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  • #45 album of 2012 – High Hills in the Creaving Road by Mawwal

    #45 album of 2012 – High Hills in the Creaving Road by Mawwal

    Artist: Mawwal

    Album: High Hills in the Creaving Road

    My largest musical discovery of 2012 was songwriter/ band leader Jim Matus, long-ago Berklee composition student and guitar student of jazz great Pat Metheny. First, I discovered his three albums leading Paranoise, who began as a skronky, brassy,  angular New Wave band for Start mawwal_creaving_roada New Race, but evolved — here’s the relevant part — into making heavy, hypnotic World Music with tunings centered in the Afghanistan/ Pakistan region. Loud, distorted guitar rock was joined by string sections and tabla drums; by choral ideas swiped from Morocco and Bulgaria; by low didgeridoo drones. The results were equally suitable for dance music, trance music, or thoughtful headphone listening. If Paranoise’s Ishq were a 2012 release, it would be in my top ten. Though Paranoise has disbanded and Matus formed Mawwal instead, High Hills in the Creaving Road sounds far more to me like Paranoise than like anything else in my collection.

    Not that Central Asian musical ideas should be completely alien or exotic. The songs center on guitar/bass that wouldn’t sound out of place on Alice in Chains’s calmer records, or some of Richard Thompson’s albums where he’s really in the mood to show off his darkness and his guitar skills, or even Alanis Morissette’s Baba/ Can’t Not just-got-back-from-India phase. They also use Indian tabla and African talking drums for percussion and (in We Must Fall ‘s case) long, wailing flute melodies, and theirmale/female harmonies and non-English duets make more sense on Eastern scales than on the ones Meat Loaf and Ellen Foley use. But Foley isn’t a bad comparison for the strength and flexibility of the (several) female singers — Richard Thompson’s low voice and careful diction, with less grouchiness and more sustain, would be a good comp for Matus’s singing. I don’t need to be educated to find the songs catchy. No Finer Men Than We even feels like a rousing Irish folk song — one somehow written with Middle Eastern scales and a trumpet solo, to be sure. I’d still try it on Dropkick Murphy or Pogues fans happily enough.

    I’m not certain why I find Mawwal’s High Hills in the Creaving Road less terrific than Paranoise‘s Ishq. One notion is I’ve spent too little time with it (it was a November release). Another is that Paranoise had a bit less of Alice in Chains’s weightiness, and more of Fairport Convention’s or Jethro Tull’s limberness. They’re both quite good, though, and perhaps which comparison *you* prefer would help you decide among them.

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    Technical note: I’ve failed to find Mawwal videos on YouTube, which is why I’m linking, instead, an especially Mawwal-like Paranoise track.

    – Brian Block

    To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

     

  • CD Review: Lady Antebellum “Own the Night”

    Lady Antebellum's ''Own the Night''
    Take a look at recent adult contemporary charts and you’ll find that some of the format’s biggest hits of the last few years have been by youngsters: Miley Cyrus. Adele. Taylor Swift. As a contemporary adult, I find the implications of that fact a little embarrassing, and a little sad. Then there’s Lady Antebellum, who landed the mother of all adult contemporary hits in the form of last year’s “Need You Now”. The Nashville country pop trio recently released their third album, called Own the Night, and it occurs to me about three songs into this new record: these are the songs Taylor Swift would be singing if she were 15 or 20 years older.

    There’s really very little difference between the average Taylor Swift song and the songs of Lady Antebellum. They both play melodic, radio-friendly pop love songs that, for little more than geographic origin, the occasional flourish of mandolin and fiddle and a general lack of Autotune, somehow qualifies as country. (What? No cowboy hats? No songs about tractors?) You could easily imagine that it was the same hit-for-hire team supplying material to both acts. Lady Antebellum singer Hillary Scott even sounds a little like Swift, especially on a big, heart-wrenching, string-laden, piano ballad like “As You Turn Away”, one of the highlights of Own the Night.

    What most distinguishes Scott and her bandmates, singer Charles Kelley and multi-instrumentalist Dave Haywood, from Taylor Swift (well, aside from the fact that most of Lady Antebellum’s songs are vocal duets) are the stories their songs tell. These aren’t the chronicles and confessions of high school girls and boys, but the backstories and subtexts of those girls’ and boys’ high school reunions.

    Never mind that they’re only a few years older than Swift, Lady Antebellum’s songs are the probable middle-aged ever-afters of Swift’s “Love Story”, where the googly eyed crushes of high school are distant memories, and every first kiss is informed by the consequences of how many other first kisses. In “Just a Kiss”, the album’s lead single, Scott and Kelley arrive at a moonlit doorstep at the end of a date and move cautiously to a good-night kiss, singing “I don’t want to mess this thing up.” These are people with pasts.

    Two old classmates reminisce separately about a single high school slow dance they’d shared years earlier, before having gone their separate ways in life – “for me you’ll always be 18 and beautiful” – in the lovely and heartbreaking “Dancing Away With My Heart”. Meanwhile, in “Somewhere Love Remains”, a couple who’ve shared a life together find themselves at the edge of splitting up – again. Sure, “Friday Night” is an upbeat, 80s-style rocker (no way this wasn’t written for the soundtrack of the remade Footloose). But it’s still basically Scott and Kelley assuring each other, in playful strings of opposing metaphors – “chore to check off on your list” vs. “lemonade in the shade” – that they don’t want to ever get into a rut.

    There are a few moments of sheer giddy pleasure. “Love I’ve Found In You” is a portrait of unqualified domestic bliss, while “Singing Me Home” is all carnal lust on the open road. But these are intermittent escapes from the album’s general sense of tastefully-rendered, elegantly-packaged, thirty-something, romantic melancholy.

  • Bitch Stole My Look – Song Edition: Cheryl Cole v. Ingrid Michaelson on “Parachute”

    When I was growing up, cover songs were usually by contemporary artists doing remakes of songs that were 15 or 20 years old: Phil Collins singing the Supremes, Club Nouveau singing Bill Withers, Joan Jett singing Tommy James and the Shondells. But back in the 50s and 60s, it wasn’t that unusual for multiple versions of the same song to compete for the same sales and airplay. This was especially true in the 50s when record labels would rush out “white” versions of R&B singles, like Pat Boone singing Fats Domino, or when any number of popular crooners would rush out singles of the latest Broadway hits. In 1955 alone, three different versions of “Unchained Melody” hit the top 10 and a fourth made it to #29.

    Ingrid Michaelson’s ”Parachute”
    But even in the 60s when singles were still the dominant force in pop music, you could hear multiple versions of the same song becoming hits right on top of each other. Less than a year after Gladys Knight and the Pips scored what was then their biggest pop hit “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” – it went all the way to #2 – Marvin Gaye took his own very different version of the same song all the way to #1.

    Cheryl Cole’s ”Parachute”
    But as albums and singer-songwriters became more popular in the late 60s and early 70s, it became a mark of artistic legitimacy to record original songs, to steer clear of covers. Now that singles are back, thanks to digital downloads; and now that anybody – regardless of talent level – can reach a huge internet audience via YouTube – “instant covers” are becoming more popular. So, with apologies to Joan Rivers and her Fashion Police, I’m introducing a new series here called “Bitch Stole My Look – Song Edition”, where two new versions of the same new song take each other on in a blogospheric cage match.

    First up is a song called “Parachute”. The song was written and demoed by quirky indie-pop songstress Ingrid Michaelson during sessions for her excellent 2009 album Everybody, but for whatever reason, it was determined that the song didn’t really fit on the album. Then late last year, the British pop starlet Cheryl Cole, formerly of the girl group Girls Aloud, got her hands on it and included a cover of it on her will.i.am-produced debut solo album 3 Words. In March of this year, it was released as a single and went Top 10 in the UK. Here’s Cheryl’s take on it:

    Cheryl Cole “Parachute”

    Last month, Ingrid Michaelson released a downloadable single of her own version of the song, and put out a pretty awesome video to go with it. Here’s Ingrid:

    Ingrid Michaelson “Parachute”

    Frankly, I love both versions of this song almost equally. Cheryl Cole’s is obviously the slicker version, but I love its sensuality and heightened sense of romance and drama. The vocal arrangements on Michaelson’s are a lot more interesting though and especially coming after her more mainstream sounding album Everybody, it’s a sweet and much more upbeat (to both Cole’s version of “Parachute” and the rest of Michaelson’s album) reminder of the quirky adorability of her first hit “The Way I Am”. I’m split on this one. Ingrid Michaelson v. Cheryl Cole goes into overtime.