eighteen

139-146


Bees - Free the Bees (EMI) 2005

I'm usually pretty mistrustful (distrustful?) of current bands who draw this obviously from 70s sources... but The Bees are so fidgety with it, never settling on just groove music or psychedelic exploration or Beatles rip-offs. In a way they're a little like Beta Band (coming to them soon), but much more accessible, less idiosyncratic... except maybe for the song about chickens. There's only room for a few of them on planet Earth.
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Belle & Sebastian - Fold Your Hands Child… (Matador) 2000

There's an element... even in a collection this large and widespread... of cohesiveness that sometimes shuts off certain avenues of perfectly respectable music. I have nothing against B&S. I find their music pleasant, infectious... toe-tapping fun, really. The word most often used to describe them, and bands from the branch of their family tree, is twee. Twee means precious, delicate, gentle... lots of strings. And again, nothing against that stuff... it's just that there's a LOT of it, both currently and historically, and B&S are excellent at distilling this music down to it's most appealing elements. But I don't have shelf space for the wing it would open up should I delve into this sub-genre. Instead I'll hold onto this playcopy, not one of their better albums, because it has no cover... and save my cardigan for cold autumn nights.
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Bellini - Snowing Sun (Monitor) 2001

In the 90s, with the rise of grunge, there was also the rise of angry girls with guitars... which supplanted then was supplanted again by sad girls with pianos. In that time bands like L7, Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill et. al. roamed the land with varying agendas and levels of phlegm. Ten years later only a few are still (albeit barely and for the wrong reasons) making news: Courtney Love of Hole no so much for music and Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill who shifted gears, formed Le Tigre and proved that growth and change is possible. It's a side effect of the still-male-centric business of music that strong women who break these barriers are more quickly cast aside... or made to remodel themselves (I'm looking at you Alanis). Bellini is a band on a small label with a strong front woman and a sound like Steve Albini's wet dream who, if they had been fronted by Steve Albini or his non-union equivalent, might have generated a lot of buzz... but not so much in reality, though.
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Belly - Star (Sire ) 1993

Speaking of girls and guitars... Tanya Donnely is someone who's still hanging around and making music for a small group of fans (I'm not sure if I should include myself since I've not heard any new music in the last decade). Starting out as second banana to Kristin Hersh in Throwing Muses she moved on to second banana to Kim Deal in The Breeders (a side project to The Pixies that became full time after their collapse). Jumping off that bandwagon after The Pod, The Breeders first album, Donnely formed Belly... a group that embodied some of the best elements from her two previous bands. Now Star still sounds pretty good... a little dated, a little bland in places... but the standout tracks like "Feed the Tree" and "Star Dog" still kick ass.
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Danny Ben-Israel - Kathmandu Sessions (Locust) 2004

Another realm I wouldn't normally part the beaded curtains and enter into is the world of "lost" 60s and 70s recordings, but it is a realm covered by Destination Out in Exclaim! and that means it is occasionally my duty to essay it. Locust records digs around in the dirt that hold everything from Garage Rock to Psychedelic Weirdness to Leftfield Folk. Danny Ben-Israel covers all three of these bases with a swirly mess that is simultaneously Hippie-like and still manages to call them all dirty bastards. This obviously scores points with me. If you can imagine The Doors where Jim Morrison was less self-constructed and more indebted to Nepal than Rimbaud... that would sound a little like this.
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Benoit Pioulard - Precis (Kranky) 2006

Wünderkinds can be pretty annoying. Especially when you're a lazy dude approaching or past the cutoff point where most people would take a "debut" album seriously. Benoit Pioulard is the nom de plume of 20 year-old Michigan upstart Thomas Meluch. With this first official release on tres cool Kranky records he manages to infuse moody ambience (which would be enought to get him noticed on the label) with a melancholy tunefulness that resembles Elliott Smith at turns. That's just overdoing it if you ask me.
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Dan Bern - Fifty Eggs (Sony) 1998


Dan Bern - New American Language (Messenger) 2001

Fifty Eggs was sitting in the cheapie bin at Digital World and I noticed it was produced by Ani DiFranco so I took it home and gave it a shot. It reminded me a little of Hamell on Trial for it's irreverence and self-aggrandizing gusto. With songs about having very large testicles and about intergalacting procreation of the spaceman/monkey evolutionary nature it was easy to enjoy but hard to take seriously. Sometime between then and New American Language either Bern or someone around him decided to get a little more serious about things and the result is a more mature, less scatalogical album. Instead of Cartman and Kenny groin-level humour we instead have deeper meaning cut with a slightly more crass Freedy Johnston/Jonathan Richman wit.