Unrelated LA :: Recommended :: Tin Man "Wasteland" 12"

Lately I’ve been fairly reclusive and moderately tired of my record collection. So I was pretty jazzed to find one of the best records I’ve heard all year in a music niche I've neglected over the years: house. Tin Man’s fourth release, “Wasteland,” harkens back to the most barren instances of classic Chicago house tracks, stretching the sound’s murkiest undercurrents into desolate, expansive drones that float beneath rhythmic throbs and deep, anesthetize vocals.

“Wasteland” is a dérive through the streets of a city’s seedy underbelly, lights streaming past while distant, shadowy decay drifts in and out of sight. Even without the dystopian evocations of the title and lyrics, the record’s soundscape signifies a world beyond redemption – cold, indifferent, entropic. The record occupies the same unsettling end times as Scott Walker’s The Drift without reveling in its dissonance or hellishness. The tracks are never convoluted or muddled by over indulgence. It’s textbook - the way creeps like myself hoped Deep house would sound the first time we heard it.

At its core, “Wasteland” is as much a rock and roll record as it is an electronic dirge or subversion of Chicago house. The spectacle, tension and attitude are all present; that’s likely what keeps me coming back for more. Like Kraftwerk’s best records, Tin Man never celebrates or condones the austere world his music evokes. It just is. He’s content there; he gets it. There are still drugs to take, sex to have, and music to dance to.

Rodriguez @ the Echo 11/21/08

Like Jim Ford’s Harlan County and Hackamore Brick’s One Kiss Leads to Another, Sixto Rodriguez’s Cold Fact is something of a masterpiece that fell into obscurity the instant it landed in record bins. Victim of poor promotion, market saturation and mixed reviews, the Rodriguez parable is structurally familiar, but ripe with lore, peculiarities and enigma. Writers and record collectors have speculated, embellished upon and even chased the Rodriguez story, tracking clues that reach from Detroit to Mexico, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand.

By 1970, the year Cold Fact was released, the industry of rock had paid off big and was starting to bloat. For the first time, a popular consciousness large enough to generate real profit found personal and social redemption in the songs they produced. Music was the vehicle of a revolution and their was money to be made from it. Record labels burgeoned and multiplied, throwing money in all directions hoping to score the next Dylan, Beatles, or Stones. Album after album after album dropped. Some made waves; many more sank. The cash that landed Rodriguez was that of Clarence Avant, creator of Sussex Records. Avant, a Beverly Hills resident now considered a legend within the black recording industry, built Sussex on the hits of West Virginia R&B artist Bill Withers. Known as a playmaker and negotiator, Avant cut his teeth managing soul and R&B artists. He founded Venture Records, the first subsidiary to a major label to exclusively release black music, but was never able to hone in a truly successful label. Both of his attempts, Venture and Sussex Records, failed within five years.

Cold Fact was Sussex first release and Avant demonstrated little understanding with regard to marketing Rodriguez’s music. Sussex was distributed by Buddah Records, a label known for putting bubblegum pop acts like 1910 Fruitgum Company and Ohio Express on the map and successfully distributing the music of a number of soul and R&B artists. Much of Buddah’s early success was the result of its relationship with Kama Sutra Records and that label’s strong tie to AM radio. Kama Sutra released a number of hits like “Goodie Goodie Gumdrops” and “Do You Believe in Magic” that now define the AM sound. But once flower power broke, the FM airwaves became the movement’s mouthpiece. Through their industry ties, Sussex and Rodriguez had little access to the airwaves that suited his music. Cold Fact and “Sugar Man,” Rodriguez’s warbling, dope-laden first single, took to collecting dust on radio station shelves and record bins. Sixto disappeared.

In a sense, the Rodriguez story begins here in his absence. While he returned to Detroit from Los Angeles and took to working construction jobs and raising a family, his global fan base began its slow development. In South Africa, word on Rodriguez spread quickly among white dissidents because Cold Fact was one of the few records with racy lyrics to slip past the Apartheid’s stringent censors. Australia and New Zealand picked up on Rodriguez as well. In America, Rodriguez’s cult is still in its infancy, but developing. For years, no one knew for sure what had become of Rodriguez. Fans speculated, building a small mythology of suicides, drug overdoses and prison, some even said he set himself on fire on stage. Rodriguez could signify whatever or whoever the listener desired, his only context being the music and album cover of Cold Fact.

The songs inadvertently play into and transcend the Rodriguez myth. Cold Fact is coated with the urban grit of a musician born into the street life that plenty of 60’s folk artists observed, sang about, and even chose to enter from more fortunate, peripheral, social positions. Dark themes of drugs, sex, struggle, and manipulation abound. Even when his lyrics are political and tend toward convolution, Rodriguez’s never sings at his audience, always remaining a member of the proverbial crowd. Sonically, Cold Fact is balanced by wandering psychedelic miscellany and elements of more straight forward baroque and folk pop. For all the Theremin drones and woozy children’s choirs that revel below the surface, there are able horn sections and sharp guitar hooks directing each song. Rodriguez’s approach remains cool and even keeled even when his lyrics provide fairly scathing social critiques. Even at its weirdest, Cold Fact never attempts to be anything more than a pop record and that’s its biggest asset.

Albums like Cold Fact, with its enigmatic cover art, interesting history and relative obscurity, are the reason why collectors continue to scour dollar bins, thrift stores and flee markets for records. We search for intriguing, maybe even profound artifacts of all but forgotten songs and stories ripe for reclamation; stories and songs that become our own in conversations, listening parties and DJ nights. And when the songs and stories happen to be as rich as those of Rodriguez, the hours spent flipping through shitty records seem all the more worthwhile.

Unrelated LA :: Recommended :: King Tuff - Was Dead LP

I recently picked up King Tuff's "Was Dead" lp and I must say, the King's brand of Volkswagen Vanagon punk is really hitting the spot. Apparently these songs have been floating around on CDRs for a couple of years now - unbeknown to me - but, the fine people at The Colonel Records were gracious enough to give them the official release they deserve. Kudos to The Colonel. "Was Dead" is a real slow burner, channeling the clean, treble guitars of Television, dumbed down via the Ramones, and blasted through the barbiturate haze of Joe Walsh's "Barnstorm." There are some power pop flourishes on a number of tracks, but thankfully King Tuff's a little too baked to recede into simple Milk N' Cookies worship. The result is the best record of the year to dub to cassette and blast in your AMC Gremlin. Let the good times roll.

The World of Wounded Lion

In a recent heart to heart I had with Wounded Lion singer/guitarist Brad Eberhard, he mentioned that Scott Soriano, curator and owner of the ever alluring Sacramento imprint S-S Records, said Wounded Lion sounds like they’re from Columbus, Ohio. As a Columbus expatriate and avid follower its musical past and present, I’d say Soriano’s ears are perceptive. Wounded Lion’s brand of charmingly timeless, lo-fi pop would fit nicely on a bill with Columbus bands like the Guinea Worms and Times New Viking. But, I would take Soriano’s assessment a step further. Wounded Lion don’t just sound like they’re from Columbus, the band embodies the city’s marvelously ass-backwards musical ideology, rejecting conventionally accepted aesthetics and approaches to revel in an ecstatic indifference toward time, place, trend, and fashion.

Columbus, and to a lesser extent smaller regional cities like Dayton and Youngstown, have been producing their own brand of insular, uncompromisingly lo-fi rock for over three decades to a small but growing number of people outside the 614 area code. In certain respects, Columbus and Los Angeles represent two opposing urban polarities, each functioning to reaffirm and stabilize the other’s differences. Columbus is a test city for Hollywood projects. On a systemic level, much of Hollywood’s most unfortunate work acts as a direct or indirect pacifier for the kind of Americans marketing think tanks associate with the population of Columbus and its surrounding area. Hypothetically, Hollywood prospers on Middle America’s escape. Whether or not the figures associated with Columbus’s population have any merit, the stigmas surrounding the town, its isolation and expansive urban sprawl do a number on the minds of its creative population. Living in Columbus, it’s easy to feel despondent. Many of the best records produced in the city deal with the feeling directly through lyrics and reactionary aesthetic choices, operating as big, black, work-worn middle fingers to banality, boredom, fear, rejection, and conventional expectations, musical and otherwise.

Wounded Lion, like their Columbus brethren, is inspired by the space the band inhabits. For those abroad, LA is less a place than a destination – a space people dream of and aspire towards. Its image is shaped through depictions, lore, and the fantasies it has provoked from each generation. There is, undeniably, a grain of truth to the assumption that LA is filled with anxious people pounding the pavement, chasing dreams, hopes, and aspirations - trying to patch the proverbial void. The city has its neuroses, but the vanity, superficiality, and image concerns are a product of one demographic’s desire to experience the fantasy, to make it tangible through empty façade. The façade weighs heavy on the city’s consciousness. We drive ridiculous cars, get plastic surgery, and accumulate insurmountable debts. We meltdown, burnout, and pick up the pieces. Amidst paradise. Thankfully, we have Wounded Lion to show us how to have fun again, despite it all.

Wounded Lion’s formula is relatively simple. The band writes shambling, alternately silly and poignant songs that bend and twist timeless pop hooks from the sixties onward. On their debut S-S 7 inch, Eberhard’s lyrics concern pony people and a girl named Carol Cloud. They’re funny on their own, but Eberhard sells them with his languid approach and straight-faced honesty. When it works, and it usually does, it feels as though Eberhard is gloriously unaware of the separation between the real world and his fantasy world, a place where troubles are coupled with and defused by raw imagination. We know he’s goofing, but it doesn’t matter. The band has pulled us in; we’re helpless. Live, Wounded Lion bring a small piece of their fantasy world as an offering the audience can take or leave - a short time with the band when nothing has to matter. The band plays and dances hard, in a fit of energy and jubilation - oblivious to personal concerns and anxieties. I like to imagine the band practicing or playing to no one with the same kind of energy; it honestly wouldn’t surprise me. In Wounded Lion’s world, people trade instruments, tune each others guitars and everyone gets a chance to sing lead – a truly democracy not unlike Dr. Hook and his medicine show, but without the cocktail of drink and drugs. In Wounded Lion’s world, no one looks stupid dancing or has a bad hair day. No one is afraid. The world is a party and everyone is invited.

Like the bands of Columbus, Ohio, Wounded Lion escape the everyday by refusing to accept it, refusing to be burdened by trends, trivialities, and contrivances. They create a space where postures are null. However, unlike the musicians of Columbus, Wounded Lion isn’t burden by Midwestern hopelessness. The band’s message is never sardonic, cynical, or hard to swallow. In times this heady, self aware, and neurotic, we need bands like Wounded Lion to remind us that, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of this shit we obsess over doesn’t matter. Regardless of pretense, two things that get us out of bed every morning are catharsis and personal connection, both of which Wounded Lion offer generously.