Album review: Damon Albarn's 'Dr Dee'

Damon Albarn seems about as busy as a pop star can be. In March the frontman of both Blur and Gorillaz released “Rocket Juice & the Moon,” a trippy Afro-funk disc he made with drummer Tony Allen and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers; next month we’ll see the fruit of his recent collaboration with the great soul singer Bobby Womack. And this summer Blur is scheduled to play a massive concert at London’s Hyde Park to end the Olympic Games.

Given that schedule, you might expect frenzy from “Dr Dee,” the first album issued under Albarn’s name since 2003. Instead, the record opens with the sound of birds and rushing water and grows only more contemplative from there. A studio companion to a so-called “English opera” that premiered last year in Manchester, “Dr Dee” explores the life and work of the Elizabethan polymath John Dee; it features Albarn on vocals along with contributions by Allen, guitarist Simon Tong (formerly of the Verve) and members of the BBC Philharmonic, among others.

As music divorced from image, “Dr Dee” glitters intermittently. “Apple Carts” is as lovely (and bummed-out) a ballad as Blur’s “No Distance Left to Run,” while “Coronation” contains some gorgeously spooky choral singing. But extracting a narrative from these delicate sounds can feel like more trouble than they’re worth — even if you haven’t half as much happening as Albarn does.

Damon Albarn
“Dr Dee”
(Virgin)
Two stars (Out of four)

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Live: Meshuggah, Baroness, Decapitated at the House of Blues

This post has been corrected. See note at the bottom for details.

 

A looming "super moon" glowered down on West Hollywood's House of Blues on Saturday as Sweden's Meshuggah shone a dark light on alternate headbanging methodology.

 

Far from the act's goofy Yiddish name (Jewish and crazy the band is not), Meshuggah has been reinventing metal as insurrection for a quarter of a century. Barfing oppression-themed lyrics and pitting thunderous thud against insidious riffs, the bearded five have waged uncivil war against political and musical convention. 

 

And the L.A. mob grabbed the flag. What could seem like distant intellectuality on record became prole electricity when the volume cranked to cannonade level and the front four hunched shoulder to shoulder like a team of oxen. Vocalist Jens Kidman, in fighting trim form these days, leaned over and spewed a disgusted rage that connected hard with the fist-pumping crowd.

 

The inflammatory wordage and the deadly impetus sprang largely from drummer Thomas Haake, whose off-center accents, mutant tangos and sarcastic waltzes regrooved preconceptions. The reverberative low frequencies were felt almost subliminally, with Fredrik Thordendal and Mårten Hagström employing downtuned eight-string axes, their fret hands flicking mainly over the thickest wires in cycles foreign to standard logic. 

Album review: Santigold's 'Master of My Make-Believe'

If a rebellion ever comes, someone had better give Santigold the microphone. Her messages, even at their most sloganeering, are coded for the dance floor, and the global approach of her compositions lends them a communal sense of urgency. “We’re the keepers,” Santigold sings near the end of the album, and as the brightly textured keyboards rise to meet the singalong vibe, she drops the bomb: “While we sleep in America our house is burning down.”

That’s as close as Santigold gets to any sort of current-events statement on “Master of My Make-Believe,” her second album and first in four years. It’s a sleek effort, with 11 songs that come in at under 40 minutes, and it opens with a bracing call to arms in “Go!” With help from Yeah Yeah Yeahs members Karen O and Nick Zinner, and production from Q-Tip and Switch, the song is techno-futurism mixed with African beats, and its images of fast food and winter palaces hint at class warfare.

“We know that we want more,” Santigold sings on the more hopeful “Disparate Youth,” in which Zinner crashes her worldly dance party with intermittent guitar strikes. All the while, Santigold dips in and out of genres as if she’s sporting musical camouflage, including the big-beat hip-hop of “Freak Like Me,” the touching balladry of “The Riot’s Gone” and the tribal electronics of “Big Mouth.” Throughout, Santigold never stops playing spin-the-globe, and she also never loses sight of her mission to keep listeners moving.

Santigold
“Master of My Make-Believe”
Downtown/Atlantic
Three and a half stars (Out of four)

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Image: Santigold at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2012. Credit: Arkasha Stevenson / Los Angeles Times

Review: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Sports Arena

Halfway through Thursday night’s miraculous revival meeting cum concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, Bruce Springsteen stopped to recall his beginnings in the '60s and early '70s playing with a bar band. There was one type of music that was guaranteed to move a Jersey Shore crowd.

“You always had to have a little soul in your pocket,” said the 62-year-old artist with the vigor of a 30-year-old. Then Springsteen led the E Street Band — at 16 pieces, it’s officially a big band, not a rock band, now — through a medley of vintage Temptations and Wilson Pickett tunes.

Testifying from a platform in the middle of the audience (the concert was sold out, as is Friday night’s), Springsteen stopped to guzzle a beer. He tossed the empty plastic cup, then fell backward on the outreached hands of fans, who passed their (tipsy) messiah up to the stage.

Springsteen has always been a killer showman, someone who’s closely studied the great acts of R&B (the Rev. Al Green and James Brown) and learned how to preach a story, milk a call-and-response affirmation, and play dead then get on up. But increasingly, the gospel roots of this soul man have made themselves manifest. It seems like this Catholic son has been spending time in black churches.

By the point — two jaw-dropping, career-spanning hours into the 26-song night — that Bruce and the band boarded the train to the “Land of Hopes and Dreams,” he had some 40,000, mostly white, hands up in the air, vibrating with the spirit of the Holy Ghost.

Another ghost was very much present in the arena, acting as the night’s guiding spirit, so to speak. Springsteen lost his musical soul mate last year when Clarence Clemons, the band’s saxophonist and the bandleader’s right-hand man, passed away. Judging by his repeated direct and indirect references to missing persons — culminating in a powerful screen tribute during “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” — Springsteen feels the loss keenly.

Clemons’ nephew Jake has stepped in to ably fill the Big Man’s shoes on sax. But it was a gifted guest who drew out of Springsteen the kind of emotive, inspired interplay that made the old Boss and Big Man chemistry so joyous to watch. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and the Nightwatchman joined the band for several songs, adding his bent-metal cries to their already stellar guitar lineup. (All hail Nils Lofgren and Little Steven Van Zandt. Springsteen ain’t no slouch at the ax either.)

On the haunting 1995 protest ballad “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” Morello proclaimed the lyrics inspired by "The Grapes of Wrath": “Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand/ Or decent job or a helpin' hand / Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free / Look in their eyes, Mom, you'll see me.”

Review: Ryan Adams at Walt Disney Concert Hall

Halfway through Ryan Adams’ solo acoustic set at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Friday night, the shaggy-haired singer looked up from the crowd as he was tuning his instrument and made a confession: “I know I’m paranoid, but sometimes when I play the guitar it seems like hundreds of people are watching me.” 

Though he was joking, Adams’ devil-may-care attitude and between-song mumbles did suggest that we -- meaning the audience in the 2,200-seat, sold-out hall -- were just passersbys who’d stumbled across a dude playing music in his backyard. 

Adams, 37, walked onto Disney Hall’s stage as though he’d just gotten off the bus in his crumpled jeans and faded jean jacket. Flanked by an upright piano on one side and a music stand and microphone on the other, the North Carolina-born Angeleno picked up his guitar (striped red, white and blue like the instruments on “Hee-Haw”) and declared his intent:  “Let’s all get sad together,” he said before guiding us through the melancholy journey of “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” from his now-classic 2000 country rock album “Heartbreaker.”

A song in which Adams roams the country “building newsprint boats I race to sewer mains,” on record “Carolina” features a full band and Emmylou Harris on backing vocals. At Disney, with its cathedral-like space surrounding him and lighting that cast the singer in blood red, his voice drifted out from center stage like a ripple, little augmentation necessary. 

Throughout a 17-year career that started with his first band, Whiskeytown, Adams has carved a determined path; while many of his would-be songwriting peers in  the “alternative country” movement from which he rose went on to either write structurally complex and intricately arranged albums or painted themselves into a (twang-heavy) corner, Adams has pared his writing to the bone. He has become a Raymond Carver-esque perfectionist whose lyrics so precisely capture emotions that adornments seem unnecessarily gauche, like painting flames on a drag racer. 

Adams is a songwriter who’s presumptuous in the best sense of the word: He understands that roots music, or whatever you call it -- the kind that stretches from Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly through Dylan, the Flying Burrito Bros., X, Lucinda Williams and Uncle Tupelo -- remains a living, breathing thing. The songwriter has full confidence that writing, say, an ode to Carolina, or ashes, or fire, though it’s been done thousands of times before, can still make a universal impact, can still expand the conversation, can become a new standard. 

Adams was funny between songs, if a little too mumbly, and throughout the evening he dotted his banter with either verbal or musical references to, among other things, Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” AC/DC (the distance down Sunset Boulevard to the beach from his house is two full AC/DC albums), and the starship Enterprise.

This was a dark and lonely night, though, and Adams, self-aware almost to a fault, acknowledged as much throughout the show; he suggested at one point a drinking game based on the appearance of the word “rain” in his lyrics -- we all would have been hammered by the night’s end. So slow was the pace that he conveyed remorse for all the weepers even as he delivered them absolutely unapologetically.

Also unapologetic was the strange opening "act," a Mark Twain impersonation by actor Val Kilmer that was such a weird nonsequitur that it's really hard to figure out what to make of it. The actor walked onstage unintroduced, so buried beneath white Twain hair, bushy mustache and white suit, few if anyone in the crowd knew who this was (but it certainly wasn't Hal Holbrook).

The actor did a Twain-type monologue that touched on Los Angeles, the oddness of Rudyard Kipling's first name, "Negro spirituals," Twain's editor William Dean Howells, and, in one of many anachronistic references, Louis Armstrong (who wasn't famous in Twain's lifetime), among others. If there was a point to his monologue other than to convey something surreal, it certainly wasn't made clear. 

That was up to Adams.

Whether singing in the lovely "Invisible Riverside," "I wanna lay my head forever on your shoulder," or acknowledging that "I'm fractured from the fall and I wanna go home" in "Two," Adams delivered his emotions in a way that deftly walked the line that separates universal truth and cliche, seldom lapsing into a predictable path while implicitly acknowledging that even though all stories have been told before, that doesn't mean they've been told by someone like him. 

Ditto the choice of cover songs: Oasis' "Wonderwall," delivered as a sad lament, and, even more oddly convincing, Ronnie James Dio's metal classic, "Holy Diver." Only Adams could pull this stuff off without it dripping with irony. But in both cases, the solid conviction that's at the heart of Adams' best work eclipsed any notion that this was a stunt. It's Adams' most admirable trait.

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Photo: Singer-songwriter Ryan Adams in his Hollywood music studio in front of a pair of Fairchild 660 compressor limiters originally used by the Beatles. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times. 

Indie music: Write Chix's Jazzy mines the R&B indie scene

Jazmine Bailey doesn’t have her sights set on conquering the Los Angeles indie music scene, despite being a native. The R&B singer-songwriter, who goes by Jazzy, is actually feeling the itch to escape.

“A lot of people I talk to say, 'Don’t leave, you’re in the heart of it all.' But I think New York is a better market for shows. Every show that I’ve done [recently], there hasn’t been one in L.A.,” she says while lounging inside a bohemian-chic-decorated recording studio in North Hollywood. “I’ve done Philly, Baltimore, New York, Boston. It’s more for that independent grind.”

Previously signed to Jamie Foxx’s Foxx/King Entertainment and well-regarded locally as one-half of songwriting team the Write Chix (with longtime collaborator Bobbie-Cheri Gobert), the 25-year-old Bailey started working L.A.’s indie R&B scene with her first self-released project, “Oh Jazzy” in 2005. 

She then went on the road as Melanie Fiona’s backup vocalist during the European leg of Kanye West’s Glow in the Dark tour and continued collaborating with Gobert before releasing last year’s “Beauty and the Beat.”

Review: Los Van Van at the Conga Room

Urgent memo to the Department of Homeland Security: Los Van Van, the brilliant Cuban dance band that tore up the Conga Room on Thursday night, poses a clear and present danger to the U.S. capitalist system.

Not because the ensemble and its roughly 70-year-old leader, Juan Formell, represent any actual threat that would justify the absurd delays the group has endured in trying to obtain U.S. travel visas over the past few months.

No, the real menace is that anyone witnessing Los Van Van perform live, as they've been doing since the late 1960s, will be swept up in a sweaty rhythmic euphoria, potentially causing them to miss work the next day and thereby undermining the free-market way of life.

On Thursday night, not even Kennedy-era red tape, and a somewhat gnarly sound mix that occasionally smothered the band's charanga-style string and keyboard players, could prevent Los Van Van from working its spell.

A floor-jamming crowd of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Peruvians and Angelenos of all flavors came together for a show of comradely, eroticized musicianship, triggering a giant dance party that roared on late into the night. Some of those present may be dancing still.

Los Van Van's longevity derives from Formell's relentless and cunning innovations as a composer and orchestral arranger. Over successive decades, he has painted drum machines and synthesizers into a dance-scape that gives pride of place to its brass section and jangling piano, thereby fashioning a funkier, hook-laden version of traditional Cuban son that Formell has dubbed songo.

Seventeen members strong in Thursday's L.A. incarnation, the band strung together extended versions of about a dozen of its hits, leading off with “Chapeando” and a smoking rendition of “Me Mantengo,” fronted by a charismatic quartet of singers: Mayito (Mario Rivera), El Lele (Abdel Rasalps), Yeni (Yenisel Valdes) and Roberton (Roberto Hernandez Acea).

Although their lyrical dexterity would make any listener assume the singers are improvising, much of the wordplay and scatting is as tightly scripted as the band's meticulous instrumentation. Formell, a relaxed and benign onstage presence, is a ruthless comandante when it comes to maintaining aesthetic discipline and somehow making it feel totally loose and organic — the essence of Cuba's musical genius.

Elder statesman Formell also lent his voice as backup to the proceedings, but mostly he focused on conducting the players, a superb group that included Roberto Carlos on piano and trombonists Alvaro Collado, Hugo Morejon and Edmundo Pina.

Here's hoping that Formell and his compatriots find their next U.S. tour less impeded by political posturing. Pleasure, joy and sensuality do not a foreign policy make, but they could be a great warm-up.

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Photo: Roberto Hernandez Acea, a.k.a. Roberton of the band Los Van Van, performs at the Conga Room. Credit: Eddie Sakaki / The Conga Room

Pop music review: FYF Festival works out the kinks

The daylong event shows a thriving punk spirit

 

This post has been updated. See below for details.

They were peppered throughout the 20,000-strong crowd at the exuberant FYF Festival in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday: first-generation punk band T-shirts worn by indie kids, twentysomethings and Gen X-ers alike. A chubby man wearing Minutemen; a pixie in a sleeveless Conflict jacket; the Big Boys on a sound guy; M.D.C/Stains shirt and knee-high black Doc Martens on a glum (and surprisingly young) skinhead. And of course many versions of the Black Flag bars. There was even a Slovenly shirt.

Most impressive were the couple who looked as if they'd just helicoptered in from Malibu: she in an elegant floor-length pattern skirt, perfect hair and nails, and a form-fitting Circle Jerks "Golden Shower of Hits" tee highlighting her Pilates physique; her man dressed casually sophisticated in a weathered Minor Threat shirt.

Punk rock long ago transcended class, age, gender and ethnicity to become a signifier not necessarily of outward rebellion but of the symbolic, crazy-on-the-inside variety. That sense of internal defiance continues to permeate the entire underground and has become a secret handshake that united not only the artists who made traditional-ish punk rock over the course of 10 hours of the FYF -- the Descendents, No Age, Off! among them -- but from a wildly divergent cast of in-yer-face artists including beat makers Nosaj Thing and Dan Deacon, the deeply sensual, self-referential house music of Portland's Chromatics and Glass Candy, and the catchy, arena-aspirant bands like Broken Social Scene.

"It's a punk rock festival. That means we're going to play ... in the wrong key," declared Guided by Voices singer Robert Pollard during his band's sturdy, hook-infused rock set featuring acrobatic kicks, monster choruses and a sexy girl delivering between-song lighted cigarettes to guitarist Mitch Mitchell.

Review: Rock the Bells gazes back while looking ahead

Don’t ask me about Rock the Bells. Ask Ron Artest. After all, the Los Angeles Lakers forward was ubiquitous at San Manuel Amphitheatre on Saturday: ebulliently rapping along to every word of Mobb Deep’s “Infamous” and bouncing onstage alongside Nas to help foster nostalgia for “Memory Lane.”

The sometime rapper/full-time fan represents the demographic sweet spot for the traveling hip-hop festival: 31 years old, weaned on rugged '90s boom-bap rap and unabashedly nostalgic for the era when its raw and uncompromised iteration received a spot on the throne. The aesthetic defined by Q-Tip’s declaration, “Rap is not pop. If you call it that then stop.”

To its credit, festival promoter Guerilla Union put in a yeoman’s effort at booking young guns such as Curren$y, Mac Miller, Blu & Exile, Freddie Gibbs and even Childish Gambino, the project from “Community” star Donald Glover. But it was clear from the massive crowds clustered around the Rock the Bells stage and the smaller Wu Tang Clan-branded Enter the 36 Chambers stage that more people loved the '90s than VH1 could ever guess.

Photos: Rock the Bells 2011

Live review: Arcade Fire at the Shrine Auditorium

There isn't a working band that has more fun playing live. The energy created is healing.

 
In the middle of Arcade Fire's set at the Shrine Auditorium on Thursday night, during its disco-dripping song “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains), the group's lead singer Win Butler ran offstage and into the crowd. This isn't unusual for the band — onstage the eight-member (and counting) ensemble batters the fourth wall as hard as it thwacks its dozens of drums, keyboards, violins and other sundry noisemakers.

What was strange was what Butler did when he made it to the back aisles. He gathered some new friends among the legion of iPhone picture-snappers, brushed his sweaty southern-goth haircut to the side and stopped to watch his band play.

Even if his jaunt was a bit of lead-singer peacocking, Butler still must have felt what the many hundreds of thousands of Arcade Fire fans have suspected since the arrival of its 2004 debut album “Funeral” — that we're watching a rambling cast of accordion-playing Canadians grow into the defining rock band of the 21st century.

The group has played some of the biggest stages the world can offer, licensed a song to the Super Bowl and topped album charts while releasing its music through the scruffy indie label Merge. Arcade Fire's best songs, like the gang-chorus rapture of “Wake Up” and call-and-response burner “Rebellion (Lies),” will be on our oldies stations in 40 years.

And after three albums, including the latest “The Suburbs,” the band members have finally written enough of them that their Shrine show could even make their singer take a step back and revel in the grandeur.