Brassy - Got It Made

AAAAAARgh. I have been trying to figure out how I feel about this band for more than ten years. I guess I first heard about them from MTV2, back when anything associated with MTV wasn’t automatic Real Shore reruns. The song getting airplay then was Work it Out, which is a pretty awesome song. Subsequently Play Some D was featured on a Motorola ad, which got the band some buzz. But this album is really inconsistent. On the good songs they construct really fun, hip hop style dance funk, and then on other songs they just sound bored.

I’m getting ahead of myself I think. Firstly, if you’ve never heard of Brassy, you can be forgiven. The aforementioned Motorola commercial is their one claim to fame. Well that and the fact that the lead singer, Muffin Spencer, is the younger sister of a dude named Jon, whose responsibility for the detonation of some industrial grade blues got him some fame in the indie scene at one point. Anyway Brassy happened when Muffin got tired of her brother’s shadow and moved to Manchester to start and Elastica/ Smiths tribute band that gradually got more and more funky and hip-hoppy until this album happened and sounds absolutely nothing like either band. After some time they made this album, which generated a little buzz and some sales, until the Motorola commercial pushed them into moderate fame some five years after the album dropped. Taking this as a sign they made a new album, ironically named "Gettin Wise," which drove them into bankruptcy and led to the breakup of the band. Maybe not so wise. So much for Brassy.

I kind of really respect the group for making Beastie Boys style music with a full band. I kind of love that kind of thing. But the thing is, the Beastie Boys comparison only works in that they have a punk attitude and are white yet still have some “flow.” But unlike the aforementioned Boys, Brassy really isn't super interesting as a Hip-Hop act. At the time this was made it may have been less obvious, but I think we can all agree that Hip-Hop has gotten very badly stuck in a rut of brag rapping. As with any genre, Hip-Hop has a multiplicity of clichés, but when I listen to the radio all I hear are a multiplicity of tracks whose sole topic is either a) my life is awesome, b) my rapping is awesome or c) I don’t like you because you don’t recognize a) or b) and therefore must hate me because of some kind of bias or bigotry summed up as “hating.”

Not all Brassy’s songs are Hip-Hop, but the ones that are hit every fucking point in the Hip-Hop song book of cliché shame. From “I Can’t Wait,” wherein they literally discuss their “flow,” to “Who Stole The Show?” which discusses the answer to this most important of life's questions. They even embark upon the dark journey down the Lovecraftian logic hole that is c) with “Got A Beef,” a song about how the singer has a beef with you for reasons unspecified, that strongly features police sirens. God help me.

Sure, their “raps” are solid, embarking on some interesting wordplay, but we aren’t talking about Busta Rhymes here, these are white girls who kind of ramble this stuff out. Speed isn’t everything, which is good for Brassy because they don’t have any. But the basic issue is that I really just do not care. These are songs created on cliché subjects for the purpose of serving as a canvas for ego and wordplay. What’s more I do not think the musicians care either. The lyrics are delivered with this low monotone that is somehow passionless despite the fascinating subjects it is regaling us with.

On the other hand the music is kind of awesome for much of the album. Theres some really great dance funk stuff going on here, with great baselines and some great beats. This is by no means universal. Some of the tracks are as lazy with the instrumentation as they are with the lyrics. But particularly on the latter half of the album, the songs tend to consist of a monotone “rap,” by a woman who sounds bored, being backed by some outrageously crazy funk.

For songs that get this formula down Brassy are rather brilliant. The bland lyrics serve merely as the justification and tone for some very energetic dance music. Unlike most standard Hip-Hop, whose backing tracks are often a spare selection of samples whose contribution to the track is minimal, Brassy uses their musical skills to bring flesh and body to their craft. If Brassy brings anything to the genre, it is bringing musicianship to a mostly vocal genre.

Unfortunately they don’t make it easy to get to this. I understand why artists don’t want to put all the good tracks up front, but the first three tracks on this album are crap, and the fifth and sixth tracks aren’t the best either. It’s like they packed the front of the album with album tracks and saved the singles for the end. What a poor decision. So if you find this somewhere, you may want to give it a shot. There’s enough goodness here to justify a few bucks. I wouldn’t necessarily bother seeking anything out form this except maybe the singles, which as I said are excellent.

Blues Traveler - Straight On Till Morning

There is a fundamental tension in life between consistency and improvisation. Improvisation is fun and lets the improviser experiment with new tricks and ideas. On the other hand, no matter how talented the Improviser, delivering a usable product is going to require leaning on some stock tricks to hold the entire edifice together, and these stock tricks tend to be clichés. Consistency allows a more finely grained exploration of the structure of the product at a fundamental level, but the continued production of the same thing, no matter how innovative its intrinsic structure, can get staid and emotionless with time.

This is, I think, a fundamental truth of life often lost in our immediate gratification era, and it is certainly true in music. To take the examples to their most extreme examples, we can see the use and abuse of consistency in the latter years of the Beatles, where they abandoned touring and essentially locked themselves in studios. They were conducting experiments to be sure, but as the end goal had ceased to be performance and had become the production of a single, jewel-like album, the end result was a number of albums that, whilst largely brilliant, could probably never have been improvised into existence. Some commentators have additionally criticized these albums as lacking energy, and some of these albums contain some, ah, poor choices (Usually ringo-derived but moving on). On a broader scale, every band with any successful single inevitably ends up complaining that they are a bit tired of playing it live. Such is the nature of the beast.

The flip side of this coin of despair are the purely improvisational styles. Almost all traditional genres started as improvisational, from Irish Folk to Southern Folk to Blues (not folk?), each has at its base periods where the only entertainment for a poor group of people was to get together and jam in public, often whilst drunk. Inevitably clichés would form that would serve as the basis for the performance. After a while outsiders would look in on these performances and find that what were cliché props for those involved had become unique musical tricks for the uninitiated. On the other hand, for those who had to listen to Uncle Ned play the same song, with minor variations, every Saturday for years on end, the opportunity to escape to a place with more than ten performers in a 100 mile radius inevitably exerted a strong draw, becoming one of the contributing factors of urbanization and the depopulation of the countryside.

These two aspects of musical performance are inevitably necessary. I personally tend to favor song writing over performance tricks, and so I tend to be biased towards consistency at a certain level, but that is true only because we live in an age of recorded media. Without improvisation behind the scenes the music would never have any kind of energy, and I need energy in my music like meth-heads need to find someone willing to get a gum-job in exchange for Sudafed.

All my problems with Jam Bands can really be found in how I relate to experimentation and improvisation in my music. Jam Bands tend to prefer live performance as their medium, and favor free experimentation and improvisation in their music. Worthy goals, but as I am not of the type to go following bands around some of the magic is certainly lost when I listen to these performances on a recorded medium. Some Jam Bands manage to make the best aspects of improvisation shine through on the recordings I have heard, which is worthy of praise, but too often jam Bands bore me. For all their improvisation and virtuosity their song structures are staid rehashing of blues song structure, padded out with reggae rhythms and decorated with endless noodling like some kind of bizarre Italinate saint procession.

It would be entirely unfair to say this album brings all the weaknesses of Blues Traveler to the front, but it does bring all their Jam Band elements out into the sun. Song writing is more staid and traditional in structure, with more focus on the decoration than the basics. There’s a lot of noodling, funky bass playing, and weird strum patterns that do not add overly much to the song. And there are some seriously embarrassing moments here. In particular the song “Business as Usual” features the band’s experimentation with late 80s style rap. Imagine Run DMC’s collaboration with Aerosmith, except featuring Popper doing the rapping and you’ll be 90s percent there. This is very much in line with the band’s open, Jam Band roots, and at the time it probably made sense for Popper to go that final step from singing really fast to rapping, but the result is not really very good.

On the other hand, this album isn’t awful. There are some fun songs on here; in particular Canadian Rose is a very nice song, if a little too reminiscent of Run Around for comfort. Even on the average songs on this album you still have the killer combination of Popper’s incisively cynical lyrics, awesome voice, and harmonica. There is nothing particularly unique or stunning, but the songs are fun and energetic and undertaken with good humor. Even on “Business as Usual” it sounds like the band is having fun with a new idea, even if the idea was a total failure.

By far this album’s greatest weakness is that it came out right after “Four.” I spose this was always going to be an issue. It’s a fun little album when taken on its own but it doesn’t transcend its genres like its illustrious predecessor. As someone who is uncomfortable at best with the structural ineptitudes of Jam Band this puts the album in dangerous territory. I am probably going to hold onto this until I buy another Blues Traveler album and see how I feel. 

Blues Traveler - Four

Defining a genre can be a tricky undertaking, especially in a historical context. Some might ask why bother. I tend to feel such shorthands are useful in letting potential listeners know what they are in for. I think it makes it easier for the brain to absorb the musical nutrients being provided. Given this functional goal, such a label would ideally tell you something about the type of music that you are about to enjoy. Often, however, genres have come to refer more to subject matter, identity politics, business model, or even just temporal period. For instance “blues” is a useful musical label, as it defines not only a certain subject matter, and era, it even has its own chord structure. This is solid, scientific. By contrast, “Emo” refers to everything from Rites of Spring to Atom and his Package, and even the vague definition of “emotionally driven punk rock” stretches things a bit thin. Yet these labels remain, often clinging to unwilling bands for years after the genres demise. 

The life and death of College Rock is a tragic case of demographic and artistic integrity running afoul of convenience and marketability. Born of an FCC decision to provide spare bandwidth to university training programs, the 80s saw a nation-wide proliferation of college radio stations. Each had its own unique quirks and oddities, but as bastions of education and more democratic programming schedules, college stations became pivotal in pioneering new genres and styles. Though the phenomenon was nation wide, colleges do have a certain coastal predisposition, which allowed nearby stations to influence each other, eventually gelling into a genre defined by a respect for independence, talent, artistic virtuosity, and liberal values. Musically the genre defies definition, serving more as a conduit for subsections of the already developing indie scene, but if you can imagine a point that unifies R.E.M., The 10,000 Maniacs, The Smiths, Tom Waits, and The B-52s, you’ll be getting close. Post-punk was a strong influence, but since this was a college based genre, and the 60s were still very fresh, Post-psychedelic, pre-jam band folk was a very strong influence as well. This genre popularized some of the biggest names of the 80s, including the aforementioned bands, so what happened? Where it go? Well the 90s happened and it went to Alternative. 

College Rock helped start the grunge thing, which made record labels take indie acts seriously, but how to market them? They were not a defined single genre, College Rock had too many identity political issues to mass market, and the concept of promoting bands based on their ability to sell records independently of control of major labels was a concept not smiled upon by major labels. Some marketing genius decided that since this hodge-podge of unrelated genres was preferred by its adherents as an alternative to mainstream music, that “Alternative” might be a feasible compromise. 

What was alternative? Well at first it was everything that wasn’t mainstream, ie, non-Pop. But that was never really true, since it was certainly neither Jazz nor Classical nor Hair Metal, and as soon as Grunge became its own genre that was seen as distinct as well, as was Punk when that has its second (Third? Fourth?) coming, nor was Rap ever really in the fold. So Alternative was anything not mainstream that wasn’t big enough to have its own genre...but still got radio play. So, it was College Rock. Or, the bits and pieces of College Rock not big enough to get defined on their own. So…all those folky, arty bits. And so Alternative became the smart jam band genre. And as mainstream music spawned more and more genres that were clearly different from Alternative, such as Ska and Swing and hell, Chick Rock, Alternative eventually came to mean everything that was neither mainstream nor particularly offensive. And so it was that Alternative became the new code word for easy listening, and now you can hear Kenny G on the same station as The fucking Gin Blossoms, and so it is that the horrific, bastard child of college radio stations wouldn't be caught dead playing The 10,000 Maniacs for fear that Natalie Merchant’s past life would rip its way out of the radio and begin hunting down and killing all those who did this to us.  

But there was that shining moment in the mid 90s when Jam Band hadn’t fully developed, and College Rock still wasn’t yet gone, and Alternative wasn’t yet pure shit, and that was the moment that Blues Traveler hit the air waves. And god are they a hard to define band. College Rock is really the only way to go. By modern definitions they would be Jam Band, given their three day long solos at shows, but they had the intelligence (or production) not to do that on the albums. The songs on the album are hook laden, energetic, and internally coherent. This allows all the good parts of Jam Band to gel, and form something really solid (when it works).

Lest you have forgotten them, lets talk singles, namely Run Around and Hook. Run Around is probably the definitive Blues Traveler song. It strongly features the things about the band that are so fucking good. John Popper was not the first person in the world to sing well, nor to bring a harmonica to pop music, but I don’t know anyone else who can blend his voice with the harmonica so perfectly. His lyrics are clever, erudite, and energetic in a way white guys weren’t allowed to be in 1994, and no one is allowed to be these days. The music is virtuosic but controlled, making solid statements and then ending when appropriate. The instruments blend, while still making energetic and interesting intertwining statements. Lovely.

Hook is one of my favorite songs of all time. All the things I said about Run Around are true in Hook, except that the lyrics make one of the most profoundly challenging artistic statements of modern pop music. Others have written songs about how politicians lie. John Popper gives us a fucking rhetoric lesson in HOW they lie, to our faces, while telling us they are lying, and still getting us to buy it. What is more, the song is also about how all pop music, hell, all art does the same thing. While all artists hope to make profound statements that influence people’s lives, this is just the payload. The body of art is emotional manipulation that aims to draw you in and suspend your critical faculties with a haze of endorphins, dopamine, and head nodding. The faster we realize we are being manipulated, and we like it, the faster we will truly understand the real world.

Popper tells this story, in exactly the emotionally manipulative way the story itself tells. I think most people who heard this song thought it was some kind of love song. Nope. But that’s ok, because you were supposed to stop paying attention. That’s the point. And Popper isn’t passing judgment. He’s right there with you. It happens to everyone, and if you love music you love the feeling. Its just part of life, and when you think about it its kind of funny, so the song is kind of a joke. The darkest, happiest joke ever told by a fat man with a harmonica.

So much for the singles. The album tracks vary in the above qualities. Popper always has an awesome voice and is universally erudite and driven. The music sometimes relies on musical clichés from the Jam Band genre that can kind of take me out of the action. The band often counters this by bringing in Southern Rock influences, which is nice. It is also nice that they avoid songs about fairies and the oh-so tired, thrice-regurgitated reggae influences. Overall the songs on this album are fun and listenable. None attain the blinding brilliance of the singles, but they are solid rock songs that feature John Popper and I have no problem with that. A good solid album. 

Tune in next time for a review of the follow up album. God Help Us All.

About - Bongo

So we’re gonna have a normal review for a change. I have a bunch of epic shit coming up soon but for now, a review of a weird indie band no one has ever heard of.

Let us start with a discussion of band names. I like to think there is more to a band than a good name, and certainly it is easy enough to come up with good names that I have spent hours with my annoying hipster friends coming up with funny band names. Others put less effort into this, and view eleaborate or catchy names with disdain, a distraction from the real focus of a band. I tend to agree that the music is most important, and stories of bands that spend years trying to settle on a name are kind of bemusing in that regard. Similarly, bands that name themselves specifically in order to show up somewhere advantageous on a cd rack are kind of pathetic and obviously anachronistic.

On the other hand, modern bands really should try to find names that are Google unique, and it kind of annoys me that a ridiculous number of indie bands don’t do this. These days you have to know that the main way people are going to get into you is by finding out about you via internet searches. Picking a really generic word as a name is just going to undermine your ability to get fans. Which may be the point, and that just annoys me more.

Today’s band has a bad case of Google anonymity. The dude called his band About. What’s with that. Freaking hipster. About is also a Dutch/ German band that sings in English. What’s with that? That’s a thing I guess, a bunch of bands I have reviewed since starting this project fall into this category. Maybe some German hipster unloaded his cd collection at PREX. I dunno. I also don’t know much about the band because of their horrible Google anonymity. I guess this is mostly a one man act, I think his name is Rutger Hoedemaekers. It looks from his website like this was maybe a one off project? He has release a bunch of stuff under a different name, which is where the band’s website redirects a searcher. Alas.

So I really don’t know shit about this guy, but his music is kind of…really fucking awesome. Fuck guys, this shit is why I am doing this project. He does these really sweet, energetic, pop songs full of hooks and fun, and then filters them through some of the most tweaky, ADD friendly engineering and mixing. He will do things like rhythmically increase the tempo, then snap it back, repeatedly, creating this new, weird, phantom tempo. It’s so tweaky. The best comparison I can come up with is T. Raumschmiere, but there is a really good chance that you silly Americans haven’t heard of The King of Gnarz. I dunno if About is a fan of T. Raumschmiere, but he is probably aware of it. Nonetheless About is a lot more energetic and happy. The weird electronic effects are strong, but not overpowering; but one instrument in a frantic pop ensemble. Maybe think of a dubstep remix of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but not annoying at all.

That’s kind of the amazing thing. Describing it - hell, even listening to it - you think it’d piss you off or give you a headache or something, but it is somehow internally coherent and just so fucking happy that you can’t help loving it. I haven’t been so excited about a CD in months. This is that perfect combination of hilarious and awesome, and he isn’t telling any jokes. It’s like musical slapstick. If you find this album, buy it. I don’t care if you have to suck cock in the back to afford it, trust me, it’s worth it. The downside is you may not be able to find this except through the record label, but the album rules. Find it. Buy it. Ruin it and buy it again. If you find anything by Bart Constant, that’s his new band. They are also pretty awesome though less energetic. But still ruinously good.

Billy Joel - Storm Front

Probably less than a month ago I reviewed Billy Joel’s River of Dreams album, which was the album that followed Storm Front. I hated River of Dreams. I am not sure how much I have to add here, except that I like this album, on the whole. I feel like most of the singles he is known for are on this album, and some are of a high quality. I have stated previously that I really like “Down-easter ‘Alexa,’” but “That’s Not Her Style,” “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” “I Go to Extremes,” “Storm Front,” “Leningrad,” “…And So It Goes,” are all Billy Joel standards, and I would say I like most of them. As the singles are something like ¾ songs on the album I suppose I like the album.

But my enjoyment doesn’t lessen my intense ennui as far as Billy Joel goes. A lot of these songs sound very standard, and of the standout singles I have some serious provenance issues. Let’s take “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” Go listen to it, you can probably find it on youtube. Now once you’ve done that, go listen to “It’s the End of the World as we Know It” by REM. REM’s came out first. They are clearly different songs, and yet their similarity has always bugged me. Given Billy Joel’s borrow-happy track record I have no doubt he was listening to REM when he wrote WDSTF. What is more galling is that looking at this record again in light of River of Dreams, it seems like he tried to borrow the album structure of the latter album…from himself:  few energetic songs up front, followed by a sprinkling of socially conscious songs, a tear jerker, and a more energetic outro. In particular the similarity between “Leningrad,” the seventh song on River of Dreams, and “Lullabye,” the seventh track on River of Dreams, seems like a blatant admission of laziness.

There are other issues with this album, but hell I might as well keep it. The songs are fun and at least it’s not as big a crap pile as River of Dreams. I still don’t understand being a “fan.” Cumon guys. 

Black Grape - It's Great When You're Straight...Yeah

A bunch of years ago a friend of mine was with me at a record store and convinced me to buy this. He has convinced me to buy a lot of things over the years, most of them turned out to be pretty good. Unlike many of those he has not stopped asking about this album. This persistence, combine with some pretty intense album art, has built up my expectations for this album over the years. This album is actually one of the ones I have most been looking forward to finally digging into over the course of this project. Before I tell you how it went, some background.

Black Grape was formed by two former members of a group called the Happy Mondays. If you haven’t heard of them, don’t feel too bad, neither had I. In the early 90s they had a few huge hits before breaking up in a cloud of ego and drug abuse. This was during the period where England had missed getting into Nirvana, and was instead busy catching up on 80s dance music, and thus the Happy Mondays sound like nothing but a British version of the Funky Bunch being fronted by the dude from The Fall. They’re kind of fun, but its going to take a lot more of this very nice Polish Ale before I get used to asthmatic British dudes with sinus infections trying to rap.

Anyway, the deal with the Happy Mondays was that they were kind of super generic, but they made fun dance music in a period which approved of fun dance music, but had a lyricist who was really clever. This was kind of a zeitgeist thing, as the scene they came out of in Manchester would go on to mature and evolve into Big Beat, which I love, but they were far from the Chemical Brothers at this stage. The Happy Mondays gained a reputation as very clever, again, largely based on the lyrics, which when combine with the general druggie atmosphere at the time led to the usual inflated egos and drug addiction and yeah I mentioned that. So, the band breaks up, the front man goes through detox, and then reforms the band with a new name in order to cleanly break from his old life into his new life.

Except the rest of the band didn’t come along. Ryder, the lead singer, managed to hold onto the band dancer, brought in a guitarist from another defunct Manchester band, found a drummer, and brought on two rappers. Note the lack of a bassist in a dance group. So this is like if Dicky Barrett reformed the Bosstones as a post addiction soap box, but could only convince Ben Carr to sign on. What does it sound like? They sound like the Funky Bunch being fronted by a tone deaf homeless man shrieking over canned pop. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t unlistenable; to the contrary they are pretty good at holding the attention of the listener. But they do it through canned clichés ripped off from other, better artists. This hook is from the Beatles, that one from REM. The vocals are terrible, except when the rappers hack in there. They are pretty ok, as is the bassist, who is a studio musician. The drumming is fucking elementary. I seriously throught it was a poorly programmed drum machine until I read the credits. The lyrics are clever, but the vocals are so bad you can’t understand them through all the blood pouring out of your ears.

The only artist on here who is possibly talented is the guitarist, but he is being backed by a room full of monkeys, so he does what any guitarist would do when not constrained by anything but a very rudimentary beat. He noodles. He noodles low, he noodles high, he shows off all his very special jazz-funk guitar tricks. He noodles for all forty minutes of the album. On quiet nights in Manchester you can still hear him, noodling away, eating his noodles to keep up his strength. It is possible that scientists may one day be able to harness him for clean energy, but until then all he will do is make the neighborhood cats horny.

I suppose I should say some nice stuff about this album because it isn’t complete trash. The lyrics I could understand were kind of clever. There was some nice word play on occasion and some incisive social commentary, though very much in that special, 80s artist who cleaned up and now wants you to stay in school kind of way. I will say the album isn’t boring, and not even in a painful kind of way. There may be people out there who really like this album and I can understand how. You may need to be into Jam Bands. But this is not my thing. I found this album to be very unjustifiably self satisfied, and I am going to be getting rid of it.

Eye Witness - A Pleasant Tomorrow

God damn hippies makin me feel feelings again.

Folk is a pretty troubling genre. Folk music originally referred to any kind of traditional “music of the people,” though initially in the Anglo-Sphere, as defined against forigen musical types. For instance someone from Wessex in England might claim to enjoy folk music but not enjoy traditional Irish music, and loath anything made by the Belgians. In the United States and Britain the genre was defined by early anthropological studies that gathered traditional music into songbooks, often as part of a political agenda. In Britain much of the footwork of folk music was done by various nationalists seeking to define the national image. In the United States much of the initial wave of gathering was done by religious revivalists and agrarian socialists, often the same people, who, much like their British counterparts, were trying to claim the national consciousness of the common man for their cause.

Inevitably the form folk took was heavily influenced by the areas where the gathering took place. In the United States the first classic texts on the subject were gathered in the south and in Appalachia, resulting in a southern focus in much traditional music that persists to this day. In Britain much of the early groundwork was done in the north country, around Manchester and along the Scottish border, which has lent subsequent British folk a celtic twinge that may of may not be justified by the hegemonic nature of London in British culture almost since time immemorial

This persistence was aided by the mass media. Much of the initial efforts at folk preservation were undertaken as a result of fears of the extinction of traditional music in the face of the encroaching influence of radio. Once folk songbooks became available and gained in popularity, radio began playing folk music that people in the countryside were suddenly being told was their own, whether or not they were from Appalachia or the North Country.

So that is all a post modern nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions. This state of do-good liberals drawing influence from ’traditional” music and playing it for “traditional” people who reflect that influence back on liberals, confirming their own beliefs, reached a boiling point in the 60s when a massive explosion of “traditional’ music occurred in that great breadbasket of traditional American values and harmonies, Greenwich Village, Manhattan. And so it is that many of the biggest names in modern folk music were NYU students. God Dammnit. I am not drunk enough.

This is not my problem with most folk music. I have learned over the years that my quest for authenticity is ultimately futile and doomed to despair. My problem with most folk music is that it is too slow and boring and grating and there are no hooks and it is either full of meaningless groupthink or else it is about fucking fairies. And I don’t mean gay people, I like gay people in music, I mean fucking Tinkerbelle fucking fairies in nature fucking fairies. God DAMN do fairies make me angry.

The exceptions, however, are pretty awesome. If I may name drop Billy Bragg, for example, and of course the Guthries, Arlo and Penis, were pretty awesome. And we cannot stop there because in many ways Folk was punk before punk. In the same way Punk seems to have spawned every genre since 1977, Folk spawned  bluegrass, country, roots, zeidico, ragtime, and thus jazz and blues and rock itself. And as the folk concept spread it began to jump borders, creating new folk traditions in each region and nation, until it eventually created world music and then we are back to sucking and god, where is the bartender.

Ok but seriously, they would take away my indie kid card if I didn’t say that I honestly think that there are awesome acts in each of these genre. Including world music. I can say that honestly. Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros is nothing if not world music a I will fight you if you don’t agree that that was some of Joe Strummer’s finest work. Bottom line, when folk music mixes diverse influences with energy, passion, and authenticity, the result can be sublime. If they do it because it got them laid in college, you get Yanni, and then I go back in time and beat your mother until she is sterile. THAT IS WHAT YOU DESERVE WHEN YOU CREATE YANNI. If, in the comments, the words 'river' and 'dance' come togethr, i will find a way to unmake reality. you are warned.

Eye Witness, I am very happy to say, are not Yanni, and so I do not have to sterilize anyone’s mothers. As with the best of their genre they blend influences seamlessly and richly, like a mousse. Bear with me. As in mousse, the various elements are blended, nay, folded, with a broad spatula, such that they are inextricably intermingled without damaging the delicate foam of their origins. Eh? nice. And then there’s the politics.

Some Punk Rocker once said something like “GRR! ANYONE CAN WRITE A POLITICAL SONG! GRRR!” then he gnashed his teeth a lot and tried to cover up his sexual inadequacies by screaming a bit and trying to start a fight. Anyway I never understood that attitude. Politics are a key force in music because politics are a key part of everyday life. We may not like it, we may just want to be left alone, but the decisions made at the political level will affect our lives, and that has always been the case. Contrary to what mystery punx said, it is really difficult to write a political song that comes off as confident and strong without relying on cliché and groupspeak that can undermine the authenticity of the message. Many punks avoid this conundrum by avoiding a single stand and just attacking everyone. This is my only major criticism of The Pogues, for example, and I feel they are at their best when they do take a stand. For example in the hedonist anthem “Sunnyside of the Street.” As I mentioned in a previous review, Black 47 may not have aged as well as the Pogues musically, but I keep coming back to them because their political songwriting is superb. In this regard, Eye Witness combines the musical coherence and immediacy of the Pogues with the politically solid and powerful writing of Black 47. Except in American Folk instead of Irish. Although the first two songs on the album are super Irish. And Milo, the lead singer, does look, you know, very much like a Leprechaun. But lets chalk that up to the Scotts Irish influence in Appalachian music and move on.

So I seriously love this band. Their music is rich and textured, but is highly energetic and chock full of pop hooks. Seriously, each song on this album is an ear worm. Ive been getting each of them stuck in my head in turn, though you can forgive a recovering irish Music snob for a particular addiction to “Which Side Are You On?,” a good ole union song. Makes me want to make like me own granddaddy and  go found a credit union or something similarly progressive.

Anyway, these guys rule, despite being from a genre who’s provenance makes me want to pee blood