Tag Archives: #singersongwriter

Music, Music Review

Review: The groovy fun of U.S. Girls’ “Bless This Mess.” 

U.S. Girls is Meghan Remy, an American musician, and producer who lives in Toronto. She draws on the Toronto-based musical scene and musicians to create and collaborate on her albums. She is a permanent resident of Canada with Canadian citizenship.

Putting aside the questionable nationality (OK, who cares?), I’ll try to focus now on this fantastic 2023 release, “Bless This Mess,” which will be one of my Albums of the Year.  

To call it “Bless This Mess” is so, so appropriate. It’s got a lot of everything in here, and it’s one hell of a lot of fun. Funk, pop, disco, shades of rock, dreamy indie pop… I could go on.

It opens with what could be a 1980s roller skating anthem (I mean it), but one regarding Greek mythology, the fantastic “Only Daedalus,” and then shifts to the indie-synth of “Just Space For Light,” where she sings to her protagonist:

“Sing into an empty room, a tune about your life, Given that we each must leave, keep that door cast wide.”

“Screen Face” (with Canadian singer-songwriter Michael Rault playing along) shifts into an easy-listening pop song about digital, online dating. “Your phone is dying, And I’m dying too. I’m dying to touch you, and I’m dying to be in the same room.“

Her tracks are so slickly produced, it’s interesting that this album could be called a “…Mess”. The following catchy track, “Futures Bet,” starts with what could be Jimi Hendrix’s opening of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and after amalgamating into the actual song, we have a chorus that begins: “Goodbye, history. Why don’t we let it be a mystery? That we never sort out?” It’s a slightly rockier, sort of synth-pop track but, as Remy says: “there’s something very Pepsi commercial anthemic about it.”

As she repeats: “Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. This is just life.” (Click… glug, glug, glug.)

Following on, “So Typically Now” is an electropop number, the first single from the album, with rolling 1980s drums (think, oh, so, Miami Vice), but apparently all about a specific time during the pandemic when people fled New York and moved upstate. 

So “Brooklyn’s dead, and Kingston’s booming,” and we’ve got “Traitors with loans, they run this show. So you sold off your condo….” and “… I’m freaking out. Yeah, I’m changing my passwords. Gotta sell all my best to buy more, not less. See you someday in Heaven.” Remy does enjoy singing all of this, though. You can tell she is having so much fun doing it.

My favorite track on the album is the disco burner, “Tux (Your Body Fills Me, Boo),” which is a song written from the perspective of, yes, a tuxedo, a discarded tuxedo… “I was your passport to so many rooms. Your mask of pure exclusivity. Now you treat me like a long gone novelty.” 

“I was born to be worn. Custom-fit to make you feel legit. It was expensive, and excessive. Now you’re too embarrassed to wear me ’round the house…“

The tuxedo concludes, “I was never for you.” 

“I was always for someone else.”

Damn right, and Remy turns this into one fun, exciting dance song that will stick in your head for some time.

“Bless This Mess” was written and recorded while Meg was pregnant during the pandemic and tending to her newborn twins. Not easy. The song’s finale, “Pump,” samples loops of the drone of the breast pump and goes some way to her headspace. “For when I was cut open. And they were taken out. Then they turned to me. Said, “Mama, I’m hungry. I need something to eat. Give us something to eat right now.“

And her line: “What I do tonight, it makes our tomorrow.” That’s a great line, and it’s a great song.

It ends with and outro with her speaking, “So, what are we talking about? We’re talking about bodies, birth, death, machines….” 

“And you, you, and you right there.”

Yes, Meg. All of us. We’re all responsible for what comes next.

Bless this Mess

This album is Meg Remy’s finest, from the beautiful balladry of the title track to the disco rhythms, funkiness, infectious R&B hooks, and synth-pop of the remaining tracks.

It is her most accessible work to date.

“Bless This Mess” is a creative, complex, but wonderous journey and I would recommend it to anyone interested in alternative dance and indie pop. Whoever wants to have fun in 2023.

It can be a mess, perhaps. But yes, let’s bless it.

9.5/10

Chris Garrod, June 2nd, 2023

Music, Music Review

Review: “Don’t fight it, we’re gonna feel it tonite.”… So, that’s how he starts it.

The exceptional “One Night Stand – Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963” by Sam Cooke.

Sam Cooke was the son of a minister and is still one of the most influential soul artists of all time. He was undoubtedly daring and stood up at a time when the Civil Rights Movement was nascent. At one time, he refused to sing at an event that was segregated.

But he crossed over into the white community in the late 1950s and very early 1960s. While starting as a gospel singer, he was amazingly popular for his soul and pop music. AllMusic biographer Bruce Eder wrote that Cooke was “the inventor of soul music” and possessed “an incredible natural singing voice and a smooth, effortless delivery that has never been surpassed.”

In the early 1960s, Sam Cooke was already a household name. However, while popular and influential, much of his studio work represented a fairly sanitized version of his roots in gospel and soul music, tailored for broader, mainly white audiences.

He was the ultimate cross-over artist at that time, and “One Night Stand – Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963” proves it. 

The show nails it, and this is Cooke at his most relentless, fun, and passionate best. Partly maybe because the Harlem Square Club is in Miami’s historically African-American neighborhood of Overtown – so he was singing to (well, listening to this live album, perhaps along with) a packed club “with the singer’s most devoted fans from his days singing gospel.” The audience in January 1963 at the Harlem Square Club wasn’t a mainstream audience used to his usual smooth and composed studio image.

For example, he opens “It’s All Right” with a not-quite clean-cut image, dated to its time: “Alright fellas, when somebody has come and told you about something your girlfriend or wife has done and stuff, [don’t go home and go hit on them,] Whatever they tell you anything about your lady, go home, if she’s sleeping, shake her, move her up / In a way that she wipes all the sleep from her eyes, understand? / And once she’s got all that sleep from her eyes, look at them and tell them, “Baby, it’s all right, oh it’s all right….“

“...All my friends tell me that you found somebody new, they report to me every little thing that you do. But long as you tell me that it’s all untrue. I believe it’s all right.“

But he then skillfully shifts into “Sentimental Reasons” – “Do you know why it’s alright? Because I love you, for sentimental reasons….” The crowd is enraptured – they are asked to sing along with him and easily oblige. It is magnificent.

When he sings, on “Chain Gang,” “That’s the sound of the men, working on the chain gang,” and then shifts to “All day long they’re saying, huh ah, Huhhhh ahhh, uhhh ah, uhhhh ahhhh” over and over… those are some serious sounds. He means it. It’s gritty, and it’s real compared to anything else he recorded. Really, honest, real.

He means it and wants the crowd to sing along. And they do – they practically become members of his band.

A lot of his pop hits are here. “Having a Party,” “Twisting the Night Away,” “Cupid,” etc. But this is a raucous, party album; you feel it when you press play. Cooke charismatically controls the room, creating an intimate, practically symbiotic relationship between himself and the crowd. (God knows how hot was that night was, but it feels (sounds?) sweltering). You get pulled into the audience while listening to it – precisely what a live album’s mission is supposed to be.

“Bring It On Home to Me” is a particular highlight. Outside of the confines of the studio, Cooke shines. It is emotional, powerful, and raw, encapsulating the heart and soul of rhythm and blues. His gospel roots come to the forefront here in this song, with the spiritual aspect of his voice coming to the fore.

His vocals are scorching throughout the brief, just over half-hour set.

His band also helps. Led by bandleader, King Curtis on saxophone, they not only support Cooke, but at times, it feels like they are pushing him to perform even harder – especially on “Twisting the Night Away” and “Somebody Have Mercy,” where Curtis’ saxophone explodes out of the gate, he practically duets with Cooke (particularly on the latter.)

The recording’s quality is fantastic, and while the entire night certainly isn’t a smooth listen (it’s rough, and it’s meant to be!), that’s just fine with me. It’s immersive – you can hear banter, chatting in the crowd, glasses clinking. Cooke banters with his audience constantly between songs. It’s the sort of live album where you feel like ordering a drink because everyone else is!!

The album was not released until 1985, more than twenty years after Cooke’s untimely death, really due to RCA’s unease with the unfiltered, intense, and emotional nature of the performance, a far cry from Cooke’s mainstream image.

Upon its release in 1985, critics recognized it for what it was – a masterpiece. It’s been hailed as one of the greatest live albums ever recorded.

As he triumphantly exclaims, “I want you to remember this!!!!” at the beginning of the last song, “Having a Party.”

“We’re having a party,
Dancing to the music.”

“I feel alright now, I don’t want to quit. We got that groove. Keep on having’ that party.”

Mission accomplished.

10/10

Chris Garrod, May 23rd, 2023

Music, Music Review

Review: Belle and Sebastian and their latest, “Late Developers.”

Musically speaking, 2023 started off slow for me.

But, thankfully, I had Belle and Sebastian’s “Late Developers” to tide me over when it was released in early January (well, and Margo Price’s “Strays“… but hey, that’s another review!)

I like this album because I’m not a huge Belle and Sebastian fan. So listening to it was a fresh start. They’re a Glaswegian band, formed and led by Stuart Murdoch, with Sarah Martin and Stevie Jackson just behind.

DIY

This is their second album within a year, coming hot off the heels of last year’s “A Little Bit Previous,” their first in seven years. (Not quite as good, in my opinion.)

So it’s now, what, May?!

I started to listen to this in January, and it’s now May. I’m still listening to it, so my Spotify algorithms are now already decidedly shot. I’ll be listening to it all summer. This is an indie-pop gem of an album, from start to finish, with really no terrible weak spots. None. (OK, stop. It is not perfect.)

Belle and Sebastian hardcore fans may gag at the synth poppiness of “I Don’t Know What You See In Me,” and I’ve read many who think it is totally out of place on the album – but it is so catchy, and the rest of the album is as well, I think it suits it. And it is damn good. 

This band displays the confidence to sing with Stevie Jackson on “So in the Moment,” a lyric: “Now we’re balancing upon the curb, please don’t say another word. Way down below, there’s still sharks in the road.

I want to jump in like Paul McCartney and Wings. ‘I feel like letting go.’ I’ll be so in the moment.“

I remember when hearing that lyric, having to go back to make sure I had listened to what I just had heard and then thought, “Yup, these guys really are my cup of tea.” Now, let’s go put the kettle on.

The first three tracks immediately hook you in, from Murdoch’s opener, “Juliet Naked,” to what should really be the next single, “Give a Little Time,” with Martin taking lead vocals and the others clapping and providing backing vocals to the lovely end. I want to make my official Teenage Fanclub comparison here, just because of this song. Thank you very much (Hey, they’re both from Glasgow.)

“When We Were Very Young” locks you in with the chorus, “I wish I could be content with the football scores, I wish I could be content with my daily chores. With my daily worship of the sublime.”

But then one of my favorite lyrics: “When we were very young, we loved our selfish fun. We cared what people thought about our selfish words.

You could not tell us then how much we wouldn’t care. ‘Bout all the mindless trivia, now we’ve got kids and dystopia.“

Hey, being young was fun. But getting old with kids and dystopia… well maybe kinda sucks.

And finally: “I wish I could walk away from my scars and sores.” Ouch.

NME

“The Evening Star” and its horn section is fantastic, blending in so well with Murdoch’s vocals- it all sounds so effortless. I forgot this band has been doing this since 1996, and this is their 11th album.

“I Do Follow” is a lot of fun, with Murdoch and Martin trading verses, trying to figure out how much they might like (or love) each other – if it’s even possible – and then together coming to a conclusion: “I’ve got a song to sing, I’ve got pain, I’ve got sorrow. It really doesn’t matter what I say, do you follow?” I guess… not.

The penultimate track, “When The Cynics Stare Back From The Wall,” was initially written in 1995, before the release of the band’s debut album “Tigermilk.”

From Murdoch on NME: “I remember writing this song very clearly. It was about my best friend Ciara [MacLaverty], who was on the cover of [1996 album] ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister.’ I wrote it in the Grosvenor Café where everyone used to hang out. It’s a pure song that goes right back to those days. I was writing so many songs at the time that there were quite a few that got left behind and never recorded.“    

When you listen to the track, it is clear. I remember listening to Belle and Sebastian back then, and this brings their sound back to me.

Belle and Sebastian aren’t late developers because this album proves they are not. Listening to this, they haven’t aged. Largely, neither has their music.

And when listening to this album over and over, that’s such an oh, so, very, very good thing.

Chris Garrod, May 18th, 2023

8.5/10

Concert Review, Music, Music Review, Technology

Concert review: Holy crap, what was that?

All photos by David James Swanson 

Jack White, formerly of The White Stripes and founder of Third Man Records, performed live in Baltimore on August 24th, 2022. I sat happily in the 3rd row of the Pier Sixth Concert Pavilion in awe.

OK, I say “sat.”  I mean “stood.” 

OK, not just stood. A lot of jumping and clapping along with my hands in the air, and since the guy behind me was yelling so much, I didn’t feel any need to hold back when necessary. 

Well, holy crap, what was that? That, indeed, was a Jack White concert.

The use of technology. Or non-technology

I have been to loads of shows where people appear to be enjoying themselves, but during so much of the show, they are taking photos and recording parts of the show on their smartphones without actually engaging with what they should be. The show. The artist.

I’m guilty – I’ve previously taken photos, video clips, etc.

But some folks will record entire songs and post them on YouTube, and to be honest, very rarely is the quality not… ultimately… crap. As the artist, I’d be f*&ing irritated. And why bother buying a ticket to see the artist in the first place if you’re wasting your money hoping for more “likes” on social media?

So, along comes Yondr, which Jack White and other artists (most prominently Dave Chappelle) are pioneering. It is actually brilliant. 

How it works: you arrive at the venue, and if you have bought along your smartphone, you’ll get a pouch. Enter your smartphone, which is locked in the pouch, so you cannot use it.  You’ll get briefly scanned to ensure you’re not hiding some other smartphone (smarty-pants) and then let in.

At first, it feels weird. “Hey, there’s the stage! Let me take a photo to send to my buddies!”  Nope. I arrived a bit early, and after getting something to eat from one of the stalls, I went to my seat and sat. Waiting. Watching and listening to the DJ on the stage. 

I began people-watching. The couple sitting next to me arrived to check their seat position and said, “Hey man, how are you?” I thought we were about to break into some sort of conversation, but they left. The opening act came on, and they were great. Cautious Clay from New York.

I’d never usually (as in, really, really rarely) sit and watch the entirety of an opening band, but these guys were really, really good. I later looked them up on the internet, and yes, they are.

Jack White

So, the Yondr made me pay attention. And once Jack White and his band hit the stage, I was happy it did.

Jack absolutely killed it, which I mean in a good, “I love rock music” way.  He reminded me why I love rock music so much. The total energy.

He played songs from his solo albums (mostly from his latest two, Fear of The Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive) but also a number from his time with The White Stripes (I will admit, I went bat-shit crazy when he played “Hotel Yorba”), The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather (he finished the official set with “I Cut Like a Buffalo”).

During the encore, there was a brilliant mix towards the end of what began to sound like “Seven Nation Army,”… getting everyone excited, but which then turned into “Steady, As She Goes” (from his time with The Raconteurs), which then slowed down…stopped, and turned into “Seven Nation Army.” The audience went unsurprisingly nuts.

I wasn’t initially sure he would use older material or just stick with his solo stuff. Still, as soon as he ripped into “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” earlier on, I thought, “Well, so he’s definitely going to end with Seven Nation Army,” then.

It didn’t matter anyway.  

The entire thing was brilliant from start to finish, and the lack of smartphones kept the audience enraptured (appropriately so). Jack slid across the stage everywhere, singing, playing, and jumping around. His opening songs from Fear of the Dawn justified how brilliant an artist he really is. His energy on the stage is practically atomic, and he is one of our best guitarists.

The songs are not only hooky and catchy, but they rocked the hell out of the place. Seeing Jack live singing them left my jaw open, but for the fact that I was singing along, clapping along, etc.  

He stopped at points to take breathers (him and the audience), dry off, trade guitars (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an artist exchange so many guitars), and play a few slower songs from Entering Heaven Alive. He cheekily played “We’re Going to be Friends,” a White Stripes song where he managed to get the audience to sing practically half of it, as it is such an iconic song from The White Stripes.

I have a sort of funny list of “Bands and Artists I Want to See Before I’m Dead.”  Well, Jack White, you were on it, and thank you.  You did not disappoint. 

Chris Garrod, August 25, 2022

Music, Music Review

Review: Back stronger than a ’90s trend.

It feels like she cannot stop making music, and it’s outstanding.

Taylor Swift was born in just 1989. So she is only 31 years old.

It’s truly fantastic to see her progress. When I started to write this, I was going to detail that progress, all the way up to 2019’s Lover, which became one of my favorite albums of that year. But it just became too much.

I just want to look at the now.

Her last year, 2020.

folklore
evermore

Both released just out of the blue, folklore and evermore shocked me; the first in July and the next in December. Both albums were largely produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner and long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff, who produced a few tracks.

The best way I can describe these albums is – while Swift described them as sister albums – that they just… drift along together. Notwithstanding the various reviews regarding which one is better (Metacritic ranks folklore), I very much see these two albums as one. They’re not even sisters in my opinion. But for “Willow” being the outstanding opener of evermore, they really are hard to tear apart, running on a constant basis (NB: caveat… I’ve now listened so much to them both, I really can tell them apart, ahem).

evermore was really conceived during the Long Pond Studio Sessions documentary, recorded with Dessner and Antonoff. Indie band Haim, Bon Iver, and The National appear on three of the tracks of evermore. Bon Iver appears on folklore (more on that below.)

Although she has maintained her pop music core, these are really indie albums. They are both introspective. The lyrics are ‘in demand’ listening – you really, really have to appreciate what she is singing. Plus she swears!

Dessner stated after folklore was released:

Taylor has opened the door for artists to not feel pressure to have “the bop.” To make the record that she made, while running against what is programmed in radio at the highest levels of pop music — she has kind of made an anti-pop record.

I’m not sure I’d say either folklore or evermore are “anti-pop”. Make no mistake, for the most part, these are really still pop albums but dialed down a notch, certainly.

The one song I’d highlight, which I’d say is certainly not a pop song, from folklore, is Exile, with Bon Iver. This is a song which has been so beautifully written by Swift, William Bowery, and Justin Vernon, that on my first listen, completely brought tears to my eyes, something songs just really don’t do. I was initially taken aback by the opening: Vernon’s singing. That was followed by Swift’s. The two combined and split apart again and then hit an amazing, beautiful crescendo, which left me literally gobsmacked. Lyrically, it is incredible. The song is about a break-up between two lovers, which is irretrievable. The song is absolutely devastating.

Swift has always been a great songwriter. 1989 and Lover are examples. Her early country music output began when she was just sixteen, with Taylor Swift being released and becoming the longest-charting album of the 2000s decade on the Billboard 200. At just sixteen.

In my view, folklore and evermore have elevated her to a brand new level, and the two combined were my favorite albums of 2020.

I’m looking forward to hearing what she does next.

Chris Garrod, 10 February, 2021