Albums

Counting Crows – August and Everything After: Live at Town Hall

In a move deeply predictable to those who know me, I think a Counting Crows album is the best release of the year. I’m cheating on at least two counts here, firstly because it’s a DVD, and secondly because it contains no new music. In fairness, it is also a CD/download album, but its well worth getting the DVD. Town Hall is beautiful, the lighting designer needs a medal, and Adam Duritz is still a be-dreadlocked whirling dervish of a frontman. He’ll never be particularly cool, but in 1993 he wrote some beautiful songs and in 2007 he performed them in front of some cameras. That’s really all there is to it.

June Tabor & Oysterband – Ragged Kingdom

It was a good year for reunited folk-rock colossi, and Shrewsbury Folk Festival had them both. But then they would, and this is why we love them. I saw a full set by June and the band in Nottingham in November, a gig marred by some of the worst live sound I’ve heard all year, but nonetheless a great night. Tabor’s voice ages like a fine wine, and the band are a more nuanced, delicate instrument than they were 20 years ago when they made Freedom and Rain. Their choice of material is eclectic but brilliant, and the result is an album garnering award nominations.

Graham Colton – Pacific Coast Eyes

The first four tracks of Pacific Coast Eyes are pure summer pop perfection. It’s not that the rest are bad, just that the  first four are inspired,dovetailing beautifully into a little song-cycle of unrequited longing, nostalgia and sunglasses. It also features the runner-up in my Best Sappy/Cute Lyric of the Year Award, narrowly pipped by Teddy Thompson (see below):

You weren’t standing with who you came with,
You told me your name, it was short for Elizabeth.
You don’t drink cos you can’t stand the taste,
You talk like a boy but you still like a little chase.

(As an aside, the fact that people have started writing nostalgic premature-midlife-crisis songs about being born in the 1980s (see below) is making em feel dangerously grown up.)

File away until the sun comes out again, then roll down the windows and enjoy.

Ryan Adams – Ashes & Fire

Lucky Now is beautiful. Musically it wouldn’t stand out if you dropped it into the middle of his first album, but lyrically it has real immediacy. It is a song of sober, 2011-vintage Adams looking ruefully back. It’s also a song of New York. The rest isn’t quite as lovely, but nonetheless a worthy addition to Adams’ substantial discography.

The Civil Wars – Barton Hollow

Suffers in comparison to their live performance only because they appear to accomplish more with less. Their vocal performances have grown since they made this record, and most of the overdubs don’t bring much to the party. If you can, see them live. I’ve got tickets to see them in Leeds in March, and there are still tickets for some of the tour dates at the time of writing. That said, this is still a pretty remarkable clutch of songs.

Wilco – The Whole Love

Continuing Wilco’s slide towards middle-aged mediocrity, or the best instalment yet of their third age? The Whole Love has convinced me that Wilco are alive, well and maturing like a fine wine. Those of us who had our concerns around the time Sky Blue Sky emerged and were only partly assuaged by Wilco (the album).

It reminds me a lot of REM’s Automatic for the People. There are string arrangements and Wurlitzer electric piano textures. There’s also a sense that the best has probably passed by now, as has any sense of trendsetting or avantgarde, but that none of that really matters. It’s good stuff, it’s very Wilco and it has none of the hesitancy or laid-back laziness that at times killed Sky Blue Sky and Wilco (the album). It’s the first album on their own label, dBpm, and between that and their own festival (SolidSound) they’re fast turning into a cottage industry. Try the first track, below, and revel in the wonderfully bipolar nature of Wilco in 2011, swinging from weird, ambient noisemaking to glorious Nels Cline guitar solos via Jeff Tweedy’s driving, sinister verses. Long live Wilco!

Blitzen Trapper – American Goldwing

Glorious retro-fest filtered through 21st century indie rock sound. It’s the Rolling Stones via the Black Crowes with Eagles harmonies as played by the bastard offspring of Band of Horses and Wilco, and it makes me grin like an idiot. This record has so much groove it’s ridiculous. I tried telling someone it sounded a lot like T.Rex and Led Zeppelin, and they looked at me like I’d gone mad. Had I continued and told them that there are hints of early Elton John or early Bowie in “Astronaut”, I have no doubt they would have asked me to stop flaying their sacred cows and leave. It’s true though; “Street Fighting Sun” is pure Zep, “Your Crying Eyes” is Bowie’s Suffragette City for a new generation. Is it original? Not terribly. Is it fun? Hugely. Is it bizarrely cool this year? Apparently so. And, thanks to the benelovent indie god that is SubPop, you can listen to whole thing for nothing on YouTube (below). Do so, then decide you’re going to buy a copy anyway.

Teddy Thompson – Bella

Deserves a place on this list simply for the line

I guess it’s good loving that I want the most
Someone who turns my bread into buttered toast

but would qualify anyway, with a slew of catchy melodies and clever lyrics like this. Teddy’s voice gets better with every passing year, as does his sense of a good pop song. I have the feeling he’s building towards a truly brilliant album at some point, but until then this is a very, very good one. If you can, see him live, especially if it’s just him and a guitar in a cathedral.

The Wailin’ Jennys – Bright Morning Stars

More than ever before the Jennys are pulling in three disparate directions. David Travers-Smith produces once again, but there’s too much slow, jazzy contemplation. Opening track Swing Low, Sail High is gorgeous, but the good vibes dissipate quickly and leave behind a disparate, patchy collection of songs. Lovely in places, but I haven’t bonded with in the way I did with Firecracker.

Gillian Welch – Harrow and the Harvest

Eight years is so long to wait for an album that it’s almost impossible for it to meet with expectation. Not bad by any stretch, but part of a trend towards inconsistency that started with Soul Journey. That said, if your decline starts with Time (The Revelator), there’s a lot of room to make good music on the way. Revelator is desert island stuff for me, and probably something of a miraculous one-off even by the high standards of Welch and Rawlings.  The Harrow and the Harvest is good, great in places, but dull in others. At its best, you believe every word Welch sings, and yearn to sing along, to join the tales of lonesome souls. David Rawlings is still a genius, his guitar parts and vocal harmonies top notch as ever.

Gemma Hayes – Let It Break

Not a bad album, but suffers from being compared to Hayes’ remarkable and underappreciated back catalogue. Her first album, the Mercury-nominated Night on my Side is gorgeous and her third, The Hollow of Morning, is a delicate, harrowing collection that still transports me to a transcendent set at the Bodega in Nottingham whenever I hear it. I played it nine times the following day; I doubt I’ve played Let It Break nine times since I got it.

OK, so that’s albums. Tomorrow, good gigs I went to, EPs and assorted other musical things that aren’t full-length albums and a few thoughts for 2012.

A new venue is always cause for celebration, albeit sometimes with caution. The Navigation is a pub by the canal and isn’t really new at all, but is under new management and they’re booking music. They’re also playing host to what smelled like a pretty remarkable burger-making operation. Note to self: next time, don’t bother having dinner before you go.

It’s probably a good thing I can’t remember the name of the first act, a local support, because his Jeff Buckley impression was so painstakingly, studiously crafted that to watch it fall so inevitably short was really quite uncomfortable to watch. It should be obvious to anyone that it’s a futile thing to attempt, but it’s also about 15 years late.

Moving swiftly on, the first two proper acts up was Paul Thomas Saunders. By way of a disclaimer, or at least some background, I should say that I’ve known Paul a long time. We went to school together for a while, and he was in the better of the two teenage rock bands that formed around that time. We played at some of the same gigs. I then had the good fortune to end up in Leeds at the time his previous band reached their peak. It could be said I’m fairly au fait with his oeuvre, if you’ll excuse the rampant francophony of that sentence.

With that taken into account, it’s all the more astonishing that he managed to deliver a set that was at once surprising and familiar to me. Above all it was impressive. During songs Paul and band oozed confidence, overcoming the challenge of the sound, not to mention a few talkative audience members, to deliver their carefully crafted slices of ethereal pop.

Paul has assembled a stellar band of sonic magicians. A guitarist who plays his effects pedals like another instrument, layering textures and fading chords into complex walls of delay, aided by keyboardist Kate’s Wurlitzer chords and strong backing vocals. Long-time drummer Ali leant power and poise to the arrangements, giving them huge dynamic range.

With this trio behind him, Paul is free to sing, something he is really rather good at. His vocal range is huge, extended by a smooth, powerful falsetto that lends itself to the dreamy, echo-drenched songs that populate his set, typified by Appointment in Samarra, below.

The Staves

Our headliners took the stage around 9pm.

I first encountered The Staves supporting The Civil Wars at the Union Chapel Islington in September. I wrote at the time that

Given the unreserved seating at the Union Chapel I was never going to dawdle on my way to the Northern Line but when a music journalist friend said that The Staves were “the best new band in the country”, I made doubly sure I was there on time. Hundreds of people were queueing round the block at 7pm, and we were not disappointed. The Staves, a trio of sisters, appear to have taken the ethereal close harmony stylings of Fleet Foxes and done something distinctly English with them. Stunningly precise and accurate singing, charmingly humble chat and elegant writing. Their debut album, produced by Ethan Johns, is out on Atlantic early next year. I’ll be queueing up.

In essence, not a great deal has changed since then. With no Grade I-listed venue to add gravitas and reverb, it wasn’t as dramatic a performance. Instead, we were treated to an intimate show with plenty of chat.

The Staves are Camilla, Jessica and Emily, sisters from Watford. Conveniently blessed with complementary vocal ranges, they sing in close harmony, accompanied by Jessica’s simple-but-effective Paul Simon-like fingerpicked guitar.

Whilst on first listen they belong somewhere in the Fleet Foxes/Midlake/Low Anthem ballpark, seeing them live reveals that they’ve taken these ethereal close-harmony stylings and done something distinctly English with them. Unlike the Mumford/Marling-type response to that particular US nu-folk pack, they’ve done something that appears both genuine and natural, powerful but never forced. They are wise old heads on young shoulders, and if you’re ready to spot them you can hear the influence of Simon & Garfunkel or Crosby, Stills & Nash in their harmonies and Joni Mitchell in their phrasing. They sing with an awareness of the power they wield, more knowing than naive.

They also sing with astonishing precision, seemingly able to start and stop singing together, moving from solos or duets to full three-part harmony without cues, snapping suddenly into unison for a line before  swooping gloriously back into lush, full harmony again.

Their Mexico EP is out on December 11th:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/preorder/mexico/id485033701?i=485033705

http://www.amazon.com/Mexico-EP/dp/B006BZ8442/

Their debut album, the first ever collaboration between father and son producers Glyn and Ethan Johns, is out on Atlantic early next year.

They support The Civil Wars on tour in the US in January 2012, followed by more UK dates in February in support of Michael Kiwinuka.

Lastly, I’d like to point out that I managed to write an entire piece about them without once mentioning cunnilingus. Unlike the Guardian.

Prompted by answering a couple of questions about the sounds on Ghosts & Heroes (no, seriously, people ask these things!), I thought I’d write a short piece on the guitar that did most of the heavy lifting in those sessions. Some of this is going to be a little heavy on the guitar-geekery, but I’ll do my best to keep it interesting for a broader audience.

There are many things to love about my favourite electric guitar, a 1998 Godin SD. It is beautiful. It is, I believe, a unique and clever hybrid. There aren’t many of them on this side of the Atlantic. It was also a screaming bargain on eBay, which always helps.

Why Godin guitars are so relatively affordable is hard to understand; they’re all made in Canada (with the exception of some of their electrics, like this one, which are assembled over the border in the US state of New Hampshire from Canadian timber for reasons that I suspect have to do with minimum wage laws/healthcare/dental plans). They depreciate significantly, because they’re not Gibsons or Fenders, I suppose. The loss of the crowd-following types is the gain of those of us in the know!

This one is nicer than your average SD for a couple of reasons, first and foremost the Seymour Duncan Custom Custom pickup that the previous owner had the good sense to install at some point in the first decade of its life.

One of the most remarkable things about my SD in particular is that it was made within a month of its stablemate, my Gordon-Smith GS1 (of which more later, perhaps), in 1998.  I was 10 years old and had scarcely touched a guitar, but in two places thousands of miles apart within a few weeks of each other, two guitars were made that would eventually find their way to me.

What led me to start looking for one in the first place was a gentle curiosity for all things Stratocaster-shaped culminating in a blinding epiphany when borrowing a friend’s Strat when sitting in for one song at their gig (in the Packhorse in Leeds, for those keeping score).

Technical language warning! Stratocasters have three pickups and a five-way switch. Why five-way? I hear you cry, when there are only three options? Because, my curious friend, positions two and four on this switch select the middle pickup with either the neck or bridge pickup in parallel. On my Godin, position 4 is half single-coil middle pickup, half humbucker bridge pickup, which further adds to the sonic alchemy going on . It is these in-between settings that give the likes of Richard Thompson and Mark Knopfler their distinctive Strat sounds. On said night, I suddenly realised that these in-between settings reveal details in your right-hand pick/finger attack that are otherwise inaudible, and make really, really cool sounds in the process. I grew up a little as a guitarist right then and there.

Why not get a Strat then? Read on!

Those of us raised in the late 90s and early 00s are scarred by the presence of millions of cheap Chinese Stratocaster copies, and I think it puts a lot of people off the notion. I’d count myself among that number; it’s tough to shake off the image of every beginner guitarist you’ve ever known struggling to play an F chord on their plasticky Strat copy. Even proper, nice Stratocasters are a bit, well, bland for some of us. By the time you’ve specified an attractive translucent finish and a humbucker at the bridge, you might as well sort all the other things you don’t really care for at the same time…

Enter, then, a hybrid. The SD has the bridge and pickups of a Strat grafted onto the curvaceous body that is Godin’s signature. It is, if such a thing is possible, a refinement of a classic. It ditches the just-plain-irritating (and also ugly) top-mounted jack plate, the too-close-to-the-strings volume knob placement and instead opts for a side-mounted jack and global tone and volume controls, decluttering the top. It is further hybridised by having a 24 ¾ “ scale (the measurement between the bridge and the nut). This makes it like Gibsons and almost every steel-strung acoustic guitar in the world. This is a Good Thing for those of us who grew up playing guitars of that scale and never really enjoyed adapting to Fender’s 25 ½” malarky. Combined with the skinny-but-not-too-skinny rock maple neck, it makes for an easy, smooth playing experience (that is, once you’ve taken some steel wool to the gloss finish on the back of the neck…sticky!).

It’s a compromise, of course. You no longer look like Hank Marvin, Buddy Holly or Eric Clapton. You might, however, look like your own man.

You retain, crucially, the in-between-pickups sounds. With a maple neck and a traditional Strat-style sprung vibrato bridge, it covers most of the sonic territory of a Strat with ease. With the Seymour Duncan humbucker replacing the factory one in the bridge position, this particular one has an authentic rock voice as well.

It plays something of a starring role on Ghosts & Heroes, mostly through a Vox AC15 surrounded by a small forest of microphones that included Sennheiser e906 and MD918U and an AKG C414.

I’m going to put my inner guitar geek away now, but if anyone finds this remotely interesting I could talk about amps and mics, the aforementioned Gordon Smith, a couple of basses… GuitarGeekery Chapter 2, perhaps? Leave a comment and let me know.

So, PR-driven sobriety narrative aside, is it a good album? If his prolific tendency has taught us one thing it is not to expect a gem every time. For every Cold Roses there’s a Jacksonville City Nights, for every Love is Hell a Rock N Roll. And of course, for every actual album there’s a comedy black metal album about alien invasion. No, really.

It opens with “Dirty Rain”. If you were to play the game of trying to fit this into said back catalogue, this one belongs on Gold. It quickly becomes clear that Benmont Tench (borrowed from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) is not here to make up the numbers or add a recognisable credit to the sleeve; rather, Johns has him playing a lovely retro Hammond organ part. The soulful vocal seems to belong on side two of Gold as well. So far, so good, if not exactly revolutionary.

The title track follows, and captures a joyous mood rarely seen on his albums of late. A jaunty waltz-time and a Gram Parsons-esque delivery make it rare if not unique in his canon, but whether either were a good move remains to be seen. Perhaps we ought not to wish for too much reinvention of the wheel here. I think I prefer the acoustic solo version he put on YouTube before the album came out, which has a certain authenticity and purity that the album version lacks. Suck it and see.

“Come Home” is more like Heartbreaker than anything else. Pedal steel, gently shuffling snare, a longing lyric that seems to promise the safety and security that Heartbreaker spent most of its time looking for. I’m not the first to point out the connection. Produced by Glyn Johns (Beatles, Stones, The Who, Eagles and, notably, father of Ethan Johns who produced Heartbreaker and Gold), there are moments that could slip unnoticed onto the inevitable deluxe edition of Adams’ solo debut a decade ago. “Rocks” is another of them, delicate, fragile and sweet.

There are glimpses of irresistible, melodic Ryan we saw on Cold Roses; “Chains of Love” betrays his love of Noel Gallagher’s best songs, if Noel had come from Jacksonville, NC, that is. “Kindness” has that Harvest groove that so much of Heartbreaker used so well, helped along by Tench’s piano.

Other bits drift past with no discernable hook; “Save Me” makes no impact whatsoever and “I Love You But I Don’t Know What To Say” makes me recoil. Your mileage may vary depending on your susceptibility to cute, or indeed to Adams songs with long, unwieldy, narrative titles (“Elizabeth, You Were Born To Play That Part” anyone? “I Taught Myself How To Grow Old”?).

By this point, you’re not sure what to make of it. For an album with a fairly consistent sound, it is nonetheless all over the place in terms of style, delivery and influences. Just as well, then, that “Lucky Now” comes along.

The dedicated/obsessed have been listening to it for weeks now, but “Lucky Now” remains a glorious piece of pop perfection. I expect it may remain so for a while yet. Even Ryan Adams albums you don’t particularly like usually have one song where he hits it well and truly out of the park; “Dear Chicago” on Demolition or the title track of Rock N Roll. This is that one, destined to show up in encores years from now, already careering with tragic inevitability towards a million iTunes playlists.

I get the same sense of compact, to-the-point poppy efficiency I got the first time I heard Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark”. It gets in, delivers its beautifully-weighted point and gets out again. The music geek in me revels in the simplicity of the IV-vi in the chorus that drives home the first and third lines:

And the lights will draw you in
And the dark will take you down
And the night will break your heart
Only if you’re lucky now

In the end, the album is encapsulated in the change between the second and final choruses, when the lyric becomes:

And if the lights draw you in
And the dark can take you down
And love can mend your heart
But only if you’re lucky now

Stop press, Ryan Adams believes in love. Probably. If you’re lucky. Perhaps it’s a reflection on the fragility of the place he finds himself, an expression of the fear that it might all disappear with the same roll of the dice that he thinks brought it along in the first place.

At this point in his career, Adams doesn’t need to, nor could he, try to encapsulate his entire career in one album. This isn’t definitive, nor is it his best album, but it’s a stop on a long road. It won’t change the world, or even the world’s perception of him. It won’t get more than a track or two onto my Best Of Ryan Adams playlist either, but at this point that’s probably about all we could reasonably expect.

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Ashes & Fire is streaming at Ryan’s Smashing Life, where you can read Chris Fullerton’s take on it and make your own mind up.

The Staves by p_a_h on Flickr

Before I get the main event, a deserved mention for the support act. Given the unreserved seating at the Union Chapel I was never going to dawdle on my way to the Northern Line but when a music journalist friend said that The Staves were “the best new band in the country”, I made doubly sure I was there on time. Hundreds of people were queueing round the block at 7pm, and we were not disappointed. The Staves, a trio of sisters, appear to have taken the ethereal close harmony stylings of Fleet Foxes and done something distinctly English with them. Stunningly precise and accurate singing, charmingly humble chat and elegant writing. Their debut album, produced by Ethan Johns, is out on Atlantic early next year. I’ll be queueing up.

Tuesday night caught Joy Williams and John Paul White in an exceptionally playful mood, toying with their songs, flirting with one another. At one point Williams remarked “Outta the palm of my hand,” and she was right. From the moment they took the stage to the moment they finished their second encore, the audience lapped up everything they had to offer.

I’ve had a hard time in the past trying to explain what The Civil Wars do. “It’s sorta folky, country-ish but soulful, y’know?”, I said to the friend who was coming to the gig with me. In the end, they explained it themselves better than I could have done, telling the story of how they met at a kind of songwriter’s speed-dating event, where writers were paired up for an hour in a room with a piano and had to create something. Joy Williams’ heritage lies in California (Beach Boys, Carpenters) and her parents’ jazz records (Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald) while John Paul White grew up in Alabama listening to Johnny Cash. The result has elements of all of those influences; Williams’ vocal delivery owes a lot to Ella and White’s tenor is capable of everything from authentic Appalachian high-lonesome delicacy to rough, bluesy growling. Shorn of their studio overdubs and accompanied by White’s robust guitar playing, their songs are compact, potent things.

A capacity audience at Islington’s venerable, beautiful Union Chapel greeted the duo, dressed as always in black, Williams in a sleek dress and heels followed by White in his customary black suit and bowtie. They proceeded to dance their way, often literally in Joy Williams’ case, through a set including most of their debut album Barton Hollow, a smattering of non-album tracks new and old and a choice selection of covers. Williams in particular seems to delight in starting a song without announcing it and then revelling in the audience’s puzzlement when it turns out to be “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 or “Disarm” by the Smashing Pumpkins. Whilst they perhaps overplayed this tactic, it’s a clever one nonetheless; my only fear is that they run the risk of reducing their gift for performance to a conjurer’s trick. Still, for the most part they moved artfully from fast to slow, mournful to playful and original to cover, never lingering on one mood for too long. Between songs they talked to the audience like we were old friends, admiring the architecture, thanking us repeatedly for coming, promising they would come back to a place that was becoming one of their favourite venues even before they’d finished playing.

The Civil Wars by p_a_h on Flickr

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about seeing The Civil Wars live, particularly in a space like the Union Chapel, is their control of dynamics. Their communication onstage seems almost telepathic at times, even if the more quotidian reality is a combination of eye contact and practice; with in a single word or phrase they can move from soft to loud, rising and falling as one. Moreso than on Barton Hollow or on the Eddie’s Attic live recording that introduced so many of us to their sound, they sing as a single entity, moving seamlessly from close harmony to interwoven conversational exchanges.

The set showed as much deft control of dynamics as the songs themselves. Williams and White display a profound understanding of what they can do, and wield that power to great effect. They ended, inevitably, with “Poison and Wine”, a brutal, impassioned love song that they clearly recognise as their most powerful play. In the Union Chapel it reduced several people around me to tears and prompting a genuine, honest standing ovation that swept the venue with spontaneity, looks of wonder and amazement on  the faces of the crowd. A two-song encore, the second song performed unplugged on the very edge of the stage, wasn’t enough and we rose to our feet again. They came back, but nobody moved, 800 people stood, clapped, cheered. One more song whilst we all stood and then they slipped away.

Every once in a while, the regular gig-goer has the privilege of seeing something truly remarkable and unique. They’re the ones where you tell people years later “I was there,” the ones that were as special for the band as they were for the audience. Somewhere around the moment Joy Williams started crying, disbelief and happiness at the crowd that refused to sit down or stop applauding, a quick look around the Union Chapel was all you needed to realise that this was a special night.

It was 14th August 2006, three days since three men attempted to smuggle liquid explosives onto airliners. Flights were cancelled, and whilst everything was now in theory back to normal, the backlog of flights and the lengthy security checks means the reality couldn’t be further from that. Check-in times were extended, which for a flight which left before 8am now meant a 4am checkin time, which meant a National Express coach at 12.10am.

I have certainly said before now that Friends Don’t Let Friends Take the National Express, a mantra I stick to so strongly that I once drove to Heathrow (a round trip of 250-odd miles) to pick up an American friend to spare her that fate. This attitude was forged that night, principally because it was a perfect illustration of Trains Good, Coaches Bad. Trains are long. This gives trains the crucial advatage that should you find yourself near someone or something noisy/scary/unpleasant, you can pretty much rely on being able to stand up, wander along and pick a new place to sit. Trains have also worked out that whilst toilets are useful and neccesary things, they are best positioned between carriages where you can ignore them until such time as you wish to use one. The humble coach, however, has no such luxury. No-one should have to witness the terror of a toddler who is convinced the bus toilet is going to swallow him up, or the stuggles of his mother trying to convince him otherwise, or indeed the smell that results because she is crouching in the doorway trying to reassure him and thus cannot close said door. Sleep? Nothing could have seemed more distant and unattainable. I arrived at Heathrow in the middle of the night, bleary-eyed and promising never to travel on one of these infernal vehicles ever again.

That morning, Heathrow was like a warzone; policemen with machine guns, kids wrapped in space blankets, families who had been stranded for three days trying to get home, backpackers camped out on their rolled-out foam mats by check-in desks. I had my shoes sniffed for explosives, we checked in all our hand luggage and carried passport and boarding pass in a clear plastic bag. No inflight movies, nothing to read, no-one really in a talking mood either, strangely enough. There was an exception to that rule in the shape of a tall, 50-something, extravagantly camp American Airlines steward with a DeVito-esque Noo Yoik accent who wandered down the aisle of the 767 exclaiming, “Would ya like the calzone or the folded pizza?” The children, of course, were seriously considering this non-choice. Every so often an adult with a working knowledge of what a calzone was would make eye contact with him, and he would return their gaze with an imploring look that said “Please don’t ruin this for them, we could all use a laugh this morning.” He was right about that.

As the first flight to O’Hare that day, we managed to get take-off and landing slots. I learned later that the next two were cancelled. I came very close to joining the ranks of the space-blanketed, kipping on a bench and living off fried chicken in Terminal 3 to await a seat.

Border control at O’Hare were jumpy, perhaps understandably, and lone male travellers aren’t exactly their favourite thing anyway, but after a brief, intense set of rapid-fire questions about whether or not I could prove I had a return ticket (difficult without my luggage, but I eventually found a print-out of my Travelocity receipt; what might have happened if I hadn’t bothered putting that in my see-through plastic bag we will never know), I was admitted to the Land of the Free, Home of the Preternaturally Suspicious.

By that afternoon I was, admittedly in a somewhat jetlagged state, looking out over Lake Michigan from a tiny beach by the north shore suburb of Winnetka IL. Lucky doesn’t begin to cover it.

We all remember where we were. I was at school. Rumours flew, a memo went round instructing teachers to turn off televisions, senior management terrified of traumatising kids. By the end of the day, everyone knew something had happened and no-one knew what that thing was. It was a sensation we were unused to; peace had reigned in Northern Ireland for some time, we were a post-Cold War generation with no real idea of what a threat to our way of life would look like. This changed the moment my brother and I walked through the front door to find our father watching BBC News 24.

Television was how most of the world experienced the events of September 11th 2001, and the subsequent events of the decade since that day. I remember watching the live footage of Baghdad the night of “shock and awe”, the fall of the Saddam statue, Col Tim Collins’ speech (both the original and the subsequent dramatisation). I finally saw United 93 this year, which is as shocking because of the chaos and incoherency of the initial response as it is moving because of the bravery of the people on the plane. Both live and after-the-fact with the gloss of Hollywood applied, the pictures were thrust into our living rooms.

And then there were moments when the shockwaves invaded your real life. I watched the 7/7 London bombings unfold on the news, but two weeks later on the 21st was in London, a 17-year-old work experience kid, when a second set of backpack bombs failed to go off but nonetheless brought the city to a standstill. Panicked phone calls, confusion, loved ones not knowing where we were. I had a tiny taste of the chaos wrought on my capital.

There is a scar on the landscape of Manhattan. Your first view of the skyline is a shock, even years later. My joy at crossing the Queensboro Bridge in a yellow cab from Kennedy airport and seeing Manhattan strung out along the night time horizon was tempered by the knowledge that the far southern tip of that string of lights was not how it used to look, how it looked in pictures or on TV. Three days later I made the pilgrimage that every tourist makes now. By this time, October 2009, there was little to see. Construction proceeds apace.

I haven’t really shown these photos to anyone before, simply because they are not of much photographic or artistic merit. Still, they stand as memories, the moment I went and bore witness to the rebuilding.

Ground Zero, 8th October 2009

Ground Zero, 8th October 2009

What people don’t necessarily realise is that other parts of the complex have already been built: below, the new 7 World Trade Center, finished, occupied and overlooking the rest of the construction site.

The new 7 World Trade Center

Like everyone who passes through and falls in love with the place, I feel a strange pull today, a desire to be there, to stand beside New Yorkers and remember. To stand once again on the perimeter of the chasm left in downtown that they called Ground Zero. To stand shoulder to shoulder with the inhabitants of the greatest city on earth and know that it is hurting, to see it bear that hurt and know that it is undiminished, undimmed, that it has risen.

11.9.01
In Memoriam

Lower Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry, 8th October 2009

]]> http://pourdownlikesilver.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/9-11-11/feed/ 2 pourdownlikesilver IMG_1093_edited-1 IMG_1144edit2 http://pourdownlikesilver.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/ryan-adams-ashes-fire-preview/ http://pourdownlikesilver.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/ryan-adams-ashes-fire-preview/#comments Wed, 07 Sep 2011 11:20:21 +0000 pourdownlikesilver http://pourdownlikesilver.wordpress.com/?p=761 ]]>

I subsequently wrote about the album here…

Whilst Ryan Adams has never truly ceased to be prolific, the stream of new material has slowed in recent years, at least compared to the glorious three-albums-in-11-months period that gave us Cold Roses, Jacksonville City Nights and 29. Halcyon days indeed. Oh, it’s not like he’s gone silent: we’ve had III/IV, a double album of Cardinals archive material that served mainly to demonstrate why none of the songs made it on to Easy Tiger, and of course Orion, an album of unlistenable metal about aliens. Yay.

All that, however, seems to have allowed Adams to return to something simpler and more elegant. There’s a delightful sweetness to “Lucky Now”, the advance track. It’s classic Ryan Adams, but less tortured than Heartbreaker or Love is Hell; not unreminiscent of Easy Tiger actually. Could it be that marital bliss suits him? Praise be to Mandy Moore!

There are a few other reasons to be excited about this album. It is produced by the legendary Glyn Johns (Eagles, The Who and, bizarrely enough, Fairport Convention’s Rising for the Moon) which just might make Adams the first artist to work with both Glyn and his son Ethan Johns, who produced Adam’s debut album. It also features among its guests Norah Jones and Benmont Tench (of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), all of which bodes well for an album positioned firmly at the tight, focused, 3-minute-song end of Adam’s artistic spectrum.

Link to the (not available for embedding…grr) video of the title track.

and the aforementioned “Lucky Now”:

Ashes & Fire is released 11th October.

Having duly shot myself in the foot as far as my credibility is concerned, I shall now proceed to tell you that this is a stunning piece of filming, a powerful performance and a restatement of the profound emotional depth of these songs which you should all rush out and buy, immediately.* Don’t believe me? Watch the video.

What we have here is a performance of Counting Crows’ debut August and Everything After. Released in 1993 and an out-of-the-blue success the following year, it went on to sell more than 7 million copies. The original is a fragile, beautiful thing of sparse elegance and staggering, heart-rending power. It frequently crops up in critics’ lists of the best albums of that decade. They never matched it for commercial success or critical acclaim, and to some extent have been living in its shadow ever since. Still, as legacies go, it’s not a bad one to be stuck with.

Gratuitous Bokeh

Only three of this band actually appear on August as members of Counting Crows: Duritz, keyboard player Charlie Gillingham and guitarist Dave Bryson.  David Immergluck has the unusual status of having played on the album as a session player before eventually joining the band full-time in 1999, whilst Dan Vickrey joined the band shortly after they finished August in time for the 16-month tour that accompanied it. Two drummers and one bass player have come and gone since then, but the incumbents are more than worthy. Jim Bogios in particular is a potent addition, matching the drama and dynamic range of the songs with effortless competence.

Given there are three times as many guitars as there were on the record, it is both impressive and near-miraculous that the trio manage to add to the songs without treading on each others’ notes. If you’ll excuse a moment’s wild rock-journalist-hyperbole, I have been known to compare the arrival of Immergluck in Counting Crows to the introduction of Don Felder to the Eagles. Both arrived first on “difficult” third albums and brought a more natural, instinctive rock voice to their respective bands, liberating the other guitarists to do more interesting things in the process. Immergluck also plays mandolin and pedal steel, broadening the palette further. If you’ve pressed play on the video at the bottom already, you are by now experiencing Immy’s pedal steel abuse; I’m fairly sure that doesn’t appear in whatever the pedal steel equivalent of A Tune A Day is. Actually, I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing and that all pedal steel players are mutants from the planet Zog, so little sense does that miraculous instrument make to the rest of us.

Vickrey is a charming country-rock guitarist, but he also has a wonderful, underappreciated voice; he nails the backing vocal on Time and Time Again, a beautiful echo of the lead. (Those of you who’ve seen Crows live know he also sings the good stuff on Goodnight Elisabeth and A Long December, and has a nice line in hats.)

Dave Bryson, holding the whole show together and bearing a startling resemblance to Hugh Lawrie in House while he does it. Miraculously not being upstaged by Immy. Yet.

Headgear notwithstanding, Bryson is without a doubt the coolest. Les Paul Juniors, Gretsch hollowbodies and a distinct lack of histrionics, Dave is just getting on with it. He has so many of the crucial little shapes and figures that make these songs, some of them no doubt dating back to when these songs were nothing more than him and AD at an open mic somewhere.

August opens with Round Here. Less a song than a creed to Crows fans (I have actually seen people, admittedly in the States, entering a state that closely resembles rapture in the middle of performances of Round Here…). It’s such a powerful song, such a sprawling musical object, that the album, and thus the show, runs the risk of struggling to follow it up. In this form, with Raining in Baltimore shoehorned into the middle, it runs to almost 12 minutes. There’s not much I can do to describe what they do to this song live, but seeing as you’ve already gone to the bottom of this post and pressed play on the YouTube video, I don’t need to. Ah, the wonders of modern technology…

The remarkable thing is that playing the album top to bottom does work as a setlist; Omaha’s folksy charms, complete with accordion solo standing on the monitors, are just the thing to bring an audience back from the brink of Round Here-induced nervous breakdown. Mr Jones is, well, Mr Jones. Straight up, no messing around, just a great big radio hit about wanting to be a rock star. Which is just as well really, seeing as you’re about to be hit with the emotional triple whammy of Perfect Blue Buildings (a pretty much about hitting your head repeatedly against a wall because you don’t know what else to do any more), Anna Begins (a song so fucking horrible, so elegantly self-destructive that some people consider it dangerous to drive and listen at the same time), followed by the alternately triumphal and despairing Time and Time Again, you’re about ready to cry. Up swings the emotional rollercoaster once more in the form of Rain King, possibly the only rock song ever named after a Saul Bellow novel (answers on a postcard please).

Cool LED backdrop, complete with Perfect Blue Buildings cityscape

After years of watching them deconstruct these songs, acoustify them, reelectrify them, slow them down and then leave them out all together, it’s a joy to hear them reunited. Of course, they’re bigger, better and matured by 14 years of life on the road, none more so than Sullivan Street, which Immergluck launches into widescreen country-rock glory with an opening slide solo that leaves you grinning like a madman. By the time they’ve stretched the ending out, brought it down and back up again, it’s pushing 10 minutes and the crowd is rapt throughout; when you can see people singing along to an improvised vocal they’ve probably never heard before, you know they’re really paying attention.

By Duritzian standards, the number of other peoples’ lyrics is quite moderate. Sure, we have most of Springsteen’s Thunder Road in the middle of Rain King and a snippet of Prince’s Sometimes It Snows in April in Sullivan Street, but otherwise it’s mostly his own words.

Moving Raining in Baltimore into the middle of Round Here has the effect of turning the end of the set into one long, loud, bluesy jam. Ghost Train was always grungy, but the arrival of Vickrey into the band made its live performances nastier, more grungy than the album version. Injected with a shot of Crazy Horse-esque riffing and shot through with menacing green spotlights, it creeps and crawls its way, sinister and dark, straight into A Murder of One.

Immy!

Out of the darkness comes an organ drone, then Immy, all spiky black hair and devil-horned Gibson SG, smashing the same note again and again. “Step right up!” exhorts Duritz, and the band proceeds to turn it up to 11. Wrung out over 12 minutes, stretched taut and let fly three or four times as it rises and falls, A Murder of One rocks. It’s as great a performance of the song as any I’ve seen or heard; better than the version on Across a Wire, as good as the Paris ’94 version so widely bootlegged before its eventual release on disc 2 of the deluxe edition of August in 2007, or an astonishing, ragged recording from Charlotte, NC that I treasure. It morphs through Sordid Humor’s “Doris Day”, U2′s “Red Hill Mining Town” and back, gloriously, into its conclusion as Vickrey and Immergluck trade wild, untamed solos.

The credits roll and then it’s just a matter of watching the “in-depth interview” with Duritz and Gillingham. If nothing else, it is long, clocking in at nearly 40 minutes. It’s one for the enthusiasts, too, discussing the minutiae of making and touring the album, their rise to fame and how they arrived at the sound of the album. For anyone who’s read interviews over the years, or indeed the sleeve notes of the deluxe edition, there’s not much here you haven’t heard before.

More interesting is the story of how the DVD ended up being a straight-through performance of August; this wasn’t the original plan, it turns out. A sprawling, Last Waltz-esque film featuring guest appearances was apparently planned, but after surprising the rest of the band with this setlist a few weeks before filming, Immergluck and Duritz decided to repeat it with the camera rolling. It is a pleasant side effect of the band’s freedom from Geffen that they are able to do things like this. I can’t imagine a label reacting well to a complete change of plan a matter of weeks before filming (the sleeve notes tell us . The result is beautifully impetuous, improvised, spontaneous; just like all the best bits of their long and storied live career.

*That is assuming you already have August and Everything After, without which very little of what I’m about to say will make much sense. If you don’t already own August, you should. If you are a close personal friend of mine and I haven’t already bought you a copy for Christmas at some point during said friendship (which would be unusual), remind me. Of course, you could always borrow one of mine. At the last count I had 4; the original DGC pressing, the subsequent Geffen pressing, the 2007 two-disc Deluxe Edition and, best of all, the Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs gold disc remaster I found in Bleecker Street Records for $15 (copies routinely go on eBay for more than £100…).