Guided by Voices, LET’S GO EAT THE FACTORY, GBV
When Robert Pollard dissolved Guided by Voices in 2004, the farewell was largely a name change. He had been virtually the band’s only songwriter since 1997, working with various lineups. Perhaps that was the way to keep up with his output, which is well beyond prolific into songorrheic. Retiring the Guided by Voices rubric didn’t prevent Pollard from putting out multiple albums yearly — solo and with assorted bands — for the rest of the 2000s.
But in 2010 he restarted Guided by Voices with members from its mid-1990s peak, when it made low-fi, sneakily catchy albums like Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. Back then Guided by Voices was more a collective than Pollard’s backup band, with Tobin Sprout also writing and singing some of the songs. The reunion led to Let’s Go Eat the Factory, a new batch of songs and fragments: 21 tracks in just under 42 minutes.
Let’s Go Eat the Factory returns to Guided by Voices’ origins in raw home recording. The album sounds equally proud of its melodies — steeped in the Beatles and the Byrds — and of the aural detritus it puts in their way.
It’s a noisy miscellany: folk-rock (Doughnut for a Snowman), near-punk (God Loves Us), chamber-pop (Hang Mr Kite), glam (How I Met My Mother), psychedelic-drone (Wave), power-pop (The Unsinkable Fats Domino), even a found-text recitation over echoey keyboards (The Things That Never Need).
The band members — Pollard, Sprout, Greg Demos, Kevin Fennell and Mitch Mitchell — all swap around instruments, playing them with varying expertise but boundless enthusiasm. The productions switch between sparse and deliberately cluttered, sometimes both at once as guitar distortion or echo effects garble the vocals. Which is often just as well; the splintered lyrics leave listeners to guess what’s a melodic placeholder, what’s heartfelt and what’s a whimsical impulse. (Could Either Nelson really refer to Nelson, the 1990s rock band?) Sprout’s Old Bones, a sparse hymn to lifelong love, is the exception.
Rare is the song that lingers over an idea; the point is to sketch and move on. Anything more polished or leisurely would be coddling the listener. Guided by Voices is betting that some scrap of sound or melody — the buzzing guitar line of Sprout’s Spiderfighter, the rise-and-fall tune of Pollard’s Chocolate Boy — will register as a pop pleasure. As usual with Pollard’s projects, that’s a hit-or-miss proposition. But on Let’s Go Eat the Factory, Sprout’s songwriting helps raise the average. Guided by Voices has a reputation to uphold, and much of the time, it does.
— JON PARELES, NY Times News Service
Kevin Hufnagel, TRANSPARENCIES, Nightfloat Recordings
Kevin Hufnagel, the guitarist in the New York instrumental-metal band Dysrhythmia, makes solo guitar albums on the side that come from a completely different musical grid. His first, Songs for the Disappeared, from 2009, sounded like a resume for a serious nonclassical guitarist: prepared nylon-string guitars played in uneven rhythm cycles, in speedy, cycling arpeggios running through strange and intuitive harmonic motion, in uneven meter or in rhythmic waves.
That record was impressive, but it was all brain. Transparencies, his new one, is a different story. (Hufnagel released it online, through his own label, last month; you can stream the music, or purchase a CD or digital download at kevinhufnagel.bandcamp.com.) This is a body album: loud and lovely, luxurious and shivering, a massed consonance, the blobby sound of joy from some sort of magic sound generator. The chords are simpler, the repetitions more frequent. It’s a spacey record, closer in spirit to the work he makes in Byla, a duo with the bassist Colin Marston. It ought not to be reduced too much though. There’s a loosely interrelated, narcotized sonic continuum just outside of pop that stretches across half a century or more: drone, ambient, industrial, shoegaze. At various points this record swims through all that.
When you definitely hear a recognizable guitar sound here, it’s light-toned and trebly, with a tremolo effect, slow beach-idyll music. (Specifically, it sounds related to the solo records recently made by Robin Guthrie, once of the Cocteau Twins.) The best tracks, like Static Aquarium, are somewhere in between, when you know unconsciously that you’re listening to a guitar but the layers of multitracking and processing make it hard to imagine how it’s created.
As far as I know, these tracks are made entirely of guitars run through digital filters. But it sometimes sounds orchestral or cavernous, like church organs or violins or piccolos sounding in an enormous space. You get the feeling of wind and water and smoke, and the nonstop intimation of beauty.
— BEN RATLIFF JON PARELES, NY Times News Service
Jimmy Owens, THE MONK PROJECT, IPO
There are at least a few good ways to interpret the music of Thelonious Monk: as a liturgy, as a set of challenges, as a point of departure. The trumpeter Jimmy Owens knows every angle of approach and at least some of the potential pitfalls, accounting for the steady equilibrium of The Monk Project. A warmly earnest tribute featuring new arrangements for a septet, it’s yet more proof of the enduring sturdiness of these compositions. What’s often missing are the elusive intangibles — a stuttering, precarious sort of grace, for starters — that once sent Monk’s music into flight.
Few things in the realm of jazz repertory are worse than facile mannerism, so there’s reason to be grateful here. But then Owens, 68, has never been drawn to the easy path: not as a slashing young dynamo and certainly not as a jazz educator and musicians’ rights advocate.
The Monk Project is one of just a handful of releases he has to his name.
It features an estimable crew, beginning with the pianist Kenny Barron, who has been working smartly with Monk’s dialect for many years, notably in the quartet Sphere. Another accomplished veteran in the band is Howard Johnson, on tuba and baritone saxophone; rounding out the horn section are two younger aces, the trombonist Wycliffe Gordon and the tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland. The rhythm section, spearheaded by Barron, also includes Kenny Davis on bass and Winard Harper on drums.
The arrangements can err on the side of palatability, as with a version of Pannonica at walking-ballad tempo, and a Well, You Needn’t with its melody elongated to fit a lackluster 12/8 groove. Blue Monk becomes a plodding shuffle, perhaps mainly for the purpose of setting up a gutbucket, plunger-muted solo by Gordon. Let’s Cool One, reconceived as a waltz, similarly comes alive mainly during Strickland’s shift.
But whenever Owens takes charge on trumpet or flugelhorn, as happens fairly often, the picture snaps into focus. And there are moments — a rakish Bright Mississippi, a galumphing Brilliant Corners — when the band sounds properly dangerous.
— NATE CHINEN, NY Times News Service
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