Music for Living: Alarm Will Sound, Ray Davies, David Bowie, Dar Williams, Vampire Weekend, The Holmes Brothers

 

 

Alarm Will Sound
a/rhythmia
Nonesuch
www.alarmwillsound.com

Listen to this recording at your own risk, for after immersing yourself in the exuberant joy and surprises that await in music that makes discontinuities and irregular pulses its raison d’être, there may be no going back. While Alarm Will Sound, a leading avant-garde chamber orchestra, focuses mostly on twentieth-century American and British composers, including “outlaw” or “outsider” types such as Conlon Nancarrow (who composed mostly for player piano), Harrison Birtwistle, and Benedict Mason, the group also leans on electronica artist Mochipet, electronic-music duo Autechre, and fourteenth-century Belgian composer Johannes Ciconia. The centerpiece of the effort is Michael Gordon’s eleven-minute “Yo Shakespeare,” which connects the New York avant-rock underground to the dynamic minimalism of Steve Reich. a/rhythmia is the perfect introduction to this adventurous, twenty-piece ensemble and a great sampler of edgy new music.

 

 

Ray Davies
The Kinks Choral Collection
Decca
www.raydavies.info

Choral versions of songs by the Kinks? On paper, it sounds like an awful idea, even with the participation and direction of the group’s visionary leader, Ray Davies. But in practice, Davies pulls off another creative plum in a career spanning nearly five decades. For one thing, the Crouch End Festival Chorus never takes front and center here, but rather is used as just one component in re-imagined arrangements that include a full rock band and feature Davies’s vocals as their main element. Outside of the Kinks’s signature hits “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night”—both of which are given credible renditions here—Davies wisely emphasizes the more lyrical aspect of his songwriting on selections including “Working Man’s Café,” “Celluloid Heroes,” “Waterloo Sunset,” as well as a six-song medley of tunes from the Kinks’s brilliant concept album, The Village Green Preservation Society.

 

 

David Bowie
A Reality Tour
ISO
www.davidbowie.com

While it lacks the personality of previous David Bowie live albums such as the 1974 soul-inflected David Live and 1978’s shimmering, proto-electronic Stage, this two-disk, thirty-three-song compilation of tracks from two 2003 shows in Dublin might serve to document Bowie’s final tour, as the rock icon has been in semi-retirement ever since the tour was cut short due to a heart attack, followed by rumors of poor health. As it turns out, Bowie used the opportunity to play straight-ahead versions of old hits, fan favorites, rarely heard obscurities, and more recent tunes in what turned out to be a career-spanning program that emphasized the music’s energy as well as Bowie’s singular vocals. If it winds up being Bowie’s valedictory, it’s a worthy one.

 

 

Dar Williams
Promised Land
Razor & Tie
www.darwilliams.com

Sometimes a single track can power an entire album, and Dar Williams accomplishes that with her song “Buzzer”—the catchiest and most upbeat number here that, upon close listening, reveals itself to be about the Milgram obedience experiment that took place at Yale University in the 1960s. “I press the buzzer, I press the buzzer,” Williams sings repeatedly, mimicking the act itself, couching it all in a hook-laden pop tune. She deserves nearly full credit for that alone, but there’s plenty else that delights on this album, whether it be the more traditional folk of “Holly Tree,” with its feminist implications, or her Fountains of Wayne cover, “Troubled Times,” that if you didn’t consult the liner notes could easily pass for one of her own. Williams has always been a folkie with the soul of a pop craftsman, much like her role model, Suzanne Vega, who lends harmonies to the album’s second-best pop song, “Go to the Woods.”

 

 

Vampire Weekend
Contra   
XL
www.vampireweekend.com

 

The Paul Simon/Graceland comparisons that might burden Vampire Weekend’s approach are apt, as lead singer Ezra Koenig’s unassuming vocals are a dead ringer for Simon’s, and the band luxuriates in the Simonesque fusion of Afropop and other world-beat influences with its New York-style indie-rock. But it seems to have escaped notice that the group implicitly also owes a debt to the effortlessly knowing eclecticism of They Might Be Giants and explicitly acknowledges its ambitions on a greater scale by naming its latest recording Contra—no doubt intended somewhat as a double-entendre while boldly referring to the Clash’s sprawling, Nicaraguan-referenced masterpiece, Sandinista! Vampire Weekend has a way to go—OK, a long way to go—before being considered in the same arena as the Clash, but the group certainly establishes itself here as the catchiest New York pop-rock band since the Strokes. Extra points for the best couplet of the year: “In December drinking horchata/I’d look psychotic in a balaclava.”

 

 

The Holmes Brothers
Feed My Soul
Alligator
www.theholmesbrothers.com

The Holmes Brothers have always mixed up a unique blend of Southern soul, gospel, and R&B, but what really sets them apart is their three-pronged vocal attack, which has never sounded better than it does on this Joan Osborne-produced effort. The singers’ impassioned voices are always mixed out front, unified in the effortless manner of the three lead singers of the Band. Osborne and Catherine Russell lend backing vocals, but bassist Sherman Holmes, guitarist Wendell Holmes, and drummer Popsy Dixon drive this effort like the stripped-down power trio that they are. The fourteen tunes include nine originals, many of which sound like soul or blues classics, and five cover tunes, including a dark, haunted version of the Beatles’s “I’ll Be Back.” Few contemporary groups can boast a single vocalist of the depth or color of any of these singers; to have all three contributing in a single effort is an embarrassment of soulful riches.
[MAY 2010]