The many guises of Joe Pernice

Return to the new west (part 5)

For various reasons I have been quiet of late (mainly busy at work) but want to get back to blog business, so thought I would start with something else I have been slow working on - my series of posts on the Uncut 'Sounds of the new west CD', after a longer than intended gap. Got distracted. Anyway......

The Pernice Brothers were another act discovered through this CD which led to a significant musical relationship, first through the purchase of the CD from which 'Crestfallen' came ('Overcome by happiness'), which I really did and still like, particularly the title track. I then worked backwards through their previous incarnation as the Scud Mountain Boys, who made a few albums of low-fi beautiful acoustic country which sounded like it was recorded simultaneously outdoors while in a large barn. While they recorded some lovely cover versions (including 'Wichita lineman' and 'Gypsies, tramps and thieves'), their finest moment for me was the song about breaking up whose central lovely plaintively sung line 'I would give anything to make it with you, just one more time' was ever so slightly undermined by the song's title ('Grudge f**k').

The core of both groups, Joe Pernice, went through several incarnations in several years, in fact (like others on this CD), including solo albums and one under the name 'Big Tobacco' , and I was very happy to see him at least twice live in Cork's much-missed intimate venue The Lobby. On one occasion, he signed my copy of this 'Chappaquiddick skyline' (what a name!), which featured a cover version of New Order's 'Leave me alone' (evidence of the English indie-US Alt Country axis which sort of defines my musical taste); if you don't believe me about the signing, by the way, see the evidence above.

The Pernice Brothers went on to record 'The world won't end' (packed with great pop tunes including 'Working girls (sunlight shines)', which can be seen below, and 'Our time has passed') , 'Yours, mine and ours' and several others which I must admit I failed to follow up on.

I will end with a longer clip of them in concert, ending up with 'Overcome with happiness'.

I will now try and return to this series of posts on a more frequent basis; the Pernice Brothers was as good a place to restart as any!

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Sweetheart of everyone's rodeo

Return to the new west (part 4)

I had heard of Emmylou Harris before 'Sounds of the New West', of course (Irish folk singer Christy Moore had a song a long long time ago about the Lisoonvarna matchmaking/music festival which name-checked her), and I had bought her 'Wrecking Ball' CD some years ago, having known the Neil Young song and also because hearing some of the songs on radio perked my interest.

I have since bought several of her solo CDs, which all feature some lovely songs (particularly, I think, 'Red Dirt Girl'), but I still believe her greatest talent, as Gram Parsons perhaps was the first to recognise, many years ago, is in lending her unique vocal talents to other artists, particularly male ones, in duets. After Gram's death, her work has been a fairly prolific mix of such duets and solo work, and some of her solo work is a bit, for me, too traditional slow country (see a good overview of her career on Wikipedia here). A very old clip of her in action with Johnny Cash is below:

In the last ten years or so, she has become a sort of fairy godmother to the whole alt-country scene, appearing on albums all over the place to bestow her blessing (and implicitly that of the great god Gram) on these newcomers who unapologietically worship at her (and his) feet. My favourite Emmylou duets are 'We are nowhere and it's now' with Bright Eyes and 'Oh my sweet Carolina' with Ryan Adams. She has also guested with a few more mature souls, including 'Coming around' with Steve Earle and 'Beachcombing' with Mark Knopfler (okay, so he doesn't quite fit the list, but she did record an entire album with him).

She also does a wonderful duet with Elvis Costello on 'Heart-shaped bruise' on his album 'The delivery man', as well as this lovely version of 'Love Hurts' (originally by Gram himself, of course):

I will come back to Emmylou later in this series of posts, as Uncut awarded her the singular honour of two songs in the 'Sounds of the new west' CD (fitting really, given her overwhelming mentoring role in the whole movement), but for now, I will leave with two versions of her doing 'Wrecking Ball', the first a fairly straightforward live version, and the second the album version set very poignantly to footage of the devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

As well as her role in guiding and inspiring the alt-country movement, comment must of course be made of the pure beauty both of her music and herself; she is really a queen with a level of sheer class that cannot be ignored, the sweetheart of everyone's rodeo.

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Suburban Sweetheart (not of the rodeo)

Return to the new west (part 3)

Working my way slowly through the Sounds of the New West, Josh Rouse from Track 3 was more of a hit with me than some others to feature, and Uncut regularly featured very nice songs of his (like 'Miracle' and 'Laughing') on their CDs over the next few years, and he also did some nice work with Kurt Wagner of Lambchop (of whom much much more later). His habit of mentioning his influences as The Cure and The Smiths of course was always going to endear him to me as well, although this is tempered by his avowed love of 70s singer/songwriters. I think there is definetely a nice image which captures the spirit of his best music in that strange mix (did Robert Smith ever listen to east-coast 70s guitar stuff, I wonder?), a strange experimental genetic hybrid of laid-back guitar, but with edgy indie sensibilities growling 'louder, harder, wierder' through the twangy haze.



His homepage can be found here and his Myspace page here and a nice clip of him playing 'Miracle' live is below:



However, my favourite song of his by a long shot was 'Sad eyes' from 'Nashville', which apparently was recorded after he broke up with his wife, and a lovely live version can be seen at:



Rouse has certainly produced some very nice songs over the years, although most of his albums I have listened to lean more towards slightly average songs than exceptional ones. His music has definetely picked up a Spanish edge (fair enough as he moved to Spain some years ago) also over the years, which is not my preference at all. One question I will end with though is why, when fate or the fickle marketplace decides which sensitive singer-songwriters will make it big, do people like James Blunt and James Morrison make it big while people like Rouse, who should be able to appeal to much of the same market, fail to?

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Hazeldine and female alt-country

Return to the New West (Part 1)

I am finally getting back to my planned series of posts on songs on the Sounds of the New West (SONW) Uncut CD from 1998!

The first song on SONW is 'Tarmac' by Hazeldine, and it certainly kicks off the CD in defiantly non-country mode, with heavy drums and snarling guitars. I must admit, in fear of accusations of sexism, that my dalliance with country music, of various degrees of alt-ness, has focussed mainly on male singers, as I have found too often that female voices somehow make the sound far less alt and far more traditional (to be explored more in later posts in this series). Nonetheless, a sound like Hazeldene’s, dominated by the aforementioned grungy guitars, is not something one would associate with Nashville, and one could certainly never imagine Nancy Griffith seductively offering the intriguing invitation to ‘f**k me like Batman’.



I quite like ‘Tarmac’, and went as far as to buy the CD ‘How bees fly’, at a CD fair if I remember right. The album is fine overall, but I can’t say it would be a favourite, and many of the songs do ditch the heavy guitars for something more conventional; on occasion, such as ‘Allergic to love’, the result is actually quite lovely. In addition, there are some good songs, such as ‘Apothecary’ (such a beautiful word, archaic and arcane, faintly smelling of odd alchemicals) which hit something stronger and stranger.

In terms of other female country singers/groups, I have had a long-standing relationship with the Indigo Girls, discovered during college years and always retaining a soft spot in my heart, although their output over the last decade has done little for me. Their ‘Southland in the Springtime’ (from 1990’s career peak Nomads, Indians and Saints) is simply one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard, warm like an aural cuddle, incredibly and tangibly evocative of a place I have never been, and with a gorgeous combination of harmony voices and acoustic guitars and a richness of texture that is quite breathtaking.

I have also bought or downloaded quite a few Lucinda Williams albums; she is in some ways analogous to a female Nick Cave, veering from the scary to the sweet on different albums, from the utter beauty and tenderness of ‘Essence’ (from which ‘Blue’ and ‘I envy the wind’ defy my limited ability to find new words for beautiful without a thesaurus to hand) to the scary rap-country she practiced on her next album ‘World without tears’.

I guess my conclusion, circuitously reached and outrageously generalising, is that, while they have not dominated my collection, female alt-countresses (?) can undoubtedly hit peaks of heavenly beauty firmly denied to their male counterparts.

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The CD that launched a thousand record collections

In May 1996, I saw in a newsagents the first issue of a new magazine about movies and music called Uncut, which I bought and liked. I have bought every issue since, and have come to trust its musical recommendations more than any other source. I cannot start to list all the bands it has introduced me to, particularly through its much-missed free CDs with collections of songs from new artists or albums (titled at various times 'Unconditionally Guaranteed' or 'The playlist'), now replaced most months by far less interesting themed compilations, some of which never even get their plastic wrapper removed.



However, of all its CDs, one stands out for eternity in my, and I bet many others', mind, and that is one which appeared in 1998 called 'Sounds of the New West', which sought to showcase the best of what has been called Alternative Country or Alt-Country. This was as far as it was possible to get from Dolly Parton and Garth Brooks and still share a planet, but still had at its sad bleeding heart some indefinable quality of Americana which meant that the only category it could somehow be shoehorned into had to have the word 'country' attached.

It wasn't my first introduction to this music; a few months previously, a rave Uncut Album of the Month review had sent me off to find and buy 'Strangers Almanac' by Whiskeytown, still probably getting my vote for one of the best albums of that whole movement (perhaps it was, for me, first love, the thrill of the new, guitars and harmonies and sadness and songs about wars and women in bars and houses on hills, but somehow filtered through an angry indie sadness not unknown to my favourite UK bands of the 1980s). I then sought out a few more which I liked from this strange new category, like Willard Grant Conspiracy's 'Flying Low', with Uncut beside me all the way, leading me gently by the hand through this unexplored musical hinterland.

So, I was sort of primed to welcome this CD when it came but, nonetheless, it blew my bloody socks off. I listened and re-listened and thought and read, and listened some more, and then I want shopping and didn't stop for most of the next decade, exploring every scrap of the territory it had provided a treasure map of, excavating under every 'x' and exploring every nook, creek and cranny.

I was not alone; several contemporaries of mine, wistfully tending our 80s record collections and looking around in suspicion at mid-90s crap like britpop and most of what passed for pop music at the time, abruptly took to this stuff like flies to dung. It was the promised land and goldrush rolled into one when we could find no new musical sustinence elsewhere; we were thirsty for new music that sated our souls and it poured and poured.

The track-listing was as follows:

01 - Hazeldine - Tarmac
02 - The Flying Burrito Brothers - Sin City
03 - Josh Rouse - Suburban Sweetheart
04 - Emmylou Harris - Wrecking Ball
05 - Pernice Brothers - Crestfallen
06 - Neal Casal - Today I'm Gonna Bleed
07 - Kate Campbell - Crazy In Alabama
08 - Willard Grant Conspiracy - Evening Mass
09 - Wagon - Two Hours Alone
10 - Freakwater - Lorraine
11 - Vic Chesnutt - Until The Led
12 - Calexico - Trigger
13 - The Handsome Family - Weightless Again
14 - Lambchop - Saturday Option
15 - Silver Jews - How To Rent A Room
16 - Will Oldham - Apocalypse, No!
17 - 16 Horsepower - Coal Black Horses
18 - The Walkabouts - On The Beach
19 - Nadine - Dark Light
20 - Emmylou Harris - Boulder To Birmingham [live]

However, something changed, just like Pulp (the only bright spot in that 1990s UK wilderness) said it would. In 2008, my favourite music was by TV on the Radio, Vampire Weekend, Glasvegas and others who could not possibly be even vaguely associated with country, no matter how alternative. Most worryingly of all, in that year many of the artists on SONW (for short) released albums.

It appears we have grown apart, and are no longer as close as we once were. Its not them, its me. But I am nearly 40 now, and instinctively I feel the reverse should be happening, that I should be heading for what seems like more mature music, not going bloody backwards. Put bluntly, this is a musical existential crisis for me; I just don't understand where it all went wrong, how we drifted apart, how first love has turned to increasingly distant respect. This is not what I ever thought would happen, and I need to understand it. As conventional therapy is not cheap these days in recession-shrouded Ireland, I am afraid I am going to have to use this blog to work it out of my system.

Over the next weeks or months, and not in every post, I am going to do a track-by-track analysis of the SONW CD, in terms of what each song meant to me, which ones I followed up, and where they led me. I want to try and draw some closure on the whole damn thing, or at least use the experience as a way to maybe explore the growth, peak and possible decline of a movement which, for a while at least, meant a hell of a lot to many folks who never went next or near to the heartlands of America which begat the music and musicians alike. Its an experiment, and it may not work, but I want to try, and if anyone ever reads this I can only hope they find it useful, if only as a case study of an odd and outgrown obsession and its strange chronicler.

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