Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
6) Ramsay Midwood, "Shoot Out at the OK Chinese Restaurant" (Vanguard)
Whether Midwood has a degree in creative writing from Harvard or was born in a graveyard in Alabama, he's selling weirdo country shtick. But he's also got Skip Edwards playing organ. "Monster Truck" is going nowhere until a descending wash of sound takes you out of the performance, and suddenly you're floating down a river on a raft; nothing is happening in "Fisherman's Friend" until there's this odd little squeak, and then a new, wordless voice is singing the song, with humor and depth, and a momentum that seems to have come out of a need or a desire nothing in the music has even hinted at is burning off the pose. Strange.
7) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Irving Plaza, New York (Oct. 15)
On their 2001 EP this New York trio was rough, sardonic, pulling an anthem, "Our Time," out of the ground: "Our time/ To be hated!" singer Karen O chanted. This night, opening for Sleater-Kinney, all they had were gestures, and by the time they got to "Our Time," the last song, it felt like not even the band believed a word it said.
8) "Ferus," at Gagosian Gallery, New York (Sept. 12-Oct. 19)
In a celebration of the revolutionary Los Angeles Ferus Gallery, which from 1957 to 1967 showed many of the most surprising works by Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn and Ed Keinholz, the most powerful piece was an unusual Andy Warhol "Triple Elvis" from 1963. Back then, Ferus mounted a whole show of Warhol Elvises, using the giant panels to make a labyrinth the visitor had to find a way through. Unlike most "Triple Elvis" works, the one in the Gagosian showed not three separate versions of Elvis from the movie "Flaming Star" -- Elvis in cowboy gear, pointing a gun out at the world, his body hunched, his black-rimmed eyes falling into his face -- but only two. On the right side of the piece there was a single, stable image. On the left there was a single image with a shadow breaking out of it, as if the Elvises were shaking, about to come apart. As Elvis' body separated from itself, the terrified blankness in his eyes was more alive than ever.
9) Chieftains, "Down the Old Plank Road: The Nashville Sessions" (RCA)
Backing such outsider-country names as Alison Krauss, Lyle Lovett, Martina McBride, Vince Gill, Buddy and Julie Miller, Gillian Welch and Patty Griffin, plus Earl Scruggs, Bela Fleck and John Hiatt, the hallowed Irish quintet leads them through the thickets of such great numbers as Dock Boggs' "Country Blues" and Uncle Dave Macon's "Way Down the Old Plank Road," into a land of such blandness you can barely tell you're listening, let alone to who or what. It's an acting out of America as, "Well, whether or not there's always something better over the next hill, you're probably better off not knowing." I blame the Chieftains; no one else here has ever been so dull.
10) Bob Dylan, "Train of Love," from "Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Songs of Johnny Cash" (Lucky Dog)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? Dylan almost never does good work on them, but here, surrounded by Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earle (it's against the law to make a tribute album without him), Travis Tritt, Keb' Mo', the unspeakable Hank Williams Jr., Bruce Springsteen, Mary Chapin Carptenter, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris and Rosanne Cash, he gets real, real gone, though not before pausing to wave goodbye: "I used to sing this song before I ever wrote a song," Dylan says before "Train of Love." "I also want to thank you for standing up for me, way back when." Way back in 1965, onstage at the Newport Folk Festival, where, as the current revisionist line has it, nothing actually happened.
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