This Week: Eitzel's rerecordings, an Essential compilation, and Whiskeytown's fiddler
Mark Eitzel
The Ugly American (Thirsty Ear)
This is the kind of Best Of collection that Mark Eitzel would make for himself: beautiful and weird. The Ugly American is not your typical revisiting of an artist's best songs, these collected from his 12 years with American Music Club and his six solo albums since. In November 2001, Eitzel was invited to visit Greece and record with some of the country's best musicians and their indigenous instruments. Instead of writing new material for the experiment, Eitzel chose to record eight older songs and two new pieces.
Eitzel's voice sounds as good as it ever has: warm and raspy, cracking at the best moments. He's picked some great tracks to record: "Will You Find Me" from Mercury and "Jenny" from California get a lush treatment with strings, mandolin and a soft, jazzy drum section. Producer and composer Manolis Famellos works instruments and backing vocals around the simple core of the songs, highlighting instead of burying them.
Four songs on Ugly American were recorded on 1991's Songs of Love: Live at the Borderline. Standing solo in front of an adoring English crowd, Eitzel pushes his volatile emotions to the brink. Where The Ugly American shows Eitzel at his most tender, Songs of Love show him as a man in immediate contact with his work, his heart and guts on the floor. As Eitzel revisits some of his best songs, he's detached himself from those intense emotions. But to get a sense of this artist's best work, you want to hear him wrestle with the devils of drink and depression. Maybe Eitzel doesn't want to go back to those days, but it makes for good art.
—Paige M. Travis
Essential Logic
Fanfare in the Garden: An Essential Logic Collection (Kill Rock Stars)
Indie label Kill Rock Stars rescues yet another art-punk legend from obscurity. Lora Logic, the singer, saxophone player and raison d'etre of Essential Logic, has long been one of the more intriguing footnotes of '70s British punk and postpunk. Now you can hear why.
Logic, whose parents knew her as Susan Whitby, was 16 when she answered a newspaper ad seeking musicians for a punk band. The band turned out to be X-Ray Spex, led by day-glo banshee Poly Styrene. After contributing fiercely unstudied sax parts to several X-Ray Spex classics ("Oh Bondage Up Yours!," "I Am a Cliché," etc.), Logic took off on her own. This two-CD, 35-track compilation gathers most of what followed.
It leads off with the first Essential Logic single, "Aerosol Burns," a blast of juddery saxophone, jittery guitar and air-raid-siren vocals that the rest of the anthology is hard put to match. (It's the greatest punk song ever written about housecleaning.) But there's plenty to admire here, and a fair amount to love. Never anyone's idea of a purist, Logic and her revolving cast of bandmates branched out into ska, dub, disco and even some things that could unpretentiously be called jazz, albeit always with one foot in the gutter. Logic's singing, which modulates between Kate Bush whoops and Patti Smith growls, keeps the songs reliably off-kilter.
The collection, with recordings spanning 1978-98, demands some exploration and patience, but it yields treasures. Sometimes frenzied, sometimes lovely, often just pleasantly weird, it's neither essential nor logical—merely marvelous.
—Jesse Fox Mayshark
Caitlin Cary
I'm Staying Out (Yep Roc Records)
When Caitlin Cary opened up for Chuck Prophet at Blue Cats last fall, the most impressive thing about the performance was her stage presence. She conveyed self-assurance and utter joy by the way she sang and the way she moved around the stage. Her sophomore effort, I'm Staying Out, confirms this effortlessness.
Cary's rich alto convincingly expresses a range of wisdom, wistfulness, and vulnerability as she chronicles love lost and found.
This daydream of an album is filled with intriguing characters in romantic predicaments to which everyone can relate. There's the devastated woman left behind in the haunting opener, "Empty Rooms." Numb from the breakup of a relationship, she desperately wants to feel something, anything, again. "Her heart won't break/ she wishes it would/ she'd float away in the flood." Cary's voice is exposed and moving on "The Next One," a song about a woman working her way through bed after bed in search of real love. "Maybe the next one/ will be the best one," she sings, but she doesn't seem to really believe it herself. What is believable is the resignation and weariness in Cary's voice, making this one of the most memorable songs of the album.
Known by alt-country fans as the fiddler and harmony singer from Whiskeytown, Cary should move further away from Ryan Adams' shadow with I'm Staying Out. With talk of an upcoming Whiskeytown reunion, it will be interesting to see how Cary and Adams will mesh once again. I hope that the resulting album will be big enough for two such major, and singular, talents.
—Laila Shahrokhi
August 14, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 33
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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