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| Dropping the sub-title into a Google image search....hey-oh! |
And…we’re back to the playlist posts. And, between the hiatus and all the deletions, yes, this is just No. 12. Happily, I think I’ve got a workable formula this time. No, really.
First up, I’ve already written posts/little histories about a several of the bands/artists on the playlist during the past month - and, because those posts have links to songs and sources galore, I’ll just direct anyone who wants to learn more about or hear more from any of those bands/artists to those posts. In alphabetical order:
At the Drive-In: Rock Band Made Flesh
Derek (Clapton), the Dominos and "Layla" (Derek & the Dominos)
Jean Knight, "Mr. Big Stuff" and the Bakery
The Stranglers: Long, Slow and So, So Good
For what it's worth, those four posts come from two different projects...which is hard to explain here, so see the sidebar, I suppose. The rest of the playlist comes from all the other I’ve squeezed in over the past month…but I’ve only selected three for short introductions/little link-fests down below. I mention the dumber reason(s) for the limited selection down below, but the short reason is, they’re the bands/artists that interested me most. With that, let’s get to it…very likely in alphabetical order (shit…yes.).
Amigo the Devil, Love Songs by Serial Killers
An Austin, Texas-based purveyor in the rare “murderfolk” genre, Amigo the Devil is the brainchild of Danny Kiranos. I don’t recall how I backed into him, or which song I heard first, but it probably featured a banjo accompanying Kiranos’ (for lack of a better word) cold vocals (if I had to guess, though, it was “Hell and You”). He traffics in some dark shit - his earliest material imagines love notes from serial killers, which I didn’t pick up on, say, “The Dreamer” and “The Recluse” (through the eyes/heart of Ed Gein), but something I couldn’t miss in “Dahmer Does Hollywood.” Those songs show up as Volume 1 on Spotify, but (I think) they came into the world as EPs titled Manimals, Diggers and Decompositions. The themes only grow darker from there - e.g., the (alleged) suicide note he worked into a song (“First Day of the End of My Life,” which I also missed) - but Kiranos cuts the heartache with humor. And he’s less a “fan” of serial killers (or suicide), but sees both as extremes of lived experience people would do well to understand. As he explained “First Day of the End of My Life” to Kerrang (best read on him, btw):
“Let’s put it into a song to see if it feels better. And when I was playing the song, it made me realize that I can guarantee I’m not the only one who feels this way. Which means there’s other people I can reach out to that understand what I’m feeling, which means that there’s an entire community of people that need to bring each other up. And then things started getting better.”
He cites Tom Waits, Fiona Apple and Leonard Cohen (really feeling the latter; really need to return to the latter) as influences, but he goes beyond the banjo on several tracks and calls in a fuller band - e.g., “Hungover in Jonestown” or the explosion at the end of “If I’m Crazy” - more often on 2018’s Everything Is Fine. Which, I should note, is better than fine. All in all, Amigo the Devil has a definite folk/analog feel, but with a vibe of singing from the end of his rope. A third Amigo the Devil album will drop this month, Against Me, and I’m looking forward.
Some (More) Songs
I actually named and linked to nearly all the ones I pulled onto the playlist in the above (and I’m regretting some choices already), but I also included “Preacher Feature” and, by happy chance, “Husband,” later re-named into his signature closing number (and crowd favorite sing-along), “I Hope Your Husband Dies.” (Just to mention, “Cocaine and Abel” reportedly prompts meltdowns.)
Bonus Sources
Just a pair of Rolling Stone write-ups, both from 2020 (here and here), neither of them terribly remarkable, but they provided some bits and pieces for the above.
First up, I’ve already written posts/little histories about a several of the bands/artists on the playlist during the past month - and, because those posts have links to songs and sources galore, I’ll just direct anyone who wants to learn more about or hear more from any of those bands/artists to those posts. In alphabetical order:
At the Drive-In: Rock Band Made Flesh
Derek (Clapton), the Dominos and "Layla" (Derek & the Dominos)
Jean Knight, "Mr. Big Stuff" and the Bakery
The Stranglers: Long, Slow and So, So Good
For what it's worth, those four posts come from two different projects...which is hard to explain here, so see the sidebar, I suppose. The rest of the playlist comes from all the other I’ve squeezed in over the past month…but I’ve only selected three for short introductions/little link-fests down below. I mention the dumber reason(s) for the limited selection down below, but the short reason is, they’re the bands/artists that interested me most. With that, let’s get to it…very likely in alphabetical order (shit…yes.).
Amigo the Devil, Love Songs by Serial Killers
An Austin, Texas-based purveyor in the rare “murderfolk” genre, Amigo the Devil is the brainchild of Danny Kiranos. I don’t recall how I backed into him, or which song I heard first, but it probably featured a banjo accompanying Kiranos’ (for lack of a better word) cold vocals (if I had to guess, though, it was “Hell and You”). He traffics in some dark shit - his earliest material imagines love notes from serial killers, which I didn’t pick up on, say, “The Dreamer” and “The Recluse” (through the eyes/heart of Ed Gein), but something I couldn’t miss in “Dahmer Does Hollywood.” Those songs show up as Volume 1 on Spotify, but (I think) they came into the world as EPs titled Manimals, Diggers and Decompositions. The themes only grow darker from there - e.g., the (alleged) suicide note he worked into a song (“First Day of the End of My Life,” which I also missed) - but Kiranos cuts the heartache with humor. And he’s less a “fan” of serial killers (or suicide), but sees both as extremes of lived experience people would do well to understand. As he explained “First Day of the End of My Life” to Kerrang (best read on him, btw):
“Let’s put it into a song to see if it feels better. And when I was playing the song, it made me realize that I can guarantee I’m not the only one who feels this way. Which means there’s other people I can reach out to that understand what I’m feeling, which means that there’s an entire community of people that need to bring each other up. And then things started getting better.”
He cites Tom Waits, Fiona Apple and Leonard Cohen (really feeling the latter; really need to return to the latter) as influences, but he goes beyond the banjo on several tracks and calls in a fuller band - e.g., “Hungover in Jonestown” or the explosion at the end of “If I’m Crazy” - more often on 2018’s Everything Is Fine. Which, I should note, is better than fine. All in all, Amigo the Devil has a definite folk/analog feel, but with a vibe of singing from the end of his rope. A third Amigo the Devil album will drop this month, Against Me, and I’m looking forward.
Some (More) Songs
I actually named and linked to nearly all the ones I pulled onto the playlist in the above (and I’m regretting some choices already), but I also included “Preacher Feature” and, by happy chance, “Husband,” later re-named into his signature closing number (and crowd favorite sing-along), “I Hope Your Husband Dies.” (Just to mention, “Cocaine and Abel” reportedly prompts meltdowns.)
Bonus Sources
Just a pair of Rolling Stone write-ups, both from 2020 (here and here), neither of them terribly remarkable, but they provided some bits and pieces for the above.
Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers, Escaping in Place
Between Laura Jane Grace’s fucking messy history and the weight of Against Me!, the act that defined most of both of her lives, there’s way too goddamn much to unpack, so I’m just going to focus on the album…and get to Against Me! later (when I can figure out a playlist to put it on where I won’t have to skip half the damn songs). Here’s the short version on Laura Jane Grace: started life and (from what I gather) lived most of it as and, when possible, escaping Thomas James Gabel. She came up in Gainesville, FL, had an unusually fucking terrible time with cops (the two felony thing is mind-blowing), but remarkable success for fronting an indie-punk act…and, predictably, caught shit for signing to a major label. Against Me! enjoyed a solid run through most of the 2000s, but she wrestled with gender identity throughout, until coming out in a 2012 Rolling Stone essay (for those who haven’t burned through your free reads, here it is). Against Me! still exists, but Grace paused the project when she came up with a bunch of songs that didn’t fit the brand. Enter 2018’s Bought to Rot.
Spotify’s algorithm fed me “China Beach” back when it and I were still on speaking terms and I still love it a little more every time I hear it. A barking, semi-paranoid opus about getting a handle on a stressful situation, I didn’t know the name “Laura Jane Grace,” so I had no idea where the song came from. Not much of Bought to Rot sounds like “China Beach,” but in a good way. While the edge and tempo dials down quite a bit - the rest of the album like good-end of indie-rock; The Replacements meets Big Star, maybe? - the tone and…call it the point of view of commentary carries through. If only so far, as Pop Matters’ review reveals with what feels like a confession:
“Grace qualifies the album as a mix-tape, however, Bought to Rot lacks a connective theme and seems disjointed.”
For what it’s worth, it feels like I’ve only just got past introductions with Bought to Rot. Without lauding it as something deep or endlessly layered, something in her lyrics and phrasing (or just her wit) helps you believe you’ll like what she’s saying even more when you catch all of it. That it’s mostly on the up-side of mid-tempo doesn’t hurt. Claims that Rowland S. Howard and Grace’s fellow-Floridian, Tom Petty, influenced the album don’t come through in the sound so much, or the tone, so maybe it comes from the spirit. A great album for a certain kind of person, it may not sound like Against Me! - probably doesn’t, given the whole “doesn’t fit the brand” line - but I’m guessing this quote makes for a through-line:
“[Punk] isn’t always what it talks about, but at least the bands I was always with, and was really into, were about those ideals that I thought were inclusive. No racism. No classism. No homophobia. And no transphobia.”
Oh, and Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers looks like a three-piece - i.e., Grace on guitar (and songwriting), Atom Willard on drums (and from Against Me!), and Marc Hudson on bass (associated with Against Me!, sound engineer, etc.).
Some (More) Songs
This could have been any of them - for instance, I skipped “I Hate Chicago” while feeling just the opposite about the song - but I went with a pair of rockers (“Born in Black” and “Reality Bites”), a dopey pop number (“The Airplane Song”), and a prickly moody fucker (“Manic Depression”). These feel representative enough to call them a decent barometer on the album.
More Sources
Wikipedia - Bought to Rot
Paste Interview (2018; the best read of the bunch)
Pearl Charles, Saved for Greatness from Theater
Not every artist has a dramatic story - e.g., something full of drugs, exes and calamity - or some thought or sound they feel compelled to tell. Some of them just write songs and perform them live with a few friends. Pearl Charles comes from that place or somewhere near, which just leaves the music to talk about.
She’s an LA kid that grew into a multi-instrumentalist. Charles didn’t come from music - her dad’s a filmmaker, her mother a visual artist - and it turns out her first love was the stage. An interview with a Reno outlet called Raise the Stakes (best source for Charles, fwiw) reveals that getting kicked out of a production put her on the musical path. A couple boyfriends pulled her into projects, which could explain her choice to go solo in her later works - in her words, “My first two bands were with my boyfriends at the time, and then I decided that I can’t break up with myself, so I’m going to have a solo project.” (Those bands, since I’ve seen the names, were The Driftwood Singers and The Blank Tapes.)
Charles started her solo career with a country EP, but branched out fairly quickly from there (including a stint with a Grateful Dead cover band…that also expanded her horizons). Explaining her sound seems a particular focus on the several sources I read - e.g., from the editor of her (tiny) Wikipedia entry: “Her sound is a melding of 1960s rock and 1970s cosmic country.” The same entry later chops and paraphrases Billboard, who went with, “Charles is a genre-blending artist in the style of Lana Del Rey and Jenny Lewis, with "subdued vocals and more uptempo, playful production.” A 2020 Lippy Mag interview offered, “upbeat yet introspective, pulling influences from folk, country and soft-rock psychedelia.” Not that I can top any of them - having only stumbled across her last week, I only got as far as “70s” - but I liked this quote (from Raise the Stakes), which keys off her mom’s tastes:
“She was into Leonard Cohen, John Prine, Townes van Zandt. I love those guys too, I totally get the gut-wrenching lyrics. But those guys have some darkness, and we need that. Trust me, I have darkness too. But how can you have darkness without the light? You can’t have one without the other. I think Leonard Cohen is only made all the better by The Eagles and ABBA.”
Charles is 29 now, and just two albums in - 2018’s Sleepless Dreamer and 2021’s Magic Mirror - but God knows what the pandemic did to her trajectory. The Lippy Mag piece talks about working on Magic Mirror and how she recorded that with her band, as opposed to session guys as she did earlier. That’s enough to convince me there’s more to come…even if I’m not sure where she’s going…
Some (More) Songs
Oops. Didn’t lace the above with songs for the first time, but I feel like the songs I picked blindly off the albums give a good sense of Charles’ taste and range. For instance, I pulled the openly disco “Only for Tonight” from Magic Mirror, but that’s also where I found her bare-necked nod to Fleetwood Mac, “Slipping Away.” (Charles confessed her fandom to Raise the Stakes.) Sleepless Dreamer boasts the same 70s warmth, but the guitar anchors both tracks I pulled from that one - e.g., “Beginner’s Luck” and “Sleepless Dreamer” (country and…I’m going with 80s-time-keeping-style, respectively).
Bonus Sources
A 2020 interview with The Yorkshire Times is the only one not mentioned above. It’s decent.
That’s it for the post, but there’s a lot more on the playlist. Apart from the bands/artists that came from this month’s projects, I wound grabbing several songs from a couple artists - e.g., Jupiter in Velvet (“Let Your Tears Flow” and “Sapphire”), R.A.P. Ferreira (who does very cool samples, nice jazz impressions, e.g., “yamships, flaxseed” and “redguard snipers”), and, even if that dive into “late-stage” Public Enemy never surfaced, I held onto “Born Woke,” the lively “Do You Wanna Go Our Way,” and “Man Listen” (plus a couple more for all those bands). I picked up real strays like Scott Mackay’s “Stupid Cupid” and Golden Shoals “Live Easy,” both of which I’m going to wind up kicking my ass for later when both of them show up on later playlists, and Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home,” which is awesome, because I don’t think I’ll listen to Blind Faith ever again.
One final note: I don’t like not having time to dig into R.A.P. Ferreira and Jupiter in Velvet, but I’ve decided to limit myself to three bands for these playlist post. That’ll limit the number of plugs I post to twitter (something I think about too much), but it also keeps from trying to read three things about every goddamn word I see…
…not to mention that I try to do too goddamn much already. Till the next post, in whichever series.
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