SnC 414 – Eastbound
Description
<figure id="attachment_5829" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5829" style="width: 620px" class="wp-caption alignnone">
<figcaption id="caption-attachment-5829" class="wp-caption-text">Boo Boo Davis brings delta traditions to new life with BLuACiD [photo Yannick Perrin]</figcaption></figure>We have some rather special and innovative blues from Boo Boo Davies with BLu ACiD – yes, Jan Mittendorp is involved so you know it’s going to be good.
There are Echoes of distant terror this Holocaust Memorial week with a track from San Francisco’s Blind Willies and another with altogether more contemporary resonance from DakhaBrakha who are based in Kiev and have friends missing elsewhere in Ukraine who are, hopefully, being held hostage.
Add to that an epic from NYC’s Stargroves and something of a rarity – a new album from My Visor and we’ve got quite a show. As if that wasn’t enough Static People are in from SF sporting a delicious mix of dirty pop and melodic indie swells.
Monkey Scratch – Static People (SF, CA, USA)
Static People is germinated in post/punk/alt turbulence, a mix of dirty pop and melodic indie swells.
Formed in 2008, the band released their debut album “The Late Projectionist” in 2011, and promptly won the Best Punk/Post Punk Artist 2013, Artists in Music Awards, Los Angeles for the single Toxic Overload.
Their follow-up EP entitled “Rare Creatures” has just been released.
Produced by Jason Carmer (Dirty Ghosts, Camper Van Beethoven, Kimya Dawson, The Donnas, Molotov, Los Amigos Invincibles, Chuck Prophet)
Recorded at Fantasy Studios October 2013
Dmitra Smith: Voice, keyboards, piano, wurlitzer
Pascal Faivre: Guitars
Shawn Miller: Bass
Michael Urbano: Drums(Red House Painters, Paul Westerberg, Cake, Smash Mouth, Cracker, Third Eye Blind)
Cremo Tango – The Blind Willies (San Francisco, CA, USA)
Alexei from The Blind Willies in San Francisco has been in touch about their new album which is approaching completion.
All these songs are about freedom and whatever the opposite of freedom is, within our selves and in our relationships with others. There’s no shortage of political and personal definitions of freedom. Politicians, whether fascist or democratic, use freedom as a tool, a badge of honor, a gun, a token pin on a lapel. At Auschwitz, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, forged in iron, stood as a warning and a promise at the main entrance gate. Work makes you free. In George Orwell’s 1984, the façade of the Ministry of Truth building has three slogans carved into its concrete: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. They’re just words, but words resonate and evolve and mutate and become what we want them to mean.
Blind Willies is a San Francisco rock Americana band led by singer/songwriter Alexei Wajchman. The band began at San Franciscos High School of the Arts as a duo playing covers of American folk songs and Alexeis originals which he began writing when he was 15. After their professional debut at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, the bands first two releases of all original songs, The Unkindness of Ravens(2007) and Everybody’s Looking for a Meal(2008), were highly praised.
To mark Holocaust Memorial Day this last weekend. A simple and evocative song in the finest tradition of protest.
Cremo Tango was inspired by Tadeusz Borowski’s autobiographical story collection This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, and by the day I spent walking inside Auschwitz-Birkenau. My inspiration for Big City was the pleasure I’ve enjoyed these last few years singing songs with children. The two songs seem natural bookends to me so that’s where they are. Horror and hope, surrender and survival, hate and love, atrocities and possibilities. The songs between are a river of reflections on those themes.
No Time For Love – Spottiswoode & His Enemies (New York, USA)
English Dream, Spottiswoode & His Enemies’ sixth studio recording, is a haunting new departure for the New York septet. After winning two Independent Music Awards for 2011’s Wild Goosechase Expedition – a poppy and satirical romp about a rock band’s doomed tour – the band returns with a beautiful and much more atmospheric set.
It’s an English record, written and sung by an Englishman but recorded in Brooklyn by a New York band. “Our fourth record, Salvation, was Americana,” says Spottiswoode, the band’s songwriter and frontman. “This time we’ve gone Anglicana and made a pastoral collection of songs about nature, love, childhood and the other side of the pond. It sounds different from anything we’ve done before. Organic and very open.”
The first single off the album is “No Time For Love”, a piano led number delivered as a duo harmony by Spottiswoode and trumpeter Kevin Cordt. It combines a sixties retro vibe both in melody and sentiment with some contemporary piano pop cred, plus a touch of boogaloo brass.
“No Time For Love” is the only song I wrote at the piano for this record. It’s also the last song I wrote for the record. I thought we needed an upbeat catchy pop ditty. This is what came out.”
Referred to as a “genius” and a “downtown ringleader” by The New Yorker, Spottiswoode is the son of an American singer and an English clergyman. WNYC’s John Schaefer describes him as “one of New York’s more colorful band leaders for more than a decade.”
Spottiswoode & His Enemies features Spottiswoode (vocals, guitar), John Young (bass),Tim Vaill (drums), Candace DeBartolo (saxophone), Kevin Cordt (trumpet), Riley McMahon (guitar, mando- lin, glockenspiel), and Tony Lauria (piano, accordion, keyboards).
youtube.com/spottiswoodeinabox
If You Ain’t Never Had The Blues – Boo Boo Davies (St Louis, MO, USA)
Boo Boo Davis is a survivor and belongs to the last generations of musicians that write and play the blues based on first hand experience of a hard life in the Mississippi Delta. He was born and raised in Drew, Mississippi in the heart of Delta. It was the richest cotton land in the South and the large amounts of field workers attracted the best musicians from the surrounding areas. The entire Delta region was rich with blues, but the town of Drew was a particularly fertile one. Charley Patton stayed near Drew for many years and several legendary performers spent time there. Sharecroppers sang loudly to help pass the grueling hours of work and without a doubt Boo Boo developed his loud, bellowing voice based on the singing he heard in the fields as a young boy. In fact, that voice, through the years has demolished many amps and speaker cabinets.
Boo Boo’s father, Sylvester Davis farmed cotton and played several instruments. Musicians who he played with include John Lee Hooker, Elmore Jame
United States
