It’s Leonard the old funkster
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Leonard Cohen gets the funk up on his latest effort.
Source: AFP
THIS week’s album reviews from The Courier-Mail (ratings out of five stars):
R & B
LEONARD COHEN
Popular Problems (Sony)
****
OH LEONARD, you got funky. In a very Leonard way, of course, but listen to that slippery bass on the sublime Almost Like the Blues, which naturally enough isn’t quite a blues but is certainly the kind of song which invites you to shake your hip.
Then there’s the ominous Hammond organ and punchy brass on A Street. This is a similar sound to the one we’ve heard on his late-career world tours. A different band but that same sumptuous R & B pulse. And My Oh My, with its Memphis-style horns. It’s Cohen as if produced by Isaac Hayes.
He is moving into uncharted territory now. Painters have done great work at 80, classical composers, poets. But songwriters? Cohen, born in 1934 and an adult long before anyone coined the term singer-songwriter, is still with us, the spirit willing and the creative muscle as match-fit as ever. And after that period of messing around with those dinky Casio keyboard sounds in his records, the sound here, with producer and co-writer Patrick Leonard, is rich and warming, his verses honed to a razor-sharp edge.
It is wrong to say that Cohen’s career is all about the lyrics, he has always found interesting musical settings for his examinations of the human condition. But when you drink up those words, that’s when the music really catches fire.
As ever, there is a twinkle in the eye, the sly R & B groove of Slow, which spins off his preference in music and love: “I like to take my time/All your turns are tight/Let me catch my breath/I thought we had all night.’’
Elsewhere, it’s those old pains of the heart, songs of love, desire, remorse and even hope, often presented with the imagery of war, apocalypse, the Old Testament.
He’s been at this since the release of his first album, at 34, in 1968. And there are still very few working in music who can match his lyrics for clarity, for economy, for precision, for grace.
Almost Like the Blues begins: “I saw some people starving/There was murder, there was rape/Their villages were burning/They were trying to escape …’’
He might be talking to an old lover in A Street, or to a nation, and either way the best of times have passed. Nevermind begins with a metronomic beat, introduces Papa Was a Rolling Stone-like strings, female vocals singing from a Middle Eastern scale, with Cohen delivering a tale as old as humanity itself, concluding “My woman’s here/My children’s too/Their graves are safe/From the likes of you.’’
Born in Chains is somewhere between hymn and Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman; Samson in New Orleans could be written by someone abandoned in that city, abandoned by their faith, abandoned by their country.
And Did I Ever Love You will certainly be the most tender letter to an old lover you will hear this year, as Cohen observes: “The lemon trees blossom/The almond trees wither/Was I ever someone/Who could love you forever?’’
At 34, at 50, 60, 80, do you think the human heart is ever over that?
You can try to pretend otherwise. Leonard’s here to tell you it’s not so.
He’s telling us what all the great ones do. We are not alone.
Noel Mengel
METAL
GODSMACK
1000Hp (Spinefarm)
***1/2
ZZ TOP eat your heart out. The cover of Godsmack’s latest album features the hottest of hot rods. And while other bands are turning it up to 11, they’re putting the pedal to the metal: “Turn that s— up louder/Make it go faster … take it to 1000Hp.” The band have come a long way from their humble beginnings, but they haven’t forgotten, as the opening title track and first single rewinds to 1995: “When we were nothing … no one caring … no one listening … until they all showed up one day … and everything changed.” It’s high-speed metal, if not speed metal. Negativity kicks in on FML, while an expansive bassline sits atop soaring strings on Something Different. What’s Next
asks the big question, with the observation that “the only thing certain is death”. Big Country-like shouts of “Shot!” punctuate Generation Day, about the children of the digital age that also features an epic instrumental break. “Not everything is always black or white,” frontman Sully Erna observes on Living in the Gray, while Nothing Comes Easy builds on a low organ-like roar.
John O’Brien
CLASSICAL
ROGER BENEDICT & TIMOTHY YOUNG
Voices in the Wilderness (Melba)
****
UNLIKE Jewish composers who perished in World War II concentration camps of the Third Reich, Hans Gál and Ernst Krenek saw the looming danger and fled ”to the wilderness” of exile — Krenek to California, Gál to Scotland where he was to co-found the Edinburgh International Arts Festival. Krenek’s sonatas on this CD could hardly be deemed politically offensive. Expressive possibilities of his Sonata for viola and piano opus 117 are well realised, three contrasting movements culminating in a dialogue-style andantino that Timothy Young (piano) and Roger Benedict (viola) develop with precision and clarity. Drawing out his viola’s warm, mellow tones with intelligent direction, Benedict brings an authoritative voice to Krenek’s plaintive Sonata for solo viola opus 92, sustaining the monologue’s drive. Gál is more optimistic in the lyrical lines of his Impromptu for viola and piano, Sonata for viola and piano opus 101 and Suite for viola and piano opus 102a, all worthily recorded here for the first time.
Patricia Kelly
Ponderosa by Richard In Your Mind
ROCK
RICHARD IN YOUR MIND
Ponderosa (Rice is Nice)
****
II HAS been a good year for psych lovers with good work from Sean Lennon (as Ghost Of a Saber Tooth Tiger), Ty Segall and White Fence. This release is right up there too, building on the clear influence of The Beatles from the opening track Love Grows, with its sitar, Indian drum and a modern take on a familiar philosophy: “When you give a high five you receive a high five in return.’’ Hammered is a bright and bubbly pop tune and the ghost of Beatles floats happily through
Look You Gave, with its “la la la-la’’ harmony and descending guitar chords. But there are plenty of other musical adventures, with the funky backbeat to Four Leaf Clover Salad as the setting to an aural kaleidoscope created from sax, harmonica, flute, vibes and guitars, or samples thereof. Pieces like Shooting Star and Good Morning are languid, floaty; This Is House Music is anything but, with metronomic drum loop and surreal lyrics; Leaf a soothing instrumental. There is beauty and strangeness here, mostly the latter in the sonic blast of My Volcano. “Shapes have shifted,’’ singer Richard Cartwright tells us. Quite.
Noel Mengel
Heartwood (2014 New Pressing) by Karl S. Williams
ROCK
KARL S. WILLIAMS
Heartwood (Footstomp/Warner)
****1/2
THIS Queensland songwriter came to attention last year with an independent release of this album. Since then he’s signed with the Brisbane label Footstomp, toured the country and generally knocked out anyone who has heard him sing. The album is now available with a new cover, three new songs and a revised sequence of tracks. Among the new songs is opener Time Bomb, a blazing slice of soulful blues-rock with brass section, and one of Williams’s most forceful vocal performances as he vows: “I won’t sit around and watch them carve a knife from the liberty bell/There’s too many hard-won freedoms that hard times have convinced us to sell.’’ The tone and atmosphere of the original remains: folk, blues and soul influences delivered with a style that never seems like its merely recreating the past. Is This Love is a sublime vocal performance, this time set against rich piano chords, while White Hotel is a powerful blues with banjo andelectric guitar, where Williams proclaims: “There ain’t no cure for my heart disease.’’ Fans of, say, Fleetwood Mac in the Peter Green years, will approve.
Noel Mengel
ROCK
KIM AND LEANNE
True West (Guilt Free Records)
***1/2
AFTER the dark pastoral reflections of The Darling Downs, a duo with Ron S Peno, and a Scientists reunion for a show in New York, Australian rock veteran Kim Salmon strips back to a duo with drummer Leanne Cowie. They cover the Rolling Stones’ Dead Flowers, replacing country-rock with thunderous guitar distortion, more Lou Reed than Keef ’n’ Mick. Elsewhere, it’s an enjoyable jukebox, from one-chord thrash (The Science Test) to Bolan-esque glam-bam (Freudian Slippers, Ow! Baby, Baby) to the mysterious riffs and talking blues of Hard To Get. The bruising Carry On Baggage sounds like one of those great singles you would find by some unknown band in the heady days of punk. It also out-Falls The Fall. Savage guitars abound, sometimes for just 1:30 (see In a Nick/Just a Tick), and across five brutal minutes on the closer, Get a Hold of Your World. Those who admire the joys of ‘60s garage-rock on Nuggets, and all those bands it spawned, this is for you.
Noel Mengel
FUNK
DR. JOHN
Ske-Dat-De-Dat: The Spirit of Satch (Concord)
****1/2
FAR be it from fellow New Orleans native Dr John to record a slavish tribute to the Crescent City’s most famous musician. Rather, the 73-year-old pianist and singer claims Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong came to him in a dream and said, “Do my stuff — your way”. The Doctor duly acquiesced, and the result is his best set in years, banishing the memory of 2012’s turgid
Locked Down. Of Armstrong’s best-known material, the lilting I’ve Got The World On a String (a sassy duet with Bonnie Raitt), and rollicking versions of When You’re Smiling (with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band) and What a Wonderful World (featuring the Blind Boys of Alabama) turn the originals inside out, while Mack the Knife is surely the funkiest murder ballad you’ll ever hear, far removed from the finger-clicking swing arrangement Bobby Darin stole from Satch in 1959. But it’s the lesser-known material, such as the romantic sledge-fest Sweet Hunk o’ Trash (a show-stealing duet with Shemekia Copeland) and the deep-pocket groove of Gut Bucket Blues, that reminds you how versatile Armstrong, and by extension Dr John, really was.
Phil Stafford
