LA Weekly

Various Artists
The Brit Box: UK Indie, Shoegaze and Brit-Pop Gems of the Last Millennium | Rhino

By the 1990s, guitar-based British indie music, established around the Smiths, Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Jesus and Mary Chain, etc., was polarizing roughly into two camps: the shuffling, laddishly psychedelic “Madchester” bands (Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets) and the more introverted and art-schooly, effects-drenched “shoegazers” (Lush, Ride, Chapterhouse). A third strand then evolved: the nation’s hair-aware hipsters united behind the swaggering, ’60s-informed Brit-pop of Blur, Oasis and the Verve. By the end of the decade, this all morphed/diluted into the intelligent pop of Placebo, Ash and Gay Dad (best band name ever?).

The Brit Box, a thoughtfully packaged, more or less chronological (1984–’99) four-disc, 78-band/song collection, revisits all of the above, plus some sonic oddities (Curve, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, the Boo Radleys), next-big-thing-at-the-time obscurities (Thousand Yard Stare, Five Thirty, These Animal Men) and deft style straddlers (Primal Scream, Cornershop). The contributions from the collection’s bigger names, including New Order and Pulp, merit little further discussion here, being often the obvious song choices — JAMC’s “April Skies,” the Bunnymen’s “Lips Like Sugar.” It’s the B-listers, cult acts and musical misfits that make this box worth opening, like Swervedriver’s robustly alienated, almost chewable “Duel” and Curve’s throbbingly sexual “Coast Is Clear.” The twin-bassed Ned’s Atomic Dustbin (worst band name ever?) fare surprisingly well with the restlessly earnest “Grey Cell Green,” as do the perpetually smarty-pants Brit chart fixtures the Wonder Stuff with their Smiths-y “Unbearable.” Primal Scream bottle after-dark excess with “Loaded,” before the Boo Radleys’ dub-dappled “Lazarus” brings the compilation some welcome swing.

It’s listenable, melodic stuff: the glacial offerings from the Primitives (“Crash”), Sundays (“Here’s Where the Story Ends”), the La’s (“There She Goes” — later a U.S. hit for Sixpence None the Richer) and Saint Etienne (“You’re in a Bad Way”) slip down like foofie cocktails. There are surprisingly few forgettables (Moose, Trash Can Sinatras) and only one mesmerizingly appalling inclusion (Spaceman 3’s rehearsal room–ish “Walkin’ With Jesus [Sound of Confusion]”). What’s so heartening about The Brit Box is that, defying the famously make-’em-and-break-’em U.K. music press, the quality acts from the era that this set so thoroughly documents prevail. There’s a reason the Cure and Oasis still fill arenas, while some of their peers probably fill grocery bags: great songs.



Various Artists
People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913–1938 | Tompkins Square

During the Depression years of the late 1920s and ’30s, there was trouble coming every day. Aside from the general miseries involved in just plain being poor, Americans witnessed a litany of disasters — deadly storms, vengeful killings, horrendous train wrecks, the sinking of the Titanic, exploding zeppelins, fires, floods, droughts and disease — all of which seemed to color the times gray and which in retrospect were often chronicled most truthfully in the music of the bards and minstrels of the day.

Their songs are collected in Tompkins Square’s handsomely packaged People Take Warning!, a three-disc set that culls the timelessly truthful work of rough-hewn folk, blues, country and jug band, and other roots-styled artists who spread the news of our common woes in simple melodies built on extant ballad styles, often whipping out an obit, tribute or cautionary tale the day after the catastrophic event itself.

The collection of 70 recordings — taken off scratchy old 78 rpm platters and digitally cleaned up as well as possible — includes 30 tunes never previously issued on CD, and its arcane, distant wisdom is both chilling and magical to hear, offering a peek through a keyhole into our past lives. “Wreck of the Old Southern 97” (1927) by the Skillet Lickers, featuring one Riley Puckett on vocals, comes replete with sound effects to heighten its retelling of “the most famous train wreck in country music.” The sprightly guitar and harmonica of Ernest Stoneman’s “Fate of Talmadge Osborne” (1927) relays the tragic but true tale of a young man getting killed trying to board a moving train, and warns all us young listeners to not ever consider doing something so dang foolish. “Wreck of the Virginian” (1927) by Blind Alfred Reed, with his hauntingly spare, sawing fiddle and unison vocals, details the gruesome facts about two trains colliding in Virginia. The wheezing harmonium and sorrowing cries of cantor Joseph Rosenblatt’s almost surreally atmospheric “El Mole Rachamim (für Titanik)” (1913) were a prayer for the dead that was among several Yiddish songs composed about the Titanic disaster. “Titanic Blues” (1932) by Hi Henry Brown and Charlie Jordan is exemplary among the many ancient blues styles represented on these discs.

It’s a bloody gold mine of arcane gems from our collective past, the heady experience of which is enhanced considerably by the accompanying 48-page booklet of historic images and a very fine introduction written by Tom Waits.



The Cave Singers
“Dancing on Our Graves” video | Matador

Evangelical Christians are the new black. Documentaries like Jesus Camp and bands like Sixteen Horsepower have liberally injected the images and language of American spiritual fanaticism into the pop-culture bloodstream. There’s a reason Borat made a pit stop at an evangelical revival. So on first glimpse of the new Cave Singers video for their recent Invitation Songs track “Dancing on Our Graves” (see below), I was a little wary of yet another addition to this pat churchly paradigm. A couple of things, though, caught my attention: (1) A few moments into the video, when singer Pete Quirk first appears and the preacher character starts lip-synching, I realized it was not composed of archival footage, as I initially believed, but was entirely original live action; and (2) unlike many preceding “exposés” of the God fearing, director Mike Ott surprisingly, amazingly, manages to keep the video from being at all tongue-in-cheek or condescending. There is no sarcasm that I can detect. Even the inclusion of a “freak,” a one-and-a-half-armed man who plays the guitar with his stump, leaves little room for abasement. The video is dreamy — enhanced by Ott’s method of hand-processing and distressing film — and an entertaining, rhythmically engaging accompaniment to the song itself. It is also perfectly cast. I don’t know if Ott found these people through a casting agent or just recruited them from a local Newhall community center, but they don’t seem at all out of place in the world of religious zealots. Sure, some may say that it’s not the place of secular West Coast artists to exploit religious zealotry, regardless of the project’s tone, but those people can go to hell.

The Cave Singers--Dancing On Our Graves