Anti- Records

Middle Cyclone

admin — Sat, 02 May 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Music reviews are supposed to be about critical analysis, not deferential boot-licking. But Heaven help me, I cannot help it this time. I love Neko Case. Did you hear me? LOVE. L-O-V-E. When a live stream of Middle Cyclone was made available through NPR before the album went on sale (it's since been taken down), I listened to it a dozen times in a row—in one day.

Released almost three years exactly to the date as her 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, the first copy that I’d purchased of Middle Cyclone came with a deep permanent scratch, causing it to skip a third of the way in; three separate re-surfacing attempts did nothing. Rather than go through the rigmarole of an online order return, I just popped in to my favorite indie record store and bought another copy. At the time, it left me with less than $10 in my bank account, but it was a sacrifice I was all too happy to make.

Neko Case is possessed of a pure primal voice, one that she uses to give voice to the natural world and its inhabitants. Case reminds listeners of the folly of forgetting an animal's instincts, to great comic effect, with “People Gotta Lot of Nerve”:

I'm a man man man man man man man eater
But still you're surprised prised prised when I eat ya

You know they call them killer whales
But you seem surprised
When it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank
Where you can't turn around

You can hear an ironic dismay in her voice when she repeats those words in the chorus, almost as though some massive creature is singing through her and shaking its head. Her lilting sarcastic emphasis on the word “killer” is full of dark humor. With its repentant tone and a large chorus repeating its title, Case's cover of “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth,” originally written by Ron Mael (also known as one half of the pop-brother duo Sparks), is less satire and more reverie. She later goes a step further, reminding us all to also remember our own nature with the appropriately titled song “I'm An Animal.”

The microcosm of “Middle Cyclone” is all in spin. Take “This Tornado Loves You,” a song about a tornado in love with a human being. Its love is grandiose, even sociopathic: “Carved your name across three counties/Ground it in with bloody hides/Their broken necks will line the ditch/'Til you stop it, stop it/Stop this madness/I want you.”

While the album title reiterates this tempestuous tone, the title song is more like the eye of a storm—eerily calm, swelling at every turn with poignancy and regret, and leaving the listener to wonder what lay in its wake. It is an absolutely heartbreaking description of how hard it can be to drop a facade and let someone in to that “middle cyclone,” that closely guarded vulnerability: “Can't give up actin' tough/It's all that I'm made of/Can't scrape together quite enough/to ride the bus to the outskirts/Of the fact that I need love.”

Yet even at my most devout, I cannot overlook missteps—and at over thirty-five minutes, it's virtually impossible to overlook a misstep as large as “Marais la nuit” (“Night Swamp”). It's a loop of chirps, tweets, croaks, and other sounds originally recorded at a pond on the land Neko Case recently bought in Vermont. While my inner completist dutifully listened to all of it when I first heard the whole album, and my apologist tries to keep in mind that this is yet another example of Case's affinity for nature, my inner skeptic thinks it sounds like a Nature Sounds CD unnecessarily tacked on to the end of an otherwise complete record.

Written by: M. Brianna Stallings, May 2nd 2009

Shades of Dorian Gray

admin — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:15:00 +0000

By Danny Cohen

Anti- Records

Danny Cohen’s third record for the label ANTI demonstrates his uniqueness as an artist, as did 2005’s We’re All Gunna Die. The 16-track CD takes one on a musical journey of mystical, gothic proportions.

Often compared to Tom Waits, Vic Chestnut, Jad Fair, and Daniel Johnston, Cohen has crafted an offbeat musical career spanning some five decades. The album was partly recorded on a half-inch Ampex tape machine, as well as, interestingly, in a “mobile garage studio.”

This slow, dark record delves into subject matters such as witches’ fables, original sin, visits to Hell and various other ghosts and “morbid fascinations” of Cohen’s. It is the kind of record one imagines listening to in the dark, lying on silk cushions, while on some kind of opiate. The women Cohen portrays in this collection almost never are fully human, another version of that tired old male cliché that allows poor treatment and misunderstanding of women because they aren't true humans, but rather sub-humans, witches or sex objects.

The song “Beneath the Shroud” demonstrates this point, for it describes a visit to Hell after “the subject loses his virginity to a gorgeous Laurel Canyon witch.” Although it is doubtful that Cohen only views women as witches or other mythical beings, rather, his unusual lyrics are simply meant to shock and intrigue the listener. Cohen’s deep, almost creepy voice makes for an excellent companion to his dark lyrics and simmering organ playing.

Written by: Kent Page McGroarty, April 5th 2007

Traineater

admin — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 20:17:00 +0000

By The Book of Knots

Anti- Records

The second project of New York collective The Book of Knots, Traineater is the melancholy tale of the fall of the great steel and mining towns in the American Midwest. It’s like the soundtrack for an apocalyptic Greyhound bus ride I once took - under the abandoned and boarded up brick buildings of Detroit, past the old Buick plant in Flint where my Dad used to work, the windows busted where kids with no future job prospects stayed out late to throw rocks. In my mind, the music from Traineater blends into the slow rolling of the wheels of the bus, the many guest vocalists fading in and out like the people on the bus telling stories of bad luck, betrayal and hope.

The haunting voice of Carla Kihlestedt on songs like “Traineater,” “Salina” and the spoken word piece “Hewitt-Smithson” were highlights of the album for me. Fans of noisy, discordant rock won’t skip over the Carla Bozulich’s introduction track or “The Ballad of John Henry” as much as I did; these loud pieces are more reminiscent of how the Rust Belt cities used to be before all the factories moved overseas. The other tracks are a comforting reflection of the quiet desperation that characterizes these cities now. Post-globalization, entrenched in the war, prison and detention economy – thanks to The Book of Knots for chronicling the promises made and broken.

Written by: Jessica Whatcott, February 24th 2007