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- The Retrographer, Issue 25 (January, 2 0 1 7)
The Retrographer, Issue 25 (January, 2 0 1 7)
Elvis Costello, Mac Demarco, Arcade Fire, Jamiroquai, Syd, Thundercat, Natalie Hemby, Father John Misty, Real Estate, Flo Morrissey and Matthew E White, Sampha, Father John Misty.
The Retrographer, Issue 25 (January, 2 0 1 7)Bulletins
If you missed my Best of 2016 issue, check that out here! If you just want the top 100 songs list, listen to that on Spotify or YouTube.
One of the reasons I make these yearly playlists is to mark the music I loved in the moment. The door closes on the year and so do my picks. As much as I gain in the authenticity of the moment, I inevitably have regret when I find great music after the fact. In 2012, it was Danny Brown’s “Blueberry”; This year, it’s the following albums:
“Honor Killed the Samurai”, Ka (Spotify / YouTube)
If Wu Tang did opiates instead of dust
“Its Immaterial”, Black Marble (Spotify / YouTube)
If you like New Order...
“Turns”, Barker & Baumecker (Spotify / YouTube)
Listen to “Statik”
“Emily’s D+Evolution”, Esperanza Spalding (Spotify / YouTube)
Abrasive acid soul
“Premium”, Sam Evian (Spotify / YouTube)
Sweet-voiced Kurt Vile soft rocker
Ten Songs for January, 2 0 1 7
“Show You The Way”, Thundercat, Kenny Loggins, and Michael McDonald (Spotify / YouTube) – A beautiful song with a beautiful sense of humor about itself. Yes, sentiments like “On the edge of dark there's the brightest light” are knowingly corny, and blue-eyed soul icons Loggins and McDonald come in like paid impressionists, but does that make the message any less true? Like Thundercat sings, “just take the ride”.
“Automaton”, Jamiroquai (Spotify / YouTube) – The first video I fell in love with (you can guess) was “Virtual Insanity”. How quaint to think of what insanities technology offered in 1996, back when the Internet Cafe was still novel. 20 years later, Jay Kay gives the idea a full update. Naturally, his haberdashery got an update in the video, too.
“Body”, SYD (Spotify / YouTube) – After years of preferring Odd Future songs that featured Syd, I finally got into her group The Internet last month. Her first single as a solo artist is sexier and dirtier than anything she’s done prior, singing of crazy sex with utter calm and composure.
“I Give You Power”, Arcade Fire and Mavis Staples (Spotify / YouTube) – Protesting, calling your representatives, striking, signing petitions, attending town halls, supporting campaigns, canvassing at elections, giving monthly donations to nonprofits, never normalizing ever.
“Pure Comedy”, Father John Misty (Spotify / YouTube) – There’s no reason to lose faith in the human race yet, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t laugh at our own foibles. Josh Tillman details original sin as our simple condition of being, which makes him more alike this song’s subject than he lets on.
“My Old Man”, Mac DeMarco (Spotify / YouTube) – Behind that gap-toothed smile Mac makes testimonies to loneliness and the weight of being indie rock’s face of youthful indiscretion. Here, he sings how his fear of letting loved ones down reminds him of his dad, who abandoned him when he was a kid, only to return once he found success.
“Look At What the Light Did Now”, Flo Morrissey and Matthew E. White (Spotify / YouTube) – A Feist and Little Wings cover, little known beyond this light and beautiful video. Morrissey and White give this sweet, lighthearted paean to nature a Stax-style soulification. Wonderful guitar riffing here, too.
“Darling”, Real Estate (Spotify / YouTube) – Real Estate returns for the first time without Matthew Mondanile, who left to focus on Ducktails full time. His departure doesn’t seem to have put a dent in the band’s worship of very clean lead guitar lines, or visions of bucolic Jersey.
“Cairo, Illinois”, Natalie Hemby (Spotify / YouTube) – Hemby has spent her career writing hits for mainstream country acts. Now, at 37, she steps out for the first time with an album of her own. It may be traditionalist, but this whole album of country Americana feels fresh and full.
“(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano”, Sampha (Spotify / YouTube) – Sampha deals in melancholy, but he’s not easy to pigeonhole. And even if he were, would this gorgeous piano line be any less affecting? Would the intimate relationship between artist and instrument be any less holy?
One Album for January, 2 0 1 7
Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Live at the El Mocambo” (Demon Records, 1978 / 1993) (Spotify / YouTube)
The El Mocambo is famous for live music. In 1977 the Rolling Stones played a surprise show at the venue, which has a two-story neon palm tree sign outside, to a room of Torontonians as stunned as they were thrilled. The crowd included Margaret Trudeau, wife of then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s and mother of the country’s current PM, Justin. It’s where Canadians caught some of their earliest listens of Tom Waits, Muddy Waters, U2, Stevie Ray Vaughn...
And then, in 2014, it closed. Or, almost. It hovered on the edge of disappearance before being saved by Michael Wekerle, a judge on Canada’s equivalent of Shark Tank, who’s describes himself on his own site as “Mick Jagger meets Warren Buffett”. Whatever you think it says about rock that a venue built by the Rolling Stones had to be saved by a banker aping the Stones 40 years later, the El Mocambo will live to host another show.
It’s hard to imagine it’d host one like the Stones staged in 1977 until you hear the performance Elvis Costello and the Attractions gave the next year. It’s enough to make you think magical things will happen under that neon palm tree, no matter who owns it.
Elvis Costello is famous, like Wire or Prince, for opening his career with a breakneck salvo of brilliant recordings. Once a year, every year, from 1977 to 1984, Costello put out an album of cutting songs, all sexual frustration and romance, made in the shape of rock’s first wave, but performed intensity and velocity that more often had it categorized with the moment’s ascendant punk movement. In truth, Costello’s music is difficult to place, even as it carries with it the markers of so much other postwar western popular music.
Costello's backing band, the Attractions, made their debut as a complete outfit on his second album This Year’s Model in 1978, after months of recording and touring. Just over a week before this record came out, on March 6th, the group played Toronto. Costello was 23 and had only landed the first punch of what would be decades of work.
In his Buddy Holly dress and (then) unhip Jazzmaster, Costello donned a pre-60s frock of sexual and social repression that framed the torrent of bile and lust in his lyrics. But it wasn’t until he employed keyboardist Steve Nieve, bassist Bruce Thomas, and drummer Pete Thomas that his band matched him, too.
Live at the El Mocambo is the rare live release from Costello, which is baffling given the absurd virtuosity of both the songwriting and performance. Costello, who is unfailingly entertaining in his storytelling, is encircled by a band that motivates with all the urgency of a couple who have 15 minutes to go at it before the parents come home. Take “The Beat”, which stays leaning forward without ever speeding up, races through Elvis’ rushed invitations to fuck. Or “Less Than Zero”, featuring dirty alternate lyrics about an affair during the Kennedy assassination. Thomas’ bass, in particular, flies wildly about the track, always landing in the right place. Nieve’s fleet-footed piano stabs on “Radio Radio” hang on in the fury of Costello’s anti-payola screed, but never gets misbuttoned.
This is part of the anomaly of Elvis Costello: The desperation of his playing and desire would suggest his punk would betray his precision as a live artist, and the practiced cheekiness of his performance (like his sarcastic fake ending on “Little Triggers”) might belie his punk bonafides. But he sits somewhere in the middle and apart, and always in full sprint.
The El Mocambo helps. The crowd is raucous and engaged: Beginning his encore, Costello announces: “When we played in America, on the east coast, it was all students sitting down and being very… uh. It’s good to be playing a club!” But not every club is like this club. The band elevates to a noisy nirvana halfway through “Lipstick Vogue”, and the crowd screams their way up like a ski lift. You can hear them shouting in the rocksteady synapses of “Watching the Detectives” and the opening shots of “Miracle Man”, which in this sizzling context sounds more like the launch of a BTO song than anything from a celebrated, throbbing anomaly of punk’s British invasion. It’s as much a sign of his singularity as the leveling power of great live performance.
It’s unclear what bearing the sparing of the El Mocambo will have on live music going forward; Likely little. But this may be the defining document of the kind of crazy shit that could happen there. What would it take to get the wife of the Prime Minister to cool in the shade of a neon palm tree, while spilling a cocktail from the balcony down to an audience who can’t tell it from their sweat? That’s why Live at the El Mocambo exists: The last two minutes of this album are just the sound of an empty stage and a crowd demanding more.
Best-Of Playlists
Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream.
To see what tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."