This is the one that started it: Mosaic, recorded in 1961, was the first recording of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers as a quintet, a setting he kept from 1961-1964. The band’s front line was trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, trombonist Curtis Fuller, and tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter; Cedar Walton played piano and Jymie Merritt (a criminally underappreciated talent) was the bassist. Everything on this set was written by the musicians in the band. Walton wrote the burning title track; its blazing tempo and Eastern modes were uncharacteristic of the Jazz Messengers sound, but it swings like mad. Hubbard contributed two pieces to the album, the first of which is the groover “Down Under,” with its blues gospel feel. The bandmembers dig their teeth into this one, carrying the blues theme to the breaking point as Hubbard fills in between. But the horn charts are so sharp, so utterly devoid of excess, that they won’t let the listener go. Shorter’s “Children of the Night” is a fine example of the tunes he would compose for the Miles Davis Quintet a bit later. While it’s a hard bop swinger to be sure, his use of modality and counterpoint between the soloist and the front line is exemplary and his solo bites hard and fast as he tears up and down the registers of the horn. Fuller’s “Arabia” is a basic blues groover, and the playing is inspired throughout. The disc closes with Hubbard’s “Crisis,” which opens with Merritt and Blakey ushering in the rest of the band. Walton first plays a repetitive minor-key riff. When the horns enter, Walton keeps the theme, Merritt moves over a bit to dig in between the lines, and Blakey keeps it all anchored because in this tune rhythm is everything. Hubbard was in many ways a soul-jazz composer before there was such a thing, and the motifs in this tune prove it — as does his beautiful blowing in his solo. This is a fine recording and should be owned by any Blakey fan. The Rudy Van Gelder reissue came out in 2006 and, amazingly, features no bonus material. Recorded in one day in October of 1960, the band recorded nothing extra — and there were no alternate takes! The sound, as on all the Van Gelder reissues, is painstakingly wonderful.
One of the most ambitious debuts in rock history, Freak Out! was a seminal concept album that somehow foreshadowed both art rock and punk at the same time. Its four LP sides deconstruct rock conventions right and left, eventually pushing into territory inspired by avant-garde classical composers. Yet the album is sequenced in an accessibly logical progression; the first half is dedicated to catchy, satirical pop/rock songs that question assumptions about pop music, setting the tone for the radical new directions of the second half. Opening with the nonconformist call to arms “Hungry Freaks, Daddy,” Freak Out! quickly posits the Mothers of Invention as the antithesis of teen-idol bands, often with sneering mockeries of the teen-romance songs that had long been rock’s commercial stock-in-trade. Despite his genuine emotional alienation and dissatisfaction with pop conventions, though, Frank Zappa was actually a skilled pop composer; even with the raw performances and his stinging guitar work, there’s a subtle sophistication apparent in his unorthodox arrangements and tight, unpredictable melodicism. After returning to social criticism on the first song of the second half, the perceptive Watts riot protest “Trouble Every Day,” Zappa exchanges pop song structure for experiments with musique concrète, amelodic dissonance, shifting time signatures, and studio effects. It’s the first salvo in his career-long project of synthesizing popular and art music, high and low culture; while these pieces can meander, they virtually explode the limits of what can appear on a rock album, and effectively illustrate Freak Out!’s underlying principles: acceptance of differences and free individual expression. Zappa would spend much of his career developing and exploring ideas — both musical and conceptual — first put forth here; while his myriad directions often produced more sophisticated work, Freak Out! contains at least the rudiments of almost everything that followed, and few of Zappa’s records can match its excitement over its own sense of possibility.
Lifetime’s third and final full-length LP is a triumphant burst of upbeat punk rock that makes it clear the band called it quits while they were still at the top of their game. Slightly poppier than previous efforts, Jersey’s Best Dancers still finds the quintet rocking hard, and with songs like “Theme for a New Brunswick Basement Show” and “Turnpike Gates,” it also sees them sticking to the hometown topics that they’ve always treasured. Don’t go expecting widespread universal theories from this band, but if personal observations like, “And I’m so/And you’re so/We’re all so/All f*cked up” are the kind of self-affirmations that make sense, then this record will go straight to your heart. It’s fun, it’s fast, and it’s the sound of suburban youth who needed guitars to help soothe their souls. For those who were a part of the scene when Lifetime still existed, this is a nice bit of nostalgia, and for those curious about what the kids see in punk rock that helps change their lives, this makes it all a little more clear. Lifetime was never the biggest name in any genre, but they were still a commanding presence with their live shows and recorded material. They left a legacy whose final recorded moments, represented on this record, are as stunning as anything else the band created in the seven short years they existed.
It’s hard to get the full effect of Lewis Black’s gloriously bitter comedy if you’re only listening to him — watching the man work himself up into a lather with jowls shaking, beads of spittle flying from his lips, and his eyes bulging from his sockets as if his head is about to burst open from sheer pent-up rage adds immeasurably to the effect of his barbed, pungent wit. But at the same time, the intelligence and reason behind his wrath often projects better through repeated listening on CD than it does by watching the man threatening to erupt on-stage, and 2003’s Rules of Enragement captures Black at the height of his powers both as a high-pressured comic and as a incisive political satirist. While Black’s rants about winter in Minnesota, the evils of soymilk, and how the Irish brought alcohol and Catholicism together are reasonably standard stuff, they’re also smart and exceptionally funny, and Black’s unceasing barrage of bad karma gives even his most mainstream material a fierce edge. It’s when he moves on to deeper matters — America’s failure to keep its water supply clean (“We buy bottles of water from Pepsi and Coke, because if ANYBODY knows water, it’s Pepsi and Coke!”), political and corporate corruption (“If big oil gave anybody in this room 31 million bucks, you’d be THRILLED to be big oil’s bitch”), and various varieties of post-September 11 malaise (“How do we bring democracy to Iraq? What do we do, give ‘em our civics books? ‘Read this, it’s crackerjack material!’”) — that Black proves he can be every bit as funny while dipping his toes into provocative material that sadly few contemporary comics would have the courage to touch. While not the full-on flamethrower of David Cross‘ epochal Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!, Rules of Enragement is a similarly powerful bit of no-holds-barred standup comedy that proves the furious provocation of Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and Richard Pryor is thankfully still alive in American humor. Or at least it’s still alive until Black gives himself a stroke.
Coming off their work on Dntel’s beautiful This Is the Dream of Evan and Chan, Jimmy Tamborello and Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard team up again for their full-length debut as Postal Service, Give Up. Instead of covering that EP’s territory again, with this album the duo crafts a poppier, new wave-inflected sound that recalls Tamborello’s work with Figurine more than Dntel’s lovely subtlety. However, Ben Gibbard’s famously bittersweet vocals and sharp, sensitive lyrics imbue Give Up with more emotional heft than you might expect from a synth pop album, especially one by a side project from musicians as busy as Tamborello and Gibbard are. The album exploits the contrast between the cool, clean synths and Gibbard’s all-too-human voice to poignant and playful effect, particularly on Give Up’s first two tracks. “The District Sleeps Alone” bears Gibbard’s trademark songwriting, augmented by glitchy electronics and sliced-and-diced strings, while “Such Great Heights”‘ pretty pop could easily appear on a Death Cab for Cutie album, minus a synth or two. Despite some nods to more contemporary electronic pop, Give Up’s sound is based in classic new wave and synth pop, at times resembling an indie version of New Order or the Pet Shop Boys. Songs like “Nothing Better,” a duet that plays like an update on Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?,” and the video-game brightness of “Brand New Colony” sound overtly like the ’80s brought into the present, but the tinny, preset synth and drum sounds on the entire album recall that decade. Sometimes, as on “Recycled Air” and “We Will Become Silhouettes,” the retro sounds become distracting, but for the most part they add to the album’s playful charm. The spooky ballad “This Place Is a Prison” is perhaps the most modern-sounding track and the closest in sound and spirit to Gibbard and Tamborello’s Dntel work. The crunchy, distorted beats and sparkling synths recall both This Is the Dream of Evan and Chan and Björk’s recent work; indeed, this song, along with the “All Is Full of Love” cover Death Cab included on their Stability EP, could be seen as an ongoing tribute to her. Overall, Give Up is a fun diversion for Tamborello, Gibbard, and their fans. It doesn’t scale the heights of either of their main projects, but it’s far more consistent and enjoyable than might be expected.
Daft Punk’s full-length debut is a funk-house hailstorm, giving real form to a style of straight-ahead dance music not attempted since the early fusion days of on-the-one funk and dance-party disco. Thick, rumbling bass, vocoders, choppy breaks and beats, and a certain brash naiveté permeate the record from start to finish, giving it the edge of an almost certain classic. While a few fall flat, the best tracks make this one essential.
Steel Pulse’s debut album set the band decisively apart from its British colleagues. This was not, by any stretch of the imagination, either pop-reggae or lovers rock. Nor was it the kind of dreamy Rasta reggae or art-for-art’s sake dub that was popular at the time. Though the subtly jazzy swing that would later become explicit was already informing Steel Pulse’s groove, the band’s first album seemed not at all interested in generating anything like a party atmosphere. Handsworth Revolution is about politics first and religion second, with a quick nod to the dance (“Sound System”) and another to the herb (“Macka Splaff”) and not a single love lyric to be found anywhere. This gives the music a certain intellectual urgency, and the band’s instrumental virtuosity is impressive given its youth and relatively inexperience. But it also makes for a rather dry listening experience; other than “Ku Klux Klan” and the gorgeous “Prodigal Son,” there’s not much to hold onto here, melodically speaking — and even those two songs sound dry in comparison to the band’s subsequent work. Still, there’s a solidity to these tunes, a sheer tensile strength, that makes them compelling in their own Spartan way.
