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CD Reviews
Edited by Dean Budnick
"The Siket Disc" - Phish review
by Jesse JarnowSo, Phish has a new album out and who woulda thunk it? Only, it's not really an album and plenty of people woulda thunk it, if that makes any sense. "The Siket Disc" has been gossip on many folks' tongues for practically as long as the music contained on it has existed. A few years ago, a rumor surfaced that Phish had played a 24 hour jam at the house of a friend. Later, it was revealed that there was no 24 hour jam. There were, however, somewhere between 20 and 30 hours of straight improvisation in the can recorded at Bearsville Studios in upstate New York.
When "The Story Of The Ghost" was released in October, much was made of the fact that the process by which the album was recorded was a wholly new one: many of the songs had been constructed by whittling down the jamming into songs which then, in turn, had vocals dubbed directly over them. Meanwhile, members of the band promised, something else would be done with other highlights of the Bearsville tapes. Now, "the Siket Disc" is here. What it is not is a new Phish album filled with all those songs you bitched about when they weren't included on "Ghost" -- you know Dirt, Twist, Vultures, Piper, Meatstick, Dogs Stole Things, etc.. What it is is is an incredibly interesting and experimental new-fangled Phish release.
It's improvisation. That's not something new to Phish or to Phishheads. However, much of it manages to sound completely different from anything Phish has done live. That's not to say it doesn't sound like Phish, though, because it does. There is no point A or point B -- just "the Siket Disc". That is, unlike a live performance, the improvisation is not rooted in basic song forms -- it does not begin and end with familiar melodies or patterns. In recent years, Phish has opted for more tensionless jamming. With the exception of a completely improvisatory late night set at the Lemonwheel festival in summer 1998, the band - while experimenting - has always kept a certain gravity about them by virtue of structuring a show around songs, even if the improvisation has always been the centerpiece. There's a certain tension naturally built into that.
And it's done away with here. I honestly had no idea what to expect. The only caveat I had was a small blurb in the latest issue of the Doniac Schvice, Phish's newsletter, which read "it plays best in the wee hours of the night" -- which is the kind of association I usually have with the aforementioned ambient fourth set from the Lemonwheel. Still, that's not much of a warning. There is nothing to grasp onto here. Even if one is the most rabid of Phish fans with scores and scores of live tapes and studio outtakes... there is still little to hold onto.
The first track, My Left Toe, fades in gently with all four band members contributing at an equal volume, creating a lush bed of sound. Bassist Mike Gordon is the first to distinguish himself, with a high picked out pattern -- somewhere approaching a lead, but not quite there. With a pattern established, a tension, too, has been created. Gordon and guitarist Trey Anastasio add random forays into discordance and irregular rhythms, always to be sucked back into the flow of the groove and resolved. Keyboardist Page McConnell supplies synthesizer washes on which the band begins to build. Instead of a grand explosion, however, the song fades back into a pattern similar to where it began.
The whole track is strikingly similar - and I mean strikingly - to Anagrama, the first track on the first disc of New York art rockers Sonic Youth's (presently) three-volume set of improvisational EPs: SYR1, SYR2, and SYR3. Sonic Youth entered their home studio, called Echo Canyon, and improvised. Then, they released them on a series of EPs on their own label. Meanwhile, they crafted songs out of the jamming and released them too -- this time as an album. Sound familiar? Sonic Youth's initial Echo Canyon sessions, which spawned the EPs, quite coincidentally occurred almost directly parallel to Phish's Bearsville sessions. What does it all mean? Nothing, probably. It's just damned innerestin', that's all, that the processes - both in technicalities and initial results - employed by Phish and Sonic Youth can sound so similar, but the results can be so different.
Late in the Name Is Slick, Anastasio - palm-muting - latches onto a melody similar to Gordon's initial lead in My Left Toe, an inadvertent conceptual link between two jams. There is a unified vibe between the two - and, for that matter, between every track on "the Siket Disc" - and, to draw it one step further, between "the Siket Disc" and "the Story of the Ghost". While there is no direct overlap between the two collections, they share a similar conceptual continuity -- from the material presented therein right down to the cover art. There is a spookiness to both. It's not hard to imagine any of the songs that made it onto "Ghost" coming out of or going into pieces on "the Siket Disc".
About a month before "the Story of the Ghost" was released, a tape of outtakes and demos began to circulate. One of the songs featured was a short snippet with sparse underlying spaciness entitled What's The Use. The title, presumably, was derived from the Tom Marshall-penned lyrics which were dubbed on top: "What's the use in going fast / If you're not in the race? / You'll find soon that everyone accepts / A slower pace". The version included on "the Siket Disc" has the vocals removed from it, and only the weirdness is left behind. It's probably for the best.
Guitar loops and feedback abound. Soon, a rhythm is established, and Anastasio plays around with several melodies featuring a host of sustained notes -- many trailing off into feedback. For the briefest of moments, McConnell switches from synthesizer to piano, and a new beauty begins to take hold. During this several second period, a remarkable potential energy is instantly built up. Just as quickly, though, McConnell switches back to synth before, along with Anastasio, dropping out almost completely -- leaving Mike and Fish.
If anything else, "the Siket Disc" is a collection of confounded expectations. What's The Use, for example, contains some of the only things on the entire CD that one might remotely classify as guitar leads. What guitar there is on the album lives to serve the atmosphere. Certainly, Anastasio makes many incredible contributions... he's just not the center of musical attention he has been in the past. That's not a complaint. If anything, this is the closest the band has yet come to achieving their goal of completely egoless music.
Clocking in at roughly 11 minutes long, What's The Use is easily the longest piece on the album. Most everything lies somewhere between three and five minutes. The disc as a whole is only around 35 minutes in duration. This confounds more expectations: Out of 20 hours of jamming, only 35 minutes are here; from a band legendary for their lengthy improvisations, (for the most part) only the briefest of snippets have been included. Most honestly, it doesn't matter. The first time I listened to the CD, it was on an old-style stereo that didn't have a timer on the CD player. When it was over, I had no idea how long I had been listening for. Time had disappeared somewhere during there. I felt like I had been in their world for a long, long time. I seriously figured that I'd been listening for at least an hour. With no songs, at first, to grasp onto, I could only internalize what I was hearing. Once that was done, I lost all sense of time.
More confounded expectations: When one sees a track title like Fish Bass on the back cover next to a picture of Fish playing a bass guitar - with the line notes featuring a picture of Mike behind the drum set - the natural assumption is to think that the aforementioned track will be one where the band switches instruments and, uh, rocks out or something. With the exception of a note at the beginning of the track, there is no clear instrumentation on Fish Bass. Video came noises and phase shifts result in something sounding a bit like one of the sonic explorations on Phish Dry Goods' last release -- Trey's solo debut, "One Man's Trash".
"Among the tunes we came up with in Bearsville," McConnell states in "the Phish Book", "is the Happy Whip and Dung Song -- imagine driving through a blinding snowstorm in the tundra with a yak, a sled, and a heaving pile of steaming dung" (77). That about sums it up. Elements of the Happy Whip and Dung Song appear to have made it directly into the infamous studio version of Meatstick, a song circulating on a couple of outtakes tapes that was also played live twice in 1997. To continue with McConnell's visualization: McConnell's synth washes could be the blinding snow storm, Fish's rhythm the ox padding along (with occasional cymbal crashes acting as the whip), the high-pitched squeal of Anastasio's guitar the whining of the yak as it sways back and forth in the wind, and Mike's steady bass part the sled lurching along in the snow.
Albert, to my ears, is easily the most focused and beautiful piece on the disc. Above gentle pushings of the band, Trey lays an absolutely gorgeous melody in the same vein as the Beatles' Dear Prudence while McConnell and Gordon provide lulling counterpoints. It's a lullaby and, if it weren't for the fact that it closes this album so perfectly, I'd be upset that the band didn't use to end "the Story of the Ghost".
The album is a drive into the unknown. If an album based on songs has departures and destinations with clearly marked roads between them, this album has terrain -- if even that. The cover illustrates a car parked in darkness, with only the car and the tree immediately in front of it illuminated. The tree is numbered: 35, and there is a small frame hanging from the tree with the phrase "THE BRAKES" hanging within, above a small decoy duck. All that we see is what is immediately around us. The brakes might not work, but who gives a rat's ass? Who needs brakes? We move through the darkness.
DEEP BANANA BLACKOUT - ROWDY DUTY
review by Benjy Eisen - benjy@newmarketproductions.comWhen I first picked up Rowdy Duty, it was a Friday night and I had plans to go out with some friends in a couple of hours. I figured I'd pop the disk in the player while I got ready. As it turns out, I never even made it into the shower. "Bump and Sway" came on and there I was, in nothing more than a towel and flip-flops, dancing circles around my room. But it was the third track, "Stiff Pickin," with its horn charts and hard driving funk that got me shaking every thing I've got.
Deep Banana Blackout is not hard to figure out - essentially they're a funk outfit. Vocalist Jen Durkin belting out lines like "Get'chall in the mood" adds a sexy, bluesy feel to the tunes and while I'd like to stay away from bringing in overused Janis Joplin comparisons, I just can't - this girl's got pipes. Lead guitarist, "The Fuzz," brings a harder edged rock feel to some of the songs but through it all, Deep Banana Blackout remains simply a raging funk band. It's what they do best.
It's not the individual songs on Rowdy Duty which makes the disks so much fun to listen to - it's the constant booty-time and rump-shaking that is laced gratuitously throughout. Having been recorded live at 7 Willow St. (Port Chester, NY), the energy of an overheated, overpacked club is catapulted onto the disk and thrown back out through the speakers as if it were an integral part of the music itself. And with this band - it is.
At the end of the first disk, I plopped down on my sofa, sweaty and smelling like funk. I had just danced wildly around my room nonstop for an hour, nearly naked on a Friday night, and I was about to do it again. What more could you want from rock n' roll? Deep Banana Blackout is more than just plain rowdy - they're also fun. And Rowdy Duty proves it.
Dude of Life- Under the Sound Umbrella (Phoenix Rising)
By AJ Abrams"You can run like an antelope out of control,
You can run like Jerry Rice in the Super Bowl,
If you're so big and famous you can't get away,
Let 'em take your picture, that's what I say."
You may recognize the first line from the classic Phish song but The Dude of Life, our old friend from the beginning of Phishstory, has updated it for the 90s. "You can't outrun the paparazzi," the song continues as the lyrics were obviously inspired by the paparazzi controversy surrounding the Princes Diana car crash.
Quirky, philosophical lyrics have always been a trademark of the Dude of Life (a.k.a. Steve Pollak) and that trend continues on his new album Under the Sound Umbrella. But the album also clearly demonstrates a more mature and sophisticated Dude. Both lyrically and musically, the album sounds much more polished than his debut album. This is surprising considering Phish was his backing band for the entire Crimes of the Mind album. However, that album was recorded in 1991, when Phish was just beginning their ascent to superstardom.
Members of Phish have returned to help out the Dude of Life on the first half of the record. Trey Anastasio and Jon Fishman appear on four songs and Mike Gordon is on one. The second half features the Dude of Life's regular backing band, the Great Red Shark. And believe it or not it is with the GRS that the songs begin to mature.
The album begins with Mike Gordon's funky, slinky smooth bass lines on "Beware of the Dog." Trey chips in on vocals and guitar, but Trey really shines on the next song, "Francilla." Trey uses a thick, fat, fuzzy, tone that is sonically pleasing. His guitar playing on this song is the musical highlight of the album. The song itself, about a girl who puked all over herself and needed a shower, is only OK. But Trey's guitar elevates this song from average to awesome. Everytime I listen to this track, I tune out the rest of the band and just concentrate on Trey's wonderful tone and style. But that's not a knock on the Dude, it's just a compliment to Trey, one of the best rock guitarists around today.
On the next song, "Tow Truck Driver," The Dude of Life unleashes his wrath on someone we have all been victim of in the past- the ruthless tow truck driver.
"Patrick Schriver was a tow truck driver,
But today he lies beneath the dirt.
If only he had known to leave my car alone,
He never would have gotten hurt.He showed no sign of pity,
And he towed cars throughout the city,
And he always had a smirk on his face.
Sadistically indeed, he fulfilled an inner need,
And someone had to put him in his place."We've all wanted to kill a tow truck driver at one time or another but lucky for us we have the Dude to take care of him for us. It's the Dude's zany observations of life that make him unique. He even defends baseball great Pete Rose who was banned from the game for life because of his gambling addiction: "It's time to put Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame. A little bit of gambling, who's to blame?"
I'd have to agree with the Dude of Life, Pete Rose does belong in the Hall of Fame. In fact, I always seem to agree with the Dude's philosophical lyrics. The Dude and I both seem to have very similar views of the world. And since I connect with those views, I tend to like the Dude's music more for its zany messages than for the actual music itself.
But towards the end of the album, the music becomes more important than the message. The Dude of Life and the Great Red Shark's partnership begins to solidify on "Scuba Dive," "Sound Umbrella," and "What You Do to Me," and the music is smooth, melodic and catchy. They also have a classic rock feel to them, particularly the title track "Sound Umbrella." That song features a terrific guitar solo that sounds similar to the .38 Special song "Hold on Loosely." Which is a good thing, because I always enjoyed the jam in that song. On these last few tunes, the Dude of Life shows signs of becoming more of a serious rock and roller and less of a funny frontman. These tunes rage with some joyful jams.
But the great thing about the Dude of Life is that he can be both, as this album proves. Many Phish fans miss the zany, strange, eclectic early days of the band. The Dude of Life helped forge Phish's insane identity. But the band has grown up and doesn't act like the goofballs they used to. However, "Under the Sound Umbrella" rekindles the memories of the youthful, more playful Phish when things were taken less seriously and life was one big party. Well, the Dude of Life has always been the star of the party. And on this album, he will make you laugh your ass off and rock your ass off. It's a contagious combination that will consume you. Step Under the Sound Umbrella become immersed in the Dude's unique blend of rockomedy.
You can order Under the Sound Umbrella through Phoenix Rising: www.radiophoenix.com
Umphrey's McGee "Songs for Older Women"
Review by: Dave RiouxDo I start with initial impressions? If I do, then I have to tell you how hard I laughed at the CD cover itself. And how I wondered what exactly two old ladies playing catch with a Hacky Sack on the beach had to do with JamBands? Or my curiosity with bands name itself. Being from New England, and an occasional recluse, I hadn't heard of Umphrey's McGee, yet.
Pop in the CD, and... whoa?! Holy time changes Batman!!! These guys really know what they are doing! From the get go, I'm taken by the hypnotic and almost disorienting staccato changes. The tight reign the band has on the time signatures during the opening song "Hangover". Funk slap bass over liquid guitar, as percussions color the accents.
As is evident is some of my previous reviews; I'm easily swayed by a expertly played bass, and Umphrey's doesn't let me down! Ryan Stasik makes a clean case for himself from the start, playing with slippery groove and keeping the bottom end funky. Good dancing stuff! It would be worth while to visit them at www.umphreys.com and find out when they're going to be around your area. I personally plan on trying to hit them at Harper's Ferry in Boston at the end of this month!
Anyway, back to the CD. Sometimes it seems easier to compare a band to something familiar. This can be good for the consumer, but sometimes bands don't like to be compared to anyone else. Well, seeing as how my first impression was that they reminded me of Dave Matthew's sound, with some of the early Phish jamming... I hope that no one minds being compared to such influential JamBands. The cut "2 x 2" had such a "Fluffhead" feel to it, that I can't believe that there isn't some sort of osmosis going on there.
One musician who absolutely deserves mention here is Brendan Bayliss on the guitar. His command of the instrument is pretty awe inspiring. Good enough to keep this CD in rotation at my house for a while, so I can try and soak up a little more of what is going on there. Very reminiscent of some of Frank Zappa's wide ranging guitar-scapes.
Another piece that bears mention is "Thin Air", which helped me to concentrate on the rest of the band who by NO means pale in comparison to the previously mentioned musicians. The fact that these five guys found each other and are just STARTING to make music together is a very encouraging fact. "They are (as a sarcastic friend of mine dubbed them) a bunch of suburban white guys playing too many notes." Coming from his Vulcan mind, that is a compliment, in case you missed it.
It was mentioned in their web site that they had some bluegrass influences, and don't disappoint here either. Fun, fast picking that leads to even faster dancing. There are good harmonies as well, however, here is the only place I think they could tighten up a bit. Maybe it's the mix from a live show, maybe even the venue itself. Either way, they have so much going for them, I can't see not mentioning a little constructive critisicm. I sure can't tell 'em how to play guitar.
Native: Exhale on Spring Street
By Chip Schramm hms3@compuserve.comExhale on Spring Street is the third release from the New York City sextet Native. Like the multitude of cultures and lifestyles that coexist within the five boroughs of New York, Native's latest outing encompasses a wide range of musical sounds. Mike Jaimes provides powerful lead guitar lines to take the band into jazzy, funky, and reggae jams. Chris Wychoff also comes through strong on the album employing a variety of organ, piano, and clavichord sounds. Mat Hutt plays guitar and shares vocals with John Wood who also adds varied percussion throughout the album. Catherine Russell also sings on 9 of the 13 tracks, giving Native a steady melodic flow throughout the CD. Dave Thomas on the drums and Matt Lyons on bass round out the rhythm section.
The contributions of the six members of native are well balanced. This becomes apparent on the very first track, "Digging Holes", as Jaimes fluid guitar soloing is matched by equally solid keyboard play from Wychoff. One of the many themes explored on Exhale on Spring Street is the folk ballad. "Outlaw" is a rough-and-tumble story of independence and flight. The "Pendleton Roundup" celebrates the great western rodeo and features Buddy Cage on pedal steel guitar. These two tracks are an interesting contrast to the rest of the album, which focuses more on Latin beats and soulful grooves.
"Restless" and "For the First Time" move the band in a different direction. Both allow the band to explore funky textured jams to fuse the contributions of all band members into one cohesive sound. The driving samba-like percussion on "Restless" paints an auditory landscape that well justifies the title of the track. On the latter song, Wychoff's clavichord work is matched by equally intense slapping by Lyons on bass. Other tracks on the album also contain funk and Latin tones, drawing from the same well. "Satisfaction" is a well-written song that uses a reggae beat to support strong vocals from Hutt, while "Simon" contains strong, moving guitar riffs reminiscent of Carlos Santana.
Native is not afraid to do a little experimentation on their album, either. "Sweet Intensity" begins with a quiet acoustic jam but quickly cuts into segments mixed in reverse, augmented by various reverbs and repeats, creating very unique effects. After an initial climax, the segment lands in a slow, low-riding shuffle to finish the tune. This process sounds rather complex and Native pulls it off well. On tracks 9 and 10, Native take an original approach to standard love songs incorporating slinky flowing keyboard work of special guest Pete Levin on "Love Should Be Free." Catherine Russell's vocals really widen Native's range as they paint a lyrical aphrodisiac on "Love Your Love."
Overall, Exhale on Spring Street is a well-rounded album. The differing styles embraced throughout the thirteen tracks offer a little something for everyone. The numerous special guests also add a lot to Native's basic sound without overcrowding the tracks with too many instruments. The sneaky, flowing grooves and seductive lyrics make this CD great for late-night festivities when you want to get "in the mood."
Anyone wanting to find out more about Native can visit their website at www.nativenyc.com.
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