Irish-Italian David J. Caron released a double CD album, Thru Never Ending Black, in 2013–a move usually made by an artist with an established following. The unusual thing here is that the mammoth 28-track work is his debut. Caron wrote, performed and produced one of the best rock debut albums in recent years, a work that lives up to its own ambition with solid consistency over its abundant length.
Categorizing the music is more difficult than appreciating it. Caron seems to straddle the worlds of progressive rock (the genre suggested by the album’s cover, artwork and, at times, lyrics) modern rock and AOR. Caron’s work has echoes of 80’s neo-prog, but with a fresh, modern rock-informed sound. It really defies easy categorization.
But while it doesn’t fit neatly into a particular genre, any fan of modern melodic rock with intelligent, captivating lyrics and infectious choruses will find something appealing here–and a generous helping thereof.
The New Christy Minstrels: Merry Christmas! (1963)
The liner notes from a brand new 2013 reissue of this classic Christmas album begin as follows:
During the holidays, in most homes there are a few Christmas albums–even old scratchy LP’s–that have become such a treasured part of family tradition that…well, the season just wouldn’t be the same without them.
This precisely describes my own family’s relationship with Merry Christmas! by the New Christy Minstrels. For so many Decembers, when it was time for my dad to pull a pile of immaculate Christmas records from his Immaculate Collection, this was one of the albums removed first from the shelf, then from a plastic sleeve, then from the cover, then from the album’s inner sleeve, then cleaned with a soft, round red pad specially designed for the purpose, and only then placed onto a stack on the spindle above the turntable. (Had he only known how counterintuitive the stack-on-spindle turntable was to the fanatical level of care he gave his record collection…but I digress).
At the height of both the 60’s folk music boom and the Christies’ own popularity (fresh off a stint as regulars on Andy Williams’ NBC TV Show and a Grammy win for their debut album) the group, under the direction of founder Randy Sparks, entered the recording studio for just three days in July 1963 to record what many consider their crowning achievement.
A smoggy Los Angeles summer not being entirely conducive to the holiday spirit, an all-out Christmas party was arranged in the studio to put the group in the mood. Member Barry McGuire was elected from the ranks to play the role of Santa, costume and all. But mock-holiday frivolity in no way blunted the professional performances delivered by a talented, well-rehearsed group of vocalists and musicians. As the finished product attests, the blend of carefully chosen voices and bold arrangements of mostly original holiday material makes up a Christmas classic that remains a favorite of families lucky enough to have owned a vinyl copy back in the 60’s. In fact former Christy soprano Gayle Caldwell, who went on to become a music teacher, would recount that many of her students told her the album was a favorite and that their parents owned a copy.
Randy Sparks, the group’s founder and main songwriter, had backed off from performing with the Christies prior to the Merry Christmas album, preferring to stay home in L.A. to develop the group’s material, in a role similar to that of Brian Wilson in the mid-60’s Beach Boys. Sparks presented new songs as they were completed, and intense rehearsals ensued in hotel rooms during the group’s performance tour in the weeks leading up to their studio dates. Then co-arranging members Nick Woods and Art Podell would add their input, with Sparks usually arguing for simplicity and the other two for more complicated musical flourishes, until the finished arrangements were fleshed out.
Sparks’ instincts for keeping it simple often won out, as is obvious in such pieces as “One Star”, “Christmas Wishes” and “Christmas Trees”, which are things of simple yet heartrending beauty. And yet, the rousing, full-throated ensemble pieces like “Beautiful City” and “Sing Hosanna, Hallelujah” are perhaps the best remembered gems here.
“Sing Hosanna, Hallelujah” encapsulates the way this album, and Sparks’ writing, neatly straddles the boundary between sacred and secular holiday sentiments. Lines like “we observe a holy celebration” and “we sing in praise in adoration” alongside “we raise our glasses of the mulled winter wine” and “we’ll glide through snowy winter weather”? Somehow it works. “Santa” isn’t mentioned here, but “St. Nicholas” is. It’s a seamless blend of festive and holy. And it’s beautifully rendered.
It’s this full band sound with multipart harmony and distinctive voices singing in turn that inspired the spot-on yet loving lampoon treatment of A Mighty Wind, in which the New Christy Minstrels were the template for the New Main Street Singers.
The Christies’ classic lineup didn’t last long. Three years later they released another Christmas album with an almost completely different group of singers. That album, a collection of covers of traditional holiday tunes with less folky, more (60’s) contemporary arrangements, pales in comparison with Merry Christmas!
Yet this revolving door of lineup changes (this site lists a roster of 298 alumni!) also meant the Christies were the ideal place for up-and-coming talents to hone their chops. Emerging from the group to go on to stardom elsewhere were such luminaries as Kim Carnes, Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark of the Byrds, Barry (“Eve of Destruction”) McGuire, Larry Ramos of The Association, and at least three members of the First Edition including Kenny Rogers. That’s not to mention two members who went on to notoriety as Broadway singers and another who became a Miss America.
Merry Christmas! is a singular success of a holiday album–a collection of mostly original Christmas songs of high quality, with a blend of sacred and secular sentiments, all wrapped up in a warm folksy sound that suits the material like a red fur-lined coat on an old jolly fat guy.
And it sounds like all the Christmases of my youth.
Kings of Convenience: Riot On An Empty Street (2004)
Erlend Øye and Erik Glambek Bøe are Norwegian indie folk duo Kings of Convenience, part of the short-lived “new acoustic movement” of the previous decade which brought such artists as Damien Rice, Turin Brakes and Starsailor to the fore.
Their 2001 album’s title, Quiet is the New Loud, practically became the movement’s rallying cry. Riot…followed a three year gap between releases which saw Øye experimenting with dance pop before returning to his acoustic folk roots here.
This album builds on the lilting, appealing acoustic folk sound of the earlier release while expanding the sonic palate with well-placed strings, cello, horns, banjo and upright bass.
“Homesick” echoes the sound of Simon & Garfunkel’s “two soft voices blended in perfection”. The existential confusion of “Misread” wafts across on a gentle bossa nova rhythm.
Perhaps the album’s most affecting song, “Sorry or Please” finds its protagonist, recently released from prison, reconnecting with the old neighborhood and a potential new flame. The coy, clumsy, tentative first steps of a nascent love affair are articulated by both the lyric and the wistful trumpet-and-banjo solo (an unlikely but effective pairing). Exquisite.
Five weeks in a prison, I made no friends. There’s more time to be done, but I’ve got a week to spend. I didn’t pay much attention first time around, But now you’re hard not to notice, Right here in my town. Where the stage of my old life Meets the cast of the new. Tonights actors… me and you.
Each day is taking us closer, While drawing the curtains to close. This far, or further, I need to know. Your increasingly long embraces, Are they saying sorry or please? I don’t know what’s happening, Help me.
Through the streets, On the corners, There’s a scent in the air. I ask you out and I lead you. I know my way around here. There’s a bench I remember, And on the way there I find that the movements you’re making, Are mirrored in mine. And your hand is held open, Intentionally, or just what I want to see?
Your increasingly long embraces, Are they saying sorry or please? I don’t know what’s happening, help me. I don’t normally beg for assistance, I rely on my own eyes to see, But right now they make no sense to me, Right now you make no sense to me.
This is a remarkable album of gentle folk with a sweet nostalgic feel. It makes a persuasive case for the power of quiet music.
When my (former) wife and I married and combined households in the mid-1990’s my burgeoning CD collection merged with her one-and-only CD, k.d. lang’s Ingénue.
“You own one CD?”
I scoffed (silently, to myself). Then I gave her single CD a listen and scoffed no more, realizing it was a masterpiece and better than 90% of my collection.
Actually, it did take a few listens. Most of the album is downtempo and brooding. This isn’t exactly beach party music. It’s a song cycle of consonant tone, with one contemplative mood piece following the next until the perfectly-sequenced affair concludes with the cathartic “Constant Craving”, the album’s only “hit” and a song I used to try to irritate the wife by rendering as “Instant Gravy” (never worked).
Producer and co-writer Ben Mink created a chamber pop album of such meticulous craftsmanship and consummate taste it reminds me of Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom, to which the word “masterpiece” was affixed on its release.
Mink places the subdued but compelling songs in elegantly adorned settings: strings, accordion, vibraphone, mandolin, slide guitar and many other instruments make their subtle way into a mix and bow out in turn, ensuring things never get tedious.
The songs are the best batch k.d. ever assembled on one LP. From this record on, one could hear echoes of Ingénue here and there on subsequent records, but never the consistent tone or quality of songs throughout an entire album.
Ingénue marked a transition from her early, rather hokey “cowgal” period into her art pop/torch singer incarnation. It’s a unique album in lang’s career and in all of pop music’s canon.
Incidentally, the Rolling Stones inadvertently appropriated the melody of “Instant Gravy” “Constant Craving” in their 1997 hit “Anybody Seen My Baby”. Quoting Wikipedia:
Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the song also carries writing credits for k.d. lang and Ben Mink.The song is known for its chorus, which sounds strikingly similar to lang’s 1992 hit song “Constant Craving“. Jagger and Richards claimed to have never heard the song before, only having discovered the similarity prior to the song’s release. As Richards writes in his autobiography Life, “My daughter Angela and her friend were at Redlands and I was playing the record and they start singing this totally different song over it. They were hearing k.d. Lang’s ‘Constant Craving.’ It was Angela and her friend that copped it.”The two gave lang credit, along with her co-writer Mink, to avoid any lawsuits. Afterwards, lang said she was “completely honored and flattered” by receiving the songwriting credit.
Mayer Hawthorne’s latest funk-soul offering sprinkles more 70’s sounds into the stew of retro-soul (or is it “neo-Motown”?) he’d been serving up on his previous two albums. I appreciate the man’s willingness to try a number of styles, sounds and lyrical themes, although what it produces is a real mixed bag. The difference between Where Does This Door Go and its predecessors is that the high points point a little higher.
“Wine Glass Woman” is like Steely Dan Lite, which is hardly a bad thing. “Robot Love” mimics the falsetto croon of the likes of Curtis Mayfield. And “The Stars Are Ours” thieves the rhythm of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” just as Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” borrowed that of Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up”.
When I tell people what a great album William Shatner’s Has Been is I’m consistently misunderstood. I know I have a snarky sense of humor at times. I know I often tend to communicate by saying the opposite of what I actually mean. But as unlikely a scenario as you might find it to be, I’m dead serious when I tell you this is a very, very good pop album.
And no, I don’t “like it ironically”. Albeit elements of novelty abound, this record is not in the category of Shatner’s 1960’s cheese-fest The Transformed Man, which can only be appreciated in the ironic sense. Rather than spotlight Bill Shatner the untalented singer as that spectacularly bad album did, producer Ben Folds plays to Shatner’s strengths here–namely, his ability to deliver dramatic spoken lyric. It works.
When Folds signed on to produce and arrange this record (he and Shatner had worked together before, on Folds’ Fear of Pop project) he didn’t check his keen pop sensibilities at the door. The music here is top-notch, not to mention quite diverse.
And the guest performances are inspired. Listen for Joe Jackson’s impassioned take on the cover of Pulp’s “Common People”, the well-cast Henry Rollins on the duet/litany of general complaints “I Can’t Get Behind That”, or Brad Paisley taking a heartfelt turn on the chorus of “Real”. Folds himself takes vocals and piano on the tale of father/daughter estrangement “That’s Me Trying”. Folds’ plaintive melody and vocal delivery complement Shatner’s lamentation here perfectly.
Interlaced among all that is the astonishingly broadly-talented Mr. Shatner delivering what are at times shockingly honest and confessional-sounding self-penned lyrics. Most extreme example (not featured here) is “What Have You Done”, an unblinking account of Shatner’s discovery of his wife, dead in the couple’s swimming pool.
The guy has stones, or happens to be at the station in life when he just doesn’t give a shit anymore what people think. Probably both.
The album’s title track is possibly its highlight. Not only is it a brilliant musical lampoon of a now-obscure 60’s pop sub-genre typified by Lorne Greene’s “Ringo”, but it serves perfectly as a (hilarious) raised middle finger to Shat’s critics. Good for him.
Of course he’s Captain James T. Kirk to most. But the list of William Shatner’s accomplishments–best-selling author, successful horse breeder, Priceline commercial icon, Emmy-winning Denny Crane, and of course, a singer of sorts–is admirable. As he says in the album’s final track, “Real”:
And while there’s a part of me
In that guy you’ve seen up there on that screen
I am so much more
While I’m dead serious about how good an album this is, the chief reason to listen is that It’s good fun.
Every Moment Has A Song 