CD reviews
Earthless is all about the anticipation. Plus, some other thoughts on the latest from The Buttless Chaps and My Brightest Diamond
By Dave Tow , Nathan Dinsdale , Seth Combs
Earthless
Live at Roadburn
(Tee Pee Records)
*7.7*
Goes well with: Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys,
Hawkwind, a David Fricke wet dream
You keep waiting and it never comes. As anyone who’s been to an Earthless show will tell you (other than it’s the only way to hear them), it’s all about the anticipation. But for those unfamiliar, their new live double CD should come pre-packaged with a bong load and a warning label that the husky-voiced singer you keep waiting to show is never going to. Lyrics? Not likely. Licks? Definitely.
Featuring former members of Rocket from the Crypt and Nebula, it’d be a mistake to compare these guys to instrumentalists like Tortoise and Explosions in the Sky, because Earthless is the type of band a death-metal fan could dig, while being as equally appealing to hippies with a penchant for Dead bootlegs. Luckily for both, there are technically only two songs on the entire album, clocking in at more than a half-hour each, and both contain brutal sonic-death-monkey-like riffs and solos that fly past the back of the room and into the cosmos. There’s nothing quite like Earthless out there, and if there is, it isn’t this good. But that doesn’t mean their music is for everyone.
What it adds up to is a tantric-sex act of an album that goes on and on but never quite reaches orgasm. Not that this is a bad thing. The ride is what’s most important.
—Seth Combs
Earthless play Wednesday, Nov. 19, at Bar Pink.
The Buttless Chaps
Cartography
(Mint)
7.6
Goes well with: Cold weather, warm whiskey, gravel roads
It’s ironic that Cartography is the first album in 10 years that The Buttless Chaps did not record in the remote Jack London environs of northern British Columbia. It was cut in Vancouver, but feels like it was made in a cabin inhabited by existential prospectors. Lead vocalist Dave Gowans’ intonation sounds like Ian Curtis reciting The Doors at the bottom of a well, if only Curtis had spent his fleeting Joy Division days listening to Johnny Cash and The Smiths in a snowbound tavern. In other words, Gowans can’t really sing. But his deep, resonating voice belongs in the somber landscape carefully plotted here.
The album is often cold and sparse, but there’s just enough warmth to keep things from veering into morose melodrama. “The Opera” is appropriately orchestral, albeit with an orchestra that favors vocoder and electronics as much as piano and strings, while “Water by the Wayside” hearkens back to simpler days when country music wasn’t performed by singing cowboys with frosted tips and designer jeans.
Much of Cartography straddles a divide between subdued alt-country and atmospheric indie rock, but the best results occur on tracks like “Broken Transit, Broken Soil” and “Coal Grey Sky,” when the pace is upped enough to show that life persists—and prevails—in even the harshest wilderness.
—Nathan Dinsdale
My Brightest Diamond
A Thousand Shark’s Teeth
(Asthmatic Kitty)
*8.6*
Goes well with: Cat Power cover albums,
She & Him, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
“Sonnets from the Portuguese”
While many other classically trained and virtuosic musicians make conscious efforts to downplay their technical skills, My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worton proudly displays her immense talent. The granddaughter of an Epiphone-playing evangelist and daughter to a national accordion champion and a classical organist, Worton’s familial legacy makes for a dominating classical influence. However, instead of becoming pigeonholed by her experience, she embraces it as a jumping-off point.
Among fellow innovators like Antony Hegarty and Sufjan Stevens, Worton has released a pair of excellent and strikingly different albums. Her debut, Bring Me the Workhorse, was pensive and restrained, but A Thousand Shark’s Teeth is staggeringly free, celebratory and expressive. Thematically, the album is cohesive and it addresses intimacy and loss in a touching, sincere way that is vague enough to universally resonate.
Opener “Inside a Boy” collides Jeff Buckley theatrics with juxtaposed guitars and strings, and yet, Worton manages to reign herself back, like on the bluesy chamber number “From the Top of the World,” only hinting at the power behind the shimmering and haunting voice. That’s truly what My Brightest Diamond is: the crying songs of ghosts, grounded by simple percussion and shrouded in twinkling strings and soaring guitars.
—David Tow
My Brightest Diamond play Tuesday, Nov. 25, at The Casbah.
Published: 11/18/2008
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