Album Reviews

THE CHAMBER STRINGS
Month of Sundays
(Bobsled)
Led by singer/songwriter (and former Nikki Sudden sideman) Kevin Junior, Chicago's Chamber Strings make exactly the kind of music you'd expect from their name: lush, melodic pop. There's no shortage of bands doing this sort of stuff these days, but the Strings are something special. Junior writes absolutely gorgeous tunes that contain just the right mixture of sugar and spice, and he knows exactly how to enhance them with strings and horns without making the results overly goopy. In addition he sings his lovelorn lyrics in a reedy, heartfelt tenor that never sounds forced or arch. The band backs up him up with taste and an obvious love for the style, especially pianist Carolyn Engelmann, whose subtle licks compliment the leader's tunes perfectly. The wonderful "Make It Through the Summer" (co-written with Wilco's John Stirrat), the rocking "Let Me Live My Own Life" and the stunningly beautiful "It's No Wonder" (with gives a nod to Laura Nyro with its "Gonna take a miracle" refrain) stand as some of the best pop music made by anyone anywhere, and they're just the tip of the iceberg. Beauty, thy name is Chamber Strings. Michael Toland

For fans of: the Pernice Brothers, Burt Bacharach, Smokey Robinson

CHARLES CURTIS
Ultra White Violet Light/Sleep
(Squealer)
I'm into experimental art. Like this simultaneous double play CD from NYC composer/cellist Charles Curtis. The sleeve instructs the listener to use four playback devices (one for each track), even suggesting dumping to cassette, which is then wired into an amp, or parking four convertibles together for a unique listening experience. Teching it up a notch, my method was to digitize all four tracks into ProTools and play them simultaneously, then to break out of my Catholic upbringing and really fuck some shit up!

Track a contained cellos, sine tones, and sustained electric guitars.
Track b contained electric guitar and bass, drumkit, sine tones, and speech.
Track c contained sine tones, and sustained electric guitars.
Track d contained cellos, sine tones, sustained electric guitars, and speech.

When playing the tracks as directed (MotherMaryMix), the voice is muted, hypnotic, suggestive of supernatural elements, dwarves, the feeling of layers—an elfin-sized perspective with looming redwoods swaying grandly above. Yellow-tinted orange butterfly wings flitting intermittently, leaving sonar circles in upscaling size with diminished transparency. Definitely dreamlike. The spoken words are announced, "Second Avenue, Thanksgiving" , bringing travel and smell to my surreal landscape. I'm like a floating anime character losing rubles from my pockets. Intersections of insects. Cornucopia. The repetition of "It is Thanksgiving" makes me loop, feel like there is something I'm trying to reinforce, a landmark, a special place, an owned segment of space. My friend Mike also visualized an elfin perspective, looking at skyscrapers with raindrops falling slowly on his face. One last noodling visual: the cello and guitar wrap themselves around the drone; long spidery fingers caressing through each other to try to capture underwater huge Venus flytraps swaying to lazily capture their prey.

Albeit a less gritty approach than amped walkmans, my digital method incurred some artifacts which added unexpected rhythms and meaning to the work. My G4 was revving with this clicking, metronome-like march that my brain likened to a determined army of well-coordinated nymphs. The MotherMaryMix was difficult listening on account of it's sine-wave cleanliness.

Mike and I then played "DJ" and foxed with all sorts of combinations, stutterances and levels of the tracks (Confessional Mixes). My personal favorite was using the mouse to pan track d left and right with the quickness of a Scratch Pickl, and opposing slow pans of alternating tracks, like a conductor stringing the sounds of Japanese hanging lanterns. These remixes provided the dirt and discrepancy our ears had longed to grab. Good for: analyzing, being depressed, tripping. Shelley Pellegrin

For fans of: Air, Japancakes, spoken word

KEVIN DEAL
Kiss On the Breeze
(Blind Nello)
Texas is just full of guys who look and sound like singer/songwriter/alt-country/troubadour types, guys who can muster the look and attitude, but can't cut it in the songwriting chops department (Slaid Cleaves, anyone?). Cut the sleeves out of a denim shirt, hit the open mics with some quiet songs about black coffee and big cars, and you've not necessarily succeeded at anything except the sincerest form of flattery.

Kevin Deal is, ahem, the real deal. There's just a little something extra, a wistful sincerity and earnestness in his songs, that makes him likable. When he sings about sitting dumbfounded at a stoplight when a DJ said Stevie Ray Vaughan died on "Day the Blues Cried," you just have to believe him. On "Can't Hold a Candle" he's talking about his lover's old flame, and instead of milking the line for a Nashville hook, he winds up quietly telling us that "I still hold her just the same." Deal dabbles in a laugh or two as well, as any songwriter of his ilk should; on "Cracked Up," he sings, "Crazy ain't all it's cracked up to be/I'm just a shell of the nut I used to be."

Kiss on the Breeze is Deal's third CD, a subtle (though not minimal) affair backed by the likes of producer/steel guitar deity Lloyd Maines, Paul Pearcy, Terri Hendrix and Julieann Banks. His voice is something akin to that of pre-strangulation Steve Earle, and his colorful but limited range is suited well to the material. He's not yet ready to rub elbows with, say, Robert Earl Keen, but he's getting there. Brian Briscoe

For fans of: Steve Earle, Robert Earl Keen, Jack Ingram

MONSTER MAGNET
God Says No
(A&M/Interscope)
New York's comic book-fueled headbangers Monster Magnet tried to be a heavy psychedelic band on Dopes to Infinity and had a rock radio hit with "Negasonic Teenage Warhead," a tune unmatched by anything else on the album. They followed that with Powertrip, a straight-up hard rock record that boasted an even bigger hit with "Space Lord" (you know, the one with the chorus "Space Lord mother fucker"—it's still a mystery how they got that on the radio). Again, though, nothing on the record stood up to the hit.

Finally, with their latest album God Says No, Monster Magnet has the opus it's been working towards the past decade. Smartly combining the two approaches and adding tasteful modern embellishments, leader Dave Wyndorf and co. make the psychedelic hard rock record of every longhair's dreams. Things kick off with "Melt," a perfect millennial update of the Black Sabbath sound, before ramming into "Heads Explode," which is turbocharged and catchy as hell, possibly their greatest single yet. The band moves smoothly from outright pounders like "Medicine," "Cry" and "All Shook Out" to high volume garage rock ("Kiss of the Scorpion," on which a Farfisa challenges the guitars in the mix), acid-fried country blues ("Gravity Well"), strangely compassionate creep rock ("Queen of You") and a surprising stab at synth pop ("Take It"). The album's spiritual center is the title track, in which Wyndorf calmly points out that a deity will tell you not to do anything you enjoy, so fuck him. With subtle drum loops augmenting the raging guitars and Wyndorf's near-perfect classic rock voice, the album sounds contemporary without pandering. God may say no to Monster Magnet, but any rock fan with ears will say yes. Michael Toland

For fans of: Alice Cooper, Nebula, Soundgarden

SHADOW GALLERY
Legacy
(Magna Carta)
Pennsylvania's Shadow Gallery has been dogged by comparisons to Dream Theater for nearly all of its decade-long career. Then again, any band that mixes progressive rock with metal and writes epic length tracks and has a vaguely spiritual bent is going to suffer DT comparisons. However, the band's last album, the concept saga Tyranny, made them DT's equal, and their latest slab Legacy shows them growing beyond their influences. Unlike DT, Shadow Gallery doesn't sound like a hair metal band that absorbed progressive elements, but rather a prog band who decided to enhance their sound with power chords. The opening "Cliffhanger" and the ballad "Destination Universe" possess a classically-inspired majesty that most headbangers just can't muster. Guitarists Gary Wehrkamp and Brendt Allman, while showy, avoid the kind of tapping/wanking fretboard frenzy that becomes so annoying in other prog metallers, and keyboardist Chris Ingles matches them lick for lick when he's not painting the songs with lush synth shadings or melodic piano beds. Perhaps the band's best asset, frontman Mike Baker doesn't shriek, growl or howl—he actually sings, and quite soulfully at that. The group brings it all home with the album-closing, 34-minute "First Light," which manages to somehow avoid bombast over its epic length. Shadow Gallery isn't quite up to the level of the prog elite (Yes, Genesis, etc.) it admires, but with Legacy it's vaulted into the top tier of contemporary prog metal. Michael Toland

For fans of: Dream Theater, Kansas, Ice Age

THE GEORGE USHER GROUP
Days of Plenty
(Parasol)
Songwriter/guitarist/keyboardist George Usher has knocked around the NYC/Hoboken rock/pop scene for nearly 20 years, logging in time with bands like Beat Rodeo and the Schramms and penning songs for the likes of Laura Cantrell. He's carried on a simultaneous solo career, but only the Europeans noticed, at least until 1998, when Parasol released his first stateside album Dutch April. The follow-up Days of Plenty strips down the comparatively lush sonics of that album to a basic quartet sound, with jangling guitars and Usher's whiskey velvet vocals front and center. While Usher loves pop hooks as much as the next guy, he's also a believer in subtlety; few of his melodies leap out and bitchslap anyone into paying attention. Usher prefers tunes that reveal themselves over time, letting listeners come to the songs in their own time, picking up on the melodic insinuations and discovering the above-average lyrics themselves. Days of Plenty requires some patience, but, like most encounters that don't resonate immediately, it offers great rewards. Michael Toland

For fans of: the dB's, the Kinks, Johnny Society

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Wayne Kramer Presents: Beyond Cyberpunk
(MuscleTone/Musicblitz)
Compiled by veteran guitarist/songwriter Wayne Kramer, in collaboration with Net-based music provider Musicblitz, Beyond Cyberpunk has little to do with the strain of sci-fi alluded to in the title. Instead it's a collection of all-new tunes drawn from the ranks of punk rockers old and young, and since Kramer, a charter member of the legendary MC5, has a broader definition of punk than most, rest assured there's more than to this album than three-chord wonders. Not that there aren't plenty of those, too—the album kicks off with the delightfully trashy "Inside Job," a new tune from Mudhoney that's one of their best-ever tracks. Also following in the KISS (that's "keep it simple, stupid," not the band) tradition are vets Dee Dee Ramone, with the very Ramones-like "Bad Little Go-Go Girl," Stooges axeman Ron Asheton, with the hard rocking "Dead End Street" and former Dead Boy Jimmy Zero, with "Take Me In Your Arms (Like Heroin)" from his new band Lesbianmaker. Notable newcomers include Quickie, whose "Medicated (Just to Get By)" brings vintage Black Flag to mind, and Mother Superior, which usually plays more complex music as Henry Rollins' latest Band and which erupts with the blatantly salacious "Black Silk."

As satisfyingly rockin' as these tracks are, what really makes this comp special are the tracks that push the envelope or even throw it away altogether. Richard Hell reunites with original Voidoids Robert Quine and Ivan Julian for the idiosyncratic six-string fireworks of "Oh," while Chris Spedding collaborates with Kramer for the roots/punk storytelling of "Love On Death Row." Unsung great Stan Ridgway contributes "Beloved Movie Star," one of his usual perfect noir-pop songs, and former Was (Not Was) co-frontman David Was offers deadpan beat poetry over hip-hop beats on "Chow Main Street." Pere Ubu cuts a slice of vintage bizarro pie called "Wasteland" that recalls their late 70s glory days. Kramer himself closes the set with the guitars 'n' electronics tale of urban alienation "Crawling Outta the Jungle," which comes closest to the mind's eye imagination of what "cyberpunk" might sound like. With the exception of the generic punk of Strung Out and Cooter and the bland 90s metal of Downset, Beyond Cyberpunk is the most aurally satisfying collection to come rolling down the info superhighway in some time. Michael Toland

For fans of: the artists involved