Album Reviews

If you’re not familiar with Modest Mouse’s brand of jumpy/shouty, guitar driven music, if you’re a fan of XTC or The Talking Heads, you actually are.

Low’s latest begins on a somber, fatalistic note with the dirge-like “Pretty People,” in which we’re reminded that along with the soldiers fighting today, and all the little babies, and all the lions and “..all the pretty people…,” we’re all gonna die.

Slinky “world music” with a distinctly American desert underpinning, yet incorporating Arabic tonal modes, Another Green World Eno-esque rhythms and an eclectic, dizzying array of instruments, acoustic and electronic, Califone’s latest album will literally leave you gasping for air as you vainly attempt to absorb even a pathetically small percentage of what’s thrown at you musically and sonically on what is a stupendous production and an even more remarkable recording.

I don’t know about you, but back in the winter of 1969, big band music was not exactly my “go to” musical genre. At 22 I was listening to Abbey Road which had just come out, and Tommy and Simon and Garfunkel and The Kinks, and Frank Zappa, not Duke Ellington, though I was into Monk, Coltrane, Miles and Cannonball. I drew the line at big band music.

Let’s get right to the point of this reissue, which is the sound, since anyone shelling out big bucks for it is doing so because he or she is familiar with the music and loves it to death.

Frank Zappa acknowledges the influence of Edgar Varése, Igor Stravinsky and other modern classical composers in much of his music but did he ever mention Charles Mingus? Not that I can recall having read (save for the oblique reference in the title of the composition “Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue”), but it’s impossible to not draw the connection when the sextet slinks its way into the staccato twists and turns of the raucous, mocking, angry and mostly exasperated and distraught half hour version of “Fables of Faubus,” found on this epic but until recently unknown March 18th, 1964 Cornell University concert.

Composed in 1937, Shostakovich’s dramatic 5th symphony is cinematic in scope and thematically rich and varied. Though 20th century modern in its angular musical approach, it retains elements of Tchaikovsky’s romantic 19th century, though many of the musical gestures more closely resemble those of Shostakovich's contemporary, Sergei Prokofiev. In fact if you’re familiar with Prokofiev’s “Lt. Kije Suite” you will hear some similarities along with some touches of Rimsky-Korsakov.