Skip to main content

SPEW crowns the 31st - 40th best Albums of 2017. All hail!

... SPEW, Best of 2017, phase 2:

31-40. You know, it’s just supposed to get better as you climb the chart. And it does, I think. As good as some of the 41-50 selections are, there’s nothing there I’d say has top 10 potential. With 31-40, some do, definitely. 


31.    Necks – Unfold (Ideologic Organ)


https://spewrocks.blogspot.com/search?q=necks+unfold


See, a review I already did. 


32.  Queens of the Stone Age - Villains (Matador) 
Josh Homme and Mark Ronson’s production combines dance floor grooves, psych-rock experimentation, and mostly hard ass rock that’s both dirty and machine-tooled. I came to QOTSA in fits and starts, but Villains is a modern classic, all dune buggies from hell and sweet menace. The smooth brutality of these guitar lacerations is head banging even listening on an iPhone at low volume. And Homme’s Jack Bruce croon lures as it destroys. 




33.   Tony Allen – The Source (Blue Note) - The Charlie Watts of ju-ju music, the man behind many of the greatest grooves out of Nigeria with Fela Kuti, makes a jazz record, and it succeeds as a jazz record, as well as an outpouring of the high-life sounds Allen marinates in. The fun here is in the tension between Allen’s jazz chops (real, redolent of having absorbed Art Blakey, for example) and his tendency to percolate more than swing. It works. And his accompanying musicians, including Cameroonian guitarist Indy Dibongue, are on Allen’s frequency all the way.




34.  Parquet Courts & Danielle Luppi -Milano (30th Century/Columbia) - Parquet Courts and Karen O, first of all, are an inspired New York pairing. Frankly, it seems to me that Luppi's greatest talent is finding boss collaborators (Danger Mouse, Jack White, Norah Jones - 2011’s Rome). Here he takes a modern cool  rock band, throws in one of the most distinctive female voices of the era, and gets out of the way. Milan was ablaze culturally in the Eighties and the Parquets' quirky songs communicate that in their droll, cool way.







35.   Ty Segall – s/t (Drag City) - Segall is all over the place. For someone whose basic metier is garage-rock, he swings from the altered-acoustic jams of Sleeper to the gonzo psych-metal of Slaughterhouse – and if Ty likes a pitch he’s a free swinger. As the self-titled approach suggests, this album demonstrates a healthy variety of what Segall does. He’s a synthesist who’s not entirely found himself in his eclecticism, but it’s fun listening to his mind work because his rock instincts are dead-on.


36.   2 Chainz – Pretty Girls Love Trap Music (Def Jam) - I love me some trap music too. Now, I ain’t gonna lie; I’m no expert. I’ve listened to hip-hop with enthusiasm since Sugarhill, Kurtis Blow and all that shit. But there are people (black people mostly, duh!) who can discuss Pretty Girls as avidly and informedly as I do the New York Dolls, but I can’t without sounding like a dumb white guy. What I do know is ... enough to know when something’s got it. Pretty Girls got it and 2 Chainz is offa his.  




37.   Doughboys – Front Street Rebels (RAM) - These guys first played together in the bloody 1960s, tearing up their native Jersey and residing musically at New York’s Cafe Wha? Drummer Richard X. Heymann has forged a critically successful solo career as a one-man band power popper. Singer Myke Scavone has had a journeyman life in rock n’ roll, too. The band reformed in 2000 and forgot to break up. Their records have all been well above average Sixties garage-rock, but Front Street Rebels is a leap forward, a set of mostly great songs that sounds fresh, even contemporary, while paying homage to their Animals-Stones-Yardbirds inspirations. It rocks.




38.   Sweet Knives – s/t (Big Neck) - Newly emerged from the Goner-Memphis scene and the ashes of Lost Sounds, the band singer Alijca Trout fronted with the late Jay Reatard, Sweet Knives trade heavily on the non-Jay part of that repertoire, but with more guitars, fewer keys and an unsettling ability to convey brooding doom and pop charms simultaneously. 


After discovering the big names and icons of Jazz (Miles, Trane, Duke, etc.) in my late teens I was ready for new discoveries. One of my first was the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a Chicago-based collective that spawned the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Their music was bold, adventurous, coming out of jazz tradition and the emerging Black nationalist sensibility. Nicole Mitchell is a vibrant inheritor of that tradition and a force in her own right. Madorla contains multitudes. Mitchell makes flute a force like no one since the generation of Dolphy, Kirk, and Lateef. Her compositions, rooted in tradition and reaching for the skies, are an inspired blend of impressionism, Monk, and Sun Ra. The players she attracts are empathetic and skilled, guitarist Alex Wing is inside and outside, Sonny Sharrock one moment, Pat Martino the next. 


40.   Mavis Staples – If All I Was Was Black (Anti)

Jeff Tweedy may gain and lose me as an admirer when it comes to Wilco, but he sure has proven a terrific producer for Mavis Staples. And since Mavis is one of the great voices in American music that’s no small thing. Nothing this woman sings is a “cover.” Her imprimatur is all over any lyric she chooses. Staples always gives love with her protestations; it’s the Christian thing to do, and Pops raised her to be Christian. But damn if it ain’t harder these days to be “nice,” and the music and Staples’ delivery take on a little more brimstone in this time where grace is a struggle.

Comments

The people have spoken.

There is a town in Arkansas called Elaine.

Elaine, Arkansas is in Phillips County, one of the poorest counties in the United States, a flat expanse of deprivation where your Google Maps won’t keep you from getting lost. Elaine is lost. It looks like a place where nothing good has happened in a very long time.  That's, at least in part, because something terrible happened there. Something a majority of Americans don't know about.  I'm educated as a historian, but I lack the imprimatur of an advanced degree. I will do my best to offer a concise history lesson.  The facts are straightforward. In order to escape destitution and indentured servitude, black sharecroppers in the Arkansas delta organized under the banner of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. On the 30th of September 1919, a prominent, white attorney named Ulysses Bratton traveled the three hours from Little Rock to meet with the workers to discuss strategy. They met at a small church on the outskirts of Elaine at a place c...

Robert Pollard and Richard Davies were COSMOS. At least in 2009. I like to keep up to date.

I’ve been such a good lad. Writing almost like a responsible journalist. That’s not a bad thing, but I promised myself (and you) that SPEW would be a place for more dashed off bits.   Well, here’s one.   Cosmos. Ever heard of them? Unless you’re a Robert Pollard completist, probably not. Their sole release, Jar of Jam Ton of Bricks was released in 2009 (one of Pollard’s 100+ issues, only about a 1/4 of which are Guided by Voices titles). Cosmos was a collaboration with Richard Davies, Australian pop oddball and auteur behind the cult faves the Moles. The two of them share a certain aesthetic, a vision that embraces early John Cale, the first two Brian Eno records, Pete Townshend’s Scoop demos, bits and pieces of the Beatles, and a dash of early Syd Barrett.   Some of the songs on J ar of Jam are based on little more than acoustic guitar and percussion, especially woodblock, others are full band janglers. Because of the duo’s shared sensibility it all hangs...

Jessica Lea Mayfield's unapologetic "Sorry is Gone"

Jessica Lea Mayfield, of Kent, Ohio, released her first album With Blasphemy so Heartfelt ( produced by Dan Auerbach, fellow Ohioan) at the tender age of nineteen. I missed it. I probably shouldn’t have.   Her second Auerbach (Black Keys) produced record Tell Me arrived in 2011 when she was 22, 23 maybe. I listened to it. I heard talent. But somehow the combination of songs, performance and production didn’t really hook me.   Never bothered with her alleged grunge-rock record, the two previous had been loosely in the roots-rock/Americana idiom, called Make My Head Sing . No Dan Auerbach. I don’t know who produced it, but Mayfield described it loosely as dedicated to one of her favorite artists, Dave Grohl. Not being a huge fan of the Zelig of contemporary rock, that dedication probably soured me on the project. Sorry. For me and Jessica it was a matter of timing. The time is now. And the record is Sorry is Gone. Which is pretty great.   Mayfield and pr...