Blood on the Dancefloor: 12 Essential Avant-Dance Albums
“I don’t think of music as cathartic or a release,” Dominick Fernow once told me in a cover story about his former band Cold Cave. “A release implies that something is leaving you. It’s not that so much as a transformation.”
Whether he’s whipping up whirlpools of noise as Prurient or delving into the darkest corners of dance music as Vatican Shadow, Fernow has always followed that path — music as a purification process, only instead of the poison being drawn out of his productions, it’s harnessed in the form of distorted tape decks, chain-linked synths and rust-encrusted samples.
He’s not alone either; while house producers have been revisiting their rave cave roots as of late, underground techno has turned 50 shades of grey. Literally and figuratively, as melodies get maimed, tempos get turned on, and rhythms embrace the very notion of electronic body music.
In the following guide, eMusic breaks down 12 essential avant-dance albums that will flood your endorphin levels (or plunge you into a pit of despair) faster than a midnight screening of Spring Breakers. Think of it as EDM’s evil twin, music that makes you move without resorting to crowd-pleasing power chords or answering the question that seems to be on everyone’s minds these days: “Where’s the drop?”
And as a bonus, we’ve also included a secondary set of recommendations and a “Panic Room” collection of deviant downtempo tracks…
Matthew Dear was way ahead of the current deviant-techno curve with the debut album from this dearly missed alias. In case you couldn't tell from oh-so-subtle song titles like "Titty Fuck," "Just Fucking" and "Your Place or Mine," Suckfish funnels Dear's darkest fantasies through hardcore techno tropes, ravenous rhythms and hypnotist hooks that are the polar opposite of "you're getting sleepy, very sleepy." If anything, you'll be wired as hell after hearing... this record.
more »A cursory look at the Black Dog's mixes page (especially the aptly-titled "Dark Wave" series) is all it takes to understand how one of Warp's earliest (accidental) IDM adopters has only gotten more ashen with age. Sometimes that approach reveals itself in ambient stunners like the Eno nod Music For Real Airports — arguably an improvement on the original — and sometimes it lands directly on the dancefloor, as is... the case on this masterclass in metallic, muscular techno.
more »A student of Throbbing Gristle's "industrial music for industrial people" teaching — Factory Floor's Nik Void -- meets two of its founders — Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, also of the incredibly influential Chris & Cosey — in a one-night-only collision of bowed guitar chords, metronomic melodies, HAM radio harmonies, and rhythms that won't let go. No wonder why the capacity crowd — part of Mute's celebratory Short... Circuit festival in 2011 — couldn't help but responding with resounding cheers at the end.
more »Ren Schofield is not as well-known as his fellow noise defectors — people like Prurient, Nate Young and Pete Swanson — but in a perfect world, he would be. Maybe even more so. Both of his Spectrum Spools albums are simply called LP, which makes them sound more vanilla than they really are. If there's any dance full-length worth a floor-punch or slamdance, it's this one, from the bendable basslines of... "Paralyzed" to the loony vocal linesof "Perforate," which might as well be considered the terrifying, long-lost twin of Cajmere's house classic "Coffee Pot (It's Time for the Percolator)."
more »As in "Not for the...," Miles Whittaker's first solo album under his own name is a three-car pileup of the highest order. Not quite as noisy as his Suum Cuique alias or witchy as his work with Demdike Stare, but demented dance music nonetheless. Even the most serene moments (the galaxy-hopping ambient loops of "Loran Dreams," the deep listening drones of "Sense Data") sound like they're seconds away from veering... off the tracks, and everything else is increasingly erratic and engrossing, as if Whittaker is trying to break on through to the other side — or at the very least, your living room wall — with his skittish samples.
more »A couple of strange things happened after Yellow Swans broke up. On one side of the aisle, Gabriel Saloman went the cobweb-y neo-classical route with his Adherealbum. Pete Swanson swung to the other extreme, expressing his basement punk roots through mangled techno opuses like Man With Potential. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to blast at 1 a.m. when you're landlord lives right across the hall, but when... you need a reality check that's fallen from the same rotten apple tree as Surgeon and the Sandwell District fam, this is a decent start.
more »Minimal techno doesn't get any more murderous than Karl O'Connor's flawless run as Regis. Maybe that's why he formed BMB (a.k.a. British Murder Boys, a recently reactivated project with Surgeon) a little over a decade after delivering the steely slabs of sound that hammer away at the core of this chaotic compilation. Definitely one of the godfathers of gloom — cool, calculated and calm like a bomb.
When Sandwell District — an audio/visual collective that counted Function, Silent Servant and Regis among its ranks — "repressed" this limited double LP in digital form a few years ago, its growing cult following interpreted it as a mission statement. Turned out it was more of a death knell. For the label at least; the group continues to tour and work together, from Regis's executive production credits on Silent... Servant's first solo album to the sprawling mix Function and Regis recently cut for Fabric under the now-familiar Sandwell District name. Witness the origins of it all right here, as truly underground techno takes on the form of tractor beams and centrifugal forces.
more »Let's say you're really excited about finally getting into a secretive dance spot like Berlin's epicenter of underground techno, Berghain. The night's going great, but then this Shifted guy goes on, starting with nearly seven minutes of mood-manipulating drone tones, then dropping into a black hole of clouded chords and beats that murmur and moan like a heart in desperate need of a transplant. Maybe you should head home before things get... too bleak? Why does the door appear to be locked? Looks like you'll have to wait until the storm passes.
more »Four songs, 40 minutes — zero bullshit. Bow down to the one of the undisputed bibles of club music that literally makes you want to club things. (Please don't; we're just making a point here.)
So this is why Dominick Fernow suddenly left Cold Cave last year — so he could perfect the tranced-out Muslimgauze tributes with the project that was quickly eclipsing his endless stream of Prurient releases. In many ways, Ornamented Walls is a transitional record, using Side A to hint at the next direction of Fernow's infamous live show (with frenzied rehearsal footage of "Operation Neptune Spear") and showing us what's up his... sleeve studio-wise throughout the chemtrail cuts on Side B. That the record came out on Modern Love — the same label as Miles, Demdike Stare and Andy Stott — sealed the deal even further for Fernow's emerging role in the sadomasochistic techno scene.
more »Considering he's been doing the whole shadow boxer thing since 2006's Merciless LP, the recent attention foisted upon Andy Stott is long overdue. That, and understandable considering how far he's raised the bar with Luxury Problems, a gorgeous exploration of electronic music's Darth Vader side, complete with melancholic melodies (from Stott's old piano teacher!), an endless supply of murky fog machines, and beats that'll make you break into a cold sweat.... Think of this as the blissful breather you're gonna need after having your head bashed in by the rest of these records.
more »Elliott Carter, Elliott Carter, Vol. 9
A wonderful place to start for those unfamiliar with Carter's work
There are ghosts on this record. Of course, the gaping maw left by the recent death of Elliott Carter — just shy of his 104th birthday, mind you — still echoes. But there is another spectre here, that of Charles Rosen, not only one of Carter’s staunchest advocates and one of the world’s great writers whose topic happened to be classical music, but among our accomplished and special pianists. So it is unsurprising that the collaboration on Carter’s ferocious mid-’60s Piano Concerto is one for the books, and Bridge has done us excellent service by making this recording (a live recording, but still) available.
This record, this ninth volume in Bridge’s important Carter sequence, is a wonderful place to start for those who might be unfamiliar with — or scared of — Carter’s work. Spanning seven — seven! — decades of his work, this collection acts as an excellent toe-dip. There is a thorough sampling of his later, more high-modernist work for which he is best known, like the behemoth Piano Concerto (in good hands with not only Mr. Rosen but the Basel Sinfonietta under Joel Smirnoff) or the solo piano works Two Thoughts About the Piano and Tri-Tribute (sumptuously rendered by Steven Beck), not to mention or the delightfully twittering, moody, breathy and ferocious Nine by Five (excellently dispatched by the Slowind Wind Quintet), but these are not even the real gems of this de-facto retrospective. Here, alongside the more jagged offerings are a few gorgeous pieces penned by the younger man: the orchestral songs “Voyage” and “Warble for Lilac Time,” thrillingly performed by Tony Arnold and the Colorado College Festival Orchestra led by Scott Woo, show a deft way with harmony and a gorgeous sense of melody — a sense that never left him, just took a radically different turn — as does the positively downright lovely “Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred,” a lilting turn for guitar and soprano (the sensitive David Starobin and Rosalind Rees).
The thrill of this record as a whole (if anyone listens that way) is that these earlier and later works do us the service of informing each other, creating context. But if a lesson is not what you seek, this disc can be listened to for the sheer glory of the sound — from the concerto’s delicious dissonances to the raw emotion of the earlier songs.
New This Week: Neon Neon, !!!, Iggy & The Stooges & More
Neon Neon, Praxis Makes Perfect Super Furry Animal Gruff Rhys and producer Boom Bip follow their Mercury nominated concept album Stainless Style, about the life of car designer John DeLorean, with another psychedelic-hued biopic, this time about the left-wing political activist and publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who was allegedly killed by his own explosives in 1972. The duo’s second collaboration has earfuls of glorious analogue-digital charm, but is probably best appreciated after reading the Wikipedia entry.
Iggy & The Stooges, Ready To Die The first album from Iggy & The Stooges since 1973′s Raw Power (!) is remarkable for the presence of incendiary guitarist James Williamson, now retired from his job as an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley. Andrew Perry interviews the legendary band here, and speaks to James Williamson about his favourite albums on eMusic here. Holly George-Warren reviews the album:
“Few albums are so misleadingly titled as Ready to Die. Its taut songs – clocking in at an old-school 34 minutes – constitute a genuine rebirth of a sneering, vital band, defiant as ever.”
The Phoenix Foundation, Fandango The fifth album from the New Zealand sextet is a dazzling mix of psychedelia, prog-folk, synth pop and motorik rock. Sharon O’Connell writes:
“As vocalist and guitarist Samuel Scott puts it, this is a record “that pays absolutely no attention to the short-form game contemporary music.” What it does pay attention to is sound – the most complexly imagined, seductively layered and immaculately produced kind.”
!!!, Thr!!!ler: The dance-punk pioneers return with another batch of jittery floor-fillers. Andrew Parks says:
“Considering all the factors working against !!! over the past 15 years — major lineup changes, members who live on opposite coasts, the questionable expiration date of “dance punk” — you’d think they’d be a part-time prospect by now. But no, here they are, delivering a filler-free album that feels like a carefully-curated DJ set, including the disco inferno diatribes of “Get That Rhythm Right,” the convulsive funk of “Station (Meet Me At the)” and the peak house-party hooks of “Slyd”.”
Akron/Family, Sub Verses: Akron/Family’s latest finds them working with an adventurous set of influences. Ashley Melzer says:
“The tracks skid from one time signature or influence to another, but feel of a whole — like some take on American roots by way of a post-industrial Africa invaded by Eastern shamans. On paper, it sounds haphazard, incomplete. But Akron/Family build these disparate parts into something explosive or holy or both, time and again on Sub Verses. There’s no mythic volcano to stamp the narrative; there’s only a radical harmony, divergent strands threading together.”
Mick Harvey, Four (Acts of Love) The former Bad Seed’s follow up to 2011′s meditative Sketches from the Book of the Dead is a song cycle on love, and includes reinterpretations of songs by PJ Harvey, Van Morrison and The Saints.
Deep Purple, Now What?! More heavy riffs with twiddly organ bits from the evergreen Purple.
The Melvins, Everybody Loves Sausages The Melvins tackle tracks from Throbbing Gristle, Queen and Roxy Music on a surprising covers album. David Raposa reviews:
“When Buzz Osbourne states unequivocally that “we REALLY like all of these songs,” he’s not just flapping his gums. The group (joined by a handful of friends, including Neurosis’s Scott Kelly, Foetus’s JG Thirwell and Mudhoney’s Mark Arm) tears through obscurities from nearly forgotten Californian punk groups like Pop-O-Pies and Tales of Terror with the same eagerness and fervor that’s bestowed upon faithful renditions of Venom’s “Warhead” and David Bowie’s “Station to Station.”
Daniel Johnston, Space Ducks Indie icon Johnston Satan for space ducks on this themed album, featuring contributions from Jake Bugg, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Eleanor Friedberger of Fiery Furnaces.
Junip, Junip Jose Gonzales’s second album with his pre-fame band spikes his airy melancholy with spacey synths and free-flowing drums. Marc Hogan writes:
“Throughout, Junip is unassumingly elegant, particularly on bleary-eyed dancefloor pick-me-up “Your Life Your Call”, jagged psych excursion “Villain” and tranquil ephiphany “After All Is Said and Done”. Over African-style rhythms, “Baton” finds a way to make even whistling sound subtle.”
Andy Cato, Times & Places This is a glamorous sonic travelogue recorded when Cato was touring with Groove Armarda that hops from Florence to Moscow to Mexico City. Groove Armarda never played Llandudno or High Wycombe, it seems.
Howl, Bloodlines: The second release from Howl is a little less bleak, but still as ugly as ever. Says Jon Wiederhorn:
“Howl can still stomp and drone, but they’ve added new tricks to their arsenal, including southern power-groove riffs, twin-guitar harmonies and unexpected shifts in rhythm; the tempos range from mid-paced (“Embrace Your Nerve”) to double-time (“Your Hell Begins”). Clearly, Howl worked exhaustively to overhaul their sound (captured expertly by producer Zeuss and they’ve done so without sounding like a completely different band than the one that recorded Full of Hell.”
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Brooklyn Babylon: The recommended latest from “steampunk-jazz” composer-bandleader Darcy James Argue. Seth Colter-Walls says:
“Some of the pieces feature wooden flutes, others Afro-Peruvian percussion. Ingrid Jensen’s electric trumpet solo in “Building” calls to mind Miles’s best fusion bands. That all these sounds work together so elegantly is evidence of expert execution, not just singular vision; the entire program flows in a way that many modern-classical composers ought to envy. Argue’s curiosity and skill at integrating all his fascinations represent the humanism of the narrative capably on its own. Both florid with moment-to-moment intrigue and a fine document of an artist with a lot to say (and the ambition to match), Brooklyn Babylon is essential listening for all sorts of musical communities.”
Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light: Indie rock’s favorite sax man releases the third installment of his New History Warfare series. Andy Battaglia says:
“Colin Stetson’s most formidable and impressive on his own, with just a metal horn and a pair of heaving lungs to help push air through its twisty, peculiar channels. Stetson’s expansive style finds fine form in “Hunted,” an unusual instrumental track that matches ghostly, wordless cries to a sax treatise in which Stetson taps on keys percussively while blowing out sounds as if summoning some strange prehistoric beast. He’s credited for playing alto, tenor and bass saxophones (the latter a burly monster of an instrument), but the presence of each, in all cases, conforms to the whole of his unique sound-world.”
The Heliocentrics, 13 Degrees of Reality: Playing out like a lost jazz soundtrack to some mid ’70s NY-centric crime film, 13 Degrees of Reality is loaded with tense, queasy greatness. Strings bow, drums stumble and stomp and the bass thumps and rattles like an elevated train. Recommended.
100 Years of Woody Herman
In the later 1930s, when swing bands ruled American pop, Woody Herman — born May 16, 1913 — ran a distant third to his rival bandleading clarinetists, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. But in the 1940s, when swing was on its way out, Herman put together his two greatest bands — his co-called First and Second Herds, among the great jazz orchestras period. And then, when big bands had really become dinosaurs, he kept his going another four decades.
As clarinetist, Herman’s timbre was drier than Goodman’s or Shaw’s, but his piping bent-note sound could really drive a band. Herman sang too, in an unassuming boy-next-door way, as if stepping in last-minute to replace the band’s real singer, who was stuck in traffic. He had to cultivate that casual air. In songwriter Isham Jones’s band in 1936, Herman sang “No Greater Love” like a ’20s crooner — through the nose, throwing himself at the lyric. Jones had been at it since 1920, and had his old-school mannerisms. But he also featured a lot of blues; “Blue Prelude” showed how much his men dug Duke Ellington.
When Jones broke the band up in 1936, the jazzier members continued as a co-op fronted by Herman. They kept “Blue Prelude” as their first theme, and kept playing the blues. The ensemble drive (like Woody’s singing) quickly got modernized and streamlined. They played opposite Count Basie at New York’s Roseland. Basie said later, “The only band that ever cut my band was that Woody Herman band.”
Herman’s idol was Ellington, and even Duke was struck by how much Woody could sound like his own suave Johnny Hodges on alto sax. Hodges also showed Herman how to make an entrance; his breakthrough “Woodsheddin’ with Woody” just plays possum, swinging in a light Basie groove, until his clarinet barges in. The compilation Blues on Parade charts the band’s progress from 1937-42, albeit in scrambled order. The earliest item is a swinging update of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Doctor Jazz,” the latest an early Dizzy Gillespie chart with boppish touches, “Down Under.”
Dizzy said in his autobiography that when bebop hit in the early ’40s, all the bands wanted a bop number in the book, but only Herman’s caught the new rhythms without coaching: “All the trumpet players in that band wanted to sound like me.” He hired a couple of women musicians during the War, trumpeter Billie Rogers and vibraphonist Margie Hyams.
Bebop’s influence is all over Herman’s First Herd, founded in 1944, a band with an Ellingtonian array of diverse soloists: vibist Red Norvo, short-lived Dizophile trumpet spitfire Sonny Berman, tenor sax sparkplug Flip Phillips, bassist Chubby Jackson (who played fast and had an extra high string, making his playing sound speeded up), and Bill Harris, a broad toned trombonist of the old school somehow perfect for the new material. (Hear “Bijou,” with an improvised Harris solo that sounds carefully worked out.) The Herd featured hot arrangements by Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti. Igor Stravinsky wrote them his harmonically modern (if rhythmically starchy) “Ebony Concerto.”
Maybe because his band had started as a co-op, Herman was always open to his musicians’ enthusiasms and ideas; the players embroidered Burns’s and Hefti’s charts in rehearsal. In a little over three minutes, the dadaistic “Your Father’s Mustache” crams in scorching trumpet and tenor solos, a quote from Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, a mock-gleeclub vocal, false endings and prime Herman clarinet. They play it tongue-in-cheek with enviable precision. Drummer Buddy Rich, subbing, learned it by ear, and nailed it.
In 1946 they broke up — everyone was doing it. A year later, the business totally tanking, Herman formed his Second Herd, with Stan Getz and Zoot Sims on tenor, that one that recorded Jimmy Giuffre’s classic “Four Brothers,” with its cushy close-harmony saxes pointing the way toward cool jazz.
The standard anthology of the First Herd, and the Second Herd’s first batch, is Columbia’s Blowin’ Up A Storm. The Second Herd’s lesser known final sides were for Capitol, Herman’s next home till 1950. There’s more Getz in his early glory as rapturous tenor balladeer (“Early Autumn”) just before he goes out on his own. But by mid-’49 things start to get weird: cheeky dixieland with harrumphing tuba, and a mocking “Mule Train” sung with Nat King Cole.
In the ’50s Herman had his dips like other swing survivors, but he bounced back once more. In 1964, he recorded the Beatles’ “Things We Said Today,” a feature for his slithery Hodges-style alto, and a sign of things to come. A few years later, his increasingly young, shaggy and amplified crew was playing tunes by Frank Zappa (“America Drinks and Goes Home”), Traffic (“Smiling Phases”), the Temptations (“I Can’t Get Next to You”), Steely Dan (“Kid Charlemagne”) — and “Proud Mary,” “Light My Fire,” “Ma Cherie Amour” and more. If music can be kitsch in a good way, these the-kids-will-dig-it sides qualify.
In those later years Herman also revisited oldies, and kept turning up new talent, like saxophonists Joe Lovano and Scott Hamilton, bassists Marc Johnson and pianist Lyle Mays. Another way Woody Herman stood out from his rivals: He was a pleasure to work for. He rarely lost his temper in public, was married to the same woman forever, and loaned money to acquaintances in need.
It all should have ended better. Late in life the IRS hounded him over back taxes, owing to dubious management by a trusted aide. In 1985 the feds auctioned off the house he’d lived in 40 years — never mind all the money he’d raised for the War effort back when — to a landlord who later tried to evict him over tardy rent. A battery of pro bono lawyers staved that off; donations flowed in from all over. That was in 1987, the year Herman played his last gig, and the year he died. He’d led a big band for 50 years.
New This Week: Iggy & the Stooges, Daughter, !!! & More
By now you’ve no doubt noticed the wealth of coverage we’ve got surrounding the first record credited to ‘Iggy & the Stooges’ in 40 years. How does Ready to Die compare to the feral glory that is Raw Power? I leave it to you to hash it out in the comments. We’ve got that, and a whole lot more, in this week’s New Arrivals roundup. Let’s get right to it.
Iggy & the Stooges, Ready to Die: The first Iggy & the Stooges release in 40 (!) years is as defiant as ever. (Read our interview here, and see guitarist James Williamson’s album picks !!!, Thr!!!ler: Dance-punk pioneers return with another batch of jittery floor-fillers. Andrew Parks says:
Considering all the factors working against !!! over the past 15 years — major lineup changes, members who live on opposite coasts, the questionable expiration date of “dance punk” — you’d think they’d be a part-time prospect by now. But no, here they are, delivering a filler-free album that feels like a carefully-curated DJ set, including the disco inferno diatribes of “Get That Rhythm Right,” the convulsive funk of “Station (Meet Me At the)” and the peak house-party hooks of “Slyd.”
Akron/Family, Sub Verses: Akron/Family’s latest finds them working with an adventurous set of influences. Ashley Melzer says:
The tracks skid from one time signature or influence to another, but feel of a whole — like some take on American roots by way of a post-industrial Africa invaded by Eastern shamans. On paper, it sounds haphazard, incomplete. But Akron/Family build these disparate parts into something explosive or holy or both, time and again on Sub Verses. There’s no mythic volcano to stamp the narrative; there’s only a radical harmony, divergent strands threading together.
Daughter, If You Leave: The lovely full-length Recommended debut from this London indiepop trio. Annie Zaleski says:
Daughter’s full-length debut, If You Leave uses chilly atmospheric effects, lyrics haunted by romantic angst and rebirth, and Elena Tonra’s low-lit voice, which is as hazy and tortured as Chan Marshall sounded on early Cat Power records. The results are often hushed and delicate; “Smother” is lovely slow-core, both “Amsterdam” and “Winter” resemble Bat for Lashes, and the relatively upbeat “Human” echoes the whimsy of Sigur Ros’s folkier moments.
Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light: Indie rock’s favorite sax man releases the Highly Recommended third installment of his New History Warfare series. Andy Battaglia says:
Colin Stetson’s most formidable and impressive on his own, with just a metal horn and a pair of heaving lungs to help push air through its twisty, peculiar channels. Stetson’s expansive style finds fine form in “Hunted,” an unusual instrumental track that matches ghostly, wordless cries to a sax treatise in which Stetson taps on keys percussively while blowing out sounds as if summoning some strange prehistoric beast. He’s credited for playing alto, tenor and bass saxophones (the latter a burly monster of an instrument), but the presence of each, in all cases, conforms to the whole of his unique sound-world.
Adventure, Weird Work: Some bright, whirring synth-based music on the always-excellent Carpark records. Adventure mainman Benny Boeldt displays an affinity with the kind of gentle, blinking music that used to score early ’80s video games. The music here feels alluringly retro-futurist, blinking blue bands of synth fit to score some interplanetary horror movie. Recommended
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Brooklyn Babylon: The Highly Recommended latest from “steampunk-jazz” composer-bandleader Darcy James Argue. Seth Colter-Walls says:
Some of the pieces feature wooden flutes, others Afro-Peruvian percussion. Ingrid Jensen’s electric trumpet solo in “Building” calls to mind Miles’s best fusion bands. That all these sounds work together so elegantly is evidence of expert execution, not just singular vision; the entire program flows in a way that many modern-classical composers ought to envy. Argue’s curiosity and skill at integrating all his fascinations represent the humanism of the narrative capably on its own. Both florid with moment-to-moment intrigue and a fine document of an artist with a lot to say (and the ambition to match), Brooklyn Babylon is essential listening for all sorts of musical communities.
Howl, Bloodlines: The sophomore release from Howl is a little less bleak, but still as ugly as ever. Says Jon Wiederhorn:
Howl can still stomp and drone, but they’ve added new tricks to their arsenal, including southern power-groove riffs, twin-guitar harmonies and unexpected shifts in rhythm; the tempos range from mid-paced (“Embrace Your Nerve”) to double-time (“Your Hell Begins”). Clearly, Howl worked exhaustively to overhaul their sound (captured expertly by producer Zeuss and they’ve done so without sounding like a completely different band than the one that recorded Full of Hell.
Brooklyn Rider, A Walking Fire: Rightly-lauded Brooklyn string quartet returns with vibrant, lively takes on Eastern European music (their version of Bartok’s Strink Quartet No. 2 is the centerpiece) and moody avant-gardism. This is the rare album that is both adventurous and playful: the group balances forays into the outer edges of classical music with jubilant gypsy waltzes. Recommended
Coliseum, Sister Faith: Since their last album, Coliseum have evolved from a storming, metallic hardcore powerhouse to a more musically refined post-punk band. Says Jon Wiederhorn:
As much as the music seems driven by the members’ collective record collections, Ryan Patterson’s lyrics seem to stem from an inability and unwillingness to fit into the mainstream and the toll it has taken. “All my life, failure, All I see, failure/ All my dreams, failure,” he barks in “Last/Lost” before concluding, “See clearly from failure, live freely from failure.” And on “Fuzzbang,” he rails, “Gotta get away, wish we could close our eyes and dream it all away.” Patterson’s resigned discontent shines through Coliseum’s tunes, which steamroll without obliterating and cut without leaving scars regardless of tempo or intensity.
Charlie Poole, the Complete Paramount & Brunswick Recordings, 1929: The title lays it out in plain english: these are the sides banjo player Poole recorded for the Paramount and Brunswick labels in 1929. That relatively straightforward title, though, betrays the loose-limbed joy lurking in these tracks. There’s gamboling piano, swinging violin and Poole’s pinched-but-earnest vocalizing, making this a sunny and essential slice of American music. Recommended
Denison Witmer, Denison Witmer: Personal bias: Denison is an old friend of mine, but even if he wasn’t I’d still describe the tender, melancholy music on this album as ‘hard to resist.’ Fans of Mark Kozelek and early Iron & Wine will find lots to love here. Witmer’s voice is gentle and feathery, and the music leaves plenty of space for it to drift down slowly between the bars. The perfect music for a warm spring night.
Mark Kozelek & Jimmy Lavalle, Perils from the Sea: Speaking of Mark Kozelek. On this collaboration with Jimmy Lavelle from the Album Leaf, MK roams way beyond his comfort zone, laying his cracked tenor over blipping electronics. Here’s the thing: it works pretty well! It’s nice to hear Kozelek try something new, and Lavalle’s productions are simple enough that they complement, rather than distract.
R.A. the Rugged Man, Legends Never Die: Do yourself a favor sometime and Google R.A. old stories about R.A. the Rugged Man. He’s been notorious for years now, but all of his late ’90s antics distract from the fact that he’s still a really good rapper, with a distinctive voice and a nimble flow. Despite its somewhat pro forma title, Legends is a slab of solid throwback hip-hop that lets R.A. go barrel-chested over great, dusty production.
Altar of Plagues, Teethed Glory and Injury: Anyone who knows anything about heavy music knows that Profound Lore has become the go-to destination for boundary-pushing metal. The latest from Ireland’s Altar of Plagues is just further proof. Existing at the intersection of black metal and the harsher strains of electronic music, Teethed Glory is a roiling, riveting listen. Recommended
Human Eye, Into Unknown: Some pretty terrific, scuzzed-out UFO-rock from Tim Vulgar, also of Timmy’s Organism. Human Eye are more direct than that project (though just barely), and are still dripping with gunk and smeared with Vulgar’s beery vocals. God bless ‘em forever.
Amorphis, Circle: Grand, sweeping 11th record from this Finnish metal band is broader and more epic in scope than Altar of Plagues. Like all Amorphis records, this one is based around a central narrative — this one about an outsider who taps into his deep spiritual core. The music is appropriately theatrical.
Arsis, Unwelcome: And for those who like their metal a little more straightforward, the new record from technical death metallers Arsis. This one is the full grisly: heart attack drumming, corkscrewing guitars and ragged-larynx vocals.
The Heliocentrics, 13 Degrees of Reality: Playing out like a lost jazz soundtrack to some mid ’70s NY-centric crime film, 13 Degrees of Reality is loaded with tense, queasy greatness. Strings bow, drums stumble and stomp and the bass thumps and rattles like an elevated train. Recommended
Hanni El Khatib, Head in the Dirt: On his second LP, Hanni El Khatib grows as a songwriter, with an ass-kicking band behind him. Bill Murphy says:
Head in the Dirt is loaded with raw, scuzzy, no-nonsense blues-rock, its lyrics telling of misfit isolation, relationship angst and hardscrabble street life. Plenty has already been said about the garage revival spearheaded by the likes of Ty Segall, JEFF the Brotherhood and Mikal Cronin, but what sets El Khatib apart is his fascination with the rootsier end of rock ‘n’ roll — think Bo Diddley and Ballin’ Jack.
David Lang, Death Speaks: The latest from David Lang, with an impressive list of indie-rock pals: My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden, Owen Pallett, The National’s Bryce Dessner, and Nico Muhly. John Schaefer says:
Lang has assembled a text in which Death is addressing us, with a message that is ultimately reassuring, and comforting. The text is built around the many and varied instances in the songs of Franz Schubert in which the figure of Death speaks. The music, as in the other death-themed works named above, has a transparent texture that sets off and subtly colors those texts, and the voice delivering it. That voice belongs to Shara Worden, one of the current breed of musicians who move fluidly between the worlds of classical music and indie rock.
Various Artists, Rough Guide to African Disco: This is as great as you suspect it is. Leaping, jumping rhythms and disco wah-wah get cross-wired with highlife and juju and Afrobeat for irresistible results. Your summer dance party starts here. Recommended
The Melvins, Everybody Loves Sausages: A covers album with cuts from Throbbing Gristle, John Waters, The Jam and more. David Raposa says:
The group (joined by a handful of friends, including Neurosis’s Scott Kelly, Foetus’s JG Thirwell and Mudhoney’s Mark Arm) tears through obscurities from nearly forgotten California punk groups like Pop-O-Pies and Tales of Terror with the same eagerness and fervor that’s bestowed upon faithful renditions of Venom’s “Warhead” and David Bowie’s “Station To Station.” That said, it’s when The Kinks’ fuddy-duddy late-era track “Attitude” is turned into a great Buzzcocks outtake, or The Fugs’ “Carpe Diem” becomes a long-lost Nuggets track, that the adventurous spirit of Everybody Loves Sausages, and The Melvins’ sincere love of music of all kinds, really shines through.
Arrington De Dionyso’s Malaikat Dan Slnga, Open the Crown: Man, I used to love Old Time Relijun. They haven’t been a going concern for a while now, but frontman Arrington De Dionyso has been carrying on their tradition of scuzzy, avant post-punk. This one sounds like another winner, De Dionyso’s demonic preacher delivery yipping and wailing against rusty bars of guitar and what sounds like broke-down dancehall on the second track.
The Backhomes, Only Friend: Nice, light, springtimey indie pop from this Canadian group, this one moves from slow, sparkly, moody numbers like the hazy “Going Home” to the shoegaze groan of “Stay.” Vocals plunged in echo and gently bobbing melodies make this one a sure winner for fans of late period Yo La Tengo or newer bands like Real Estate and Ducktails.
The Body, Master, We Perish: I am pretty into these weird dudes. Maybe you will be, too. A loose definition of The Body would have to include the word “extreme,” but not “extreme” as in speed and distortion and riffery — “extreme” as in mood and tone. This two-man group excels at creating moments of sheer unholy terror — shrieking guitars, panicked vocals, wails, feedback, sludge and apocalyptic droning. Those who like a good scare should look up their video for “The Ebb and Flow of Tides in a Sea of Ash,” which may or may not contain actual footage of a cult mass suicide.
Howl, Bloodlines
A little less bleak, but still as ugly as ever
Doom metal is a cathartic outlet for depression and loneliness and, yeah, it sounds pretty great under the influence of recreational pharmaceuticals, since the rhythms are generally slow and repetitive enough to separate the individual instruments and sink into the full, echoing effect of their sound. Howl’s 2010 full-length debut Full of Hell was an angry stoner’s paradise, a feast of trudging riffs, plodding beats, serpentine guitars and tumbling drums that appealed equally to fans of Black Sabbath and Mastodon.
Who knows if frontman Vincent Hausman stopped smoking weed or if he’s merely evolved as a songwriter and musician, but Howl’s second album Bloodlines is far more intricate and diverse. Some of that might be because the band hired a second guitarist, Josh Durocher-Jones, who adds counter-melodies and extra heft to Hausman’s leaden chugs (Since recording the album, Hausman has actually focused strictly on vocals and handed his guitar over to new member Jonathan Hall).
Clearly, vocals have become a priority to Hausman. On Bloodlines he expands his parameters, spewing various flavors of venom, including Lamb of God-style roars (“Attrition,” “Demonic”), shouty growls (“Your Hell Begins, “Of War”) and even moody melodic baritone crooning (“One Last Nail,” “Down So Long”).
The abundant musical flourishes are even more impressive. Howl can still stomp and drone, but they’ve added new tricks to their arsenal, including southern power-groove riffs, twin-guitar harmonies and unexpected shifts in rhythm; the tempos range from mid-paced (“Embrace Your Nerve”) to double-time (“Your Hell Begins”). Clearly, Howl worked exhaustively to overhaul their sound (captured expertly by producer Zeuss and they’ve done so without sounding like a completely different band than the one that recorded Full of Hell.
Maybe that has something to do with their overall aesthetic. No matter how much they’ve strayed from their roots, Howl are still filled with animosity and contempt. Just check out the album art, which depicts a naked woman bleeding from her eyes, a spurting heart, a skeleton with a spear, a wolf and ravens, all of them swimming in an ocean of blood. “I will tear limb from limb/this is where your hell begins,” sings Hausman on “Your Hell Begins.” “Drink up the blood you maggot/spit on the open wound,” he rails in “The Mouth of Madness.” Howl’s music may sound a little less bleak and a bit more multifaceted than they did two year ago, but at the core they remain as ugly as ever.
Interview: Iggy & The Stooges
Many rock reunions have an air of inevitability about them and Iggy Pop’s reactivation of his legendary late-’60s band The Stooges in 2003 was no different. When, after six years of high-energy, extreme-volume touring, their guitarist Ron Asheton passed away unexpectedly in 2009, many justifiably thought, that was that.
Iggy’s subsequent decision to reconvene the band’s second line-up — and coax legendary guitarist James Williamson out of retirement — was less expected. While the original combo had never enjoyed any success during its fleeting existence, the infamous second incarnation of The Stooges, born circa 1972, was doomed from the outset and soon became a byword for druggy self-destruction. Although all just about escaped with their lives, this was the unlikeliest reunion.
Back in the day, The Stooges Mk 2 were augmented by James Williamson, a fabulously talented guitarist, whose savage, mangled riffing on the band’s lone album, 1973′s Raw Power, was a perfect foil for Iggy’s incandescent lyricism. Their brutality was way ahead of its time: only once they’d imploded, and Iggy had checked himself into a Californian psychiatric unit, would both incarnations of the band become a key influence on punk rock.
Their story is singular enough, even without the added spice that Williamson quit music altogether circa 1980, and spent the intervening 30 years working successfully as an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley in California. His return in 2009 couldn’t have been less foreseeable, but subsequent tours showcasing Raw Power and 1975′s Pop/Williamson collaboration, Kill City, found his playing remarkably unspoiled — and undiluted.
It remains as such on Iggy & The Stooges’ remarkable comeback record, whose title, Ready to Die, is a fittingly gnarly statement from unrepentant rockers in their mid 60s. Its 10 tracks balance swinging riffage with near-the-knuckle balladry, while Iggy holds forth on gun control, underpaid labor, abundant female breasts and, indeed, death. In exclusive conversation with eMusic’s Andrew Perry, these legends are implausibly invigorated.
For a peek into the Stooges’ record collection, click here.
Iggy, how did you persuade James to rejoin the band, after so long out of the game?
Iggy Pop: After Ron Asheton passed away in 2009, I talked to James about possibly coming in for some gigs that we had booked already, and I also talked to a friend of Ron’s who was in a Stooges tribute band, [Radio Birdman's] Deniz Tek. I ended up canceling the gigs, but James and I stayed in touch, and toward the end of that year, I had an offer that was too good to refuse. And James was up for it.
James had to do a lot of rehearsal to relearn how to play the guitar after 37 years, and in the course of doing so he sent me a very nice piece of dobro blues music — he called it “Ron’s Tune.” And he began and ended the tune with a slide-guitar rendition of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” which is Ron’s greatest and best known riff.
James, you’d not been playing in public for all that time, but had you been doing music privately, just for your own enjoyment?
James Williamson: Not really, no. I wrote one song when we were doing New Values [Iggy's 1979 solo album], and that was it. After the really bad experience we had on Soldier [Iggy's 1980 solo album], I just said, “Screw this, I’ve gotta focus on technology.” I just put the guitar down. There was the odd time or two, when I’d pull it out and try and impress my son, but by then I was pretty rusty, so he was kinda like, [skeptical] “Really, dad?!” So I just stopped altogether.
But then, about a year and a half before I got the call to rejoin the band, I happened to be at a flea market, and came across this old guitar. I didn’t know what [brand] it was, but it sounded amazing, and I bought it for a song basically, because the guy who was selling it didn’t know what it was either. It turned out to be made by a guy from the 1920s and ’30s, named Hermann Weissenborn. He made Spanish-necked guitars, as well as lap steels, back in the heyday of Hawaian music, and was really a master.
So that inspired me to play a little bit. Granted, that was acoustic, so it was not the same as playing in The Stooges, although I wrote most of the songs [for The Stooges] on acoustic.
So did it take quite a bit of practice to get “match fit” for those first shows in ’09?
Williamson: It’s funny, if you ever could play guitar in the first place, you have the same synapses and muscle memory and all that stuff — it all comes back. I did have to work pretty hard to get it up to a kind of professional level, but I had six months to do it. We rehearsed a lot, and I did one show with a local band, just to get the feel of it. Almost all of our set is my stuff, and then the earlier Stooges stuff is pretty simple.
But in terms of writing, I had not done that at all, so going into this album was a little daunting at first, but then things got going so well, you couldn’t hardly stop it.
Some reactivated bands, like the Pixies, believe that it’s okay for them to play shows for people to enjoy the old material, but that they shouldn’t make new records, because they can never match up — they can only tarnish their own legacy. You obviously disagree…
Pop: My motivation in making any record with a group at this point is no longer personal, it’s just a pigheaded fucking thing I have, that a real fucking group, when they’re an older group, they also make fucking records. They don’t just twiddle around onstage to just make a bunch of money and then go, “Oh, it wouldn’t be as good.” This is not the fucking Smashing Pumpkins, you know? No. So this is the key, the only thing I really have left to say is, The Stooges are a real group.
Williamson: The first priority when we reformed was to get the band cracking, and in tour shape. And I think you saw the results of that. Then after about 2011 or so, we started thinking, Well, you know, shouldn’t we make a record? But we weren’t sure we could do it. The previous album, The Weirdness [released by The Stooges Mk 1 in '07] didn’t come out too well, or at least the critics didn’t like it much, and so I was determined that we would make a record that we felt was really representative of us, and that we liked.
So I started writing with Ig, and that was the first revelation — it’s funny, but we have some kind of chemistry, for lack of a better word, where we can actually write songs fairly quickly. So we started doing that when we had time, and little by little some of them started sounding pretty good. It took quite a long time, because we were still touring, but we made a concerted effort in 2012, and eventually we came up with 15 songs, and then pared them down to 10 that went on the album.
Were there any ground rules for making it? Anything you wanted to avoid? Or was it just the music that came out?
Williamson: It was pretty much just the music that came out. We really were keenly aware that, this being the 40th anniversary of Raw Power, all this stuff would get compared. So we didn’t wanna write in the rearview mirror, if you will. If you fall into that trap, you start to be a caricature of yourself. We wanted to be authentic, as we are now, and that’s what you’ve got — songs about today, and I think it ended up being some very topical material, that covers gun control, immigration, sex, money — you know, all the keen topics. And the music sounds like us. I think we couldn’t help but be us really.
We kinda still maintained the old school way. We used tape on a lot of stuff, and a lot of analogue outboard equipment, like Neave 10-73 pre-amps. That’s the killer sound, maybe a little bit of a throwback to the ’70s, but I think Ig stepped up and really sang his ass off. And I played hard.
Have you felt any obligation maybe to reinhabit your state of mind as you remember it from the early ’70s, to be true to the original Stooges, to be the “streetwalking cheetah” from the classic song “Search & Destroy,” but updated for today? On several songs you actually seem in quite a dark place: on ‘Unfriendly World’, you sing, “Fame and fortune make me sick, and I can’t get out.” In short, not the streetwalking cheetah…
Pop: Well, unfortunately for me, I’ve hit a point in my life where I’m kinda famous, and I’m not used to that, ’cause I couldn’t get arrested my whole fucking life. Nobody knew who I was, except for a few crazy people. So I got to be like 50 and still living like outside of crappy areas in New York City, and nobody knew who I was. I got used to that, so, no, I’m not used to who I am now, and it’s not in my interest to express myself, some days. I’m not like most people, I don’t share the acceptable thoughts on society; mine are unacceptable. So it’s become harder and harder for me to give in a lyric. Also I may just be out of things [to say] — as you get older you notice your vocabulary stays the same.
So I have to be careful because if I say what’s really on my mind I might get laughed at or locked up, or cause other problems around me. And the world has changed and I’m a person who’s very fortunate to be walking around healthy, free, and respectable; in terms of what I did, way back when, and I know it, I have this mentality.
Looking back at Raw Power, it was always doomed to commercial failure, at the time at least. You came in on guitar, James, and Ron Asheton came back in at the last minute, but relegated to bass, with his brother Scott on drums. Any human resources manager would’ve told you, that’s not a band that’s going to thrive and conquer the world, there will be arguments…
Williamson: And that’s exactly what our management thought! [The Stooges were signed up by David Bowie's management company, at the behest of Bowie, who was obsessed with Iggy. —Ed.] Going over to London, just me and Iggy at first, at that particular time — it was sort of ground zero for the glam thing, and here we are, some midwestern US guys who’d never been out of the US before, and we got parachuted in to Bowie’s world, and T Rex’s world — Marc Bolan was on fire when we got there.
We’d never seen anything like that since The Beatles. The girls were flinging themselves against the chain-link fences, and crying and screaming, and we were thinking, “Wow, okay, this is pretty cool,” but when we went to find musicians, it was like we just couldn’t relate to the guys. There was guys ruffled cuffs and collars and flowers and stuff, and it wasn’t us.
Our management wanted us to be like pop stars, like Bowie. That was the model they had, and in fact they didn’t even want me to come over. They just wanted Iggy, so they kind of begrudgingly let this surly-looking, pimply, long-haired guy come along with him, and then pretty soon there were four of us [when the Ashetons arrived], haha! So every time we’d bring a demo to MainMan, the management, they would reject it. “I Got A Right,” “I’m Sick Of You” — all those great songs were done before Raw Power, and they didn’t like them.
So our job was to try to come up with some material that they would like, but the real break we got was that David Bowie suddenly started getting very popular, so that took all the focus off of us, and they just didn’t have time to deal with us. But we owed an album to CBS, so they let us just go in the studio on our own, and make it. I don’t think Raw Power would’ve been made otherwise, or at least it certainly wouldn’t have been the same.
In the end, though, MainMan, took Bowie into the studio to remix the album, in the hope of making something palatable out of it, and the released version came out pretty tinny. Did that upset you?
Williamson: The good news was, we were left alone without any adult supervision. The bad news is, this is my first album, so I assumed Iggy knew what he was doing, but Iggy’s not a technical guy, and so I think we made the engineer do a lot of things he didn’t really wanna do. The basic tracks — bass and drums, and probably some guitar — were all done live in the room together, so the isolation wasn’t very good, so there’s a lot of bass in the drums.
It’s a mess really, in some ways, so I think when David Bowie went to mix it, he didn’t have much to work with. He probably had to take the bass and drums down quite a bit, like he did, in order not to hear all that stuff. But of course he made me sound great, because basically it’s just guitars and vocals — which is what Jack White has made a career out of, by the way! So it’s not all lost.
Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols always says he learnt to play guitar by playing along to Raw Power in his bedroom (on speed!). When you first heard British punk rock, did you think, “Hang on, they’re ripping us off”?
Pop: Williamson has such a strong energy, he’s a Scorpio, and he has powerful waves of negative repellent energy in his playing. So it’s no accident that it was his playing that ignited certain sparks that led to English punk rock, no accident at all.
Williamson: I hear him say that, and I’m like, “Really?! Because I consider myself a positive force.” The only way I can interpret that is he’s saying I’m like a bad-ass guitar player, in which case I consider it a compliment.
Pop: Someone put it this way in a recent book, that the original Stooges with Ron, Scott, myself and Dave, were like lone artisans, working away in isolation, crafting away the templates for the content of punk rock. But nobody knew the tree was falling in the forest. It took a combination of James Williamson and David Bowie. They both served similar roles in my life and it took the platform that we got from Bowie’s people, and the negative waves from Williamson, to put us in touch with the generation that really articulated punk.
So did it feel like a vindication?
Williamson: By the time all that stuff had started happening, I was pretty much out of music, so I wasn’t really paying much attention to it, but of course it was hard to miss The Sex Pistols, so I did notice a kind of similarity, and I thought to myself, “Good for these guys, they were able to put it together, and market it successfully.” They were doing stuff right. That was one of the regrets that I think I’ve always had about the early Stooges — we were just too fucked-up to be successful [laughs]. We just didn’t care about that kind of stuff. In the end it broke up the band, because people just couldn’t go on.
Iggy, your lifestyle problems ran on well into the 1990s, as has been well documented over the years. But James, how did you manage to extricate yourself, straighten up and hold down a challenging, cutting-edge job for so long?
Williamson: I think he has a different kind of vulnerability to these things than I do. I wasn’t as bad as people make me out to be in terms of drug usage and debauchery and all this sort of stuff. I always had girlfriends who were usually pretty clean, and so once I stopped doing music it wasn’t too hard for me to get cleaned up. That’s not the hardest part, though. The hardest part is getting your mind wrapped around different concepts. It was a rather large existential gap, between The Stooges and calculus, for example.
Where exactly did you work? Legend has it you ended up working for Sony in computer programming.
Williamson: No, no, I went back to school, to become an electrical engineer, because I was fascinated by the personal computer. It was the very beginning of that, and it was much more exciting to me than what rock ‘n’ roll had become. It was really tough, but when I was finished, I got hired to a company called Advanced Micro-Devices up in Silicon Valley, which is where I still live, and from there I worked through a succession of jobs. It was a really exciting run — the PC, and eventually the internet, waves and waves of different technology from brilliant people that I got to work with. So I never really regretted any of it.
Is it true you’d been presented with a retirement package just around the time you got the call from Iggy?
Williamson: Yeah, the timing of it was just unbelievable. For all its success, the company was not immune to this current economic situation, so they were handing out those packages. I looked at the package, and at first I wasn’t sure I wanted to take it, but eventually I thought, “You know what, I can’t actually afford not to take this.” So coincidentally Ig had called, and initially I just told him, “No,” but then a little while went by, and I decided to take the package. I had also given Ig’s call a lot of thought, and soul-searching, and I felt like I kind of owed it to those guys. We went back a long way. They were fresh out of Stooges — I was kind of the only one left, so I called him back and said, “Let’s do it.”
Was there some patching up to do between you? Iggy, you’ve said that you hung up the phone after James accepted your offer, and suddenly panicked, “Hang on, but James is the devil!”
Williamson: I don’t know where all that devil stuff comes from exactly, but yes we did have some patching up to do. The thing is, when people die, there’s also this funny thing that happens, and a lot of stuff suddenly isn’t that important, that has been going on all those years. We didn’t really talk much after Soldier for 20, 25 years. Only the odd phone call for publishing or whatever. After Ron died, we got together down in L.A. when Ig was doing a benefit show with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We chewed the fat for a little bit. It was no big deal, but I think it made it easier for both of us to go forward from there.
Your lives have been so different in the intervening years. Does that give an extra frisson to The Stooges now?
Pop: To deal with him, the bar was higher. And it was also higher for me because this has got my name on it — it’s Iggy & the Stooges [just as the band was billed for Raw Power], so I had to live up.
Williamson: The thing is, you can’t help but be who you are. The first two years of touring together, we covered a lot of ground about different experiences we’d had over the years, but basically the two of us know each other since we were in our 20s, and so we go back a long way, and I don’t care what you do in your life, there’s some things that never change about people. That person’s personality was developed early in life, way before your 20s, and they’re pretty much always that same person. When you know somebody for that long, you dial into the commonality, rather than the difference.
Is it an odd feeling to be a celebrated guitar hero now, James, when all you’d ever known before was being in that loser band from Detroit all those years ago?
Williamson: It’s just unbelievable. I can’t begin to tell you what it’s like now. The largest show I ever played in the five years I was first in The Stooges was less than 2,000 seats. The first show I played back with The Stooges was 40,000 people in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Just, what?! People are crazy about us. Twenty-somethings are out there in the audience, and we even got in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The last four or five years have been like victory laps. And we’ve made a new album which was really a defining full-circle moment for the band. I’m very proud of it.
Interview: Iggy & The Stooges
Many rock reunions have an air of inevitability about them and Iggy Pop’s reactivation of his legendary late-’60s band The Stooges in 2003 was no different. When, after six years of high-energy, extreme-volume touring, their guitarist Ron Asheton passed away unexpectedly in 2009, many justifiably thought, that was that.
Iggy’s subsequent decision to reconvene the band’s second line-up — and coax legendary guitarist James Williamson out of retirement — was less expected. While the original combo had never enjoyed any success during its fleeting existence, the infamous second incarnation of The Stooges, born circa 1972, was doomed from the outset and soon became a byword for druggy self-destruction. Although all just about escaped with their lives, this was the unlikeliest reunion.
Back in the day, The Stooges Mk 2 were augmented by James Williamson, a fabulously talented guitarist, whose savage, mangled riffing on the band’s lone album, 1973′s Raw Power, was a perfect foil for Iggy’s incandescent lyricism. Their brutality was way ahead of its time: only once they’d imploded, and Iggy had checked himself into a Californian psychiatric unit, would both incarnations of the band become a key influence on punk rock.
Their story is singular enough, even without the added spice that Williamson quit music altogether circa 1980, and spent the intervening 30 years working successfully as an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley in California. His return in 2009 couldn’t have been less foreseeable, but subsequent tours showcasing Raw Power and 1975′s Pop/Williamson collaboration, Kill City, found his playing remarkably unspoiled — and undiluted.
It remains as such on Iggy & The Stooges’ remarkable comeback record, whose title, Ready to Die, is a fittingly gnarly statement from unrepentant rockers in their mid 60s. Its 10 tracks balance swinging riffage with near-the-knuckle balladry, while Iggy holds forth on gun control, underpaid labor, abundant female breasts and, indeed, death. In exclusive conversation with eMusic’s Andrew Perry, these legends are implausibly invigorated.
For a peek into the Stooges’ record collection, click here.
Iggy, how did you persuade James to rejoin the band, after so long out of the game?
Iggy Pop: After Ron Asheton passed away in 2009, I talked to James about possibly coming in for some gigs that we had booked already, and I also talked to a friend of Ron’s who was in a Stooges tribute band, [Radio Birdman's] Deniz Tek. I ended up canceling the gigs, but James and I stayed in touch, and toward the end of that year, I had an offer that was too good to refuse. And James was up for it.
James had to do a lot of rehearsal to relearn how to play the guitar after 37 years, and in the course of doing so he sent me a very nice piece of dobro blues music — he called it “Ron’s Tune.” And he began and ended the tune with a slide-guitar rendition of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” which is Ron’s greatest and best known riff.
James, you’d not been playing in public for all that time, but had you been doing music privately, just for your own enjoyment?
James Williamson: Not really, no. I wrote one song when we were doing New Values [Iggy's 1979 solo album], and that was it. After the really bad experience we had on Soldier [Iggy's 1980 solo album], I just said, “Screw this, I’ve gotta focus on technology.” I just put the guitar down. There was the odd time or two, when I’d pull it out and try and impress my son, but by then I was pretty rusty, so he was kinda like, [skeptical] “Really, dad?!” So I just stopped altogether.
But then, about a year and a half before I got the call to rejoin the band, I happened to be at a flea market, and came across this old guitar. I didn’t know what [brand] it was, but it sounded amazing, and I bought it for a song basically, because the guy who was selling it didn’t know what it was either. It turned out to be made by a guy from the 1920s and ’30s, named Hermann Weissenborn. He made Spanish-necked guitars, as well as lap steels, back in the heyday of Hawaian music, and was really a master.
So that inspired me to play a little bit. Granted, that was acoustic, so it was not the same as playing in The Stooges, although I wrote most of the songs [for The Stooges] on acoustic.
So did it take quite a bit of practice to get “match fit” for those first shows in ’09?
Williamson: It’s funny, if you ever could play guitar in the first place, you have the same synapses and muscle memory and all that stuff — it all comes back. I did have to work pretty hard to get it up to a kind of professional level, but I had six months to do it. We rehearsed a lot, and I did one show with a local band, just to get the feel of it. Almost all of our set is my stuff, and then the earlier Stooges stuff is pretty simple.
But in terms of writing, I had not done that at all, so going into this album was a little daunting at first, but then things got going so well, you couldn’t hardly stop it.
Some reactivated bands, like the Pixies, believe that it’s okay for them to play shows for people to enjoy the old material, but that they shouldn’t make new records, because they can never match up — they can only tarnish their own legacy. You obviously disagree…
Pop: My motivation in making any record with a group at this point is no longer personal, it’s just a pigheaded fucking thing I have, that a real fucking group, when they’re an older group, they also make fucking records. They don’t just twiddle around onstage to just make a bunch of money and then go, “Oh, it wouldn’t be as good.” This is not the fucking Smashing Pumpkins, you know? No. So this is the key, the only thing I really have left to say is, The Stooges are a real group.
Williamson: The first priority when we reformed was to get the band cracking, and in tour shape. And I think you saw the results of that. Then after about 2011 or so, we started thinking, Well, you know, shouldn’t we make a record? But we weren’t sure we could do it. The previous album, The Weirdness [released by The Stooges Mk 1 in '07] didn’t come out too well, or at least the critics didn’t like it much, and so I was determined that we would make a record that we felt was really representative of us, and that we liked.
So I started writing with Ig, and that was the first revelation — it’s funny, but we have some kind of chemistry, for lack of a better word, where we can actually write songs fairly quickly. So we started doing that when we had time, and little by little some of them started sounding pretty good. It took quite a long time, because we were still touring, but we made a concerted effort in 2012, and eventually we came up with 15 songs, and then pared them down to 10 that went on the album.
Were there any ground rules for making it? Anything you wanted to avoid? Or was it just the music that came out?
Williamson: It was pretty much just the music that came out. We really were keenly aware that, this being the 40th anniversary of Raw Power, all this stuff would get compared. So we didn’t wanna write in the rearview mirror, if you will. If you fall into that trap, you start to be a caricature of yourself. We wanted to be authentic, as we are now, and that’s what you’ve got — songs about today, and I think it ended up being some very topical material, that covers gun control, immigration, sex, money — you know, all the keen topics. And the music sounds like us. I think we couldn’t help but be us really.
We kinda still maintained the old school way. We used tape on a lot of stuff, and a lot of analogue outboard equipment, like Neave 10-73 pre-amps. That’s the killer sound, maybe a little bit of a throwback to the ’70s, but I think Ig stepped up and really sang his ass off. And I played hard.
Have you felt any obligation maybe to reinhabit your state of mind as you remember it from the early ’70s, to be true to the original Stooges, to be the “streetwalking cheetah” from the classic song “Search & Destroy,” but updated for today? On several songs you actually seem in quite a dark place: on ‘Unfriendly World’, you sing, “Fame and fortune make me sick, and I can’t get out.” In short, not the streetwalking cheetah…
Pop: Well, unfortunately for me, I’ve hit a point in my life where I’m kinda famous, and I’m not used to that, ’cause I couldn’t get arrested my whole fucking life. Nobody knew who I was, except for a few crazy people. So I got to be like 50 and still living like outside of crappy areas in New York City, and nobody knew who I was. I got used to that, so, no, I’m not used to who I am now, and it’s not in my interest to express myself, some days. I’m not like most people, I don’t share the acceptable thoughts on society; mine are unacceptable. So it’s become harder and harder for me to give in a lyric. Also I may just be out of things [to say] — as you get older you notice your vocabulary stays the same.
So I have to be careful because if I say what’s really on my mind I might get laughed at or locked up, or cause other problems around me. And the world has changed and I’m a person who’s very fortunate to be walking around healthy, free, and respectable; in terms of what I did, way back when, and I know it, I have this mentality.
Looking back at Raw Power, it was always doomed to commercial failure, at the time at least. You came in on guitar, James, and Ron Asheton came back in at the last minute, but relegated to bass, with his brother Scott on drums. Any human resources manager would’ve told you, that’s not a band that’s going to thrive and conquer the world, there will be arguments…
Williamson: And that’s exactly what our management thought! [The Stooges were signed up by David Bowie's management company, at the behest of Bowie, who was obsessed with Iggy. —Ed.] Going over to London, just me and Iggy at first, at that particular time — it was sort of ground zero for the glam thing, and here we are, some midwestern US guys who’d never been out of the US before, and we got parachuted in to Bowie’s world, and T Rex’s world — Marc Bolan was on fire when we got there.
We’d never seen anything like that since The Beatles. The girls were flinging themselves against the chain-link fences, and crying and screaming, and we were thinking, “Wow, okay, this is pretty cool,” but when we went to find musicians, it was like we just couldn’t relate to the guys. There was guys ruffled cuffs and collars and flowers and stuff, and it wasn’t us.
Our management wanted us to be like pop stars, like Bowie. That was the model they had, and in fact they didn’t even want me to come over. They just wanted Iggy, so they kind of begrudgingly let this surly-looking, pimply, long-haired guy come along with him, and then pretty soon there were four of us [when the Ashetons arrived], haha! So every time we’d bring a demo to MainMan, the management, they would reject it. “I Got A Right,” “I’m Sick Of You” — all those great songs were done before Raw Power, and they didn’t like them.
So our job was to try to come up with some material that they would like, but the real break we got was that David Bowie suddenly started getting very popular, so that took all the focus off of us, and they just didn’t have time to deal with us. But we owed an album to CBS, so they let us just go in the studio on our own, and make it. I don’t think Raw Power would’ve been made otherwise, or at least it certainly wouldn’t have been the same.
In the end, though, MainMan, took Bowie into the studio to remix the album, in the hope of making something palatable out of it, and the released version came out pretty tinny. Did that upset you?
Williamson: The good news was, we were left alone without any adult supervision. The bad news is, this is my first album, so I assumed Iggy knew what he was doing, but Iggy’s not a technical guy, and so I think we made the engineer do a lot of things he didn’t really wanna do. The basic tracks — bass and drums, and probably some guitar — were all done live in the room together, so the isolation wasn’t very good, so there’s a lot of bass in the drums.
It’s a mess really, in some ways, so I think when David Bowie went to mix it, he didn’t have much to work with. He probably had to take the bass and drums down quite a bit, like he did, in order not to hear all that stuff. But of course he made me sound great, because basically it’s just guitars and vocals — which is what Jack White has made a career out of, by the way! So it’s not all lost.
Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols always says he learnt to play guitar by playing along to Raw Power in his bedroom (on speed!). When you first heard British punk rock, did you think, “Hang on, they’re ripping us off”?
Pop: Williamson has such a strong energy, he’s a Scorpio, and he has powerful waves of negative repellent energy in his playing. So it’s no accident that it was his playing that ignited certain sparks that led to English punk rock, no accident at all.
Williamson: I hear him say that, and I’m like, “Really?! Because I consider myself a positive force.” The only way I can interpret that is he’s saying I’m like a bad-ass guitar player, in which case I consider it a compliment.
Pop: Someone put it this way in a recent book, that the original Stooges with Ron, Scott, myself and Dave, were like lone artisans, working away in isolation, crafting away the templates for the content of punk rock. But nobody knew the tree was falling in the forest. It took a combination of James Williamson and David Bowie. They both served similar roles in my life and it took the platform that we got from Bowie’s people, and the negative waves from Williamson, to put us in touch with the generation that really articulated punk.
So did it feel like a vindication?
Williamson: By the time all that stuff had started happening, I was pretty much out of music, so I wasn’t really paying much attention to it, but of course it was hard to miss The Sex Pistols, so I did notice a kind of similarity, and I thought to myself, “Good for these guys, they were able to put it together, and market it successfully.” They were doing stuff right. That was one of the regrets that I think I’ve always had about the early Stooges — we were just too fucked-up to be successful [laughs]. We just didn’t care about that kind of stuff. In the end it broke up the band, because people just couldn’t go on.
Iggy, your lifestyle problems ran on well into the 1990s, as has been well documented over the years. But James, how did you manage to extricate yourself, straighten up and hold down a challenging, cutting-edge job for so long?
Williamson: I think he has a different kind of vulnerability to these things than I do. I wasn’t as bad as people make me out to be in terms of drug usage and debauchery and all this sort of stuff. I always had girlfriends who were usually pretty clean, and so once I stopped doing music it wasn’t too hard for me to get cleaned up. That’s not the hardest part, though. The hardest part is getting your mind wrapped around different concepts. It was a rather large existential gap, between The Stooges and calculus, for example.
Where exactly did you work? Legend has it you ended up working for Sony in computer programming.
Williamson: No, no, I went back to school, to become an electrical engineer, because I was fascinated by the personal computer. It was the very beginning of that, and it was much more exciting to me than what rock ‘n’ roll had become. It was really tough, but when I was finished, I got hired to a company called Advanced Micro-Devices up in Silicon Valley, which is where I still live, and from there I worked through a succession of jobs. It was a really exciting run — the PC, and eventually the internet, waves and waves of different technology from brilliant people that I got to work with. So I never really regretted any of it.
Is it true you’d been presented with a retirement package just around the time you got the call from Iggy?
Williamson: Yeah, the timing of it was just unbelievable. For all its success, the company was not immune to this current economic situation, so they were handing out those packages. I looked at the package, and at first I wasn’t sure I wanted to take it, but eventually I thought, “You know what, I can’t actually afford not to take this.” So coincidentally Ig had called, and initially I just told him, “No,” but then a little while went by, and I decided to take the package. I had also given Ig’s call a lot of thought, and soul-searching, and I felt like I kind of owed it to those guys. We went back a long way. They were fresh out of Stooges — I was kind of the only one left, so I called him back and said, “Let’s do it.”
Was there some patching up to do between you? Iggy, you’ve said that you hung up the phone after James accepted your offer, and suddenly panicked, “Hang on, but James is the devil!”
Williamson: I don’t know where all that devil stuff comes from exactly, but yes we did have some patching up to do. The thing is, when people die, there’s also this funny thing that happens, and a lot of stuff suddenly isn’t that important, that has been going on all those years. We didn’t really talk much after Soldier for 20, 25 years. Only the odd phone call for publishing or whatever. After Ron died, we got together down in L.A. when Ig was doing a benefit show with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We chewed the fat for a little bit. It was no big deal, but I think it made it easier for both of us to go forward from there.
Your lives have been so different in the intervening years. Does that give an extra frisson to The Stooges now?
Pop: To deal with him, the bar was higher. And it was also higher for me because this has got my name on it — it’s Iggy & the Stooges [just as the band was billed for Raw Power], so I had to live up.
Williamson: The thing is, you can’t help but be who you are. The first two years of touring together, we covered a lot of ground about different experiences we’d had over the years, but basically the two of us know each other since we were in our 20s, and so we go back a long way, and I don’t care what you do in your life, there’s some things that never change about people. That person’s personality was developed early in life, way before your 20s, and they’re pretty much always that same person. When you know somebody for that long, you dial into the commonality, rather than the difference.
Is it an odd feeling to be a celebrated guitar hero now, James, when all you’d ever known before was being in that loser band from Detroit all those years ago?
Williamson: It’s just unbelievable. I can’t begin to tell you what it’s like now. The largest show I ever played in the five years I was first in The Stooges was less than 2,000 seats. The first show I played back with The Stooges was 40,000 people in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Just, what?! People are crazy about us. Twenty-somethings are out there in the audience, and we even got in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The last four or five years have been like victory laps. And we’ve made a new album which was really a defining full-circle moment for the band. I’m very proud of it.
Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light
The frequent indie collaborator proves most formidable and impressive on his own
Avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson’s credits as a collaborator include a slew of indie friends — Arcade Fire, Feist, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and TV on the Radio among them — but he’s most formidable and impressive on his own, with just a metal horn and a pair of heaving lungs to help push air through its twisty, peculiar channels. Stetson’s expansive style finds fine form in “Hunted,” an unusual instrumental track that matches ghostly, wordless cries to a sax treatise in which Stetson taps on keys percussively while blowing out sounds as if summoning some strange prehistoric beast. “High Above a Grey Green Sea” follows in a comparatively subtle mode, abstracting the sax until it’s mostly a tool for texture and extrapolations on timbre and tone. Stetson is credited for playing alto, tenor and bass saxophones (the latter a burly monster of an instrument), but the presence of each, in all cases, conforms to the whole of his unique sound-world. Another habitué of that world is Justin Vernon from Bon Iver, who contributes vocals on four songs in a very Bon Iver-ian way (see, especially, “Who the Waves are Roaring For”). His nuanced presence is never unwelcome but it is also ultimately unnecessary — a testament to the powers that Stetson wields on his own.
The Stooges’ eMusic Essentials
To celebrate the new Iggy & The Stooges album Ready To Die, we invited guitarist James Williamson to rifle through eMusic’s catalog and talk us through some of his favourite albums. You can read about the legendary guitarist’s choices below.
Andrew Perry interviews the band about their remarkable comeback album here.
Abundant anthology of the Mississippi-born father of Chicago electric blues
I love Muddy Waters, he'd always have a couple entries in my Top 20. I saw him play in Detroit. I actually liken that scene to The Stooges, because at that time all the British guys were coming over and playing the blues back to us [Americans], and at some point, you go, "Well, that's good, but it ain't the real thing," so... then we'd start going [back] to the old guys and listening to them, and in a way that's what happened to us: people are coming back to watch us, because we did the original work. We're kind of the old blues guys of rock!
Iggy went to live in Chicago, pre-Stooges, to check out that scene. He was the drummer for a band called The Prime Movers, and they were very much a Chicago Blues-style band. They were quite good actually.
One of the most revered of the early 20th-century bluesmen, newly re-released on Jack White's label
There's a lot of real esoteric original delta blues — Robert Johnson and all those guys — and you just can't touch them. I haven't tried to play it much, but I love to listen to this stuff.
Another Mississippi bluesman, who played at his own juke joint until his death in 1998, and recorded for Iggy & The Stooges' new label, Fat Possum
I didn't ever see him myself, but Iggy took him out on the road, and I think they made a record, or at least a couple of songs together. I initially got in contact with Fat Possum because RL Burnside, Junior and all those guys were on... that label. I started looking at their catalogue, and I said, "Hey you guys, I'm this guitar player, could you send me some of your stuff?" and they ended up sending me this huge boxful of almost everybody that was interesting on their catalog. So I'm quite familiar with their stuff!
Breakthrough record of fuzzy-blues groovology from Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney
I like the Black Keys, especially this later stuff. It's some of their best songwriting.
The soul legend's first hit single from 1963
All this Motown stuff was in the air while we were growing up in Detroit. Stevie Wonder would actually play at the state fair, which was just an open field basically with a bunch of equipment, and he'd be on a stage which wasn't more than two feet high, with four guys around the edges so he wouldn't fall off, and he'd play "Fingertips," right... up close and personal. I love "Superstition" too — it's a great song.
Inspirational '60s free-jazz alto-saxophonist on fiercely improvisational form
Coltrane was a master. A Love Supreme, that's also an amazing record. He was completely plugged into something.
The improv ivory-tinkler let loose upon a German church organ, to mind-blowing effect
My favourite is the Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett, which would've been in the mid- to late '70s, but Spheres is pretty good, too, from around the same time. He's an improvisational pianist, and some of the things he's done are just incredible, very free, almost jazzy sometimes, but very melodic. He's also played with a ton of very good... musicians.
Mid-'60s British Invaders, whose succession of top-name guitarists paved the way between R&B beat-pop and psychedelia
I was a huge Yardbirds fan, I saw them play both with Jeff Beck and with Jimmy Page. That was prominent in my evolution. They were so exciting. They had a big hit over here with 'For Your Love', and then that attracted a lot of people to get their albums and stuff, and those albums were... incredible, like Over Under Sideways Down — all those songs. Jeff Beck is one of my very top guitar heroes. A couple of years ago, we were in France, but we came over to the UK to see an artist, and he was playing with her, so I got to meet him backstage, and that was a big thrill for me.
Sizzling live set from the dying days of the Experience
Before I joined The Stooges, we had a friend in common: Ron Richardson, who was the manager for the first band I helped found, called The Chosen Few. He was someone Ron Asheton knew, and he went out to California for the Monterey pop festival, and brought back home Are You Experienced? It was just a game-changer for all of us — after... that, nothing was the same.
Ace Dylan comp, structured around 1965's half-electric Bringing It All Back Home album
I was into Bob Dylan even more than Iggy was. I patterned my whole life around Bob Dylan. He would be No. 1 on my list, every record he made except for a few, I like 'em all! Bringing It All Back Home is a great album.
Agit-political revolutionary combo from Detroit who, circa 1968, were the "big brother" band to the formative Stooges
The MC5 were well established at the time when The Stooges started. I wasn't in the band at that time, but I saw all those guys play at the Grande Ballroom and so forth. They were pretty mindblowing, I always liked them. They were quote-unquote, high-energy. Kick Out The Jams was a great tune, but the... thing about the 5, though, was that they were all caught up with this political thing, too. They had that Trans-Love thing going on, and lots of hippie politics. That aspect of the band didn't really resonate with me, but they were good guys, and great players, and they still are, the ones that are left. Fred Smith was a really good songwriter — real simple.
Solo Reed captured shortly after his departure from original art-punkers, The Velvet Underground
I loved that Loaded album [final Velvet Underground album, from 1970], I used to play it all the time. A couple of years later, the Raw Power Stooges played Max's Kansas City [legendary rock 'n' roll club] in New York, and Lou came in and sat down at our table and was trying to pitch us to do a couple... of his songs. Because of course he was in the last wave of the Tin Pan Alley music writers. I had to inform him, "We write our own songs, Lou, we don't want any of yours!" Maybe in hindsight we were stupid, because he does write good songs.
Inspirational 1978 performance from US punk's high priestess
She's a good friend. When I first went to New York in The Stooges, we always would stay at the Chelsea Hotel, and they had coffee makers in the room. I was making coffee, and in those days I was using sugar, so I knocked on Ig's door and said, "You know anybody around here? I need some sugar." And he said, "Well, I know... this girl upstairs," so I went knocking on her door, and I said, "Hey, I'm here in the hotel with the Stooges, and, er, do you have any sugar?" So that was the first time I met Patti Smith. She lived there of course, so she had sugar!
Early recordings of NYC's proto-punk trash-rockers
We were contemporaries of The New York Dolls, and I really liked those guys. We'd see them on tours and stuff, and hang with them sometimes when we were in New York. I knew The Ramones a little bit as well. When they'd come out to Hollywood, they'd hang with me. They were nice guys!
High-speed early-'80s alt-rock, with jazz chops. Features current Stooges bassist, Mike Watt.
This album was the heyday for those guys. It's a good record. They were great players unlike some bands in the punk era, and Mike's really a talented musician. Today, in his own band, he's writing what he calls operas, but they're basically a huge string of one-minute songs, and they play them back to back [à la vintage Minutemen], and... it's amazing to see how they can remember all that stuff — there's maybe 30 or 40 of those things back to back. He's a very astute student of the industry as well, so he an interesting guy to work with.
I didn't pay attention to any of this kind of music when I was out of the business. At first I didn't even believe that all these guys were copying my style. I'm like Rip van Winkle, I just left everything and went to sleep.
The latest Bad Seeds opus, full of simmering psychodrama
We played in Australia with them. I do feel that Nick's live act — I think he's taken a few pages out of Iggy's book. There's nothing wrong with that — I mean, even The Boss [i.e. Bruce Springsteen] crowd-surfs now. You gotta go with what works, right?
The Stooges’ eMusic Essentials
To celebrate the new Iggy & The Stooges album Ready To Die, we invited guitarist James Williamson to rifle through eMusic’s catalog and talk us through some of his favorite albums. You can read about the legendary guitarist’s choices below.
Andrew Perry interviews the band about their remarkable comeback album here.
I love Muddy Waters, he'd always have a couple entries in my Top 20. I saw him play in Detroit. I actually liken that scene to The Stooges, because at that time all the British guys were coming over and playing the blues back to us [Americans], and at some point, you go, "Well, that's good, but it ain't the real thing," so then we'd start going [back] to the old guys... and listening to them, and in a way that's what happened to us: people are coming back to watch us, because we did the original work. We're kind of the old blues guys of rock!
Iggy went to live in Chicago, pre-Stooges, to check out that scene. He was the drummer for a band called The Prime Movers, and they were very much a Chicago Blues-style band. They were quite good actually.
There's a lot of real esoteric original delta blues — Robert Johnson and all those guys — and you just can't touch them. I haven't tried to play it much, but I love to listen to this stuff.
I didn't ever see him myself, but Iggy took him out on the road, and I think they made a record, or at least a couple of songs together. I initially got in contact with Fat Possum because RL Burnside, Junior and all those guys were on that label. I started looking at their catalogue, and I said, "Hey you guys, I'm this guitar player, could you send me some of your... stuff?" and they ended up sending me this huge boxful of almost everybody that was interesting on their catalog. So I'm quite familiar with their stuff!
more »I like the Black Keys, especially this later stuff. It's some of their best songwriting.
All this Motown stuff was in the air while we were growing up in Detroit. Stevie Wonder would actually play at the state fair, which was just an open field basically with a bunch of equipment, and he'd be on a stage which wasn't more than two feet high, with four guys around the edges so he wouldn't fall off, and he'd play "Fingertips," right up close and personal. I love "Superstition"... too — it's a great song.
more »Coltrane was a master. A Love Supreme, that's also an amazing record. He was completely plugged into something.
My favorite is the Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett, which would've been in the mid-to-late '70s, but Spheres is pretty good, too, from around the same time. He's an improvisational pianist, and some of the things he's done are just incredible, very free, almost jazzy sometimes, but very melodic. He's also played with a ton of very good musicians.
I was a huge Yardbirds fan, I saw them play both with Jeff Beck and with Jimmy Page. That was prominent in my evolution. They were so exciting. They had a big hit over here with 'For Your Love', and then that attracted a lot of people to get their albums and stuff, and those albums were incredible, like Over Under Sideways Down — all those songs. Jeff Beck is one of... my very top guitar heroes. A couple of years ago, we were in France, but we came over to the UK to see an artist, and he was playing with her, so I got to meet him backstage, and that was a big thrill for me.
more »Before I joined The Stooges, we had a friend in common: Ron Richardson, who was the manager for the first band I helped found, called The Chosen Few. He was someone Ron Asheton knew, and he went out to California for the Monterey pop festival, and brought back home Are You Experienced? It was just a game-changer for all of us — after that, nothing was the same.
I was into Bob Dylan even more than Iggy was. I patterned my whole life around Bob Dylan. He would be No. 1 on my list, every record he made except for a few, I like 'em all! Bringing It All Back Home is a great album.
The MC5 were well established at the time when The Stooges started. I wasn't in the band at that time, but I saw all those guys play at the Grande Ballroom and so forth. They were pretty mindblowing, I always liked them. They were quote-unquote, high-energy. Kick Out The Jams was a great tune, but the thing about the 5, though, was that they were all caught up with this political thing,... too. They had that Trans-Love thing going on, and lots of hippie politics. That aspect of the band didn't really resonate with me, but they were good guys, and great players, and they still are, the ones that are left. Fred Smith was a really good songwriter — real simple.
more »I loved that Loaded album [final Velvet Underground album, from 1970], I used to play it all the time. A couple of years later, the Raw Power Stooges played Max's Kansas City [legendary rock 'n' roll club] in New York, and Lou came in and sat down at our table and was trying to pitch us to do a couple of his songs. Because of course he was in the last wave... of the Tin Pan Alley music writers. I had to inform him, "We write our own songs, Lou, we don't want any of yours!" Maybe in hindsight we were stupid, because he does write good songs.
more »She's a good friend. When I first went to New York in The Stooges, we always would stay at the Chelsea Hotel, and they had coffee makers in the room. I was making coffee, and in those days I was using sugar, so I knocked on Ig's door and said, "You know anybody around here? I need some sugar." And he said, "Well, I know this girl upstairs," so I went knocking... on her door, and I said, "Hey, I'm here in the hotel with the Stooges, and, er, do you have any sugar?" So that was the first time I met Patti Smith. She lived there of course, so she had sugar!
more »We were contemporaries of The New York Dolls, and I really liked those guys. We'd see them on tours and stuff, and hang with them sometimes when we were in New York. I knew The Ramones a little bit as well. When they'd come out to Hollywood, they'd hang with me. They were nice guys!
This album was the heyday for those guys. It's a good record. They were great players unlike some bands in the punk era, and Mike's really a talented musician. Today, in his own band, he's writing what he calls operas, but they're basically a huge string of one-minute songs, and they play them back to back [à la vintage Minutemen], and it's amazing to see how they can remember all that stuff... — there's maybe 30 or 40 of those things back to back. He's a very astute student of the industry as well, so he an interesting guy to work with.
I didn't pay attention to any of this kind of music when I was out of the business. At first I didn't even believe that all these guys were copying my style. I'm like Rip van Winkle, I just left everything and went to sleep.
We played in Australia with them. I do feel that Nick's live act — I think he's taken a few pages out of Iggy's book. There's nothing wrong with that — I mean, even The Boss [i.e. Bruce Springsteen] crowd-surfs now. You gotta go with what works, right?
The Stooges’ eMusic Essentials
To celebrate the new Iggy & The Stooges album Ready To Die, we invited guitarist James Williamson to rifle through eMusic’s catalog and talk us through some of his favorite albums. You can read about the legendary guitarist’s choices below.
Andrew Perry interviews the band about their remarkable comeback album here.
Abundant anthology of the Mississippi-born father of Chicago electric blues
I love Muddy Waters, he'd always have a couple entries in my Top 20. I saw him play in Detroit. I actually liken that scene to The Stooges, because at that time all the British guys were coming over and playing the blues back to us [Americans], and at some point, you go, "Well, that's good, but it ain't the real thing," so... then we'd start going [back] to the old guys and listening to them, and in a way that's what happened to us: people are coming back to watch us, because we did the original work. We're kind of the old blues guys of rock!
Iggy went to live in Chicago, pre-Stooges, to check out that scene. He was the drummer for a band called The Prime Movers, and they were very much a Chicago Blues-style band. They were quite good actually.
One of the most revered of the early 20th-century bluesmen, newly re-released on Jack White's label
There's a lot of real esoteric original delta blues — Robert Johnson and all those guys — and you just can't touch them. I haven't tried to play it much, but I love to listen to this stuff.
Another Mississippi bluesman, who played at his own juke joint until his death in 1998, and recorded for Iggy & The Stooges' new label, Fat Possum
I didn't ever see him myself, but Iggy took him out on the road, and I think they made a record, or at least a couple of songs together. I initially got in contact with Fat Possum because RL Burnside, Junior and all those guys were on... that label. I started looking at their catalogue, and I said, "Hey you guys, I'm this guitar player, could you send me some of your stuff?" and they ended up sending me this huge boxful of almost everybody that was interesting on their catalog. So I'm quite familiar with their stuff!
Breakthrough record of fuzzy-blues groovology from Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney
I like the Black Keys, especially this later stuff. It's some of their best songwriting.
The soul legend's first hit single from 1963
All this Motown stuff was in the air while we were growing up in Detroit. Stevie Wonder would actually play at the state fair, which was just an open field basically with a bunch of equipment, and he'd be on a stage which wasn't more than two feet high, with four guys around the edges so he wouldn't fall off, and he'd play "Fingertips," right... up close and personal. I love "Superstition" too — it's a great song.
Inspirational '60s free-jazz alto-saxophonist on fiercely improvisational form
Coltrane was a master. A Love Supreme, that's also an amazing record. He was completely plugged into something.
Mid-'60s British Invaders, whose succession of top-name guitarists paved the way between R&B beat-pop and psychedelia
I was a huge Yardbirds fan, I saw them play both with Jeff Beck and with Jimmy Page. That was prominent in my evolution. They were so exciting. They had a big hit over here with 'For Your Love', and then that attracted a lot of people to get their albums and stuff, and those albums were... incredible, like Over Under Sideways Down — all those songs. Jeff Beck is one of my very top guitar heroes. A couple of years ago, we were in France, but we came over to the UK to see an artist, and he was playing with her, so I got to meet him backstage, and that was a big thrill for me.
Sizzling live set from the dying days of the Experience
Before I joined The Stooges, we had a friend in common: Ron Richardson, who was the manager for the first band I helped found, called The Chosen Few. He was someone Ron Asheton knew, and he went out to California for the Monterey pop festival, and brought back home Are You Experienced? It was just a game-changer for all of us — after... that, nothing was the same.
Ace Dylan comp, structured around 1965's half-electric Bringing It All Back Home album
I was into Bob Dylan even more than Iggy was. I patterned my whole life around Bob Dylan. He would be No. 1 on my list, every record he made except for a few, I like 'em all! Bringing It All Back Home is a great album.
Agit-political revolutionary combo from Detroit who, circa 1968, were the "big brother" band to the formative Stooges
The MC5 were well established at the time when The Stooges started. I wasn't in the band at that time, but I saw all those guys play at the Grande Ballroom and so forth. They were pretty mindblowing, I always liked them. They were quote-unquote, high-energy. Kick Out The Jams was a great tune, but the... thing about the 5, though, was that they were all caught up with this political thing, too. They had that Trans-Love thing going on, and lots of hippie politics. That aspect of the band didn't really resonate with me, but they were good guys, and great players, and they still are, the ones that are left. Fred Smith was a really good songwriter — real simple.
Solo Reed captured shortly after his departure from original art-punkers, The Velvet Underground
I loved that Loaded album [final Velvet Underground album, from 1970], I used to play it all the time. A couple of years later, the Raw Power Stooges played Max's Kansas City [legendary rock 'n' roll club] in New York, and Lou came in and sat down at our table and was trying to pitch us to do a couple... of his songs. Because of course he was in the last wave of the Tin Pan Alley music writers. I had to inform him, "We write our own songs, Lou, we don't want any of yours!" Maybe in hindsight we were stupid, because he does write good songs.
Early recordings of NYC's proto-punk trash-rockers
We were contemporaries of The New York Dolls, and I really liked those guys. We'd see them on tours and stuff, and hang with them sometimes when we were in New York. I knew The Ramones a little bit as well. When they'd come out to Hollywood, they'd hang with me. They were nice guys!
High-speed early-'80s alt-rock, with jazz chops. Features current Stooges bassist, Mike Watt.
This album was the heyday for those guys. It's a good record. They were great players unlike some bands in the punk era, and Mike's really a talented musician. Today, in his own band, he's writing what he calls operas, but they're basically a huge string of one-minute songs, and they play them back to back [à la vintage Minutemen], and... it's amazing to see how they can remember all that stuff — there's maybe 30 or 40 of those things back to back. He's a very astute student of the industry as well, so he an interesting guy to work with.
I didn't pay attention to any of this kind of music when I was out of the business. At first I didn't even believe that all these guys were copying my style. I'm like Rip van Winkle, I just left everything and went to sleep.
The latest Bad Seeds opus, full of simmering psychodrama
We played in Australia with them. I do feel that Nick's live act — I think he's taken a few pages out of Iggy's book. There's nothing wrong with that — I mean, even The Boss [i.e. Bruce Springsteen] crowd-surfs now. You gotta go with what works, right?
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Brooklyn Babylon
Florid with moment-to-moment intrigue and a fine document of an artist with a lot to say
With Infernal Machines, Darcy James Argue seemed to come out of nowhere: Who was this guy who wrote tunes drawing equally from the big band tradition as well as post-rock and classical minimalism? Why did he call his music “steampunk-jazz?” The reality was that this composer-bandleader came from the practice hall, where he’d been drilling his band for several years. Infernal Machines bowled us over with a fully formed, highly unique vision.
Brooklyn Babylon is his follow-up and, after a Grammy nod as well as three of DownBeat’s “rising star” awards, the album has got a lot of following up to do. A 53-minute suite originally written as one half of a visual-art-and-music spectacle at the Brooklyn Academy of Music back in 2011, the studio-recording version of Brooklyn Babylon raises a few questions of its own: Is this a proper jazz record, or is it a one-dimensional document of a live multi-media project? And: does it matter?
The answer does matter. If this were just a callback to some live event, it would be of interest mostly to those who attended the shows. But the first two tracks — “Prologue” and “The Neighborhood” — advertise that the new music here will be able to carry this idiosyncratic album on its own terms. The first piece features some high-spirited marching band romping-about, as well as a striking tenor sax solo from Sam Sadigursky. The second tune, after opening with a minimalist piano quote from LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” pairs electric bass with a sweetly idyllic clarinet solo that never gets too saccharine, thanks to some tart, brassy interruptions in the background. (Argue didn’t win that “arranger” DownBeat award for nothing.) The whole thing blooms into an electric guitar-driven section that, in turn, deftly morphs back into a reprise of its opening piano motif.
And there’s still more than 40 minutes of inventive music like that left to discover. Some of the pieces feature wooden flutes, others Afro-Peruvian percussion. Ingrid Jensen’s electric trumpet solo in “Building” calls to mind Miles’s best fusion bands. That all these sounds work together so elegantly is evidence of expert execution, not just singular vision; the entire program flows in a way that many modern-classical composers ought to envy. And you don’t need to look up the plotline of the (wordless) stage show — it was about an architect commissioned to build the world tallest carousel amid “embattled neighborhoods” — in order to enjoy the music. Argue’s curiosity and skill at integrating all his fascinations represent the humanism of the narrative capably on its own. Both florid with moment-to-moment intrigue and a fine document of an artist with a lot to say (and the ambition to match), Brooklyn Babylon is essential listening for all sorts of musical communities.
Hanni El Khatib, Head in the Dirt
Scuzzy, no-nonsense blues-rock
Tracked entirely at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye studio in Nashville, Hanni El Khatib’s sophomore outing lives up to its title. Head in the Dirt is loaded with raw, scuzzy, no-nonsense blues-rock, its lyrics telling of misfit isolation, relationship angst and hardscrabble street life.
Plenty has already been said about the garage revival spearheaded by the likes of Ty Segall, JEFF the Brotherhood and Mikal Cronin, but what sets El Khatib apart is his fascination with the rootsier end of rock ‘n’ roll — think Bo Diddley and Ballin’ Jack. Thanks to his Bay Area skate-park roots, he absorbed these influences through the dual prisms of hip-hop and punk, which made his 2011 debut Will the Guns Come Out a muzzle-blast of slashing guitars, gravel-crunching beats and rebel swagger.
El Khatib’s growth as a songwriter takes Head in the Dirt a step further, but it doesn’t hurt that he has an ass-kicking band behind him (Auerbach on bass, Bobby Emmett on keyboards and Patrick Keeler on drums). The title track swirls out of a psychedelic haze into a razor-sharp groove, with El Khatib snarling into a distorted microphone, “Don’t want your empathy/ The road to my heart is narrow and covered with thorns.” Despite that grim sentiment, El Khatib is mostly having fun; you can hear it in the guitar solo that rips through “Skinny Little Girl,” in the twists and shouts of “Save Me” (which reprises the evergreen “Not Fade Away” shuffle beat, and in the pure elation of the scuzz-pop ditty “Penny” (“You’re my perfect little penny/ So please shine on”). Vintage amps buzzing all around him, El Khatib sounds right at home in the Black Keys’ sandbox.
David Lang, Death Speaks
A reassuring and comforting text, played by a remarkable ensemble
First, I feel it’s important to say that, as of this writing, David Lang is nowhere near death. I see him walking through the neighborhood from time to time and he is his usual cheery, deadpan self. And yet the Bang on A Can co-founder has produced an incandescent string of pieces in recent years focused exclusively on death and dying. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Little Match Girl Passion gravely watches a poor young girl freeze to death as passersby ignore her. His yet-to-be-recorded Love Fail takes an oblique look at the fatal love affair between Tristan and Isolde. His haunting, drifting Salle des Departs (recorded here under the title “Depart”) was written for a hospital morgue. And then there’s Death Speaks, a five-movement work which takes up most of this recording. Here, death is not an event, but a figure, like something out of an engraving by Albrecht Dürer. But unlike the American folk song “O Death,” in which Death is a scary, implacable foe — the singer asks, “oh Death, won’t you pass me over another year” — Lang has assembled a text in which Death is addressing us, with a message that is ultimately reassuring, and comforting.
The text is built around the many and varied instances in the songs of Franz Schubert in which the figure of Death speaks. The music, as in the other death-themed works named above, has a transparent texture that sets off and subtly colors those texts, and the voice delivering it. That voice belongs to Shara Worden, one of the current breed of musicians who move fluidly between the worlds of classical music and indie rock. While still leading her own band, My Brightest Diamond, Worden has become the go-to voice for the so-called “indie classical” crowd. The rest of the ensemble here is equally remarkable: Bryce Dessner, one of the twin electric guitarists from the popular rock band The National, and a fine composer himself; Owen Pallett, the violinist, vocalist and composer who formerly recorded as Final Fantasy; and Nico Muhly, the in-demand composer and keyboardist whose works range from choral to electronic. With essentially an all-star band, Lang has chosen to write music which is not conventionally virtuosic, relying instead of the quartet’s musicality and precision. The results are quietly stunning. Highlights include the gentle, chiming minimalism of part 1, “You Will Return”; the resonant percussive use of the piano’s bass end in part 2, “I Hear You”; the deft, rhythmic use of the violin in part 3, “Mist Is Rising”; and the lovely duet that blossoms in part 5, “I Am Walking.”
After Death Speaks, the album invites you to relax in the dark-hued but warm ambience of “Depart,” for chorus and strings. Probably best not to think too much of the French morgue for which it was written.
The Melvins, Everybody Loves Sausages
The band's sincere love of music of all kinds really shines through
When The Melvins put out an album of covers, a little irreverence, both in song choice and in execution, is to be expected. Deciding to replicate the electric piano intro to Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend” with some chintzy-sounding Casio tones, and completely disregarding the second verse of the song: par for the course. Turning The Jam’s “Art School” into an oi-punk anthem, complete with introductory chanting and a spoken outro from someone affecting an over-the-top British accent (“Is this too Rough Trade?”): not surprising. And if any other group puts a Throbbing Gristle homage and the theme to John Waters’s Female Trouble on the same LP, please contact us immediately. But when Buzz Osbourne, in the press materials, states unequivocally that “we REALLY like all of these songs,” he’s not just flapping his gums. The group (joined by a handful of friends, including Neurosis’s Scott Kelly, Foetus’s JG Thirwell and Mudhoney’s Mark Arm) tears through obscurities from nearly forgotten California punk groups like Pop-O-Pies and Tales of Terror with the same eagerness and fervor that’s bestowed upon faithful renditions of Venom’s “Warhead” and David Bowie’s “Station To Station.” That said, it’s when The Kinks’ fuddy-duddy late-era track “Attitude” is turned into a great Buzzcocks outtake, or The Fugs’ “Carpe Diem” becomes a long-lost Nuggets track, that the adventurous spirit of Everybody Loves Sausages, and The Melvins’ sincere love of music of all kinds, really shines through.
Akron/Family, Sub Verses
Working with adventurous influences to brute, yet majestic ends
A cabin on the side of an active volcano is a captivating image. There, pastoral peace shares space with violent bombast; the world is a fury, a wonder. As a metaphor it’s an exceptional fit for Akron/Family’s music; as a real place, it served as the location from the writing of their last release, 2011′s ecstatic S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT. Some two years later the band has come down from the mountain and crawled down into the doom basement (studio) of Seattle producer Randall Dunn. The new songs take aim at familiar targets (harmony, frenzy), but find the band working with an adventurous set of influences to brute, yet majestic ends.
The album flips between prog-psych freak-outs, monastic slow jams, Afro-pop rhythm and noise-addled soul. Reverb drenched vocals, swells of minor-keyed strings, futzed electronics, complex drum rhythms smack against handclaps, jangly guitars and lightly spaced tambourine, and horns. The tracks skid from one time signature or influence to another, but feel of a whole — like some take on American roots by way of a post-industrial Africa invaded by Eastern shamans. On paper, it sounds haphazard, incomplete. But Akron/Family build these disparate parts into something explosive or holy or both, time and again on Sub Verses. There’s no mythic volcano to stamp the narrative; there’s only a radical harmony, divergent strands threading together.
Daughter, If You Leave
Hushed and delicate portrayals of loveless lives, dissonant relationships and bleak futures
The London trio Daughter usually gets filed under folk or indie-folk, but their music bears no traces of strum-and-stomp barnstorming or campfire confessional. The band interprets folk the same way Jason Molina records do: dusky guitars, spare arrangements, sparse beats and anguished vocals thrust into the spotlight. Daughter’s full-length debut, If You Leave, softens this stark foundation with chilly atmospheric effects, lyrics haunted by romantic angst and rebirth, and Elena Tonra’s low-lit voice, which is as hazy and tortured as Chan Marshall sounded on early Cat Power records. The results are often hushed and delicate; “Smother” is lovely slow-core, both “Amsterdam” and “Winter” resemble Bat for Lashes, and the relatively upbeat “Human” echoes the whimsy of Sigur Ros’s folkier moments.
Yet Daughter isn’t easily pigeonholed; If You Leave‘s biting moments sting like an icy wind. “Youth” transforms from a somber lullaby into a galloping, battle-scarred treatise on failed relationships (“If you’re in love, then you are the lucky one/’Cause most of us are bitter over someone”), while electric guitar simmers underneath the surface of “Lifeforms” before crescendoing into distressed post-rock howls. The record is desolate and desperate in equal measures. Little by little, If You Leave‘s portrayals of loveless lives, dissonant relationships and bleak futures burrow under the skin, lingering long after the album ends.
Coliseum, Sister Faith
Direct and tuneful, replacing raw, loose rhythms with more economical song structures
Over the past two years, Louisville, Kentucky’s Coliseum have completed their evolution from a storming, metallic hardcore powerhouse to a more musically refined post-punk band. The group’s fourth full-length, Sister Faith is direct and tuneful, replacing raw, loose rhythms with more economical song structures. The album was produced by J Robbins, which explains the Jawbox influence, but there are also strains of Fugazi and Quicksand present in the barbed hooks.
As much as the music seems driven by the members’ collective record collections, Ryan Patterson’s lyrics seem to stem from an inability and unwillingness to fit into the mainstream and the toll it has taken. “All my life, failure, All I see, failure/ All my dreams, failure,” he barks in “Last/Lost” before concluding, “See clearly from failure, live freely from failure.” And on “Fuzzbang,” he rails, “Gotta get away, wish we could close our eyes and dream it all away.” Patterson’s resigned discontent shines through Coliseum’s tunes, which steamroll without obliterating and cut without leaving scars regardless of tempo or intensity.
Iggy & the Stooges, Ready to Die
A genuine rebirth of a sneering, vital band, defiant as ever
Few albums are so misleadingly titled as Ready to Die. The first release in 40 years under the “Iggy & the Stooges” banner sounds nothing like resignation; its taut 10 songs — clocking in at an old-school 34 minutes — constitute a genuine rebirth of a sneering, vital band, defiant as ever. Iggy Pop’s voice retains its feral power on searing opener “Burn” and lower-middle class anthem “Job,” while his deep croon conveys poignancy on the woebegone closer “The Departed.” Not-so-secret weapon James Williamson, retired from his job at Sony, is back in the fold, replacing the late Ron Asheton, and reminding listeners how integral his gracefully primal guitar playing and hooky songwriting were to seminal 1973 Stooges classic Raw Power. Bassist Mike Watt’s muscular, supple lines propel everything forward, even flirting with Motown-y funk on hilarious horndog anthem “DD,” while original Stooge drummer Scott “Rock Action” Asheton keeps it all earthbound, but just barely.