New Music Monthly: September 2020 releases

September is upon us and the new music is flying high in spite of the pandemic and the lack of live shows across the country. The next best thing to rockin' your local venue is getting your kicks with new music, so pick yer poison, kiddies! There's blues and roots music from the New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers, Grant-Lee Phillips, Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters, and the adept pairing of legends Elvin Bishop and Charlie Musselwhite. There's classic prog-rock from King Crimson and Flying Colors; high-octane rawk from Bob Mould and the duo of James Williamson and Deniz Tek; and groovy reissues from Little Richard, Johnny Thunders, and the Rolling Stones. Who could ask for anything more? 

Release dates are probably gonna change and nobody tells me when they do. If you’re interesting in buying an album, just hit the ‘Buy!’ link to get it from Amazon.com...it’s just that damn easy! Your purchase puts valuable ‘store credit’ in the Reverend’s pocket that he’ll use to buy more music to write about in a never-ending loop of rock ‘n’ roll ecstasy! If you're boycotting Amazon and don't have an indie record store close by, may we suggest shopping with our friends at Grimey's Music in Nashville? They have a great selection of vinyl available by mail order, offer quick service, and if you don't see what you want on their website, check out their Discogs shop!

SEPTEMBER 4
King Crimson - The Elements 2020 Tour Box   BUY!
New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers - Volume 1 [w/Charlie Musselwhite, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Jimbo Mathus & friends!]   BUY!
Grant-Lee Phillips - Lightning, Show Us Your Stuff   BUY!
Throwing Muses - Sun Racket   BUY!

SEPTEMBER 11
Blitzen Trapper - Holy Smokes Future Jokes   BUY!
Doves - The Universal Want   BUY!
Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters - Beyond the Blue Door   BUY!
The Flaming Lips - American Head   BUY!
Gasoline Lollipops - All the Misery Money Can Buy   BUY!
Marilyn Manson - We Are Chaos   BUY!
Mastodon - Medium Rarities   BUY!
Johnny Thunders - Que Sera Sera: Resurrected [3-CD box set]   BUY!

SEPTEMBER 18
Ace of Cups - Sing Your Dream   BUY!
Flyer Colors - Third Stage: Live In London [prog-rock supergroup w/Steve Morse, Mike Portnoy & Neal Morse]   BUY!
Gazpacho - Fireworker   BUY!
Little Richard - King of Rock and Roll   BUY!
Little Richard - The Rill Thing   BUY!
Napalm Death - Throes of Joy In the Jaws of Defeatism   BUY!
Sugar Ray & the Bluetones w/Little Charlie - Too Far From the Bar   BUY!
James Williamson & Deniz Tek - Two To One   BUY!

SEPTEMBER 25
Ayreon - Transitus   BUY!
Elvin Bishop & Charlie Musselwhite - 100 Years of Blues   BUY!
Bruce Cockburn - True North (A 50th Anniversary Box Set) [vinyl reissue]   BUY!
Deftones - Ohms   BUY!
Thurston Moore - By the Fire   BUY!
Bob Mould - Blue Hearts   BUY!
The Pretty Things - Bare As Bone, Bright As Blood   BUY!
The Rolling Stones - Steels of Wheel Live [unreleased 1989 concert]   BUY!
Surfer Blood - Carefree Theatre   BUY!

 

Album of the Month: Man, there's a lot of great music to choose from this month but I'm going to have to go with the Pretty Things' Bare As Bone, Bright As Blood LP. The final recording by legendary PTs' frontman Phil May, this collection of acoustic performances is basically May and PTs' guitarist Dick Taylor, literally finished up days after Mays death in May 2020. This promises to be a fitting swansong to a great, unheralded band. Check out the latest issue of Ugly Things music zine for more info on May's enormous musical legacy.

CD Review: The Rolling Stones' Blue & Lonesome (2016)

Funny story, but true…speaking with legendary Deep Purple bassist Roger Glover last year, the conversation turned to blues music, a subject which really lit a fire under the veteran rocker. He spoke of seeing first gen British bluesmen like Alexis Korner and John Mayall play in London back in the early ‘60s, and how the audience was typically made up of other musicians. Glover told us that the earliest version of the Rolling Stones would sometimes open for Korner – Mick Jagger had previously performed with Korner’s Blues Unlimited band, as had Keith Richards and Charlie Watts – and that the primal Stones were, in a word, ‘awful.’ Glover said that the band went away for a couple of months and, when they returned, they were a thousand times better.

They’d transformed themselves into a live R&B powerhouse in a very short time and the rest, as they say, is history. Glover didn’t come right out and say that they’d made a Robert Johnson styled deal in exchange for their newfound abilities, but clearly something was afoot. That the Stones have blues as part of their musical DNA is no secret – the band’s founding mythology is based on a chance meeting by former classmates Jagger and Richards, the two bonding over the R&B records Jagger was carrying. The Stones’ early albums were littered with covers of Chicago blues and Chess Records artists like Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and Jimmy Reed, but in 50+ years, they’d never made a straight up blues LP until Blue & Lonesome.

The Rolling Stones’ Blue & Lonesome

As the story goes, the Stones were trying to get a feel for a new recording studio and started jamming on Chicago blues giant Little Walter’s “Blue & Lonesome” and it just felt right. More blues covers poured out of the band and, within three days, they’d recorded Blue & Lonesome – an album of classic blues tunes performed spontaneously, live in the studio. The band’s first new album in eight years (since 2005’s lukewarm A Bigger Bang), and only their second of the past two decades, Blue & Lonesome captures the band at their rowdy best, these clearly inspired performances resulting in what is, arguably, the best Rolling Stones album since 1978’s Some Girls.

The band delves deep into the Chicago blues songbook for the project, which makes perfect sense as it was their original inspiration, pulling out minor R&B chart hits and blues obscurities alike. Harmonica wizard ‘Little’ Walter Jacobs is represented by four of the twelve tracks here, every one of ‘em a slab of molten steel. Jagger provides the title track with what is possibly his best vocal performance in years, masterfully channeling the song’s built-in pathos, the emotional lyrics punctuated by Jagger’s icy harp and Richards’ haunting fretwork. The album-opening “Just Your Fool” has just the right amount of rhythm-driven vamp, Jagger providing the flash with his fluid, soulful vocals and raucous, swinging harmonica while Chuck Leavell adds some jaunty piano in the background as the six-string tandem of Richards and Ron Wood rock the house.

The Stones draw upon more than just Little Walter for inspiration on Blue & Lonesome, however…you can’t pay tribute to the Chicago blues without a little Howlin’ Wolf, and they knock out red-hot covers of a pair of Wolf tunes, beginning with the feral “Commit A Crime.” Jagger is a far different vocalist than the mighty Wolf, and to his credit he doesn’t even try to imitate the bluesman’s growling vocal style. Instead, Jagger goes over the top with both his jagged vox and jumpin’ harmonica jive while the band lays down the fiercest groove to be heard since Hubert Sumlin first plugged into his amp (kids, look it up…). The other Wolf cover, “Just Like I Treat You,” is a Willie Dixon-penned gem more in the Chicago tradition with a choogling rhythm track and the twin piano-pounding of Leavell and Matt Clifford hiding behind Richards’ nimble guitarplay.

The Stones honor guitarist Jimmy Reed with a haunting cover of his 1957 Top 10 R&B chart hit “Little Rain.” A slow-burning ballad, Jagger’s vocals are appropriately tortured, his mournful harp playing matched by shimmering, atmospheric instrumentation that blankets the lyrics like morning fog on a kudzu vine. The band doesn’t forget the “West Side” of Chicago, either, honoring the great guitarists Otis Rush and “Magic” Sam Maghett with covers of “I Can’t Quit You Baby” and “All of Your Love,” respectively. The former is a Dixon-penned treasure that features Jagger’s fine, emotionally-fraught vox and Richards’ rattling fretwork while the latter is an unsuccessful 1957 single that would go on to become a blues standard, infused here with a menacing, electric vibe and hypnotic instrumentation. Noticeable by his absence are any covers of the great Muddy Waters, who provided the Stones with their name lo those many years ago.

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Blue & Lonesome is a fine, entertaining collection, but I have a minor gripe with the disingenuous and/or uninformed hype surrounding the album’s release. In the album’s liner notes, Jagger states that the band is “taking the blues forward and hopefully introducing them to a whole new generation of fans.” Amateur rockcrits have tripped over their adjectives in praising the Stones’ effort as some sort of rediscovery of the blues. Just what audience does Mick think that the Stones are selling to these days? I don’t see a lot of young Beyonce fans getting turned onto the blues by this record, no matter Jagger’s best intentions. The largest portion of the band’s audience is aging greybeards like myself.

As for the genre of the blues itself, it doesn’t need rejuvenation by the Stones’ current embrace of their roots. Talented artists like Walter Trout, Shemekia Copeland, Joe Bonamassa, Ruthie Foster, Joe Louis Walker, and the great Buddy Guy, to name but a few, have been keeping the blues flame burning bright for decades now, creating new fans with their tireless touring and genre-stretching recordings. None of which belittles the Stones’ efforts here – Jagger’s vocals are stronger and more involved than they’ve been in years, and his harp playing is both raunchy and nuanced, as the occasion requires.

Richards’ and Wood’s guitars snap, rattle, and croon in the spirit of great bluesmen like Hubert Sumlin and Jimmy Rogers while the rhythm section of drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Daryl Jones dig a trench-like groove deep enough to drive a semi through. As a result, Blue & Lonesome is a good – tho’ not great – Rolling Stones record, but it’s also the most joyous, inspired, and freshest-sounding music they’ve made in decades. Grade: B+ (Interscope Records, released December 2, 2016)

Buy the CD from Amazon.com: The Rolling Stones' Blue & Lonesome

New Music Monthly: November & December 2016 Releases

November is upon us and with it a dearth of new album releases at the end of the year. This month we're giving you, our readers, a 'two-fer' with both November and December release dates; there will be no column next month. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some great music coming our way, including a fine new album by the legendary Glenn Hughes, an outstanding tribute album for one of our favorite rock 'n' roll singers, Frankie Miller, a bunch of stuff from the Zappa archive, and cool new blues-rock discs by Greg 'Stackhouse' Prevost and the Rolling Stones...dig it!

NOVEMBER 4 
Glenn Hughes - Resonate CD/DVD   BUY!
Jim James - Eternally Even    BUY!
Lambchop - FLOTUS (For Love Often Turns Us Still)   BUY!
The Pink Fairies - Naked Radio   BUY!
Public Image Limited - Metal Box   BUY!
Frank Zappa - Chicago '78   BUY!
Frank Zappa - Little Dots   BUY!
Frank Zappa - Meat Light: The Uncle Meat Project/Object   BUY!

NOVEMBER 11 
The Band - The Last Waltz (40th Anniversary Edition) BUY!
Frankie Miller - Frankie Miller's Double Take  BUY!
Pink Floyd - Cre/ation: The Early Years, 1957-1962  BUY!

NOVEMBER 18 
Rory Block - Keepin' Outta Trouble: A Tribute to Bukka White   BUY!
Jethro Tull - Stand Up (The Elevated Edition)  BUY!
Metallica - Hardwired...To Self-Destruct  BUY!
R.E.M. - Out of Time (25th Anniversary Edition)   BUY!
Mike Zito - Make Blues Not War    BUY!

NOVEMBER 25 
Greg Prevost - Universal Vagrant   BUY!

DECEMBER 2 
The Rolling Stones - Blue & Lonesome    BUY!

Album of the Month: Greg Prevost's Universal Vagrant is the singer, songwriter, and guitarist's second solo album after years of fronting garage-rock legends the Chesterfield Kings. The follow-up to 2013's acclaimed Mississippi Murderer LP, Universal Vagrant is another white-hot slab of ramshackle blues-rock that will rattle the teeth right out of your mouth. Whereas many otherwise earnest blues-rockers depend on covers of the classics with which to frame their fretwork, Prevost penned six of ten songs here, and they're barely distinguishable from his inspired covers of tunes by Muddy Waters, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and others.