The Sonics – “This Is the Sonics” (2015)
The mighty Sonics are back!! This review comes from the Pitchfork website, April 3rd. Written by Jason Heller…
If garage rock was conceived in the ’60s as the primal sound of teenage boredom, frustration, and angst, what does it mean when men in their seventies attempt to play it? There’s probably a deep and worthy discussion to be had somewhere in there, but the Sonics don’t give a shit about that, nor should they. The Tacoma band’s new release This Is the Sonics is their first studio album of all-new material in 49 years, and that fact alone is staggering. What’s even more remarkable, though, is how one of garage rock’s most legendary bands has dared to test their legend by making a record that spits, snarls, drools, honks, wails, and screams as if it were 1966 all over again.
Granted, recording with Jim Diamond doesn’t hurt. The former Dirtbombs bassist and famed producer of the White Stripes’ self-titled debut spares no grime or fuzz. The album was recorded mono, live in the studio. “Bad Betty”, the most powerful original composition on the album, hints at the rock-appropriated folklore of Black Betty in its title while remaining gleefully ignorant of anything except how to pound a riff into the ground in execution. Vocalist/keyboardist Jerry Roslie sings of the wild, leather-clad woman who puts his own savagery to shame, the septeguenarian whooping and screeching like a tomcat in heat.
Roslie is joined by fellow founding members Larry Parypa on guitar and vocals and Rob Lind on saxophone and vocals; the lineup is rounded out by bassist Freddie Dennis (a veteran of the Kingsmen, one of the Sonics’ Pacific Northwest garage-rock brethren in the ’60s) and drummer Dusty Watson. Together they lock into a single-minded, almost monomaniacal unit, pulverizing numbers like “Be a Woman” and “Spend the Night” into lumps of distorted, house-wrecking lust. Roslie’s voice, though, is the star. Still steeped in the R&B of his youth, his corroded pipes—which produced godlike shrieks on ’60s Sonics classics like “Strychnine”, “The Witch”, and “Have Love Will Travel”—sound somehow rawer.
R&B informed the Sonics’ unhinged passion from the get-go, and This Is the Sonics pays proper homage to the group’s roots. Willie Dixon’s “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover”—by way of Bo Diddley’s iconic version—is given a giddy workout, with Lind’s sax squawking nauseously over a jackhammer backbeat. Eddie Holland’s “Leaving Here” gets similar treatment; the fact that it’s one of garage rock’s most threadbare standards doesn’t keep the Sonics from putting a fresh coat of paint on it. The best cover on the album, though, is of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ “Look at Little Sister”, whose hoot-and-holler horniness is rendered simultaneously sleazy and boyish. Less successful is a rendition of The Kinks’ “The Hard Way”, which the Sonics rip through a little too quickly for the melody to survive intact.
No song on This Is the Sonics summarizes the band’s grizzled, miraculous resurrection like “Save the Planet”. In it, they thumb their noses at the hippie platitudes that helped render garage rock (briefly) extinct in the ’60s; Parypa’s bluesy, sneering riff is more of a taunt than a hook, and Roslie makes it crystal clear why he believes Earth should be preserved: “We have to save the planet / It’s the only one with beer!” King Khan, one of the Sonics’ most faithful spiritual offspring, couldn’t have put it better himself. The Sonics’ children are legion, and every generation of garage rockers owes them. Roslie and crew surely know this, but from the timeless sound of This Is the Sonics, they might just as well be oblivious to their legacy. Legacies are for the dead. The Sonics are alive and viciously well.
Jason Heller
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20212-this-is-the-sonics/
Sananda Maitreya – “Return to Zooathalon” (2013)
This article/review comes from The New Yorker, dated June 4, 2013 and written by Ben Greenman. He talks about the former Terence Trent D’Arby’s career and reviews his then-current album Return to Zooathalon…
Whatever Happened to Terence Trent D’Arby?
The day Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby came out, in the fall of 1987, I bought it, on cassette, in a state of fevered anticipation. I had been reading about D’Arby all summer: the record, released in England that July, had become an instant sensation, topping the charts and earning comparisons to everyone from Prince to Michael Jackson to Sam Cooke. It remains an audacious début that brought soul music into the eighties, with hits like “If You Let Me Stay,” “Wishing Well,” “Sign Your Name,” and the Smokey-through-Michael-Jackson cover “Who’s Loving You.” The importance of the music was matched by the self-importance of its creator: D’Arby claimed that his album was the most monumental piece of pop music since Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and used nearly every interview to anoint himself a peerless genius. Because of D’Arby’s evident talent, these assertions were both irritating and exciting.
Two years later, there was another record, Neither Fish Nor Flesh, a compelling sidestep that frontloaded three long ballads, and, as a result, blunted the force of the balance of the album, which consisted of powerful, soulful, and funky compositions that were every bit the equal of the début (“This Side of Love” remains one of his finest moments). The mixed reception to the record also effectively killed D’Arby’s commercial momentum. Then there were two more records, Symphony or Damn, in 1993, and TTD’s Vibrator, in 1995, uneven releases that seemed, at the time, like object lessons in diminishing returns. D’Arby didn’t want to play the superstar game, at least the way it was supposed to be played; he could be silly one moment and solemn the next, and he had a penchant for releasing singles with B-sides that were little more than wordless piano improvisations. And then he vanished, or so it seemed.
When D’Arby returned, in 2001, he had a new album, an independently released opus called Wildcard that included a soaring opener, “O Divina,” and songs co-written with hit-makers like Glen Ballard and Dallas Austin. But he wasn’t Terence Trent D’Arby anymore. Or, rather, he was and he wasn’t. The album was released under both that name and the name Sananda Maitreya (which he had adopted during his years away from recording, and which he legally took in 2001). Wildcard was re-released in 2002, and this time there was no trace of Terence Trent D’Arby: it was a Sananda Maitreya album in full. He was typically maximalist in his explanation of the change: “Terence Trent D’Arby was dead,” he said. “He watched his suffering as he died a noble death. After intense pain I meditated for a new spirit, a new will, a new identity.”
There were other changes, too. After the slow demise of his major-label career, Maitreya moved to Munich and then Milan, where he settled in 2002. The following year, he married the Italian architect and television host Francesca Francone. Many artists of his (former) stature would have stopped making music, or contented themselves with nostalgia tours, belting out lazily played arrangements of “Wishing Well” for decades. But Maitreya was as stubborn and ambitious as D’Arby had been. In Milan, he started to make music again, creating it mostly on his own (he borrowed the “Written, Arranged, Produced, and Performed” credit from Prince). He distributed his songs primarily through his Web site, occasionally packaging them into multi-phase albums and selling CDs. It took him a while to develop a working pace and a release schedule, but once he did, he created as much as he ever had: Angels and Vampires – Volume 1 came out in 2005; Angels and Vampires – Volume 2, the next year; Nigor Mortis, in 2009; and The Sphinx, in 2011.
All of the albums were proudly unclassifiable, veering between straightforward soul ballads, idiosyncratic experiments, personal confessions, and instrumental fragments. Nigor Mortis, for example, had a wordy bit of neo-soul (“This Town”), a jazzy dissection of intimacy in relationships (“A Wife Knows”), and a bit of raga-flavored hard rock (“Mrs. Gupta”). Along the way, Maitreya also created a mini genre of similarly titled odes to various women, possibly mythological (not just “O Divina” but, also, “O Lovely Gwenita,” “Ooh Carolina,” and “O Jacaranda,” which he rhymes with “I wanna be your panda,” a reasonable request). They weren’t records that major labels would have released, or could have.
This spring, right on schedule, Maitreya released Return to Zooathalon, a sprawling album that’s just as baffling, uneven, and wonderful as his best work. Listing its influences is exhausting: there’s Beatles and Stones and Motown and Sam Cooke and Prince, of course, but there’s also plenty of jazz and prog, not to mention yacht rock and arena rock.
At twenty-two songs, in fact, there’s a little bit of everything. There’s a two-part “Stagger Lee,” which has little to do with the classic Lloyd Price song and everything to do with gritty soul, something he still excels at more than a quarter-century after his début. There’s a cracked self-portrait (“Mr. Gruberschnickel”), a broken love song based on a preposterous pun (“Tequila Mockinbird”), a scene piece worthy of Jimmy Webb (“Albuquerque”), and a pair of instrumental compositions to wrap the whole thing up, one for kazoo (“D.H.S.”) and the other for piano (“The Last Train to Houston”). What there is, mostly, is a conspicuous commitment to artwork and the messy, miraculous process of creation, which is a strange thing to say about a pop album at this point in time. How does the earnest, open-hearted “Free to Be” sit comfortably next to the surging, bitter “Kangaroo” (“Will I ever learn to jump like you?”)? It doesn’t, and that’s one of the album’s greatest assets. Throughout, pop melodies are wrapped around lyrics so specific and idiosyncratic that they demand (and reward) repeated listenings.
And there’s a song to a woman, of course: “Ornella or Nothing,” which sings the praises of a girl who “punches poets just to keep it real” and features one of the loveliest choruses of his career. More than a decade after leaving American and British soul stardom behind, Maitreya still has it all, at least artistically. That’s the hardline.
Ben Greenman
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/whatever-happened-to-terence-trent-darby
The Beat Patrol 