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Righteous
Original
Ani DiFranco, who burst onto the folk rock scene with her 1990 self-titled album, is now America's sweetheart, with well over one million records sold. DiFranco packs venues like Carnegie Hall with tattooed, buff, butch women and lipstick chicks screaming for her and crying as if she were the second coming of The Beatles. By the time you read this article, the 35-year-old will have unleashed a new studio album onto the world, her 16th, not counting two videos, three EPs, eight official bootlegs of her rowdy concerts and 11 collaborations with other musicians. DiFranco and her tour buddy Todd Sickafoose began recording the new CD in New Orleans in early 2005, but were displaced by Katrina and instead finished it in DiFranco's hometown of Buffalo. Reprieve, released on Aug. 8, features 13 new songs and spoken word pieces from the original Righteous Babe, showing that she still has a mind to speak what's on her mind, and if it's controversial or just a tad uncomfortable, so much the better. Anything in the world, both at home and abroad, is fair game for DiFranco's poison pen. This release finds DiFranco mourning the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago. On the album's title track she remembers "the day it was thousands of degrees in the shade." Reprieve's cover image is a gnarled and twisted eucalyptus tree, half full and healthy, half broken and destroyed by war. It is a real tree, one that was photographed in Nagasaki on Aug. 10, 1945, by Yosuke Yamahata. DiFranco's music is like a dip in an ice-cold lake on a 100-degree day. It's shocking as hell when you take that first plunge, but when you pull yourself out on the bank, breathless and shivering, it's only a matter of time before you're jumping in again. You just have to hear what she's going to come up with next, what verbal snapshot she'll hand her fans. We don't always like what she says or how she says it, but we love that she says what we can't always define for ourselves. And she's almost always at her best when she focuses her knack for wordplay on the political situation of the day. Sometimes DiFranco's funk-o-matic guitar playing and her voice, which delivers in fits and starts, can be too much to handle. But we're always awfully glad she's there, taking up space on the feminist women's music shelf that would otherwise be occupied by vapid, coiffed Spice Girl clones. One new track, "Half-Assed," has her spitting out the words, "You start tripping and I start slipping away. I was taught to zip it if I got nothin' nice to say." Luckily for us, DiFranco chose to ignore at least some of what she was taught.
Summer
Sounds Something about summer — maybe the brief hint of tropical climes, maybe the many outdoor concerts — just gets the world music mojo working, so let me pass on a few recommended new CDs. You may have seen Ska Cubano at the Oregon Zoo last week. On their zany new release, ÐAy Caramba! (Cumbancha), this UK-Cuban collaborative project "imagines what would have happened had Jamaica ska blended with the big band blasts of classic Cuban mambo and son." The group includes some of London's finest Jamaican and Cuban musicians, including singer Natty Bo, guitarist Benhy Billy (who insists he's a reincarnation of the great Cuban singer Beny Moré), Japanese sax mistress Megumi Mesaku and legendary session trumpeter Tan Tan Thornton, who played on tracks by The Beatles, Stones, Hendrix and more. I've enjoyed the haunting vocals of Persian-Indian chanteuse Azam Ali since she co-founded Vas a decade ago and released her solo debut, the Euro-medieval sounding Portals of Grace. Her newest, Elysium for the Brave (Six Degrees), features musicians such as King Crimson's Trey Gunn (a former Eugenean) and her current bandmates in Niyaz, and adds electronics and English-language vocals to its traditional instrumentation. On her self titled debut disk on the Triloka label, Canada's Kiran Ahluwalia draws on similar Indian-Iranian influences (she studied Persian sung poems — ghazals — and Indian classical music) and added touches of folk (Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster appears) to create a vibrant, melodic hybrid that should appeal to fans of Anoushka Shankar and other cross-cultural musicians. On Balancé (Times Square), another bicultural singer extraordinaire, Cape Verde's Sara Tavares, proves herself more than a worthy successor to her countrywoman, Cesaria Evora, mingling Afrobeat, reggae and other global styles with gorgeous melodies. Tavares, who now lives in Lisbon, calls the album "lullabyes to myself" but her sultry vocals won't put anyone to sleep.
Still another global diva, Ethiopia's Gigi, scored an international breakthrough with her self-titled debut on Palm Pictures (featuring collaborators as august as jazz legends Wayne Shorter, Henry Threadgill and Pharoah Sanders) a few years ago. Now, the album's producer, world music Svengali Bill Laswell, has "reimagined" it as an ambient soundscape called Illuminated Audio (Palm Pictures), and it works as well as his re-envisionings of Miles Davis and Santana. I wish Michael Ramos's Charanga Cakewalk had been around when I lived in Austin in the '80s and '90s. On Chicano Zen (Triloka), the well known session musician enlists collaborators like Ruben Ramos and Patty Griffin plus disparate global influences (Tejano, merengue, reggaeton, flamenco, ska) to produce some of the hookiest sounds I've ever heard. I'd hate to see this inventive concoction pigeonholed as merely Latin or lounge; its global grooves should be enjoyed by everyone.
Not Modest in the Slightest Straight out of Sacramento, the artists formerly known as The Feeling are back with a new name and ready to rock. Now The Spiral States, the band is ready to get back into the scene with a new EP and a forthcoming album. "We're not trying to be crazy experimental," says guitarist Alec Roberts-Knutila. "We're just layering a lot of things on top of each other and going with that." "But if you listen to this new album on your headphones," bassist Allen Maxwell says, "you're going to hear things that will blow your mind." Laying down a brand of rock that grooves like The Smiths with surf rock, The Spiral States enjoy the simpler things in music, with soft guitar melodies and vocalist James Williams crooning as if he were on a beach somewhere, looking out at the ocean. "I joined the band last," Roberts-Knutila says, "and when I joined the band was really into The Smiths and Orange Juice, and those were two bands I had never heard before. But I like them now." With the new album on the way, the band plans to tour up and down the West Coast, seeking popularity in places other than their hometown. "Sacramento's an interesting place," Maxwell says. "There are a lot of good bands, but many that we're friends with are more popular elsewhere. It's cheap to live here, so you can have a band, afford the time and practice space, but you have to get out of town if you want a good response." The Spiral States play with Merch at 10 pm Thursday, Aug. 10 at Luckey's. 21+ show. $3. — Dan Hoyt
Not So Over America has a curious relationship with its musical heroes. A band can become known as "the next big thing," reach a level of success and ride that wave until, very suddenly, the wave just dissolves into mist and foam. "Hey, whatever happened to so and so? You know, they did that one song?" "Oh, yeah. Them. They're, like, so over."
I'm not going to pretend I'm immune to this phenomenon. When the assignment came to write about Big Head Todd and the Monsters, my first thought might not have been "They're so over," but I will confess to a startled "They're still together?" I honestly hadn't given them a thought in years. Fortunately, the band has not been discouraged by my shortsightedness. Instead, as evidenced by their 2004 CD Live at the Fillmore — the musical backdrop to which I am now writing — they have spent the long lonely years of my neglect developing into a solid and professional musical outfit. The things I've been missing! This is a band with chops galore, tricks a-plenty. Boasting the same core lineup since the mid 1980s, the band's sound is built around Todd Park Mohr's songwriting and sizzling guitar work. His playing is virtuosic without being overly showy. Think the solid riff work of Eric Clapton meets the fluid flights of fancy of a Stevie Ray Vaughn or Mark Knopfler; only later, replaying the songs in your mind, do you realize how exceptional Mohr's work is. His playing is anchored by drummer Brian Nevin and bassist Rob Squires, who have been holding down the rhythm chores since the men all met at Columbine High School in Colorado. The band's prowess on stage is fortunate because they have reportedly released their last CD. Instead, they are opting to release new material via a regular series of "Toddcasts" available from iTunes and other podcasting services. Since the podcasts are free, the band clearly expects to derive most of its income from concert fees. A gutsy move. Joining BHTM for their Eugene concert is Toad the Wet Sprocket. Featuring a softer, more pop-oriented sound, the band was one of the most influential voices on the alternative scene in the early '90s. Though they officially disbanded in 1998, they have twice reformed for reunion tours. Big Head Todd and the Monsters and Toad the Wet Sprocket play at 6 pm Friday, Aug. 11 at Secret House Vineyards in Veneta. $28 adv., $30 dos. — John Ginn Snakes on an Attack Ship A name inspired by Blade Runner, loud rock 'n' roll and a major label debut album. What could possibly be better for any rock band? Well, this first album isn't quite a major label debut for Attack Ships on Fire, but they like to pretend it is: They titled it Major Label Debut. Why not be a little tricky with the fans and fool them? "Well, we thought it was funny, anyway," says vocalist Mike Bell. The band has been around for three years now and has toured up and down this side of the country, bringing their straight up rock to strip clubs, bars, all-ages venues and anywhere an ear can be blasted off. They need no help structuring their sound, either; the new record was mixed and produced completely by the band itself. "We worked on it for just over a year," Bell says, "and had arranged with a producer in L.A. to do all the mixing and mastering. He ran us around for about eight months and I made him send me all the original tapes. From there, I taught myself how to mix and master an album. It's completely do-it-yourself besides the duplication." Lyrically, Bell pieces together life struggles, a dash of third-person character descriptions and the joys of being immature and loving it. "There are a couple songs where I've had to write from another person's perspective," he says, "but overall it's something that I've experienced or personified in terms of a particular emotion, and every once in a while we just get completely sophomoric and write a song about hangovers." Attack Ships on Fire plays with Arroyo at 9 pm Saturday, Aug. 12 at the Samurai Duck. 21+ show. $5. — Dan Hoyt
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