scene&heard

The former lead singer for the 90’s band Semisonic just released his first solo album. Not impressed? You should be. Dan Wilson’s reemergence is brought to you by music executive/super producer Rick Rubin, who was named president of Columbia Records earlier this year.
Not coincidentally, while Rubin was picking up his Grammy award for best producer at the 2007 ceremonies, Dan Wilson was picking up his award for song of the year. Both had collaborated with the Dixie Chicks on their Grammy-sweeping album “Taking the Long Way Around.” Wilson included one song he co-wrote with the Chicks on his own album.
“Free Life,” comes at a perfect time of year, as summer gives way to a gloomy autumn. Wilson’s music can turn a melancholy mood into something a bit more hopeful. It’s perfect for a rainy afternoon.
The thing that gets you is THAT VOICE. Wilson’s calm, unaffected vocals convey a kind of well-worn humility that is both peaceful and profound. There is no straining or striving. Listening to him sing is like meeting someone who makes everyone in the room feel at ease. The intimate quality of his voice allows him to comfortably convey vulnerable sentiments without sounding sappy.
Wilson’s lyrics have a conversational quality, which makes one want to listen closely. The title track is typical of the album in its folkish existential pondering. The songs are concerned with how one should appreciate life and how love can add meaning to it.
Wilson plays many of the instruments himself. The instrumentation has a homemade quality, which matches his casual vocal style. Overall, the music could be tighter in some spots.
The album takes a delightful turn near the end, introducing some pop-inflected tunes. “She Can’t Help Me Now” is a standout. It sounds a bit like what George Harrison might be doing today had he been a better singer, and had his “free life” lasted a bit longer.

Four Stars

The Go! Team’s new release, “Proof of Youth,” is not an album, but a series of sounds that try to become an album, and fail (gloriously). Listening to “Proof of Youth” you are not lifted from your mundane world and given fleeting insight into a universe of beauty. Instead, you witness a band trying to make Music, and failing. The failure is what makes The Go! Team’s music so fun, so honest, and so worth coming back to for this second release.

To understand The Go! Team’s music, you have to first understand its drumming. It is clumsy, loose, and awkward drumming. The drums are too loud and too heavy, and because of this they force themselves to the front of each song, and once there become lost and confused. They try earnestly to keep up with the sounds that swirl around them, to provide a rhythmical anchor for the group despite their own lack of rhythm, but they fail, coming off as sloppy and amateur. In short, they are pathetic imitations of Drums, incompetent, burdened by a human inadequacy that extends beyond the percussion and into the entire album.

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I saw Ani DiFranco in concert once. I was a little girl, and my mother had taken me to a folk festival in upstate New York. All the ex-hippie parents were cheering wildly for Ani as their face-painted kids scampered happily in the grass. DiFranco ascended to the stage, grabbed the mic, and bellowed, “FUCK!”

For eighteen years, Ani DiFranco has channeled this unapologetic fierceness into folk songs wearing punk clothing, ardently championing her liberal, feminist ideology. “Canon,” a career retrospectivce, does a praiseworthy job of selecting songs from DiFranco’s substantial repertoire. The two-CD best-of divides her music into two vague categories. The first CD nicely sums up her earlier, more conventionally folk-y period, starting with the song “Fire Door” off her first CD and venturing into more exploratory territory towards the end with the spoken word track “Fuel.” The second CD continues to chart her experimentalism, from increasingly politically charged lyrics to instrumentation with drums, horns and unconventional harmonies.

“Canon” also contains its fair share of live recordings, including some tracks from her live CD “Living in Clip,” which are vibrant and full of energy. In the songs “Gravel” and “Untouchable Face” we can hear DiFranco playing to her adoring crowd, laughing, sighing and practically spitting her words out. The sounds of the audience’s adulation are also a nod to DiFranco’s extraordinarily devoted fan base and her status as something of a cult figure.

Unfortunately and inexplicably, “Canon” also includes a track called “Distracted,” a recording of some of DiFranco’s stage banter, including the following phrase: “And so now, like, now it’s so funny, like, all the, you know…”

Despite this single unpleasant detour from DiFranco’s otherwise sharp and thoughtful songwriting, both CDs are strong throughout, and perhaps even sufficiently varied to keep the listener engaged for the two-plus hours needed to listen to the whole thing. For devoted fans or those just discovering her, “Canon” is a commendable compilation of some of DiFranco’s best work.

In Johnathan Rice’s newest album “Further North,” the 24-year-old singer/songwriter successfully combines granola folk music with a head-bopping rhythm that is easy to groove to.

He continues the use of avant-garde sound effects begun in his previous album “Trouble is Real,” utilizing the sound of a camera winding to set a beat in the first single of the album, entitled “Stay at Home.” In the beginning tracks, Rice successfully draws the listener into his groove with lyrics such as “I took a camera on vacation to put Miami in a frame.” His words are not lost among the instrumentals, which are soft enough to underscore his vocals and complement Rice’s raspy voice — which recalls both the softness of John Mayer and drawling, elongated style of Dave Matthews Band — complements his folksy lyrics and soft rock appeal. The single “We’re All Stuck Out in The Desert,” while suffering slightly from the monotonous repetition of the title line, perfectly exudes Rice’s left-of-center viewpoint, with lyrics such as “an investment banker started something so I broke his neck.”

The lyrics and beat of most of the tracks are intriguing enough to arouse the curiosity of most soft rock aficionados, while accessible enough to appeal to many mainstream music listeners. The final half of the tracks on the album tend more towards the rock end of the musical spectrum, as Rice’s voice hardens and evolves with the tracks to a completely surprising end with the tracks “Hard to Believe” and “It is Best to Keep it All Inside,” depressing and cynically self-pitying creations which seem unbelievably anti-Rice. An evolutionary album for the artist, Johnathan Rice’s “Further North” is certainly worth a few listens.

Listen to Johnathan Rice at www.myspace.com/johnathanrice

Simian Mobile Disco is all about the synthesizer, to the point of naming their debut album after one of its parts, the ASDR envelope. The tracks on “Attack Sustain Decay Release” are electronic to the point of occasionally sounding like four-minute monologues by R2-D2. Condensing Simian Mobile Disco’s repertoire from hundreds of songs and mixes into forty minutes simultaneously highlights flaws in the duo’s music and leaves the listener feeling cheated.
Simian Mobile Disco, composed of James Ford and Anthony Shaw, is a production and remix team who broke from the “electronically enhanced psychedelic folk band” Simian on a US summer tour in 2005. Leaving behind the rock elements of Simian, Simian Mobile Disco is more pop and dance-oriented, and do DJ sets with other groups like Justice. Shaw and Ford dropped a number of singles and did notable remixes of bands like Air, Muse, and The Go! Team before the release of “Attack Sustain Decay Release.”

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