Hand-Painted Dream Photographs, Moon Honey, Self-released
Whirlwind virtuosity, extremes of delicacy and impact, melodies that leap all over the place, suite-like structures, cryptic lyrics based on literary conceits — all the hallmarks of progressive rock are robustly in place on Hand-Painted Dream Photographs, the first full-length album by Moon Honey, a musically hyperactive band from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It released a 2010 EP, Lemon Heart Opera, under a different band name, Twin Killers.
The guitarist Andrew Martin, the keyboardist Jeffrey Livingston and the drummer Jermaine Butler back the high, quivery vocals (and lyrics) of Jessica Ramsey in songs that segue amid folky-baroque intricacy; power-trio stomps; odd-meter excursions; and pealing, crystalline multiple-guitar constructions. Moon Honey’s repertory could plausibly be collaborations among Joanna Newsom, the Mars Volta and Grizzly Bear.
Each song is an odyssey, like The Two Fridas, which, in its six minutes, moves through pageant, barrage, rush, reconsideration, private reflection, desperate waltz and wailing affirmation, not to mention lyrics that tease at possibilities of meaning. Ramsey sings:
Deliriously
I walked across a rickety beam gray drone
clogged throat
couldn’t speak but you said you’d help me
up a ladder.
Salvador Dali described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs,” and on the band’s lyrics page, Dali is one of the painters and poets who provide epigraphs — and perhaps imagined narrators — for every song, among them Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath, Edvard Munch and the self-taught Cayman Islands artist Gladwyn K. Bush. (Martin is from the Cayman Islands.) Yet if Ramsey is imagining artistic minds at work, she also hints at the ups and downs of romance throughout the album, which ends with a pair of songs called The Lovers (I and II). The latter concludes:
This game of hide and seek
was fun
I lost but I was found
I won one more time
promise you’ll hide inside my arms
this time.
Moon Honey often describes its music as “psychedelic,” but its songs aren’t the psychedelia of amorphous, open-ended jamming. They are fully composed from end to end, meticulously plotted voyages through chaotic states of mind. It’s strenuous music for both players and listeners; the tempestuous ride is its own reward.
— JON PARELES
Has Anybody Seen Our Freedoms, Peter Walker, Delmore Recording Society
When John Fahey’s folkloric but futuristic, proto-neo, Mississippi Delta-to-the-Ganges acoustic guitar style was rediscovered in the 1990s, the second-wave enthusiasts scattered his ideas far and wide. But recognition for some of Fahey’s fellow travelers, including Peter Walker, came a bit later. Walker is still around; he retreated from recording for four decades, between Second Poem to Karmela, Or Gypsies Are Important, from 1968, and Echo of My Soul in 2008. He’d already studied Indian music at the beginning, and during his long interim went deep into Flamenco, learning from teachers in Andalusia. Perhaps more than his better-known peers, he was interested in doings outside of his own art, plunging into the antiwar movement and the study of traditional musical languages.
But the tapes for Has Anybody Seen Our Freedoms?, not released until now, suggest a different path: inward, gnarled and stubbornly personal. He performed some of it in 1970 at the Goose Lake International Music Festival — an event in Michigan that drew several hundred thousand — and recorded these tracks several months later; in the liner notes, he calls it his “requiem for the ’60s.”
It’s rough, passionate and often raga-like, with surging and falling tempos, drone notes at the bottom, scale melodies on top, fast fingerpicking patterns clumping together. In a flat, conversational voice, Walker sings words as melody, doubling them with steel-string acoustic guitar lines, building a flowing stream-of-consciousness narrative about art and love and constant travel, with words coming out in clipped, jagged bursts; sections keep repeating and doubling back, among strummed crescendos.
This is a solitary, even recessive kind of music, but very special. You get the sense it’s been intensely, almost ritually practiced, with text and guitar filigree woven together into a kind of epic poem meant mostly for the performer.
— BEN RATLIFF
Hypnosis, Distortions & Other Sonic Innovations 1969-1978, Angola Soundtrack 2, Analog Africa
One way to listen to this compilation of music from the short-lived heyday of Angola’s record companies is to marvel at how magnificently inventive each band could be. Despite the album’s subtitle, this collection revolves around songs, not sound effects, though there are a few buzzier guitar tones and some spookier, inside-out mixes than are found in the tracks on Analog Africa’s equally worthwhile 2010 compilation, Angola Soundtrack.
With just a few electric guitars, hand percussion and voices — horns or electric organ were rare add-ons — bands like Os Kiezos (the Brooms, because their shows raised so much dust from the dance floor), Africa Ritmos and Jovens do Prenda came up with grooves that never let go. Those bands also, in various combinations, backed many singers credited on other tracks.
Angolan musicians were aware of music from Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the United States and their African neighbors. Their fondness for the reco-reco, a scraper heard in nearly every track, particularly connected them to Brazilian samba and Dominican merengue, but those rhythms were transformed by Angolans’ own touch, tone and sensibility.
They had transparent arrangements of interlaced guitars, often with the bass line lightened by being played on guitar rather than on bass. They had a taste for the kind of syncopation that perpetually discovers new offbeats in tracks like Negoleiros do Ritmo’s Lemba and Elias Dia Kimuezo’s Chamavo. They also had a penchant for minor keys that lend a melancholy tinge, even while the songs dance ahead.
The album’s copious liner notes suggest why. Angola was in turmoil. A war for independence from Portugal lasted from 1961-74. The Portuguese outlawed the percussion troupes of carnival but encouraged music in clubs in the townships, leading to the formation of the electric-guitar bands on the album. Some songs carried protests, subtly or not. After independence came a protracted civil war between factions; Angolan record labels were among the casualties, and so were some musicians, like the singers Urbano de Castro and Cisco.
On this album, when Cisco sings, “I do not know what is the crime and why they wanted to kill us” over the breezy, samba-tinged beat of Divua Diami, hindsight makes his plaintive voice even sadder. To hear the irrepressible musicianly joys and tense undertones of these songs is to wonder how Angola’s music would have developed with a different history.
— JON PARELES
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