Román Leão

Tag: review

  • Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970) [ficção]

    Hindsight is always a cold-hearted bitch. Lucious Cole was a head case. Anyone who had to personally deal with him—whether his ex-band mates who threw him to the curb, or this writer, who once was caught in his maelstrom for a lost weekend in San Francisco—could attest to his mercurial nature.

    Lucious Cole was also a genius. Perhaps it took a seriously damaged personality to fully capture the zeitgeist of our troubled times. Cole’s new—and sadly ironically titled—album, A-OK, does just that.

    Starting the album with the slow, meditative lope of Hold Me Down, Cole’s trademark rock solid rhythm guitar anchors his plaintive vocal to the Earth. It’s easy to read too much into Cole’s entreating Come with me / Hold me down / I feel like I’m losing my grip / On the ground; but the entirety of Cole’s later output, from the National Loaf’s Cut the Loaf on, could be read as a cry for help, albeit, a consistently tuneful one.

    A weary resignation has crept into Cole’s consciousness by the title track where a swirling guitar figure underscores an exhausted soul coming to terms with leaving all his worldly possessions in the care of others. I’m glad that you still care / About all the thousand things / That I can no longer bear.

    A radio-friendly jangle of acoustic guitars announces the freedom that Cole has found in letting go in Clear Skies. Ex-National Loaf drummer Chas “Chalky” Woodrow provides his trademark skittering background as if trying to escape the session before being caught up once again in Cole’s drama.

    Should we infer anything by whatever olive branch brought his contentious former band mate back into Cole’s creative circle? Was Cole making amends, intuiting that time was short, or did he just need a damn good drummer to propel the obvious breakout single?

    Whatever peace Cole found in rekindling an old friendship has clearly eroded by the arrival of the tense and jittery Sliding Away [From It All]. Chalky reprises his rhythm work on this track, laying down a solid foundation for Cole’s precarious emotional house of cards, while a trio of background gospel singers try to provide a modicum of tranquility behind the singer’s fragile vocal. Woodrow has since talked about the A-OK sessions as a drug-fueled Boschian nightmare, which would explain Cole’s clipped and manic avian-sounding chirps leading into the fadeout.

    By the time A-OK hits mid-point, the album has eased into its horse latitudes, a calming tropic of mid-tempo song craft that would stand out as a handful of highlights on a lesser artist’s record. Cole, however, is merely lulling the unsuspecting listener into a false sense of security.

    Our man suddenly kicks the speakers wide open with Power Games, a ferocious slab of pure, uncut funk, that could have established him as a viable photo-negative answer to James Brown himself. This writer, for one, would have loved to see Lucious Cole live long enough to have blown some minds and moved some asses on the new Soul Train television show.

    Perhaps A-OK’s most beguiling, and hauntingly beautiful, song is the closing track. Named after a mythical kingdom in ancient Buddhist and Hindu lore, Shambhala has come to generally refer to a spiritually pure place where wizened “sun worshippers” live out their long lives in bliss.

    One can hear the primal yearning for such a place in Cole’s impassioned delivery behind a soaring orchestration incorporating exotic instrumentation from the Far East. It’s a shame he never found what he was looking for.

    Grade: Five bones

    Follow the story:
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
    Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony

  • Put on This Record: Funland—Unknown Instructors [2009]

    Shakespeare had it right. You really can’t trust anyone that doesn’t appreciate music. All of our greatest thinkers eventually seem to come to the conclusion that we are only vibrations in the great void. Call it the Big Bang Theory, call it what you will, but how could one go through life closed to the most primal and necessary form of human expression?

    Into the late spring of our discontent, like a silver dollar dropped down an outhouse shitter, the third, and most cohesive, album from Unknown Instructors—an unlikely supergroup of sorts—could just be the vital blast of L.A. punk you didn’t know the situation was calling for.

    On Funland, the planet’s premier punk rock rhythm section of Mike Watt and George Hurley consistently push each other in more and more complex jams supported by Saccharine Trust guitarist Joe Baiza playing at his most insectoid. Whereas Hurley played pretty straight-ahead on the previous album, producers Baiza, Joe Carducci, and Dan McGuire saved the most Rashied Ali-inspired grooves for its follow up.

    Recorded at the same time as 2006’s The Master’s Voice, Funland is no mere collection of second-rate tracks, but a cohesive work of art that follows a thematic surge. Of course, that theme is loose enough to include Pere Ubu’s père David Thomas (R.I.P.) wailing as if existentially wounded on Afternoon Spent at the Bar, Sunny; while elsewhere, poet Dan McGuire reprises his role as a modern-day Jim Morrison with a real penchant for language rather than just a vehicle for getting more whisky and leather pants.

    McGuire has an eye for the details of the less-than bucolic childhood that many of us aging suburban California kids can relate to. He remembers the forgotten places, the weed-strewn empty lots, and trampled-down hurricane fences, but he’s not the only poet on deck.

    Whereas Voice was a hard-charger right out of the gate with the swirling Swarm, the opening salvo on Funland is Maji Yabai—Japanese slang originally meaning something like, “Oh, shit,” and morphing in recent years into something like “sick” or “bad,” but in a good way—an introspective Watt-spiel.

    This paints the scene in a peculiar midway twilight. The unmerciful heat of the summer sun has finally abated and that belly full of PBR and corndogs isn’t going to hold you. It’s time to make some decisions. As the buzz threatens to loosen its grip, you can opt to reinforce with another semi-cold one, or pop out to the car for something stronger.

    Funland’s hard stuff includes a cover of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Frownland, welding its odd gravitas to the album’s own weird sense of bacchanalian carny freedom. In addition to Thomas’s unique contributions, artist Raymond Pettibon’s unexpected jazz-influenced rap on Lead! proves that his take on Voice’s Twing-Twang wasn’t just an anomalous laugh.

    Pettibon has a surprisingly direct and, dare I say it, swinging delivery that may just cause me to rethink my idea of him as a quiet, misanthropic artist; or someone you might meet working the ring toss. It’s good to remember not to confuse the artist with his art.

    Funland is all about pushing the boundaries of what you think you know about these musicians, and like the famous Tilt-A-Whirl, if you don’t hurl, you just might have the time of your life.