych freakouts, and mastered them all. But there's no question that it's the Sabbath-meets-"Low Rider" stoner cool of Black Mountain breakthroughs like "Druganaut" and "Don't Run Our Hearts Around" that are his greatest claim to fame. 

Black Mountain's second LP, In The Future, sought to push this style to the edge of its possible envelope—the result being an eight-minute single, "Tyrants", and the seventeen-minute "Bright Lights" (notable if only for the endless repetition of "Light Bright/Light Bright..." that no doubt had scores of high thirty-year-olds scouring their mom's closet in the vain hope of finding the namesake toy left over from their youth). It was a solid effort, but as an album it kind of lost itself in places.

Well, the band has definitely found itself again on Wilderness Heart, a pure distillation of all the things that make McBean's projects great—it swoons, it spaces out, and it rocks like a hurricane—and all within the confines of a far more succinct LP. "Old Fangs" and "Let Spirits Ride" (the latter containing a riff that actually sounds a lot like a sped-up take on Van Halen's "House of Pain"—just saying...) are head-banging bursts of hirsute fun. In other places, tracks like "Radiant Hearts" and "Rollercoaster" offer beautiful pedestals for the perfect pairing of McBean and Amber Webber's vocals. And all across the album, the band sounds capital 'A' amazing: locked and loaded with even more room than before for Jeremy Schmidt's killer synth and organ lines.

As with any album that seeks to truncate a band's sound, what it gains in brevity, it loses a little in blissed-out patience. And so Wilderness Heart has no slow-building stunner on par with their debut's "No Hits" or "Set Us Free". But it's a welcome shift all the same that the band wears well. Besides, with a career as varied as McBean's, there little doubt he'll find himself back in that trippy, kraut-y territory again soon enough.

QUEST FOR FIRE - Lights From Paradise

Everything sounds better when you're stoned. It's a fact upon which far too many so-called stoner rock bands have lazily rested, whether they actually partook of the magic weed or not. Hey, when the central tenets of your style are lead-limbed repetition, fuzzed-out tones, and blurry vocalization, how much impetus would you have to break bold new ground?

So what makes Toronto's Quest For Fire more than just another pack of rockers slouching their way onto an already crowded wave? While it may not have been virgin territory, QFF's debut smartly balanced stoner rock’s need for bluesy lethargy with a sound that made the most of the band members' pedigree (one that covered everything from bar rockers The Deadly Snakes to the hardcore blitzkrieg of Cursed)—in other words, underneath the haze were well-written songs full of wounded heart, human tales and well-nuanced aggression. It was heavy for sure, but it was a lot more than that: it had real soul.

Lights From Paradise builds wisely on this formula with a similarly strong record that increases in meaning with each listen. Chad Ross’ half-awake croon in particular nails the group’s appeal, managing to sound casual, desperate, wise, and menacing, all in equal measure. And his subject matter benefits greatly from being rooted in the personal, rather than in realms of fantasy. Sure, sometimes smoking with dragons while bedding mysterious demon women is cool, but it’s nice to know that this kind of stuff can be used to explore themes not already covered by Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. So while fans of all manner of stoner rock—from Boris and Dead Meadow to even heavier fare like High On Fire—will find lots to like here, so will those who crave a little more meaning from their music. Stoned or not, this record sounds amazing.

TAGES - Studio

Long before ABBA released their string of Seventies smashes and more than thirty years before The Hives burst out of their garage, Sweden was boasting some of the best bands to hail outside the U.K. and the U.S. Singing mainly in English, beat/mod combos such as The Shanes, The Lee Kings and The Namelosers put out records almost on par with what the finest Anglo/American groups had to offer. At the top of the Swedish pop crop was Tages, whose singles and albums reflected the evolution of English rock from the early to late '60s (and, might I add, bloody brilliantly at that!).

Tages' fifth and final LP was Studio, released in late 1967 and now finally available for the non-Swedish world to savour in all its melodic glory, especially if you're already partial to albums like The Zombies' Odessey And Oracle or even Sgt. Pepper. But no matter how much Swingin' London pop rubbed off on Tages' style, they still weren't afraid to psych things up with traditional Swedish classical and folk influences, instead of simply strumming a sitar.

With bonus tracks consisting of their last few singles, socially-conscious lyrics about then-taboo topics like unwed motherhood and transvestism, charming flower-power idealism, and more hooks than a meat locker, Tages' Studio is something that's worth checkin' out—a hard-to-beat pop-sike treat and one of the most impressive reissues I've heard this year. 

HANOI JANES - Year Of Panic

At this point in music history, toying with stereotypes of Germans playing music that doesn’t sound, well, playful does come with a slight twinge of guilt and deserves a bit of a groan. But really, besides maybe Can’s “Turtles Have Short Legs,” how many songs can you name from Germany that send you into fits of teenage home-alone dancing like a giddy Molly Ringwald in her younger days? Or, for that matter, like Jane Fonda (nicknamesake of the band at hand) doing aerobics in one of her era-defining workout videos? Not too many, really, which is just part of what makes Hanoi Janes’ debut such a pleasure to listen (and jump around) to. 

After the pathetically early death of Jay Reatard this past New Year, fans were left wondering who would inherit the monumental task of continuing what he started, but along comes Sachsen's Oliver Scharf to pick up the Reatarded torch and show the Yanks how to have fun again, with the Janes' sunshininess filtered through home-recorded DIY fidelity and enough stop-starts and syncopation (as on “Good Bone”) to keep spirits up and the body moving for a whopping 31 minutes (and that’s 15 tracks too, like the way it used to be!). It’s the small sonic details, like the occasional frantically-strummed nylon-string guitar instead of an electric, frame-tapping as an alternative to keeping time with a hi-hat, and an aggressively frenetic approach to tempo and rhythm that further suggest that Stephen Pope and Billy Hayes would have been better off working for Sgt. Scharf instead.

Don’t make their mistake—choose Hanoi Janes!

VA - Bubblegum Music Is The Naked Truth

Ah, bubblegum music. You'd think that in this day and age, this chewy, sticky genre would get the respect it deserves, right? I mean, sure, lots of folks who groove to '60s soul and garage may give lip service to the pleasures found in aurally masticating a wad of sugary cud, but do they actually take this stuff SERIOUSLY? This reviewer does...

Not too solemnly, though, as befits a style of music that was the missing link between mid-'60s teenpunk and early-'70s glam. Bubblegum pop/rock, specifically whipped up to appeal to kids too young to wrap their heads around—and blow their minds to—hard psych, is celebrated here in all its gooey glory: a tasty re-ish of a compilation first released in 1969 by Buddah Records, one of the prime purveyors of pop (bubblegum division). The British label Rev-ola has lovingly included a buzzin' dozen of the fourteen tunes on the original album, along with an additional seven sweet ditties.

Most of the big bubblicious names are here: The 1910 Fruitgum Company, The Ohio Express, and The Lemon Pipers keep cool company with the likes of The Shadows Of Knight and Salt Water Taffy. From "Yummy Yummy" and "Chewy Chewy" to "1, 2, 3 Red Light" (covered by the early Talking Heads) and "Indian Giver" (nicely redone by The Ramones years later—those New York punks knew a tasty piece of gum when they chewed one), these studio concoctions go beyond their creators' intentions of appealing/pandering to susceptible youth. With bright melodies, double-entendre nursery rhyme lyrics, and occasional garage grit, a type of pop once dismissed as disposable fluff has ultimately never lost its flavour one bit. Chew on!

WE NEVER LEARN: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001

Well, well—what do we have here? Why, it's the first book to chronicle the emergence of possibly the most submerged (in terms of "alt-nation" popularity and commerciality) rock subculture of the '90s. Eric Davidson, lead snot-spewing singer of Ohio's New Bomb Turks, has interviewed and written about the groups and movers and shakers of what he's colourfully labelled "the gunk punk undergut": lo-fi garage bands which were too wildly raunchy to subscribe to a strict "'66-only" approach, but too rootsy for hardcore punk purity.

From the U.K.'s Thee Headcoats (led by the ridiculously prolific Billy Childish) to The Mummies out of San Francisco (some nutcases who performed in, you guessed it, sweaty mummy costumes), a crazed commitment to rockin' noise is the common thread among the many diverse gunky groups. None of these sounded like the alt-rock bands which resonated with the indie-loving public at the time, mainly because the gunk-punkers were too uncompromisingly raw, savage, and unapologetically non-arty. Finally, close to a decade ago, The White Stripes, coming out of Detroit's garage-rock underbelly, had the wide-ranging impact that their predecessors/compatriots couldn't/wouldn't muster. With We Never Learn, educating yourself in the fun and frantic times that were had in the gunk punk world is, like the music, a total and bonafide blast!

THE DING-DONGS - S/T

Meet The Ding-Dongs, who sound like they hail from somewhere deep in the wilds of Arkansas...No, that ain't quite right; how's about some neglected one-horse town off a two-lane highway in Tennessee? Hmmm, nope, scratch that. How does the lovely and liberated, sophisticated cultural hotbed of Montreal grab you? Yippers, these here Ding-Dongs do indeed come from a punkabilly place found in the innards of that city's rock'n'roll underground. More importantly, their debut disc represents the raunchily raucous collaboration between charismatic rockabilly powerhouse Bloodshot Bill and great garage-punker Mark "BBQ" Sultan.

On this release on the fantastic Brooklyn-based Norton label ("Where the loud sound abounds" is their appropriate motto), The Ding-Dongs deliver the crude deep-fried rootsy goods in an unrelenting barrage of yelped vocals, twangy gi-tar, and pounded backbeat. The result is a breathlessly exciting romp that recalls the buzz put out by '80s/'90s Montreal rockabilly gods Ray Condo and his Hard Rock Goners, but utterly stripped-down AND souped-up. In other words, no musty revivalism here, just a ding-dong daddy of a damned good time!