Steven Wilson "Get All You Deserve"

 

I can count the number of music videos I've purchased in the past ten years on one hand...and it's three more than the number of movies I've bought.  About eight years ago, I paid for Phish "It" and in early 2010 it was Joe Bonamassa at the Royal Albert Hall.  The moment I heard "...Deserve" was available, I searched for a teaser and found this...



Did not know the song but it was a helluva track!  But dammit, one of the main reasons I don't buy concert videos is the overuse of edits.  I can't stand it when there are thirty a minute!  I actually had to look away while I listened to the audio.  Found another clip and felt the same way.  Caused me to reconsider the purchase. 

A couple of weeks go by and my wife gets a coupon from one of her membership retailers, hands it to me and says "get something for yourself."  As soon as I bandage my chin I head to the retailer's website and find that the deluxe version is still available (Blu-Ray, DVD, 2 CD's).  Ahhh, why not?

The first thing I did was pop the CDs into the car player.  Most everything is from his two solo records, and since his last release is one of this century's best, I was prepared for disappointment.  Had no faith in the ability to recreate much of it in a live setting.  And, honestly, I wasn't blown away, but it was the car environment and I recalled that "Grace For Drowning" did not translate well in those surroundings, either.  So I waited a few days till the wifey was out of town for the evening, closed the blinds, dimmed the lights, cranked up the surround system, poured a TN whiskey, indulged in a small amount of party favours, and popped the DVD in the player...

...if I had seen this concert in the flesh I would have had to change my shorts afterwards!  I heard Yes, Rush, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Phish, Chick Corea/Return To Forever and Billy Cobham, to name a few.  To pull that shit off live is impressive.  More so is the fact that Wilson spends a large portion of the show basically conducting the band.  He struts from musician to musician, all around the stage, punching the air and stepping to the rhythm.  Then he'll sit at a keyboard for a few noodles, get up and walk to the mic to sing a few lines, go back to the rear of the stage and strap on a guitar for a power chord or three.......the rest of the band KICKS ASS!  It's as if Elgar was conducting his own "Pomp and Circumstance" and jumped down from the stand to grab a cello to start wailing away!  Yes, all the visual edits were a bit tedious, but they make more sense in the context of the whole program.  Wilson's imagery partner of the past ten years or so, Lasse Hoile, puts on a show for your eyes while the band plays on.  There had to be subtle differences between the sets night to night as no click tracks were used and as Wilson said about his guitarist, "...he can't play the same run a second time, so why should we?"  Speaking of band members, I did not know most of them, but I can tell you that the keyboardist played with some guy named Miles Davis and the bassist was a member of Kajagoogoo.  Never in a million years would I have thought to use those two names in a sentence, and they are in the same band...wow.

Wilson liked this group so much that he employed the lot of them to do his third solo, which has finished recording and is set for a late February drop.  Check out the guy manning the board...



For Wilson to employ Alan Parsons is a sign that he is focused on the music this time, saving himself from double duty on the knobs.  Wilson has already remixed King Crimson and Jethro Tull back catalogs, so to get Parsons off his considerable laurels says much about the respect each has for the other.  I eagerly await "The Holy Drinker."

Only European tour dates announced so far, but I know he's scheduling North America again.  Please, please come somewhere remotely close to Florida...

The Sheepdogs

I do believe it was Greg A. who alerted me to this band.  Don't recall the clip but the question was whom did the song sound like.  It was a dead ringer for Burton Cummings/Guess Who, so I looked them up.  Damn if they weren't from Saskatoon...a favorite song by the Guess Who was "Running Back To..."  So I made a mental note to be on the lookout for them in the future... 

...which arrived two months ago and I just pulled this self-titled release from the player.  There is absolutely nothing new or ground breaking musically about this 45-minute record,

but if you are in my age demographic and this doesn't put a smile on your face then you might as well curl up and crawl back into your stale old musical cubbyhole! 

Don't know how these Canadians sound so Southern...well, partly because the album was tracked in Nashville, but there are Allman Bros. w/ Warren Haynes stylings, Skynyrd musings, Blackfoot sounds, Molly Hatchet moments and what could pass for a rewrite of ZZ Top's "Cheap Sunglasses."  Speaking of rewrites, there's a flat out rip of the Yardbirds "Shapes Of Things" and the currently obligatory Norman Greenbaum riff that morphs into a Gary Glitter-type beat.  You can hear part of it one minute into this video...



You should also hear the Los Lobos influences that I jotted down throughout the plays.  I also noted a little CCR here and there and then I discovered they had opened for John Fogerty on a recent tour, so that probably explains it. 

The Sheepdogs grows better with every spin.  I will certainly make my way to see them if they get to Orlando.

Dokken "Broken Bones"

 

Another submitted selection.  Hey, if you want to provide me with a copy of something relatively new, no more than five months since release, I'll give it the treatment.  Be prepared, though, I am brutally honest. 

The guitar work is still the best thing about a Dokken record.  When I saw the current slinger's name, Jon Levin, a faint bell sounded from deep in the bowels of my brain's musical chamber. 

Mr. Levin was recruited by Warlock just as Doro was going solo in the very late '80's.  And here he is with her back in 1989 alongside journeyman drummer Bobby Rondinelli...



I'll sell you that poster if interested.  Got plenty of others from the old music store days that I'll part with for a few $'s (all the Mikey J's were sold when he passed).   

Never thought much of Don Dokken's voice or songwriting skills. Best thing about the band used to be George Lynch's guitar work. With "Broken Bones," Don D is still singing and writing and Lynch is long gone. Care to guess my opinion?  The opening track and single offered an eyebrow-raising start...



...but the remainder was back to status quo.  Couldn't even listen through the one song Dokken didn't write. 

Thanks to the above video, "Broken Bones" isn't a total flusher like fellow LA band Great White's latest effort.

Elbow "Dead In The Boot"

 

I have three of the previous five albums by Elbow but knew something was awry when this one crossed my path.  The others were spaced apart by 2+ years apiece, so when "Dead In The Boot" arrived not eighteen months after "Build A Rocket, Boys!," I was suspicious.  And I was right.  DITB is a collection of B-sides which span the band's career.

"B-side" generally evokes a runner-up mentality but I never viewed it in that manner.  When I bought a 45 as a kid, I got two songs, not just the hit.  The Beatles singles started it but they were always considered double A-sides.  It was "Goodbye" on the flip of Elton's "Levon", Chicago's "Colour My World" and "I'm A Man" were B's.  The most outstanding in my mind was a few years later when my friend, John Pattie (where are you?), and I flipped "Another Park, Another Sunday" and declared the B-side the true hit.  Sure enough, a few months later, "Black Water" became the Doobies first #1. 

I'm not going to rehash my history with Elbow here (you can click the link in paragraph one for that), but there was a 30-month gap between the end of my retail music career and returning to WPRK in which I blanked on any new music.  That empty period was the window in which Elbow's "Leaders Of The Free World" was released and I missed it.  Many consider it the band's best album ("Seldom Seen Kid" is my fave) and now I think maybe they were right because the only keepers on DITB are from that period.  One track could have been a Masters Of Reality tune and another could be mistaken for David Byrne.  I'm torn on going back to find out, though.  Maybe "Leaders..." was just so damn fine that they couldn't put everything on it, but it could also be a "Sam's Town" by The Killers, which was patently awful.  The discarded sessions from that record ("Sawdust") turned out to be far superior to the original. 

The remaining B's of DITB are cast-offs for a reason.  As a whole, DITB is too restrained, too downbeat, too monotone, too cerebral for a complete uninterrupted listen.  This album smells of a contractual obligation.  I am fearful the band is on the verge of phoning it in and there are allusions to that possibility.  After the grand display of this summer's Olympic Games which featured plenty of Elbow's compositions (I kept yelling at Bob Costas to shut the fuck up so I could hear them), I hope that's not the case.

Since these are all old tunes, there really isn't any quality video easily available to link for you.  I stumbled, however, onto this hour-long set from 2011 at Glastonbury.  It is well worth your time...

Mark Knopfler "Privateering"

I don't own the first Dire Straits or Knopfler solo or soundtrack but had a hand in selling quite a few.  Super saturation on radio and MTV if I ever wanted to hear any.  Doesn't mean I didn't like them, just knew I would never play one on a personal level.  After leaving the retail biz in '03, I never bothered to search his work out until "Get Lucky" in '09.  Some good tunes but still didn't pull the trigger on a purchase.  Saw "Privateering" on my release schedule, noted it was a double disc, sampled a few of the tracks......wait, was that blues?...then another...and another...wait, is that Kim Wilson of the Fabulous Thunderbirds blowing harmonica?........well, I'll be damned.  I'll take it!

Since I purchase from an international site, I come across many recordings unavailable in the US, but I never dreamed this was one.  I bought it a couple of weeks after its early Sept. release and was truly digging the record as a whole.  Wondered how it was doing domestically and pulled up the Billboard Top 200.  Scrolled through the entire list and nada.  Knew that couldn't be right as he's been a fixture on the Top 200 with all his solos.  Well, I'll be damned, again!  It's available in every country in the world EXCEPT America...WTF!  It has to be a major label spat as the album is Mercury/Universal and his US company is Warner Bros.  When are the old coots at WB going to join the 21st century?  Crying shame, too, since this record positively screams Grammy.

Multiple nominations and probable wins, that is.  Certainly the most complete album of his career and the old farts in NARAS love to reward the long-time musical veterans.  Besides the large dollops of the blues, there is plenty to like for the faithful.  He doesn't abandon the Celtic-tinged songs...



...folk stories or the rocking tunes, they just aren't as predominant this time around.  And I love it!  The record sounds like it was fun to make.  Knopfler said this is his best band ever and thoroughly enjoying the supporting tour.  He has two more weeks in the States with Bob Dylan (I'll bet this CD is for sale at the merch table) before going back to Europe.  I'd love to see this tour if he was coming to FLA and I'd guarantee my early arrival to see his set and early departure to miss Dylan's (past his prime by at least two decades). 

There isn't a lot of quality footage online but I want to play one of the blues tracks from the record, so here is one using stills from the tour...



Oh, yeah, the guitar work is pretty good, too.  There isn't a turkey in the twenty tracks.  One day I'll check out all the additional selections from the deluxe versions.

One of 2012's best.

Simeon Soul Charger "Harmony Square"

 

Read about this band on some German music site and was very surprised they were American, based in northeast Ohio.  The story is that a couple of Germans on vacation in NYC saw them live and were so blown away that they changed their flight to stay and see the band again.  For the next year, the tourists tried to convince the band to come to Germany.  Finally giving in, they arranged a two-week tour and everything started to click.  They've played many more times over there since and developed quite a fan base in Europe.  As you should be able to tell from the cover art, they are into "psychedelicrock."  This is how they describe "Harmony Square" on their website:
   
"An elaborate story about an alien circus descending on Earth to offer transcendence to a sea of oppressed humans." 

Thar's some chemicals in them thar brains...



Man, I hear LOTS of Crack The Sky in the first single.  Other artists that I hear hints of are Bubble Puppy, Blitzen Trapper, Beatles (blue years), Queen, City Boy and the singer from Klaatu.  I actually hit on three or four of their listed influences published on their Facebook page.  These are the others:
"David Bowie, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, Davis Lynch, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix, Stanley Kubrick, Existentialism, Led Zeppelin, The Universe, Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Violent Femmes, Can, Dr. Suess, Ingmar Bergman, Shel Silverstein, The Residents, King Crimson, The Decemberists, Leonard Cohen, Robert Anton Wilson, Queens of the Stone Age, Dreams, Radiohead, Muse, Time, Terrence McKenna, Primus, Black Sabbath, Rage Against the Machine, TRex, The Animal Collective, Of Montreal, Grizzly Bear, Velvet Underground, Them Crooked Vultures, Tom Waits."
I omitted a couple of which I had no clue who/what they were...and I could have dumped a few more, but I wanted you to have the opportunity to giggle.  One more video from their YT channel...



I love things like this.  On the downside, however, it's a 67-minute rock opera in one continuous track that is broken into fifteen pieces and it gets monotonous about a third of the way in.  I will keep about twenty-five minutes of it and that should be plenty. 

Great White "Elation"

 

Why this band continues to use the same name after the disaster nearly ten years ago that killed 100 fans is absolutely beyond belief.  And there are two versions of Great White out there?!  That's just plain stupid. 

 

"Elation" is by the group sans Jack Russell.  The record was submitted for review by Bobbed Kilts Productions.  I don't own any Great White and did not give this any consideration upon its release in May.  Felt guilty every time I rang up a sale for these guys back in their heyday.  Believe I actually made a staffer complete the transaction if I happened to notice any Great White CD in a customer's hands.  Did not want to be held accountable. 

 

So here goes.........If you are remotely interested in this record, save your money and go back into your collection and pull out any Aerosmith, AC/DC, Whitesnake or Guns N' Roses CD and spin it instead.  You'll be glad you did.

 

I'll quote BKP's take on this album..."FLUSH!"