Somethin' Fer Sunday Dept. - Charlie Rouse

Let Foam-O-Graph© live your life for you!

Back when th' IoF© was the hip place to hang, Sundays were the time to rock the Daks, a pastel cardigan, Penny Loafers, and kick back on the patio with a Daiquiri and some cocktail jazz on th' Consolette™. Like, Populuxe, daddy-o!

Today we honor that tradition by featuring a fine album by Charlie Rouse, who played sax with Thelonious Monk but here falls back into his Sunday slacks and delivers nine smuthely swingin' sides, ably abetted by [discogs rsrch musicians pse ed]. 

This album, recorded in [ed?] goes some way to disproving the commonly-held notion that all jazz is shit. It's swell, and you'll dig it! Also, it'll make a change from Davis and John.

 

Free! With every download - this swell Art cover! Yours to keep whatever you decide!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First Cut Is The Deepest Dept. - Television, Ramones, Patti Smith

Noo Yawk, 1975. Yikes?

A recent flurry of page hits for the first in this series [here - Ed.] inspired me - too strong a word - to pen this sequel, late at night though it be. The wind howled through the shadowed stones, banging the moldering shutters, as if in warning. I lit a guttering tallow candle and made my way to my study, high in the ruined tower of this age-old house above the Miskatonic. Shiveringly, I cut a new quill, uncorked the inkwell, and arranged a blotter on the escritoire. As I bent to my task the rats chattered hideously in the rotten wainscotting, as if mocking my literary pretension. The cursed rats! Ever louder! Ever closer! Must ... finish ...  must ... *bonk*.

Television's first album was a stunning achievement on release, and remains, along with epic presingle Johnny Jewel, some kind of apogee [is this the right word? - Ed.] of guitar rock. Yayy! It's a Perfect Ten, with no evident failings anywhere. There are those who defend Adventure, the second album (as I once did), but it's really a stance that requires clinical denial and results in a cognitively dissonant stress head. It's okay, I guess, and that's truthfully the best we can say about it. The third album? I bought it, along with a few other hopeless punters, and tried to convince myself it was worth listening to again. Just different, right? But also duller and weaker, even less interesting than Adventure. Meh. They should have stopped after the first, and the world would be a better place.

The Ramones got universally ecstatic reviews for the first album, because it's a genius-level zeitgeist statement, a work of art, a fantastically perfect idea manifested in a perfect way. Whatever you think of the music (it always sounded a bit thin to me) it established Th' Brudders as a global brand. How could they follow that? Who cares? They needn't have bothered, but the formula was good for more sales across a series of rinse-and-repeat albums. And t-shirts. You're going to tell me yebbut Rocket To Russia is pretty good, thinking that I'm interested in your opinion, a mistake. They should have quit after the first, or become a jam band.

Patti Smith, darling of NY Loft Society, shook things up in an entirely good way with Horses, but insisted on hanging around for a ballsaching series of "challenging" albums that are used to illustrate the concept of diminishing returns at music biz conferences. Yes, Easter had the hit Because I Stole This From Bruce Springsteen, but she could have locked the stable door after Horses bolted. To give her her due, she's nearly as good a poet as Rod McKuen, although not as accomplished as Jim Carroll, another alumnus of the New York School Of Scag, or Elliott Murphy. But Horses has kept its impact untouched by the passing decades - true bottled lightning.

This post funded in part by IANYTYWU "It's A New York Thing, You Wouldn't Understand", a non-profit organisation.

Joes' Garbage Dept.

Russell Brand, yesterday

Zappa's leftovers are tastier morsels than most artists' main meals. Way back in 2004, grizzled, near-blind Zappa archivist Joe Travers was cruelly whipped by the elderly Gail Zappa [below - Ed.], furious she wasn't seeing any new Zappa albums at her local Target. 

Still bleeding from the sting of her lash, Joe hastily cobbled together three barrel-scraping exercises, Joe's Domage, Joe's Corsage, and Joe's Xmasage, had some sleeves run out by Dave at Kinkos, and stuffed them into the racks himself. Result: job kept, Gail escorted from Target screeching "My husband, bitches! Eat my fucking panty-hose!"

 

 

THIS JUST IN!!!!

 Joe's Menage and Joe's Camouflage added in separate link!!! YOU DO NOT DESERVE THIS!

Note: The "garbage" in the title to this piece is pronounced gar-baahj for conceptual continuity. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

This post co-funded by Widows Of Famous Rock Stars™. See them at this year's CPAC!

Swagger And Strut Dept. - Aerosmith

Girls just wanna have fun, boys just wanna sulk

Aerosmith took a lot of flak for being dumb Rolling Stone knock-offs. Two things wrong with this: they don't sound like the Stones, and they're dumb like The Ramones are dumb. If you don't grab your air guitar three seconds into any Aerosmith song, rock n' roll may not be your thing. That's okay. Tedeschi Trucks are there for you.

Their first four albums vary only in the number of hits they contain, from zero (Get Your Wings) to a shitload (Rocks), but they all sound exactly like rock n' roll should sound; deceptively simple. If you lend an ear to the arrangements - yup, these songs are all craftsman built - you'll hear surprises and neat tricks you might not expect from a bunch of dumb Stones wannabes.

Associations with Hair Bands, Metal, Glam, and Hard Rock are off the mark. Aerosmith is 100% proof pure rock music, and at their best as great as it gets. Drums that sound like drums, guitars everywhere, riffing and soloing, bass crunching, and vocals that never degrade into that grunty vein-popping thing.

Deliverables: first four albums. Self-titled first album with really nice extra track, Get Your Wings, Toys In The Attic, and Rocks. An absolute fucking blast, a feast.

StealthLink© embedded into post for community wellness.

 

This post autoclaved with an alembic donated by Alchemy Al's All-Aluminum Alembics, Alabaster, AL

Tedeschi Trucks Must Die! Dept.

 

Real human art or AI? Dreadful either way

I wanted to like this album. I've always wanted to like Tedeschi Trucks. What harm do they do? None. They bring wholesome rock n' roll entertainment to many, many good people - media and IT consultants, mostly, wellness mentors, realtors, barristas, craft beer entrepreneurs, bitcoin traders. A Prius with oat milk lattés in the cooler. The TTB's festival gigs have extended families literally standing up with excitement across the USA, and getting home in time for bed. What am I, the Grinch at Christmas?

Not being able to join in the fun at their gigs, I've dutifully listened to their albums hoping to hear something, like songwriting, to convince me they're worth my time. They perform a lot of covers, which is not only a respectful nod to those great musicians who went before them but also an admission they have trouble coming up with material. Sooner or later - preferably sooner - they had to come up with their own Layla or Dark Star or Ramblin' Man. They just can't. I'm sure their fans can tell the songs apart, but to anyone outside that blessed circle they've made no impact at all.

It's not a question of competence. They have competence out the ass. Trucks is a fine guitarist, if *cough* a little lacking in charisma and on-stage dynamism. To the point that it's hard to see if he's even up there - you're thinking that the potato in Target duds is a guitar tech, tuning up. Tedeschi has a winning voice, and she's sexy in a kind of Walton's Mountain way. Amish schoolmarm sexy. Not too much of a threat to Mom out there keeping an eye on hubby! Neither of them could write a hit at gunpoint. There are, at last count, thirty-seven musicians in the band. Some of them have to stay in the tour bus because there's no room on stage. Excuse me, but Jimi Hendrix was three guys, and one of those couldn't play. The Who? Four, and one of those just swung a mic. They set everything on fire, made the sound of planets colliding ...

Oh dear.

When this album was touted as their song album - heavy on hooks, light on noodling - I pulled on a pair of freshly-laundered pre-aged Levi's (made in China) and my original collector's item Official Revelator Tour Shirt (made in China), swung my TTB ball cap (made in China) backward and settled in for some good old-fashioned rock n' roll. Spoiler - not.

Take a hinge at that cover. It's either AI or a real human artist painting exactly like AI. Whatever. But there's some significance here - the TTB are real humans who sound exactly like AI. The songs have that generic, flat, sterile, faultlessly competent, no-surprises-here sound. They slide on by in an agreeable and entirely unmemorable mid-tempo snooze, never breaking out into the excitement zone. Never making your neck hairs bristle or your palms sweat. Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, a fine, responsible married couple who are also the two most joyless fucks in showbiz.

Let's worry less about machines doing human stuff and worry more about humans doing human stuff. Taking risks, having a laugh, getting angry. 

This post written somewhere between resignation and annoyance.