Al Stewart: Sparks Of Ancient Light

AL STEWART: SPARKS OF ANCIENT LIGHT (2008)

1) Lord Salisbury; 2) (A Child's View Of) The Eisenhower Years; 3) The Ear Of The Night; 4) Hanno The Navigator; 5) Shah Of Shahs; 6) Angry Bird; 7) The Loneliest Place On The Map; 8) Sleepwalking; 9) Football Hero; 10) Elvis At The Wheel; 11) Sil­ver Kettle; 12) Like William McKinley.

And another modestly perfect album; they just keep comin'. At such a pace, with such a steady mindset, Stewart could probably go on like that for another twenty years or so. A major asset is his unyielding vocal power: realize that on Sparks, a 63-year old Al sounds exactly like the 22-year old Al sounded on Bedsitter Images, and I mean it — not a single note betrays the aging (come to think of it, he looks pretty great for his age, too, except for the hair).

Of course, he did not exactly start out with the most powerful or wide-ranged voice of them all, but that is the com­mon benefit — break out your superhuman voice in your twenties and you will be eating dust by the time you hit fifty; stay cool, calm, and collected when you're young and your singing life will be lengthy and healthy. The miracle of Al Stewart, then, is that the story of his voice is basically the same as the story of his songwriting. Here we sit listening to early peri­od albums like Love Chronicles, classic years' albums like Year Of The Cat, and recent offer­ings like this record — and, for the life of me, I cannot figure out which ones are the «highlights» and which ones the «lowlights».

Focus on Sparks Of Ancient Light. Topics covered include: the Islamic revolution in Iran ('Shah Of Shahs'), the golden days of British imperialism ('Lord Salisbury'), America in the Fifties ('The Eisenhower Years'), ancient Phoenician naval expeditions to Africa ('Hanno The Navigator'), glo­ries and pitfalls of professional sports ('Football Hero'), and a bizarre story about Elvis seeing the face of Stalin in the clouds on an Arizona trip in 1964 ('Elvis At The Wheel'). Plus a healthy dose of not-so-lyrically-specific tunes, of course, to ensure that the album will be likable by more than just history buffs.

Musically, Al's stern conservatism keeps up its rule: all the arrangements, by Al and long-term colleague Laurence Juber, follow the standard formulae. But, as usual, it is impossible to accuse the man of direct self-copying: as much as the melodies sound familiar, there are no obvious re­writes to be found. The expected hooks expectedly keep coming: catchy singalong choruses to 'Lord Salisbury' ("look away, look away, look away for our survival..."), 'Hanno' (with the char­ming line "when my sailing days are done, I'll see Poseidon's daughter"), 'Sleepwalking', and more. The expected acoustic instrumental is confined to the first half of 'Ear Of The Night', with Al giving us another of his simple, unassuming, but lovable folk interludes. The rock'n'roll, which Stewart never abandons, is represented by 'Angry Bird' and, to a lesser extent, by 'Eisenhower Years' — neither of the two «kicks ass», but Stewart is still one of the few veterans who can make a song «rock» while exercising restraint and cutting out dirty distorted guitar tones.

In short, it is exactly what is to be expected these days in the guise of the next Al Stewart album, and solid proof that the powers of melodic folk-rock, although drained, are still far from being completely spent. As I write this, Sparks is Stewart's last original studio album to-date, but there is truly not a shadow of doubt in my mind that he still has something like a dozen more records of the same quality in him, and that the longer he lasts, the more of an awesome example he can set for generations to come — doing for British folk-rock more or less the same that, say, a J. J. Cale does for American blues-rock. And he knows it well himself, the cunning old fox, or else he wouldn't end the album with the following refrain: "I'll sit on my porch like William McKinley / And I'll let the world come to me / And if it's too busy I really won't mind / And there's no place I want to be". Well, we can only hope that the world will continue to leave Al alone — not too dif­ficult — since it would benefit no one see him end like William McKinley. Thumbs up, even de­spite the ill-omened nature of that one simile.

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Aretha Franklin: Love All The Hurt Away

ARETHA FRANKLIN: LOVE ALL THE HURT AWAY (1981)

1) Love All The Hurt Away; 2) Hold On! I'm Comin'; 3) Living In The Streets; 4) There's A Star For Everyone; 5) You Can't Always Get What You Want; 6) It's My Turn; 7) Truth And Honesty; 8) Search On; 9) Whole Lot Of Me; 10) Kind Of Man.

The only good thing that can, overall, characterize these early Eighties Aretha albums is that the Ari­sta people did try not only to modernize her, but to «maturate» her as well. That photo on the front sleeve, for instance — she hadn't looked that stylish or genuine since at least 1970. And the music is always deeper, denser, and darker than on her last Atlantic albums, dropping the giggly disco crap in favour of bombastic adult contemporary... crap.

Half of this album is devoted to instantly forgettable «diva ballads», which, by then, she could probably sing under deep narcosis without any difference, and the other half is primitive electro-pop that would disgust Michael Jackson, let alone Prince. The title track is a duet with George Benson, a first for Aretha — never before did anyone dare to market her singles on a double bill, and, fortunately, this one sold so miserably that she never went on the «Duet Circuit for Pop Di­no­saurs» that made many a good artist into a marketing curio. But the fact that it is a duet at least makes it a standout number.

Well, actually, another standout number is the dance version of 'You Can't Always Get What You Want', a good candidate for the «Top 100 Butchered Classics» of all time list, but also a shocking distraction from the interminable boredom of it all. How I wish to have been able to get inside the mind of the person who came up with the idea of re-recording the song on a foundation of slap bass and cheap synths... then maybe I don't. At least the similar rearrangement of Sam & Dave's 'Hold On! I'm Comin' has this classy brass melody arrangement, putting it closer to the likable rearrangement of 'Can't Turn You Loose' than the Stones' killer job.

None of the other songs are even worth talking about. If you do not have a specific alergy to all that dance crap and deep-soul-by-the-pound as they used to make them in the Eighties, it's all lis­tenable, but nobody gave a damn when writing these songs and Aretha probably didn't give a damn when she sang them, although, her being a professional and all, I couldn't say that she is slacking: the vocals are as powerful as ever, throughout. But great singing from Franklin is a gi­ven, so I just give it a thumbs down for all the evil people who had the nerve to spit on it. (For the record, evil people included several members of Toto — throw on a couple hundred thousand years on the frying-pan, please. Just for justice sake: they probably won't even notice, what with the already accumulated several billion centuries for mass spiritual genocide; I'd rather listen to Love All The Hurt Away over and over again than having to repair my ears from 'Rosanna' just one more time).

B. B. King: Midnight Believer

B. B. KING: MIDNIGHT BELIEVER (1978)

1) When It All Comes Down (I'll Still Be Around); 2) Midnight Believer; 3) I Just Can't Leave Your Love Alone; 4) Hold On (I Feel Our Love Is Changing); 5) Never Make A Move Too Soon; 6) A World Full Of Strangers; 7) Let Me Make You Cry A Little Longer.

Another excellent idea — match B. B. King, the tumbleweed connection of the blues world, with The Crusaders, one of the longest living jazz-pop bands that never had any reason to live that long. Together, they make good music: the band offers the old blues guru guy fat and tight mu­sical backing, and the old blues guru guy pays them back with his regular lyrical spark that, for a moment, adds sense and purpose to their interplay. (Coincidentally or not, they released their big­gest commercial success, Street Life, the following year, but I have never been able to get my mind focused on even one track on that album from beginning to end.)

Most of the material is original, written by The Crusaders themselves or in collaboration with Will Jennings, and follows the regular R'n'B patterns of the epoch (without any serious con­ces­sions to disco), but is very clearly geared towards King: all the blues and ballad pieces fit his style of singing, and there is also surprisingly more guitar playing from him on all the songs than even on some of his pure blues albums (where «pure», much more often than wanted, means «letting the horns guys do all the work while I satisfy my inner crooner»).

The two regular blues-rock numbers ('When It All Comes Down', 'Never Make A Move Too So­on') are fun due to all the extra touches — such as the gospel choir on the former and the loose party attitude on the latter; the sentimental ballad ('Hold On') is respectably arranged, with Lucille always louder than the soft lethargic Seventies piano sound; the funk comes properly equipped with clenched teeth and gripped fists ('A World Full Of Strangers'); and the retro-swing number 'I Just Can't Leave Your Love Alone' simply comes out of nowhere, suddenly replacing the disco bar with a speakeasy for four happy minutes.

It wouldn't make sense to rave and rant in detail about any of these songs, but the participants are clearly delighted to work with each other — and, even if unbeatable clinchers like 'Thrill Is Gone' could not be produced any longer, this is still the next best thing: a B. B. King album whose pro­duction and entertainment values are so consistently high, I could never sustain a case against even one of these songs. It is albums like Midnight Believer that should encourage you, the lis­tener, to defy the odds and dig around in interminable discographies of «has-beens»: critics may eventually lose interest in the old dogs and leave them forever locked in the one-star collar, but that's just because they always go after the cutting-edge thing. Midnight Believer cuts no edges; it is simply a charming album that shows old man King going both with the grain and against it at the same time. Thumbs up.

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Beirut: Gulag Orkestar

BEIRUT: GULAG ORKESTAR (2006)

1) Gulag Orkestar; 2) Prenzlauerberg; 3) Brandenburg; 4) Postcards From Italy; 5) Mount Wroclai (Idle Days); 6) Rhi­ne­land (Heartland); 7) Scenic World; 8) Bratislava; 9) The Bunker; 10) The Canals Of Our City; 11) After The Curtain.

Even if you have only just arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, without having spent an overall total of around two and a half years in it like I happened to have, you will immediately notice that the town thrives on kitsch. Being located almost equally far away from every civilized center in the world, it compensates by sucking in superficial cultural elements from each of them and regurgi­tating them in series of some of the most oddly, randomly, and — for tourists — excitedly juxta­posed sets of display cases in the world. You may spend all your life in Zia Country, never setting foot outside the domain of coyotes and cottontails, and still, through the power of ersatz, travel the globe, albeit mostly in an exoticized state of mind.

Granted, Zachary Francis Condon, who, based on all the sources I could find, was actually born in Santa Fe (a rarity, that — up to now, I thought people don't ever get born in Santa Fe, they just sort of materialize there from time to time), founded his band and wrote his music through the ac­tual experiences of travelling in Europe rather than pure ersatz; most, or maybe all, of the places mentioned on this LP are locations whose air the young prodigy has actually breathed in.

Still, why the heck am I not surprised that a band fronted by an American, consisting mostly of resi­dents of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, NM, calling itself Beirut (the one city that Zach admittedly never ever visited in person), releasing an album called GULAG (how do you sleep, Alexander Isayevich?) Orkestar (that's Croatian spelling, FYI), adorning it with a photo found in a Leipzig library, filling it with songs whose titles and lyrics travel from Germany to Slovakia to Italy, and playing them in a manner most reminiscent of Yugoslavian folk music — why am I not surprised that the whole thing keeps reminding me of that first visit to the Museum of Internatio­nal Folk Art on Santa Fe's Museum Hill, where the basic reaction was uncontrolled giggle: «so, which two cultures are going to shake the unshakable hands in the next display case?»

Nevertheless, even if the kitschy, predictably unpredictable «Santa Fe Style» mostly sucks (I mean, I am still fond of the place, but for entirely different reasons), the debut album of Beirut does not. It is not a masterpiece: the style is way too monotonous, and Condon's pop hook senses are seriously underdeveloped, or perhaps he is consciously trying to bury them. But neither is this simply an ecstatic declaration of the «ooh, look at me, I'm so advanced in my knowledge and in­fluences» kind, the perennial bane of indie music. Well, there certainly are elements of that, or else the guy wouldn't probably have included so many toponyms in the song titles (on the other hand, what a better way to make local kids interested in European geography?). Yet the basic motivation for Gulag Orkestar, (I want to believe), is quite different.

What we have here is a young impressionable artistic mind, smitten with the folk tradition of Eastern Europe and beset with the idea of describing its own experiences and feelings through the medium of that tradition. Much as I dislike quoting old man Christgau, he hit the nail on the head when writing that, in comparison to Condon's Yugoslavian influences — «contained chaos and wild drums» — Condon's own music is «irrepressible melodicism tempered by harmonic me­lancholy». Indeed; Condon borrows the superficial elements of Balkan music (the instrumenta­tion, mainly brass and accordeon, and the basic melodic structures) and, rather than using them to reproduce the reckless drunken debauchery of that tradition, adapts them as background for the retro-romantic yearnings of his own heart.

Of course, one could easily bring in field experts deriding us for the clichéd association of Balkan folk music with gypsies, bears, and frantic bop-till-you-drop dancing in the streets, and stating that Zachary Condon simply demonstrates a deeper, subtler understanding of that musical culture than any of us bloody tourists can ever hope to develop. Possibly, but I'd bet all of those field ex­perts' credentials would be fairly flimsy. Condon is a bloody tourist himself, and way too young and inexperienced (he was barely 20 years old upon the album's release, and his first close en­counters with the emulated musical tradition began when he was about 17) to gain a properly de­ep understanding of all those things; it is fairly obvious that he is doing his personal schtick, bor­rowing the formal trappings from another culture — much like the Kinks and the Beatles did their naïve imitations of the Indian vibe with 'See My Friends' and 'Norwegian Wood'.

But this is exactly what makes Gulag Orkestar worthy of your attention. The delicate mix of kitsch and sincerity. This is not some sort of lame tribute to Goran Bregović or Boban Marković, but an original creation that borrows elements of their music, originally used for an entirely diffe­rent purpose, to paint a sort of one-of-a-kind «An American In Eastern Europe» picture. And even if the songs, with their balalaikas, accordeons, trumpets, and what-not, all tend to merge to­gether after a short while (I only find 'Postcards From Italy', with its tender, friendly brass riff, to stand on its own as a truly memorable composition), the overall impression is lite-wond'rous.

Condon does not have much originality, but he's got taste: his lyrics are simple, but never flash­ing their clichéd nature, and his singing, admittedly inspired by Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields yet also showing traces of Andrew Bird's influences (in fact, quite a few of these songs could ea­sily be passed off as obscure Bird outtakes), is impeccable on the grounds it covers. He also seems to have his feet planted steadily on the ground: there is sadness and loneliness all over this thing, but he never overplays it, drowning in mannerisms and pathos — it's loud, but still low-key and humble. In short — unmemorable, but charismatic.

I must warn you, though, that I really hated the record upon first listen. Not being a big fan of drunk Serbo-Croatian parties and Emir Kusturica in the first place, I was even more upset when it turned out that the songs were so flabby, dynamics-deprived, and hookless at that, and it took a few listens to understand it all contributed to making the experience worthwhile rather than incre­asing its ugliness. So beware: if you do like wild gypsy stuff, this is not wild gypsy stuff. It's not party music at all — it's a one-man project! «Beirut» does consist of several people when they're playing live, but in the studio, Condon overdubs most of the instruments all by himself. So Gulag Orkestar may just be one of the non-rowdiest albums ever to be recorded in a rowdy manner, and for that alone deserves a thumbs up.

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Änglagård: Epilog

ANGLAGARD: EPILOG (1994)

1) Prolog; 2) Höstsejd; 3) Rosten; 4) Skogsranden; 5) Sista Somrar; 6) Saknadens Fullhet.

Perhaps if Änglagård continued to carry on well unto the 21st century, even their biggest fans would eventually get bored, leaving them to preserve the purity of their progressive spirit in local progressive strip bars. But they were smart enough to go their own ways upon recording their second LP, which they unambiguously titled Epilog — and thus, ensure at least minor legendary status. «Remember those mysterious Swedish guys going against the grain in the early Nineties? They're, like, so cult, you just got to know them! Prog Annals sacrifice to their memory on a re­gular basis! Sure the music is derivative and crappy, but just listen to that name — Änglagård! Any idea on how to read that funny circle above the third a? Funny chaps, those Swedes!»

Strictly speaking, the music is good, though. In fact, Epilog is objectively better than Hybris at leas in one respect: nobody sings — which is a major advantage, since nobody in the band can sing (guitarist Tord Lindman's several attempts at mimicking the trade almost killed off the po­ten­tial of at least two of Hybris' best numbers). The three lengthy suites that comprise the bulk of the record (the rest are just brief minimalistic links) are completely instrumental and focus exclu­sively on band interplay, which is this band's major — and only — claim to fame.

This and a few other factors contribute to Epilog's slightly more somber mood, although «som­ber» by no means implies «heavy»: the electric guitar is here more than ever subdued to the im­pact of keyboards (Hammonds and Mellotrons, mostly) and especially Anna Holmgren's flute playing, very prominent on all three compositions (those at least as perceptive as myself will easi­ly spot the variation on Peter Gabriel's 'Firth Of Fifth' flute solo in 'Sista Somrar', and those who are more perceptive will probably name several other variations that I have not been able to de­tect). With a few notably aggressive passages cut out, the whole record would form the perfect soundtrack for a funeral service — solemn and sad, but never depressing and desperate.

The bad news is that, just like Hybris, this is all too manneristic. The three suites are located as three separate tracks under three separate titles, but they do not correspond to three different indi­vidualities or purposes — you can easily cut a large chunk out of 'Sista Somrar' and paste it into the middle of 'Höstsejd' and nobody will give a damn, since each of the three is a bunch of copy-pastes in the first place. Build-ups, fade-outs, tender interludes, stormy jams are interspersed with each other almost at random; perhaps a dedicated fan could find perfect Apollonic harmony in all this stuff, but most, I fear, will lack this capacity. Professionalism, intelligence, and sincere dedi­cation combine to make it all perfectly listenable and respectable, but there is no high purpose to Epilog, whatever such a purpose might have surmised.

As a «low-purpose» record, though, it deserves its thumbs up: I mean, it is named Epilog, after all, and it certainly sounds like an epilog — what more can one ask for? Curiously, it is probably the only record in the world named Epilog whose first track is named 'Prolog'. So if you hate its guts, you might still want to own it as a cult and curio piece.

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