Michael Tarbox used to lead a great band called Tarbox Ramblers. Hailing from the Boston area, Tarbox Ramblers were the leaders of the new blues revival for the past 15 years with a blend of academic and heartfelt approach that won our hearts. The first album for Rounder Records in 2000 was a furious collection of authentic and raw blues which relied on the primitive traditions on North Mississippi blues and Appalachian folk. The second album also for Rounder A Fix Back East was a step towards rock roots, split produced by one and only Jim Dickinson and Paul Q. Kolderie who we know best from his work with Morphine. Then, a long decade with sporadic limited edition discography followed.
Through all that time, Michael Tarbox all but stood idle. He toured with a revolving line up the country multiple times, even entered the studio a few times. The songs were ready, but the band had a chronic problem with drummers. Without the record label, struggling to keep the band together, and perhaps some other reasons, Michael decided to crowdfund his next record last year, without much help from the outside. The new album, Works and Days is the outcome.
Without pretensions, the record is simply imagined as a collection of songs, without a particular theme that connects them. This is understandable, the record has been conceived over a large period of time, but the variety actually contributes to the overall quality of this new record. In the long period since 2004, I can only imagine that there was a lot of songs to choose from, but Michael and his producer friend Chris Rival have good ears and experience to identify those songs that worked particularly well in the studio at the time of recording.
In essence, the record is an emotional aggregate of many changes that Michael went through. The friendships that were evolving, struggles that they were going through and the arrival of his daughter. But the good news is that the relief is in the art. This truly comes through in this record.
Sound-wise, the new record dwells even more into rock territory. While the first record was almost entirely filled with traditionals, the new record, much like the second one is filled with original songs. From wild rocking Hey Mister Starlight over Lou Reed-like The Night Train To Chelsea to soft and almost spoken word title song The Tower of Works and Days, there is a little bit of every rock’n’roll taste on this record.The final result is intimate and exciting, and for me at least, long awaited record that will stick around for quite some time.
First published on rockxs.com.
While Tame Impala is becoming one of the most popular bands in the world at the moment, there are also other bands, making up together a very strong and promising new psychedelic and garage rock scene over in Australia. We learned this fact last year thorough a very interesting tribute to the legendary Nuggets. A number of young Australian rockers covered each one song from the original Nuggets for its fortieth anniversary and the result was the new compilation record known as Nuggets: Antipodean Interpolations of the First Psychedelic Era. One of the central roles on that compilation record was a seven-piece with a silly band name King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard who covered Open My Eyes by The Nazz. They also have a new record out called Eyes Like The Sky, which is a topic of today’s review.
New American rock was a musical label worth carrying in the late eighties. Being a part of that scene meant that you belong to the most innovative group of musicians on the scene, and that you possess a direct link to more traditional rock roots. One of the bands that proudly carried the “new American rock” label back in the day was The Sidewinders from Tucson, AZ.
Golden Boys are a five piece from Austin, Texas. The best known name in the band is John Wesley Coleman III, who is known in Austin and elsewhere not only as one of the Golden Boys, but also as a singer songwriter, stand up comedian and a trash poet. But, according to what I could find about the band, it seems that Matt Hoopengardner and Bryan Schmitz, on two guitars and main vocals, are the main driving forces behind the Golden Boys.
Jesse Lee Smith is a fellow that hails from the Atlanta rock’n’roll scene that gave us many interesting garage rock bands in the past few years. One of the bands that started it all was the Ramones influenced quintet The Carbonas and Jesse played bass in it. He had a somewhat more complex vision on what his music should be, so he started a solo career with a rotating line up of musicians simply referred to as “his men”.
After several years of personal hell, Dan Stuart is finally back. His old band, legendary Green On Red, disbanded in 1992, and Dan tried to continue solo. After a record with Al Perry in 1993 and the first solo album in 1995, Dan disappeared from the music business.
Natural Child is a trio from Nashville TN. When you hear Nashville, the immediate association is country music. These three guys though, sound like they could be from Atlanta or Memphis. What we have here is a garage rock dealing. And it’s a lucky draw.
In the past decade or so, we witnessed a surge of reunions, particularly of bands that meant something in the seventies and the eighties. Some of the bands just tour, perhaps make a live album and try to relive the past without changing much. Others make new records. Often times the motive is to draw larger crowds to the gigs than each band member would individually, or perhaps these bands simply want to go back to the youthful years. In any case, reunions are typically in shadows of the famous past. Exceptions to the rules are scarce. I can only think of Mission of Burma and their reunion album On Off On which is as great as anything they did before, if not better, more mature and stronger piece. Now we have a new example in Redd Kross.
Eamon McGrath comes from Canada. He grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canadian Western province, North of the US state of Montana, with lots of prairies. This is where he started to come up with his first songs, recording them in his house and distributing them around on cd-rs to friends and fans. There is about 15 to 20 of those proto albums that he made in very small amount of copies and it is unclear what exactly is contained in those releases. Perhaps some songs repeated in multiple versions, but what we can tell for sure, they were all recorded relatively cheaply in lo-fi technology.
When the story of Husker Du ended in 1988, Grant Hart briefly started a solo career, only to put together a new band in 1990 called Nova Mob with two of his Minneapolis friends: Tom Merkl on bass and Michael Crego on drums. The group’s first album was something nobody wanted from Grant Hart in 1991. It was a rock opera with a seemingly bizarre libretto. It was a make believe story with real life characters about the engineer of the Nazi V8 bomb and one of the leaders of the US space program, Wernher Von Braun. In the opera, Von Braun finds himself towards the end of the World War Two on a losing side with a desire to escape. In a prayer to Germanic god Woton, Von Braun asks for an ability to travel in time, which Woton grants through a gateway. Von Braun first travels in future, he learns out about all the space achievements which he would end up contributing in the 50s and 60s. In his adventures, Von Braun runs into the Roman lawyer Pliny.