RECENT LISTENING #37

Mountain Movers, Magik Markers, The Sea and Cake, Carnivorous Bells, Sly's Stone Flower 1969-70, Robert Scott & Takumi Motokawa, David Nance, Blind Owl Wilson

MOUNTAIN MOVERS Walking After Dark 2LP (TROUBLE IN MIND) New Haven psych/scorch guitarist Kryssi Battalene is in two different but very similar bands. There’s Headroom, which she fronts as a vocalist/guitarist/songwriter, and Mountain Movers, which is fronted by vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Dan Greene. Thing is, the rhythm section for both bands is the same (Rick Omonte on bass and Ross Menze on drums), and just as I’m feeling, right or wrong, that there hasn’t been too much action from Headroom in the last couple years, here comes a sprawling new double LP from the Mountain Movers in which they sound more like Headroom than ever. Dan still sings his songs, which still feel deep and instantly familiar, nice and cozy, and Kryssi doubles a lot of the vocals beautifully, but at least 60% of the album has no vocals and consists of the same boldly extended and highly mantric changing-same instrumental explorations that make Headroom so heady to listen to, like the 7-minute “Factory Dream” closing side A, the 14-minute “Reclamation Yard” closing side B, and the 19-minute side-longer “Ice Dream” closing the whole thing out, and now that I’m typing those titles out, and thinking about the album title Walking After Dark, and about Greene’s cover paintings, and about his lyrics, like in the opener “Bodega Mind” when he sings “I’m just walking by/bodega on my mind/I’ll be feeling fine/when I see that neon sign,” which segues dreamily and ambulatorily into “The Sun Shines on the Moon,” where he sings “Still out walking around/the same old parts of town/In the middle of the night/I find my second sight,” and I realize this is absolutely a sprawling double-LP concept album about one dude who goes on one long nighttime walk in his city, a walk the length of the album, an industrial urban nighttime dérive that enables his “second sight” to bring about spiritual visions, perhaps of a harmonious pagan stone age future manifested by music, poetry, and painting. And this is not hippie music!

MAGIK MARKERS A New Kind of World (ARBITRARY SIGNS) (I wrote this review before Minnesota governor and current United States vice presidential candidate Tim Walz started using the word “weird” to describe T***p and his followers, and now think I might’ve lost the ability to use it as a compliment for weird music made by awesome goofballs and weirdos, as I have been doing for years. Oh well, I’ll run the review as written, because you know, as a wise man once said: sometimes words have two meanings.) They’re baaa-aaack (Poltergeist reference, 1982, d. Tobe Hooper) . . . and weirder than ever. You might remember the last major Magik Markers release being their album 2020, released by Drag City indeed in Our Covid Year of 2020, an album that was already weird enough, but now the Markers are back on their own Arbitrary Signs label for this new 2024 release A New Kind of World and it’s actually significantly weirder. We’ve got the same Elisa Ambrogio/John Shaw/Pete Nolan trio lineup as on 2020, but on the 25-minute (!) opening title track, any concession to a straight-ahead guitar/bass/drums approach seems to be out the window. Nolan is not playing a trap set here, instead cryptically credited only with “stylophone drum machine” and “monologue.” Shaw plays “bass/synth,” maybe sounding more synth than bass, and then Ambrogio vamps electric guitar throughout in her ongoing definitive, highly singular, and, yes, very weird style. And over all that, you guessed it: endless fascinating high-literary verbiage from Ambrogio. “God is dead and Marx is dead and I don’t feel so good either” is just one of the 4 or 500 zingers you might notice on the first couple listens. The epic title track is followed by four more tracks that are each in the 4-8 minute range themselves. I’ve only listened to it once, and it kinda scrambled my brain. Do I detect actual Twin Infinitives vibes?

THE SEA AND CAKE The Moonlight Butterfly (THRILL JOCKEY) Shout out to what might be the best Chicago band. By which I mean the best Chicago band out of that whole 1990s post-rock kinda movement that happened here, because the best Chicago band is the Sun Ra Arkestra, it’s Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions, it’s the Art Ensemble of Chicago, it’s Howlin’ Wolf’s band, it’s goddamn Muddy Waters (with Little Walter, Willie Dixon, and Otis Spann backing him up), it’s Phil Cohran’s African Heritage Ensemble, it’s the Chess Records house band, it’s Rotary Connection, it’s Phuture. But other than all of those, it might just be the Sea and motherf*****g Cake. They released their self-titled debut album way back in 1994; counting that, their most recent 2018 release Any Day, and everything in between, they’ve released a total of 11 albums, which is an average of one every 2.18 years, and here’s the thing: every single one of them is perfect. Absolutely 100%. That doesn’t mean you will like their particular approach to perfection, or have to like it— but I have a feeling you will. It’s why you can find an album like the ninth of those eleven albums, The Moonlight Butterfly, thirteen years after its 2011 release, and there’ll be a track like “Inn Keeping” waiting for you on side two, over 10 minutes long and perfectly exquisite every step of the way. That delicate-but-insistent “Future Days” electro-pulse running underneath, John McEntire’s delicate Dingerbeat variation on top of it, the delicate guitar-chording by Archer Prewitt and Sam Prekop and bass-lining by Eric Claridge, all in support of Prekop’s trademark melancholy cold-seaside jazz/pop croon. Toward the end of “Inn Keeping,” after the vocal section, this arrangement is joined by e-bowed guitar and synth counterpoint that ride the song out into its horizon, its sunset, its vanishing point. The rest of the album? Also perfect.

CARNIVOROUS BELLS Room Above All LP (HUMAN HEADSTONE) They sure do wear their SST influence on the (record) sleeve with this (nonetheless rad and as far as I can tell uncredited) overtly-Pettibon-style cover art, don’t they? And then the music comes in with a ‘barking poet’ vocalist type that is very Jack Brewer, and the band is spitting sharp and jagged atonal riffs and herky-jerky grooves that are also very SacchTrust, but obvious influences aren’t always a negative, and I’m just excited to hear a band that could correctly be described as “punk rock” in 2024 playing with this much space and kick and unpredictability. The vocals by Matthew Aldis are the most predictable element, indeed Brewer-like in their samey declamation without melody, but nonetheless also Brewer-like in their distinctively strong poetics and well-timed power surges, the lyrics booklet insert doubling as a chapbook (with more of that seemingly uncredited Pettibon Jr. art). And the band is just sharp as hell, guitarist David Vassalotti (who was in that 2010s band you might know called Merchandise) peeling off one jagged-diamond guitar riff after another, and bassist Michael Bacich and drummer Leo Suarez keeping things rolling and tumbling underneath, the tickertape on which Adis and Vassalotti make their jagged graph lines. Tenor saxophonist James McKain, who may or not be a permanent member, is in there too and the Bells sound gives him plenty of that aforementioned space to paint in, to especially nice effect on the album closer “Unfinished Matter.”

VARIOUS ARTISTS I’m Just Like You: Sly’s Stone Flower 1969-70 (LIGHT IN THE ATTIC) Been binging on everything by Sly after reading his 2023 memoir, and this compilation of his short-lived Stone Flower label has been key. The label came at a time when Sly was at the peak of his stardom circa 1970, and was distributed by Atlantic Records, but fizzled out after only releasing four 45RPM 7-inch singles during an 8-month period; instead of capitalizing on his fame with some clean chart-ready pop, these singles were the first revelation to the world of the wasted Rhythm Ace-driven screwed-bass electro-funk that would permeate the forthcoming There’s a Riot Goin’ On LP. I’m Just Like You has these eight released tracks, along with ten more from the Stone Flower vaults, including a few solo-Sly proto-Riot instrumentals which are incredible but certainly not ideal for release on the pop market. (Could’ve been supercool B-sides though… had there been any A-sides for ‘em.) I don’t quite remember exactly where I was when I first heard the song “Stanga” by Little Sister (probably just sitting at a computer, duh, around ten years ago when this comp came out), but I do remember what it felt like, and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. The funky nonsense (?) title (some combo of “stagger”? “standard”? “stand up”? “stank up”?) and that distinct Riot production sound, but with a trio of gospelized female voices laying down the heavy vocals instead of a muttering/roaring/slurring Sly — of course I’m obsessed. Other standout tracks include “Somebody’s Watching You,” also by Little Sister, which is close to clean chart-ready pop, certainly having some huge hooks and great sly Sly lyrics (“Live it up today if you want to/Live it down tomorrow afternoon/Sunday school don't make you cool forever/Neither does the silver of your spoon/The nicer the nice, the higher the price/This is what you pay for what you need/The higher the price, the nicer the nice/Jealous people like to see you bleed”), and the absolutely killer and particularly dark and wasted “Life and Death in G and A” by a little-known Sly associate named Joe Hicks. It was released as a single in 1970, Hicks having released a couple 45s before that on various regional labels, at least one of them later picked up on by Northern Soul collectors in Britain. After his brief and obscure tenure with Sly, Hicks went on to release a 1973 solo LP called Mighty Joe Hicks on Stax subsidiary Enterprise, which closes with a pretty damn banging 9-minute version of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” by Kenny Rogers. P.S. Photo colorizing for I’m Just Like You by notorious post-punk vocalist David Yow! Thanks, David.

ROBERT SCOTT & TAKUMI MOTOKAWA Aramoana (NO LABEL) Bandcamp recently posted an article by Jude Noel called “Secret Things: A Guide to Robert Scott Rarities,” highlighting just a handful of the dozens of tracks buried deep within Scott’s remote multi-decade home-taper world. Even just a handful is a lot to take in from an underrated and unassuming and yet very prolific folk/pop/punk/psych wizard like this guy, so I found myself focusing on the most recent rarity, an all-instrumental digital-only EP that Scott recorded and released about a year ago with another New Zealander, one Takumi Motokawa. Seems to be a Bandcamp-only release, a total of 19 to 20 minutes of music, the two of them blasting heavy instrumental distorto electric guitar and electric organ over a drum machine, but beautiful melodies and harmonies only, like some kind of secular sky church music. Blasting gets a bad rap, associated with noise and destruction, but blasting can be beautiful, and blasting can help build. Blasting can bury, but blasting can also reveal. That’s what we get on Aramoana, which is a Maori word meaning “pathway to the sea.” Maybe Scott and Motokawa are blasting through all the seaside dunes and tall grass and heat to make a clear perennial pathway to the steady and powerful sea in our heart, our mind, our soul. Now we can walk to the water any time we want.

DAVID NANCE More Than Enough (BA DA BING) Some recent writing by Doug Mosurock on his newly activated Heathen Disco site had me appreciating just how good David Nance actually is, even more than I already had been, and this was right around the same time I found myself algorithmically discovering Nance’s beautiful song “Never Gonna Fall,” which was released way back in 2016 on the More Than Enough album, his first for Ba Da Bing label, maybe marking when his music first ‘went national.’ (Sorry I think that way, but I used to live in Nebraska too.) Next thing you know, the 2 minutes and 54 seconds of “Never Gonna Fall” have pretty much become my out-of-nowhere song of the summer for 2024, everything I love about the Xpressway label, the Old Age/No Age label, Siltbreeze Records, and early Sebadoh, not to mention a drummerless Sun Records acoustic guitar drive, all rolled into one young singer/songwriter and bursting with fresh garage rock and raw folk rock intensity. I mean, this song even has an ‘R2D2 solo’ not unlike the one in Can’s otherwise very dissimilar “Moonshake.” And that’s just one song on the album — the 9-minute slowburn heartache ballad “(All I Want to Know is When You’re) Coming Home” is another great one. (But heads up — unless it’s been fixed by the time you read this, that Bandcamp page linked to in the review header has a messed-up track listing. The track times are correct, but the titles are not, so to hear the 2-minute and 54-second “Never Gonna Fall” you have to click on “Unamused (2:54),” even though “Unamused” clocks in at 2:24, so to hear that you have to click on “Fully Automatic (2:24),” and to hear the aforementioned 9-minute and 9-second “(All I Want to Know is When You’re) Coming Home,” you actually have to click on “Never Gonna Fall (9:09),” and so on.)

BLIND OWL WILSON s/t LP (SUTRO PARK/MISSISSIPPI) There’s a lot more I could say about this beautiful release by one of my favorite singers of all time, and a great guitarist and songwriter too, but holy shit, that Larry Taylor bass solo on the last track “Pulling Hair Blues,” wait what? Although now that I’m reminding myself how hard Taylor was jamming in those outtakes from Woodstock (1970, d. Michael Wadleigh), it’s a little less surprising.