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Music Features

Two synthesizers and a microphone

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› molly@sfbg.com

When Chromeo released their Vice debut, She’s in Control, in 2004, the electrofunk duo from Montreal mainly stayed a cult favorite, semifamous for their single "Needy Girl" and mostly unknown otherwise. But with their just-released sophomore album, Fancy Footwork (Vice), and their tour with Jock Jams favorites Flosstradamus, it seems their ’80s pop–influenced, synth-heavy dance beats may have finally found their temporal groove. After all, if T-shirts masquerading as dresses and leggings masquerading as pants can come back, why can’t foot-tapping, bleep-blooping, stay-in-your-head-all-day music? (Especially since, unlike those other retro trends, Chromeo’s music actually works.)

But don’t think that Chromeo is just a throwback joke band, satirizing male-male ’80s pop — they call themselves "the thugged-out Hall and Oates" — the way the Darkness satirizes glam rock. Sure, the Montreal-born longtime friends, P-Thugg (Patrick Gemayel, who daylights as an accountant) and Dave-1 (Dave Macklovitch, who’s also earning his doctorate in French lit at Columbia University), have a sense of humor about their music; one look at the Fancy Footwork cover, on which synthesizers have sexy mannequin legs, tells you that — to say nothing of their claim that they’re the first successful Arab-Jewish collaboration in history.

But the music is no joke. Taking a step away from their past as hip-hop producers, the team decided to pay homage to the musicians who helped shape them, from Phil Collins to Robert Palmer.

"I grew up on MTV," Macklovitch writes in an e-mail interview. "I used to watch Billy Ocean and Huey Lewis videos and I wanted to be those guys. I got my first erection watching David Lee Roth’s ‘California Girls’ video."

It’s what made their first full-length so much fun: just like the records of those bands in the ’80s, it’s totally earnest about its danceability, its focus on relationships, and its love of computerized sounds. But rather than regurgitate the same formula, Gemayel and Macklovitch took enough time with their second disc to do something a bit different. Fancy Footwork is a more sophisticated collection of songs, both musically and thematically. "Momma’s Boy" is a funny, self-aware ode to the Oedipus complex; "Opening Up," a fresh, unusual take on the rebound relationship — which, by the way, references "Needy Girl." And if there’s any question that these are dance anthems written from a mature perspective, there’s "Bonafied Lovin’," a song about what an older man can offer a woman that her younger boyfriend can’t, from the perspective of someone who actually knows ("Never mind an SMS/ What you need is a sweet caress").

Complaints about Chromeo come mostly from the electronic music community, which argues that their simple beats and Prince-inspired melodies don’t add much to the techno canon. But Chromeo shouldn’t be compared to the Chemical Brothers. This is dance-party, road-trip, living-room-Jazzercise, and MySpace theme song music: fun taken seriously.*

CHROMEO

With Flosstradamus, Codebreaker, and DJs Jefrodisiac and Richie Panic

Mon/23, 9 p.m.; free with RSVP at going.com/chromeo

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

For the rest of the interview with Chromeo’s Dave-1, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

L.A.’s dark side

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Just as many Angelenos surely paint San Francisco as a fog-ridden vortex crawling with hippies, a lot of folks here in the Bay Area remain convinced that Los Angeles means little more than sunshine, surfers, and superficiality. So who’s right? Neither, to be fair. Take LA: insist that it’s all shiny and sparkly, and you’re skipping over the seedy and sordid bits of the city’s history (also known as "the good stuff"). What about James Ellroy, Raymond Chandler, film noir? And what of the darkness and disillusionment of the Doors and Love? There’s a whole other side to LA where the sun never shines, bless its murky little heart …

Midnight Movies emerge from the creeping shadows of the City of Angels like a pack of Philip Marlowe acolytes, but here’s the kicker: picture them setting up camp on the Sunset Strip, roosting among the rebels and the riots of its ’60s to ’70s heyday. Their sophomore release, Lion the Girl (New Line), is a quintessentially LA disc in the same sense that one of the band’s main reference points, the Velvet Underground, will be forever identified with New York: both celebrate their hometowns’ geography of grit with a language that’s equal parts unsettling and alluring.

Many of the inevitable VU comparisons stem from vocalist Gena Olivier’s brooding alto, which bears a striking resemblance to that of the Velvets’ Teutonic ice maiden, Nico. Broadcast’s Trish Keenan also comes to mind, but Olivier brings considerably larger doses of warmth and a broader vocal range to Midnight Movies’ electropsychedelic garage racket, along with the slightest hint of a Gallic lilt that reimagines Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier as a postcomedown California Girl. And if we’re going to throw one more touchstone into the mix, Midnight Movies share a spirit with Liverpool’s Clinic — thanks to the organ squalls, primal rhythms, and bristling guitars of Ryan Wood, Sandra Vu, and Larry Schemel.

Truth be told, only two albums into their career, Midnight Movies sound like little else. Whether wafting ghostly sunrise lullabies on classic 4AD–worthy "Dawn," love-nesting away in a morning-after haze to murmurs of "You’re all I want to know" on the glockenspiel-twinkled ballad "Ribbons," or launching into fuzz overload with convincing foreboding on "24 Hour Dream," Olivier and her fellow proponents of psychedelic garage noir arrive with a singularly bewitching vision of their LA. "We warp and swell and bend," she sings on "Souvenirs"; in listening to the spectral storytelling on Lion the Girl, I see what she means.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES

With Nico Vega and the Gray Kid

Sat/21, 9 p.m., $10

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

Keeping up with Melina Jones

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

MC Melina Jones represents everything that’s right with hip-hop. She’s female, she’s socially conscious, her lyrics are tight, and she’s fully clothed onstage. You won’t see the MC from "Sucka Free" (i.e., San Francisco) in any metal bustiers or stripper attire, à la raunch rappers Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, who, along with their thug-rap male counterparts, helped hypersexualize hip-hop to the point where it’s become nearly inhospitable for self-respecting females.

She is a perfect fit for Girl Fest Bay Area, now in its second year. The event aims to promote female empowerment and prevent violence against women and girls through art and education. Fortunately, the festival organizers have chosen appropriately fierce artists to represent this noble endeavor, including some of the illest up-and-coming voices in hip-hop, neosoul, and spoken word: homegrown talents Jennifer Johns, Femi, Mystic, and Aya de Leon, as well as legendary Los Angeles rapper Medusa. These ladies of the underground are worlds away from the willowy, lily white womyn artists who feathered girl-power gynopaloozas such as Lilith Fair in the ’90s. I mean, how much of a cultural impact did Jewel really have?

Jones, in contrast, is quick to clown anyone for making too much of the fact that she’s a woman who raps — or for dismissing hip-hop wholesale. She often checks people for describing her as a "female MC," because "I wouldn’t classify Mos Def as a male MC. I would just classify him as an MC and a really dope artist," Jones tells me at Cafe Abir. "So as soon as you say, ‘female MC,’ that already kind of diminishes some of the respect and some of the value of a woman that happens to be an MC."

To Jones, it shouldn’t be much of an issue that "one of Sucka Free’s flowest got mammary glands," as she proclaims on "Picket Fences," the opening track of her first full-length, Swearing Off Busters (Female Fun). She painstakingly crafted the album over the past several years so that it would be "beautiful without being pretty, meaning that I wanted … each song to be really lovely but edgy at the same time. I don’t like things that are too shiny or … too cute or too easy on the ears."

Jones achieves this balance, showcasing her poetic skill in diverse musical settings, from smoky ballads such as "Love in Progress" and "Wrap You Up" to cipherworthy battle-rap tracks like "Rock with Fire" and "Knock Ya Block Off." Jones’s musical partner, DJ-producer Deedot, furnishes lush, loungy instrumentation that complements her lyrics, whether he’s drawing inspiration from cool jazz, trip-hop, or stanky West Coast funk.

In classical hip-hop style, Jones brings a sense of bravado to her songwriting and performing. She doesn’t shy away from criticizing wack MCs or, for that matter, anyone else who brings disrespect to the temple of hip-hop, while her hard work recording and gigging has begun to pay off with brisk sales on iTunes and bubbling word of mouth. Yet she’s motivated more by love of the form than an egotistical need to get over on competitors. In another line, she professes to have "heart and hella soul. I rock from my colon. Like Olivia Newton-John, I’m hopelessly devoted. Making average MCs feel mighty crunchy and corroded."

Tapping masculine and feminine energies, Jones is a fighter and a nurturer in her approach to rap, calling out music industry busters in order to protect hip-hop, to keep it healthy and vital. In the song "Tunnel Vision," she reflects how hip-hop "got took" by corporate interests, "but now we taking back the spot. Won’t get got another millisecond on the clock. The next time around, no chance of shutting us down. No option but to follow, submit to the underground."

If there’s a hint of the maternal in Jones’s attitude toward hip-hop — she is, after all, the mother of an 11-year-old ("I’m constantly putting that boy in check," she jokes) — she’s anything but matronly. Nor is the stylish MC afraid to reveal her glam-y, girly side, a move that hip-hop’s hardcore and most highly respected female rappers were hesitant to make in the beginning of their careers (think MC Lyte, Yo-Yo, Eve). Jones, who professes to "love to play dress-up" and "invest in hella makeup," acknowledges how difficult it is to be taken seriously as a woman in the rap game and how a lot of her peers "kind of grime themselves out."

"When I spit," she explains, "I’m really not interested in trying to make my voice sound like a dude or even taking the place or the role [of a man]. I’m not trying to bust anyone’s balls, unless you take me there …"

Given her cover-girl good looks, the MC likely has to go there fairly often. She recounts one time when she had to deflect a cheesy come-on by a club-owner type — behavior that in any other professional field would clearly be defined as sexual harassment. "I definitely get challenged by men all the time who are in the game," she confesses. "[It’s] nuance[ed]; it’s not like somebody just coming right out…. It’s those little tiny inflections of body language that tell me [they’re] sexualiz[ing] me."

Jones doesn’t waste too much time playing the victim, however, or complaining about misogyny in hip-hop to the point where there’s no joy in it or room to maneuver. "These clowns can say what they want," she defiantly proclaims. "I’m gonna do my thing. There’s a power in that."*

MELINA JONES

Appearing at "Women Re-Birthing Justice"

Sun/22, 1–5 p.m., free

Dolores Park

Dolores and 18th St., SF

For other events at Girl Fest Bay Area, July 19–22, go to www.girlfestbayarea.org.

Praise the Lordi!

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Even if you haven’t heard Lordi’s music, you’ve heard of Lordi — or at least seen their picture. After they won the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest, a distinction that approximates winning American Idol, the Finnish group became a media sensation. Who can resist a band that performs songs like "Hard Rock Hallelujah" with copious pyrotechnics while dressed in head-to-toe monster outfits? Nobody in Finland, where Lordi’s members are national heroes. Besides musical fame, the band has a postage stamp, a "rocktaurant" (on the menu: chili-sautéed reindeer), and its signature Lordi Cola.

Back in March, on what was to be the eve of a Slim’s gig, I spoke to bass player Ox the Hellbull (the band’s other members, who never publicly appear out of character, are lead monster Mr. Lordi, mummy guitarist Amen-Ra, vampire keyboardist Awa, and alien drummer Kita). Soon after, Lordi’s club tour was scrapped in favor of a main-stage slot at Ozzfest. The band’s latest album, The Arockalypse (The End), is a jubilant celebration of fist-pumping rawk that wouldn’t have been out of place on Headbangers Ball. Like you’d expect anything less from rock ‘n’ roll monsters.

Initially, Ox said, folks didn’t know what to make of their act. "People thought we were like crazy Satan worshipers or something, but we’re not," he explained before noting that Lordi is heavily influenced by KISS, Alice Cooper, and "my personal favorite, Mötley Crüe."

In fact, the Crüe is the reason for Ox’s bass-playing ambitions. As a kid, "I saw a picture of Mötley Crüe in the paper, and I hadn’t heard them yet," the 31-year-old remembered. "But I decided that this was the coolest band in the world. Then I bought the album, and it was the coolest band. And I decided this is what I want to do: I want to play rock."

However, band mastermind Mr. Lordi — who makes all of the band’s monstrous apparel — is the reason for the Ox. "At the first rehearsal we had, Mr. Lordi looked at me and said, ‘You look like a raging bull when you play.’ "

Inside the costume "it’s hot as hell. I start sweating when I put the mask on," Ox said, adding that he’s not bothered by the fact that the group is so defined by its theatrical image. "There are all kinds of fans. Some like the music first. Some like the outfits. It doesn’t matter really."

And, being a wiseass, I had to ask: what are the signs of the Arockalypse? Ox laughed. "Everyone’s gonna turn into monsters!"

OZZFEST

July 19, noon, free (sold out) Shoreline Amphitheatre 1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View (650) 967-3000

www.livenation.com

Party with me, Oh My God

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The Toxic Avenger pawing ferociously at his slime-dipped guitar while an army of redneck zombies feasts on a moshing drove of punk rockers — now that’s a cool visual. Maybe Giuseppe Andrews — Cabin Fever star and an independent filmmaker who’s had a number of his movies distributed through Troma Entertainment — can keep Toxie and his flesh-eating pals in mind for his next music video for Chicago prog poppers Oh My God. With one director’s credit for the quartet already under his belt, Andrews recently added a second by helming the video for the title track off the band’s fifth full-length, Fools Want Noise (Split Red). Andrews’s vision for the song might not be a gore-packed freakfest typical of the Troma catalog, but there’s no denying the oddball humor and sicko charm exhibited within his art. As the video opens, a grizzly, bronze-tanned old-timer dressed in a thong shimmies in place to vocalist Billy O’Neill’s rabid whine and snapping fingers. "Two eyes swimming in a sea of fat / A liver drowning in a vodka vat / You want more of that / Do you want more of that? / Well the TV is on and the radio is on cuz nobody can make a choice / Fools want noise," O’Neill proclaims between random shots of a lip-synching cheeseburger puppet and trailer trash conga-dancing around a swimming pool. Just as the song erupts, Andrews — clad in a bathrobe and flaunting a set of horse-size wax choppers — pops up onscreen and slams his body around a living room.

From his Chicago apartment, OMG synthesizer player Ig said he was a bit puzzled by the video’s kooky imagery on initial viewing but has since warmed up to it. Andrews’s actors, he explained, are "the mostly elderly people who live in his Ventura trailer park, where he lives along with his dad. He chooses to live in this trailer park and to use his fellow residents as actors — many of whom are ex–drug addicts, Vietnam vets, etcetera.

"Basically, he makes John Waters’s films look like Disney movies."

But enough about Andrews. Playing a mash of disco, glam, and hard rock, OMG has garnered plenty of fans of its own through its flamboyant live shows and relentless tour schedule since forming in 1999. Uniting bustling organ, bassy grooves, and Bish’s propulsive drumbeats with a heap of distortion, the group sounds like the musical spawn of Robert Fripp and Gary Richrath, that guy from REO Speedwagon. Somehow work in a jealous Bob Mould, and the result is Fools Want Noise, a guitar-laden punk onslaught ripe with devil-horned salutes and tempos jacked up by adrenalin.

The album also finds the combo joined by friend and Darediablo guitarist Jake Garcia. Though all of OMG’s previous endeavors were accomplished without the use of guitar, Ig said, the three didn’t have a "prior plan to get punky or guitary. We just jumped at the chance to record with Jake." Then again, the added guitar really shouldn’t be a shock to fans — it just adds to OMG’s ever-teetering dynamic.

"I have an organ sound that’s very distinctive, and no matter how pliable Billy’s voice is, he’s still such a Billy," Ig said. "Bish too has a drum sound style I could pick out of a lineup.

"And somehow, once Billy’s background, mine, and Bish’s get poured into a beaker, the result consistently is the unique chemical called Oh My God." *

OH MY GOD

With the Faceless Werewolves

Thurs/12, 9:30 p.m., $5

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0925

www.hemlocktavern.com

Sweet release

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In the midst of hyphy’s ups and downs, Warner Bros./Reprise will finally drop the new Federation album, It’s Whateva, on Aug. 14. The group’s second major-label disc, after The Album (Virgin, 2003), which helped inaugurate the hyphy movement, It’s Whateva was originally slated for release last fall, until difficulties arose with its lead single, "Stunna Shades at Night." Based on Corey Hart’s ’80s hit "Sunglasses at Night," "Stunna Shades" was building a big buzz when the group learned the Canadian rocker refused to clear the sample.

"He felt like he wrote the song when he was young, and it meant a lot to him," producer and nonperforming Federation member Rick Rock says from Sacramento. Nonetheless, "Stunna Shades" "took off and was big promotion. But we never got a chance to really work it. To me that was a number one hit."

The delay caused by the "Stunna Shades" difficulties recalls the experience of Mistah FAB with his "Ghostbusters" remake, "Ghost Ride It." Though FAB had clearance to use the Ray Parker Jr. theme song, Columbia Pictures forced MTV and other outlets to stop playing "Ghost Ride It" ‘s buzz-building video due to its inclusion of the Ghostbusters logo. The lack of TV support convinced Atlanta to delay FAB’s disc.

Still, these two examples raise one major problem in the presentation of hyphy to a national audience. Remakes of goofy songs, "Ghost Ride It" and "Stunna Shades" rely on a novelty factor uncharacteristic of their genre. The best hyphy tunes have been startling originals, like FAB’s "Super Sic Wit It" and the Federation’s "Hyphy," and the former two tracks’ reliance on attention-getting pop culture reference points has only compounded the difficulty of breaking the Bay nationwide.

In any case, Rock worked on the album again, looking for a new single "that could be as big as ‘Stunna Shades.’ " Yet the group only accidentally stumbled onto one: "College Girl," an extended campus-themed meditation on "to give brain," rap slang for a blow job.

"We had the song, but then another dude had a similar song," Rock recalls. "I didn’t want it to come out after him, so I leaked it to radio. Then Warner Bros. started chasing it." The success of the single prompted Warner Bros. to schedule It’s Whateva for June, though it’s since been pushed back twice.

"It’s not a great time in the music industry, so I’m sure Warner is being real careful with the release," an unfazed Rock points out. "We need the right song, the right video to get it to come across."

While Rock will continue to add and drop tracks until the last minute, the rough version of It’s Whateva I heard is astounding enough as a hip-hop album. While it begins in a recognizably hyphy vein with tracks like "College Girl" and the 2006 single "18 Dummy," the recording soon veers into uncharted terrain that looks well beyond present trends in the Bay.

Heavy metal rave-up "Black Roses," with live drums courtesy of Blink-182’s Travis Barker, is one of the best realizations of a rock-rap fusion to date. The far-out groove on "I Met Yew" proves perfect for a cameo by Snoop Dogg, the only big-name rapper here besides E-40. The majority of the disc leaves hyphy behind in favor of a level of experimentation that recalls the golden age of hip-hop. Even in its present state, It’s Whateva displays a level of originality and all-out weirdness that fully justifies Rock’s statement that he’s "got a lot to show these youngsters about putting an album together."

"People want to know what’s next," Rock insists. "If you keep doing hyphy, people will say, ‘Oh, they’re still doing that hyphy shit.’ So I gotta do something different. I gotta put paint where it ain’t."

Hyphy and its discontents

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"Hyphy is here to stay because hyphy was created in the streets and the streets will be here forever."

E-40 in an e-mail, June 28

Send a 911 to the 415 and 510: does hyphy have a pulse? Several articles in recent months have suggested the answer is no. A May 13 San Jose Mercury News article, "What Happened to Hyphy?" by Marian Liu, for example, insists that a year ago, "the Bay Area seemed poised to become the center of the hip-hop universe," when, we are told, the genre "was ubiquitous at clubs, on the streets and on local radio stations." Now hyphy is "listless, with even local popularity beginning to dissipate."

This account of the rise and fall of hyphy is exaggerated to the point of fiction. Bay Area hip-hop has, of course, been cracking for at least two and a half years, following a long post-Tupac period of commercial decline now referred to as "the drought." But while the amount of local spins Bay Area music received increased, hyphy was never anything like ubiquitous on the radio. The small number of major-label signings never threatened to displace any presumed center of hip-hop’s stubbornly regional universe nor does such an image convey what’s been at stake in the Bay’s struggle for recognition.

According to the Arbitron radio ratings system, San Francisco is the fourth-largest market in the country, after New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. This figure includes Oakland but not Sacramento or San Jose, which are classed as separate markets but are considered by everyone from the rappers to the media and the listeners as part of the Bay Area in terms of hip-hop regions. All Bay Area artists want is to be treated like other rappers in similar areas of the country. Rappers from smaller markets like Houston (number six), Atlanta (number nine), Miami (number 12), and even St. Louis (number 20) routinely receive local airplay, major-label deals, and national exposure.

Only the Bay is denied such opportunities. While the publicity of E-40’s 2005 signing with BME/Warner Bros. scored hyphy coverage in national media like USA Today and secured the Bay its own episode of MTV’s region-oriented rap show, My Block, the music hasn’t had a chance to blow up. With the exception of E-40 — whose gold-selling 2006 album My Ghetto Report Card (BME/Warner Bros.) ensured a Warner Bros. release of his upcoming The Ball Street Journal — no Bay Area hip-hop artist has been permitted to drop a big-label full-length in the past two years. Albums by the Pack on Jive, Mistah FAB on Atlantic, Clyde Carson on Capitol, and the Federation on Warner Bros./Reprise have all experienced frustrating delays, fostering the notion that hyphy is foundering. But not everyone agrees with this impression.

DEAD OR ALIVE?


"How can hyphy be dead when the key players are still there?" 19-year-old producer extraordinaire and Sick Wid It Records president Droop-E asks. It’s a good question, for if the short history of the hyphy movement has proved anything, it’s that there’s no lack of hot Bay Area acts, from vets like Keak Da Sneak to new artists such as FAB to rappers who came up during the drought and didn’t get to shine, like Eddi Projex (formerly of Hittaz on Tha Payroll) and Big Rich (once of Fully Loaded). Carson, the Jacka, Beeda Weeda, J-Stalin, the Federation, Turf Talk, Kaz Kyzah, San Quinn, Messy Marv: the list of major-label-level talent only begins here, and the extent to which any of the above identify as hyphy hardly matters, inasmuch as for the rest of the country, hyphy stands for Bay Area hip-hop.

Many of these rappers predate hyphy, and while the word definitely has musical signification — it’s a fast, club-oriented sound inspired by crunk but transformed by electronica and techno flourishes — its most important function has been as a marketing tool to direct national attention back to the Bay. To write off hyphy as a passé trend is, in this sense, to write off the region, leaving the Bay back where it started.

Further complicating any so-called postmortem analysis of hyphy is the fact that the term also refers to the Bay Area culture of disaffected hood youths known for white Ts, dreadlocks, and ghost riding. "Hyphy is part of the street," Droop-E affirms, noting that the culture emerged before the name was attached or the music drew attention to it. The merging of this culture and a particular hip-hop sound in a single term is what makes hyphy so potent a concept, functioning in a manner akin to the word psychedelic in the late ’60s. This union between a lifestyle and an aesthetic is the chief justification for considering hyphy a movement, however vaguely articulated.

"The hyphy movement reflects what’s going on in the streets," Federation producer and national hitmaker Rick Rock says. "That will never die, as far as that goes. The kids are going to be hyphy. But the music — you don’t have to say ‘hyphy’ to do a hyphy song. If people are saying ‘go dumb’ on 10 different songs on the radio, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot."

Traxamillion — another architect of the hyphy sound and producer of Keak’s local number one hit "Super Hyphy" — agrees the music could be "losing its edge due to oversaturation of the same topics: scrapers, purp, pillz, shake ya dreads, and stunna shades," underscoring the tension between hyphy and a region whose rappers pride themselves on originality. Yet if hyphy’s lyrics often suffer from an overreliance on now-established slang, the limitations of its subject matter hardly seem greater than that of mainstream rap; the high-fashion emphasis of East Coast rap is infinitely more tedious.

In any case, Rock’s response has been to reinvigorate hyphy through the innovative impulse that led to its current form. "That hyphy sound I blueprinted, I don’t have to stay with it," Rock says. "Hopefully people will gravitate toward the new music, and that’ll be the new hyphy."

NEW SICK SOUNDS


Rock is leading the way with the Federation’s thrice-delayed It’s Whateva — finally to be released by Warner Bros. on Aug. 14 (see sidebar) — and his production on "I Got Chips," the guitar-driven first single off Turf Talk’s West Coast Vaccine (Sick Wid It), released in June. One of the year’s most anticipated Bay full-lengths, Vaccine more than fulfills its buzz. Besides the excellence of its composition as an album, it displays Turf Talk’s tremendous artistic growth in the number of flows he adds to his characteristic bark, from a whisper to a lazy drawl to a hyperactive bellow.

While Droop-E confirms that several major labels expressed interest in Vaccine, ultimately none pulled the trigger. Yet deals of various sorts keep trickling in, most recently for Keak, whose camp confirms his recent signing to national independent Koch. Tha Mekanix production squad is negotiating a rerelease of J-Stalin’s On Behalf of the Streets (Zoo Ent., 2006) through one of the biggest independent distributors in the States, Select-O-Hits. And more major-label ice has begun to thaw, as the Team member Carson reports that Capitol is leaning toward a mid-October release of his solo debut, Theatre Music.

"It’s going to be real good for the Bay," Carson says of his ambitious project, originally conceived as one continuous track, à la Prince’s Lovesexy (Warner Bros., 1988), though Capitol has nixed this risky idea. Yet Carson insists the album "will still be one body of music." Cobranded by the Game’s Black Wall Street Records and boasting appearances by the multiputf8um rapper, Theatre Music finds Carson busting over big-time beatmakers like Scott Storch and Wyclef Jean, and it’s hard to imagine Capitol squandering such resources.

SO HARD ON THE FUNKY RADIO


Another symptom of hyphy’s alleged demise, offered in the Merc and elsewhere, is its lack of current radio play. Yet if there’s been no recent hit on the level of Keak’s "Super Hyphy," it’s because KMEL and other hip-hop stations have withdrawn support for local music.

"The radio play on the hyphy movement has definitely slowed down," Traxamillion says. "They play a few Bay joints here and there, but overall I feel a lot of the radio play is coming to a halt."

Mistah FAB, for example, has a pair of new singles, "Goin’ Crazy," highlighting Too $hort and D4L of "Laffy Taffy" fame, and "Race 4 Ya Pink Slips," with Keak and Spice 1. But you’ll never hear these on KMEL, as the station has stopped playing FAB.

"It’s the politics of radio," says FAB, who claims that since he accepted his Friday-night radio gig at KYLD, he’s been subject to an unofficial ban at KMEL, courtesy of musical director Big Von Johnson — though both stations belong to Clear Channel. "As an artist, I find this hard to accept," FAB confesses. "As a businessman, I realize why." Nonetheless, FAB was surprised that ending his radio show had no effect on the ban.

"It hurts the movement," he says, and he’s right. His 2005 radio hit "Super Sic Wit It" was one of the catalysts of hyphy, bringing other local music in its wake. "If we can’t get the support here at home, how can we expect to break nationwide?"

FAB has a point: local rap needs radio to generate sales, which in turn generate label deals. At press time, Johnson hadn’t respond to several requests seeking his side of the story, yet the Arbitron ratings speak for themselves.

In summer 2006, when it was playing hyphy, KMEL was the number two station in the market, after KGO-AM talk radio. That winter, when it began slacking off, KMEL finished at number seven, tied with KYLD. (Spring ratings aren’t yet posted.) This is difficult to reconcile with the claim that hyphy’s popularity has dissipated. Yet while hyphy — and by extension, Bay Area rap — may never break nationally if KMEL doesn’t support it, even fewer people will tune in to KMEL if the station doesn’t play it.

Nearly every Bay Area rapper I’ve met seeks what Messy Marv once called "that major label shine." Yet the lack of hyphy-era major-label-deal flash — or rather follow-through — thus far may stem more from the general decline of the corporate music system than from the strength or weakness of local hip-hop. Fewer major-label albums are being released now compared with earlier periods of pop, and those imprints are generally taking fewer chances and are often unable to move fast enough for rap. Radio, moreover, has lost at least a portion of its audience to Internet alternatives like MySpace and YouTube, both of which FAB credits with mitigating the impact of absent radio play. Given the fact that a popular independent artist can potentially make more money — at the price of much glory, perhaps — than many bigger names, it’s hard not to wonder if the major labels do hip-hop more harm than good. It’s something to consider as we wait to see if the Federation’s new album, whateva its final form, keeps hyphy’s momentum alive.*

Free William

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

William Hooker is feeling good right about now. The voice of the 61-year-old composer, drummer, and seasoned kingpin of the free-jazz world doesn’t betray an inkling of wear and tear. His utterance is eloquent in delivery and animated in expression and possesses a rather youthful quality coated in optimism. During a phone call from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment, Hooker lightheartedly raps about his enduring tenacity in hammering out art as an artistic director, musician, and poet and touches on life in New York City: his love for the theaters in his neighborhood, his hand in codeveloping the nonprofit Rhythm in the Kitchen Festival, and even the friend who gave him a rare copy of a silent film by Oscar Micheaux. As Hooker stresses frequently during the conversation, "It’s a good thing."

But the one thing that surfaced often throughout our discussion was the New Yorker’s impending trek to the Bay Area for a one-off performance. Hooker reveals that he hopes his visit to San Francisco will grow into an opportunity to return and build on this experience with more West Coast shows the next time around.

"This is going to be the start of the first time I perform annually in the Bay. Basically I’m trying to see what’s on the horizon right now because I don’t know what’s happening in the Bay, to tell you the truth," he says with a laugh. "I don’t think there is any difference in the quality of musicianship, but I do think there is a difference in the attitude of musicianship. Here it’s a little bit edgier. It could be because of the way Manhattan is, but I’m looking forward to having that free feeling for a change and just letting this opportunity grow."

Skimming through Hooker’s bulky résumé, one finds that the musician’s lifelong pursuits have been about nothing less than self-growth. Born and raised in New Britain, Conn., Hooker got off to an early start as a drummer for the Flames, a rock ‘n’ roll group that backed up singers and bands such as Dionne Warwick, Freddie Cannon, and the Isley Brothers. At college he studied 20th-century composers and independently researched the Blue Note Records catalog while performing in ensembles that played straight-ahead jazz, or "tunes," as Hooker referred to the music. He says his late-’60s move to the Bay Area was what really shaped his musical perceptions, a discovery that allowed him to hone his skills as a free-jazz musician.

"California opened me up to a different kind of approach to life," Hooker says. "Out of that came a desire to want to extend forms more. There was a lot more exploring of different cultures and playing with different sorts of people. You know, using a lot of drummers instead of me just being the one."

After relocating to the East Coast, Hooker finally established his home base in NYC in the mid-’70s, when he was involved in the loft scene with cats such as David S. Ware, Cecil McBee, David Murray, and Billy "Bang" Walker. He continued to perform in a number of jazz ensembles throughout the ’80s before mingling with lower-Manhattan noise rockers like Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Christian Marclay, and Elliot Sharp during the ’90s.

"The combination of jazz with noise … I must say, the time was culturally right for me and many of the free-jazz and rock people to come together," Hooker says. "I think that time has passed. There’s another thing going on now. And for people that like to go back to it, I like to remind myself that that happened already. Artistically I’m not in that place anymore."

Hooker may have moved on from the free-rock aesthetic, but his limits have been boundless for some time now, especially when it comes to experimentation. Playing in support of his new album, Dharma (KMBjazz), a duet recording with reedist Sabir Mateen, and his forthcoming Season’s Fire (Important), a trio full-length rounded out by Bill Horist and Eyvind Kang, Hooker acknowledges that he’s just trying to connect with listeners who are on "a certain level as far as free jazz goes." He believes he’s found two of those people in reed player Oluyemi Thomas and bassist Damon Smith, who are in his Bliss Trio.

"I’m looking forward to what’s going to happen when we play at the Hemlock, because both of these musicians are very good," Hooker says. "There’s no doubt about that."*

WILLIAM HOOKER’S BLISS TRIO

With Weasel Walter Group

Thurs/5, 9:30 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Toolin’ around the Bay

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Nothing’s ever straightforward for Bay Area hip-hop. After the hyphy-fueled buzz of the past three years, the road to major-label glory remains beset by difficulties. The unexpected delay of Mistah FAB’s Atlantic project, the loss of the Federation’s lead single for their Warner/Reprise album due to sample-clearance issues, the lack of a firm date for Clyde Carson’s Capitol disc — all have fostered a certain amount of frustration as the Bay waits for a new artist to shine on the national level alongside Too $hort and E-40.

While Bay Area acts try to jump into the majors, however, a major-label act has suddenly jumped into the Bay, as crunk pioneer Pastor Troy has released his new album, Tool Muziq, through local powerhouse SMC Recordings. Departing from Universal after three albums followed by a flurry of underground releases over the past two years, the Atlanta resident has chosen the independent route despite the interest of imprints like Interscope and Cash Money in his continued viability as a hitmaker.

"It’s a fool," Troy says by phone. "I like to say what I want to say without worrying if it’s going to be cut off by the bosses. On an independent label, you’re really at your own discretion."

Well, almost. While SMC allows Troy the creative freedom he lacked on his heavily A&R–<\d>ed Universal full-lengths, the rapper narrowly averted a showdown with several retail chains that threatened not to carry the album under its original title, Saddam Hussein.

"I came up with the name because I felt like I’m comin’ back into the game," Troy explains. "I keep that military edge to my music. And Saddam, everything he was going through, as much controversy as his name was sparking at the time — I was, like, ‘I’m gonna call my album Saddam Hussein!’ He’d just been executed and everything."

I confess I’ve always been a fan of rappers using the names of dictators notable for their defiance of the United States. In gangsta rap, names like Noreaga and our own J-Stalin are a positive advance in political consciousness compared to the glorification of Italian American mobsters. While Troy insists the title wasn’t politically motivated, the threat of retail censorship raises First Amendment issues not unlike those faced by Paris when he was forced to conceal the provocative cover of Sonic Jihad (2003) — portraying a jet on a collision course with the White House — under a plain black sleeve.

"It’s no big deal," Troy says. "We just switched the title before we ran into a brick wall." Despite the brouhaha, however, "Saddam," produced by Young Jeezy hitmaker Shawty Redd, remains the lead single. "Who am I?" Troy screams over the intro. "I’m the motherfuckin’ president! And I … will … live!" The recentness of Saddam’s execution, combined with the Pastor’s army-of-one style of crunk, lends an undeniable potency to this invocation. Yet it’s also hilarious — Saddam as Skeletor — and essentially devoid of political content: like many raps, "Saddam" is primarily about its rapper, though it’s amusing to imagine Saddam shouting, "I don’t want your bitch, nigga!" as Troy does here. But instead of a rock opera devoted to the late Sunni strongman, Tool Muziq is an extraordinarily well-rounded hip-hop album, and Troy’s ability to flow over a wide variety of tracks — from the gangsta R&B of "Wanting You" to the conscious-thug, letter-from-jail-themed "Hey Mama" — demonstrates a technical virtuosity well beyond that of your average crunk MC.

"Everybody knows crunk is my specialty," Troy says. "But you just can’t crunk ’em to death. You got to give them good listening. I had a 50-year-old woman tell me she’s waiting on the album to drop. Goodness gracious! I gotta cater to a lot of people."

The addition of Pastor Troy to SMC’s roster is an unexpected but welcome event for Bay Area hip-hop, insofar as he lends a national profile to the local label’s increasing reputation. Evolving out of RT Entertainment, which helped Moedoe move 36,000 units of Keak Da Sneak’s Copium (2003), and then Sumday Entertainment, responsible for Messy Marv’s 28,000-selling Disobayish (2004), SMC concentrates on Bay Area acts, even as it looks strategically to other regions. In 2005 the label dropped its first official releases, Block Movement, by B-Legit, and Speaking Tongues, a solo album by Bizzy Bone of Los Angeles’ Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, which sold 40,000 copies. SMC’s connection to Troy goes back to last year, when it served as third-party distributor for his 40,000-seller Stay Tru (845 Ent.). The rapper was so pleased with the label’s performance, he decided to cut to the chase for Tool Muziq.

"We’re going to keep having a relationship together," Troy confirms, as he and SMC are working out the details for a new release by Troy’s group D.S.G.B. "They needed a guy like Pastor Troy to shake it up for real."

And while Troy has no intention of leaving the Dirty South, his new connection to the Bay offers the tantalizing prospect of further collaboration between the regions’ related genres.

"Hyphy and crunk — it’s the same kind of music to me," Troy says. "I’m sure SMC will have me get down with Messy Marv. I want to go out there and go dumb!"

www.myspace.com/pastortroy

Nuggets of Water

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COLIN BLUNSTONE

One Year

A genuine lost classic from 1971 — full of feathery, jazz-inflected vocals and sublime melodies — from the dejected Zombies vocalist after he had resigned himself to life behind a desk at an insurance office. "She Loves the Way They Love Her" picks up precisely where Blunstone’s disassembled ensemble left off, with weaving boogie-woogie and an angelic chorus that dips its wings in soul’s waters. Utterly gorgeous string arrangements by Chris Gunning and occasionally Tony Visconti, plenty of production help from ex-bandmates Rod Argent and Chris White, and Blunstone’s limpid songwriting make One Year necessary listening for pop romantics. And the chamber elegy "Misty Roses," the up-on-the-downbeat "Caroline Goodbye," and the impressionistic "Smokey Day" — driven skyward by intertwined vocals from the three ex-Zombies — are bound to besot those who swoon over Odessey and Oracle, Nick Drake, and other assorted instances of beauty and sadness. (Kimberly Chun)

ANNE BRIGGS

The Time Has Come

Mythologized among British folk vocalists like Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, depicted as something of an enfant sauvage of the ’60s folk scene in Joe Boyd’s memoir White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, and valorized by indies like PG Six and Isobel Campbell, Anne Briggs put down so little recorded music that it’s hardly any wonder she’s nearly disappeared into the dirt and mists of remote Scotland, where she’s said to be currently sequestered. But this, her last, exquisite album (1971), embellished with little more than and acoustic guitar and the occasional bouzouki, shows what the fuss was about, as Briggs wraps her pure, unpretentious pipes round the original title track — also recorded by her partner in music and lifestyle, Bert Jansch, as well as Alan Price and Pentangle — and "Wishing Well," her dark take, cowritten with Jansch, on the seduced and abandoned leitmotif of "Blackwater Side." Traditional English folk songs rarely get as mesmerizing as her ghostly version of "Standing on the Shore." (Chun)

ELAINE BROWN

Seize the Time

Polemical music has the potential to either go down in the songbooks and history tomes as an artifact linked forever with a critical place and time or fail miserably, stumbling over its grandiose ambitions (e.g., the many anti–George W. Bush CDs of recent vintage filed in ye olde circular file). The music on the powerful Seize the Time hasn’t yet taken its place next to "This Land Is Your Land," but it does offer an invaluable snapshot from the front lines of the black power movement. Elaine Brown’s robust delivery of odes penned for fallen Black Panther brethren, the party’s national anthem, and entreaties to continue the struggle finds handsome, tempered accompaniment at the hands of jazz pianist Horace Tapscott. A moving, amazingly graceful document. (Chun)

GIOVANNI FUSCO

Music for Michelangelo Antonioni

Nino Rota’s ornate Federico Fellini tunes have gotten the deluxe reissue treatment, Goblin’s spook sounds have been revived as often as Suspiria‘s Elaina Marcos, and Ennio Morricone sections in record stores are rightfully enormous. Even Pino Donaggio’s scores have had worthy second lives. But until now Giovanni Fusco’s subtler work for a director who avoided music whenever possible, Michelangelo Antonioni, has been easiest to find on DVD. Dominated by the flute flights from 1959’s L’Avventura, this collection closes with Fusco’s casino rockabilly and protoambient contributions to 1964’s Red Desert. A pioneering work in terms of its blurring of diegetic and nondiegetic sound, that film is also the great prototype for Todd Haynes’s Safe, in which malaise-ridden Antonioni muse Monica Vitti utters the great line "My hair hurts." (Johnny Ray Huston)

GILBERTO GIL

Gilberto Gil

A letter of exile from London in the wake of months of unjust imprisonment imposed by the Brazilian government, this English-language recording possesses a warmth and sensitivity one wouldn’t expect from someone who’d been through Gil’s trials. But Gil rarely made a show of his anger, usually expressing it through pointed spoken or written words or musical metaphor. A sublime example here of the last is the cover of Blind Faith’s "Can’t Find My Way Home," on which the Tropicalista leader’s voice is pure, refreshing, and vibrant while singing words of solitude and alienation. Elsewhere, his pop folk makes time for Volkswagen blues, shampoo chats, mushroom trips, and existential thoughts about Kodak moments. (Huston)

FRED NEIL

Fred Neil

A lightly sparkling hoot, "Everybody’s Talkin’ " — made famous by Harry Nilsson when Fred Neil refused to rerecord it for Midnight Cowboy — may be the biggest commercial hit on this album, but the first track, "The Dolphins," is the real, pulsating heart of this wonderful disc. The narcotic serenade to those lucky enough to escape into the wild yonder was memorably nicked for the last season of The Sopranos and encapsulates this Piscean songwriter’s lifelong identification with the sea creatures. The flighty Neil needed to be gentled into the studio by producer Nik Venet and harbored among friendly foils to produce this remarkably organic, mostly live recording, which brought out the best blues-folk writing from the rarely bottled artist. (Chun)

NICO

Desertshore

Aside from her femme fatalism with the Velvet Underground, Nico might be best known musically for the one-of-a-kind Teutonic Californian frisson of her pairing with Jackson Browne on 1967’s Chelsea Girl. But the VU’s John Cale was her right-hand man for most of her career, right on through to the practically postmortem version of "My Funny Valentine" on 1985’s Camera Obscura. This 1970 collaboration includes the layered psychedelia of the title track (on which spoken interludes add extra layers in a manner many indie rockers have imitated), the ballad "Afraid" (addressed narcissistically to herself or forebodingly to her son, Ari?), and of course the one and only "Janitor of Lunacy," which mopped the floors for generations of goths to come. Two tracks here were featured in La Cicatrice Intérieure, a film by Philippe Garrel. (Huston)

JACK PALANCE

Palance

Sauntering the line between camp and cool with winking menace, the Shane star takes his opportunity to coin a few memorable countryisms in the absurdist, Marty Robbins–esque "The Meanest Guy That Ever Lived." "I ruled like a king and they / All did my thing / ‘Cause the foot was in the other / Shoe, shoe, shoe / ‘Cause the foot was in the other shoe," Palance sing-snarls, laying into those "shoe"s like a deranged Shangri-la with rabies. Aided and abetted by lush production from ex–Hank Williams bassist and Nashville publishing czar Buddy Killen, Palance gets to really sink his actorly teeth into the juicy, who’s-sorry-now melodrama of Dottie West’s "Hannah." (Chun)

THE SOFT MACHINE

The Soft Machine

Volume Two

Albums so wide and deep they threaten to engulf you with their sheer twists, teetering turns, and utter invention. Drummer Robert Wyatt’s frisky fills gets equal time alongside organist Michael Ratledge and bassist Kevin Ayres on the high-chair-rattling "Joy of a Toy" and the toy-piano-tricked-out "So Boot If at All" on the raw-edged eponymous debut, which must have sounded like a tripindicular aural telegram from the outer edges of the universe when it rolled forth in late 1968. Thanks to the departure of Ayres and the arrival of onetime roadie Hugh Hopper, Volume Two gets off the pop leash and takes an exhilarating yet elegant romp through the wide-open fields of fusion. (Chun)

Black planet

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Heralded as one of the most important reissues of this year, the two-disc Music of Idris Ackamoor on the Em label shines a light on Ackamoor’s long-neglected Bay Area contributions to free jazz. But Water’s appreciation of local improvisation predates Em’s work: in 2003, the imprint put out CD versions of Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening, a pair of standout 1969 recordings by San Jose’s Gale and his Noble Gale musicians and singers. Both might be described as sprawling if their vast reach weren’t so dramatically composed. On Ghetto Music, which includes a track called "Fulton Street," 16 people come together to form one ebbing, flowing, raging, soul-stirring musical entity.

As Gale whipped up gale-force storms on the West Coast, on the East Coast the lovably hulking Sonny Sharrock performed an even more extraordinary feat in giving birth to Black Woman, a recording so radically fierce that the world still hasn’t caught up with it — though Water has done its part by reissuing it. The duets between Sharrock’s guitar and his wife Linda’s voice have to be heard to be believed. She’s as octave-hopping wild as Yoko Ono with melodicism and Yma Sumac without the kitsch, and he’s the Jimi Hendrix and Robert Johnson whom no one knows about, patenting a skronk that’s never been bettered. Sharrock once lived across the street from Sun Ra, yet he and his wife discovered their own feminist black planet. The US space program reached the moon in 1969, but in my mind, the Sharrocks’ trip was — and is — greater. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Hot, sexy, and dead?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

What is Water?

The best reissue independent in the country? A label fueled by Cat Power and other wistful girls strumming plaintive guitars? Perhaps the ’60s and ’70s reissue imprint — along with Runt, its Oakland distribution parent company, and its associated sister labels — got to where it is because owner Filippo Salvadori had the foresight to put out the first LP, 1995’s Dear Sir, by the ageless, Karl Lagerfeld–anointed troubadour Cat Power, née Chan Marshall, foreshadowing Water’s releases by femme folkies such as Judee Sill and "Windy" songwriter Ruthann Friedman, once lost but now passionately hailed by fans like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, respectively.

Or maybe the Runt-Water phenomenon all started with a simple scenario familiar to music fans of a certain age when, back in the plastic age before cable, the Web, IM, MySpace, text messages, and the lot, as Pat Thomas — longtime Runt staffer and Mushroom drummer and onetime respected San Francisco folk label Heyday owner, a "detective and general errand boy" who’d track down artwork, master tapes, and families that own publishing rights — puts it, "The only thing to do was smoke a joint and listen to an album. So you really got into your albums. That was your entertainment."

And that was the reason why Thomas and the rest of Salvadori’s small staff would later lovingly dust off and rerelease those precious artifacts from the lazy days of endless summer, multiuse gym socks, wood-grain stereo consoles, and just three channels on the boob tube, unearthing and restoring previously unheard gems along the way. As monolithic major labels tighten their catalogs and slap together cookie-cutter reissues with cut-rate art, it’s come down to indies like Seattle’s Light in the Attic and Coxsackie, New York’s Sundazed, and Runt (named after Salvadori’s favorite Todd Rundgren LP) and its imprints Water, 4 Men with Beards, Plain, and DBK Works to dig into swelling back catalogs and curate with the care that makes true music geeks and retro hipsters want to snag everything they issue. Those Water releases range, dizzyingly, from Terry Reid, the man who would have been Led Zeppelin’s lead vocalist had he been more career minded, to a recent series of majestic Milton Nascimento ’70s releases to Sonny Sharrock’s screaming early endeavors and the Flaming Lips’ Restless albums on pink, blue, and clear vinyl.

"There’s not one fucking record on there that isn’t interesting," says Patrick Roques, who has worked for Water as well as Blue Note. "Everything on the catalog, you want to have. It reminds me of Factory, growing up: anything you saw with that label, you wanted to buy it. All that music that came out on Water is important."

And in the recent years of industry downturn, the music has gotten lost while major labels have largely focused on reissuing albums digitally — sans the careful packaging and new liner notes that Runt takes pains to deliver — rather than physically. "The way the market is going for all labels and with fewer places to sell physical CDs, we can’t put out as many as we used to," says Mason Williams, A&R director at Rhino/Warner Bros., which made its name as an independent reissuer, continues to put out handsome reissues, and now works with Runt, among other indies. "More and more smaller labels have started in the last few years and are working with other labels to reissue deep catalog stuff."

"When I was a teenager [in the ’70s]," Thomas continues, "I could go to JC Penney and Sears and buy any album by the Stones or the Beatles or the Who from the classic rock back catalog. Now if you go Target or Wal-Mart, you’re only going to get ‘Best of’s. Even multimillion-selling bands — you can get the best of Led Zep, but you can’t get Led Zeppelin IV. This is forcing labels to tighten up their catalog because places like that aren’t ordering it." The closure of Tower, one of the biggest stockers of back-catalog albums, didn’t help. "Eventually, it’s going to reach a point that legendary items aren’t going to be available on CD."

That’s where Runt comes in. The latest Elliott Smith collection of tasty, previously unreleased scraps wafts through Runt’s spacious brick loft and warehouse as Salvadori burns me a copy of Water’s latest release, Judee Sill’s Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973, beneath a Dr. Seuss–like shadow man painted by staffer Nat Russell, who fronts Birds of America and runs Isota Records, which is also distributed by Runt. Life is beautiful, as the Roberto Benigni film title goes, on this sun-dappled day a few rolling blocks from the Parkway, and the man from Arezzo, the same small town the Italian dark comedy was set in, is talking about 4 Men with Beards’ upcoming vinyl releases of iconic albums by the Flying Burrito Brothers, Tim Buckley, John Cale, the Velvet Underground, Nico, the Replacements, and, as chance would have it, Smith — all with pricier gatefold packaging, if the LPs originally had it, and careful remastering at Fantasy. That sense of dedication reached its height with the release of Public Image Ltd.’s Metal Box on immaculately canned vinyl. "It was really crazy, but we really did it," Salvadori says, peering through thick black-rimmed spectacles as he picks up an original Metal Box, purchased off eBay and now significantly diminished in resale value thanks to the characters scrawled on its silver surface at the Chinese factory that duplicated it. The Runt crew procured the music rights from Warner Bros. before being told that the packaging permissions were owned by EMI/Virgin, which, it turned out, only had OK in the UK. Eventually John Lydon himself delivered the approval.

That journey — tracing a slab of decades-old wax on its manifold trajectories, to its multiple owners — is only one of many Salvadori has made. After his initial Cat Power success, he moved to Berkeley to study English in the mid-’90s. The touch-and-go world of struggling indies brought him back to Europe to distribute friends’ labels. Then, around 2001, Salvadori and his fellow collector-geek pal Thomas decided to take their major-label contacts and get into the reissue business themselves, beginning with such offbeat releases as the Holy Modal Rounders’ The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders and the Zodiac’s Cosmic Sounds. Licensing albums from labels like Rhino/Warner Bros. seemed mutually beneficial, Salvadori recalls: "For us it’s fine if we move a few thousand. Sometimes we get lucky and move more than several thousand, but for them it probably wouldn’t be worth it."

Water also seems to be sparking revivals in the music of Sill and Reid, who remain the label’s biggest sellers, as well as Ruthann Friedman, who began recording with Banhart and in early July had her first Bay Area show in aeons. Think of Runt, Water, and its offshoots as the logical extensions of your older sibling’s mysterious yet well-loved record collection, guiding you toward what you must listen to next, be it a cry from Albert Ayler, a Cluster and Brian Eno collabo, or a forgotten solo disc by Neu’s Michael Rother. Still, Salvadori hopes to someday get back to his roots, despite the costs and risks associated with nonreissues, i.e., newer artists, with … say, have you heard the Moore Brothers, on Plain? "We didn’t get too much luck yet, but I always hope the next record is going to be the one," he says. "They’re so good! So hopefully people are going to eventually say, ‘Hey, this is good.’ I always hope …" *

www.runtdistribution.com

RUTHANN FRIEDMAN AND MUSHROOM WITH EDDIE GALE

With Bart Davenport

July 13, call for time and price

Starry Plough

3101 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 841-2082

www.starryploughpub.com

I love Lucio

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› johnny@sfbg.com

"I was sad when he died and sad to have never been able to meet him and tell him how much he had done for me," Amedeo Pace of Blonde Redhead writes in the liner notes for Water’s reissue of Amore e Non Amore, a 1971 album by Lucio Battisti. Pace then closes his brief yet poignant tribute — one that describes growing up in a household unified by a love of Battisti’s music — with a simple but effective declaration: "Amore e Non Amore is one of the greatest albums."

The fact that one of Blonde Redhead’s twins acknowledges Battisti as a font of new and familiar ideas should intrigue English-speaking listeners who’ve never heard Battisti’s music. But there’s also an elliptical quality to Pace’s plaintive wish that he had met the man behind Amore, an album that shifts from propulsive beat rock to soundtrack-ready flamenco flourishes and sweeping string arrangements in its first two songs, setting the tone and rhythm for a richly seesawing display of vocal and instrumental tracks.

With Amore, Battisti established himself as an Italian corollary to Scott Walker, a singer with a brighter if just as seductively handsome tenor voice who, not content with mere stardom, was ready to chart the outer limits of popular music. Just as the late ’60s — the era of Scott through Scott 4 (all Fontana) — saw Walker move from the mainstream pleasures of Burt Bacharach to the ribald, poetic, and pun-laden chansons of Jacques Brel as well as his own imaginative landscapes, so Amore and 1972’s Umanamente Uomo: Il Sogno (also recently reissued by Water) saw Battisti use his position as a favorite voice of his nation to take its people to musical places they may not have expected to discover. In Battisti’s case, those were deeply emotional places; it was no accident that the album he’d completed before Amore was Emozioni (Ricordi), a 1970 collection that boasts a title track as gorgeous and reflective as the enigmatic, sunlit silhouette cover photo of the bushy-haired man behind its music.

As the years went on, Battisti, much like Walker, retired from public life, becoming even more of an enigma. He died in 1998, 14 years after the release of his final album, Hegel (Alex, 1994) — a title so blatantly philosophical, so nonpop, that the avant-leaning Walker of today, draped in references to Pier Paolo Pasolini, again comes to mind. It’s here that Pace’s sadness that he’d "never been able to meet" Battisti becomes something more than personal; many Italians wish they could have known the man whose recordings they found so moving on an elemental level.

"After E Già [BMG, 1982], Lucio disappeared from view," Stefano Isidoro Bianchi of the Italian magazine Blow Up wrote when I e-mailed him to ask about the Battisti enigma. "After the early ’70s, he didn’t appear on TV — the one exception was a German TV show in 1978 — and never gave interviews. And after 1982, he really became invisible: no interviews, no TV, no pictures. We knew he lived in London for some time, and then for the rest of his life in a county called Brianzia, in Lombardia (north of Italy). The further he vanished, the more he was loved because of his songs. He was a presence on the Italian music scene. We knew that when Lucio was back with another album, it was a strike. And it was."

In the wake of his heyday, Battisti truly struck, according to Bianchi, in 1974 with Anima Latina (BMG) — which, though it was unreleased in the US, he rates as highly as Amore — and with E Già and 1986’s Don Giovanni (BMG), which included lyrics by surrealist poet Pasquale Panella. But Water has chosen wisely in selecting Amore and Umanamente to rerelease. "These albums are unique in the way they combine string-heavy European crooner pop with prog rock grooves and psychedelic guitar," notes Michael Saltzman, who penned the liner notes for the label’s Umanamente reissue. When I ask Saltzman to name a favorite period in Battisti’s career, he chooses Amore and Umanamente as peak examples of the stylistic cross-pollination that was occurring on other continents — via Tropicália, perhaps most notably — during the late- and initial post-Beatles years. Indeed, they are "comunque bella," to quote the chorus of one of Umanamente‘s hymnlike highlights, only in the sense that Battisti adds dissonant elements to counterbalance the abundant beauty of his voice and compositions.

Perhaps at my suggestion, Bianchi isn’t averse to likening the deep artistic connection that Battisti had with his Amore and Umanamente lyricist, Mogol, to one that existed between a certain American troubadour and his wordsmith: "Mogol was the inner voice of Lucio like Larry Beckett was the inner voice of Tim Buckley," Bianchi observes. But in the end, he’s insistent — apologetically so — that "no one but the Italians can understand" the "magic" of Battisti in full bloom: "In the early ’70s, Battisti released his best albums, and the way he approached something we can call progressive was peculiarly Italian and peculiarly Battisti-like. If you know the other Italian progressive bands, you know that Battisti wasn’t part of the scene. He was a great musician because he changed the face of Italian pop music."

To which I say, "Pace, Pace," or "Pace, pace." The most musical of all languages might float through Battisti’s songs, but their space — shadowy, sacred, alternately melancholic and frenzied — is open to anyone who listens, Italian, American, Italian American, and otherwise.

After all, the glorious anthemic harmony at the close of Umanamente‘s "… E Penso a Te" speaks the universal language of pop, repeating variations of "la-la" until shivers shoot up the spine and tears form at the corners of one’s eyes.*

For an e-mail Q&A with Amedeo Pace about Lucio Battisti, see the Noise blog at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Dream girl

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

"I used to joke sometimes that I’m Judee’s last boyfriend," concedes Patrick Roques, producer of Dreams Come True, Water’s two-disc 2005 compendium of Judee Sill’s unreleased 1974 third album and demos. "I don’t mean to sound egotistic or anything, but I loved this woman like I’d love a girlfriend or wife."

Sill has that effect on listeners. Over the past few years, the onetime hooker, junkie, armed robber, bisexual reform-school girl, and all-around archetypal bad apple has realized the revelation visited on her while incarcerated in the Sybil Brand women’s prison: her music has been etched into the consciousnesses of passionate followers around the world who know her as a singer-songwriter of uncommon musical and metaphysical power. Even 27 years after her death from a cocaine overdose, it seems like Sill still hasn’t quite passed. Water has done its part to keep her musical reveries alive with the landmark Dreams Come True, mixed by Jim O’Rourke and including Roques’s obsessively researched, invaluable 68-page booklet and a 12-minute QuickTime movie of rare performance footage; reissues of her two Asylum studio albums, Judee Sill (1971) and Heart Food (1973); and the newly released Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973, an impeccably recorded document of Sill performing solo on acoustic guitar and piano, chatting with the audience and an interviewer, and in the process revealing snatches of a nervy yet nervous urban cowgirl in her blue-collar SoCal drawl.

For too long, before her rediscovery in recent years by a generation falling back in love with the folk songs of their parents’ youth, Sill was simply the lost girl from an age of singer-songwriters, a victim of her lack of stateside commercial success — though she’s been covered by artists ranging from the Turtles to the Hollies, Warren Zevon to Bonnie "Prince" Billy — and her will to transcend the bounds of the earth and everyday troubles, growing up in her father’s rough Oakland bar and later sexually abused by her stepfather. Clues to map out her art — or potential escape routes, which included a brief stay in Mill Valley’s Strawberry Canyon — were found in the sacred texts and music of Rosicrucianism and other forms of Christian mysticism, her studies of Pythagoras’s music of the spheres and occult modes like numerology, or simply the moment’s drug of choice, whether it be a daily tab of acid or the $150-a-day heroin habit that led her into prostitution and eventually check forgery.

Her decision in prison to devote her creative efforts to songwriting led her to truly reach for the sublime, in the form of songs that still touch listeners’ cores. Always-immaculate intonation, a deft sense of harmony, and elegantly composed songs informed by AM radio, folk, R&B, blues, gospel, and classical music were framed by Sill’s own arrangements, leading competition like Joni Mitchell to stop by and check out the Heart Food sessions. "I defy anyone who’s a high school dropout ex-junkie reform-school person to do that," Roques declares. "This woman was brilliant and plugged in — she had the energy, and it flowed through her." If you want to know and love Sill, she is, remarkably, still available — her spirit can be found all over her music.

So why didn’t Sill become a household name like Asylum labelmate Jackson Browne? "Judee didn’t get along with [Asylum head] David Geffen, and David Geffen isn’t someone you give shit to," Roques says. After recording two moderately successful LPs, "she was in debt to him, and Jackson Browne came along, and he was just easier to deal with, I think, from a corporate perspective. Browne hung out in the close inner circle and had hits. She didn’t hang out with the Asylum record crowd too much. She hung out a little with Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, and she had a lot of strange friends that she had had for a long time in LA."

One of Sill’s exes and old pals, musician Tommy Peltier witnessed the disconnect between the worlds Sill ran in and remembers accompanying her to a Warner Bros. Christmas party right after her debut came out. "We went in my beat-up old car to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and that was first time I saw her cringe," recalls Peltier, who first met Sill onstage at a 1968 jam session ("It was love at first song"). "Here she was the new starlet — there were all these Rollses and limos, and then this clunker drives up, and the new starlet comes out! That was the only time I saw her really uncomfortable, but she just went in there and took over the room."

But as difficult or out of her element as Sill could be, she was within her rights to complain about her handling when she went from opening for kindred souls like Crosby, Stills, and Nash to fronting rock bands. "If you listen to the BBC sessions, she talks about lower chakras and people who just want to boogie, and it’s true," Roques explains. "The rock crowd just wanted to drink wine and take mescaline and get fucked up and party, and there’s Judee singing ‘Jesus Was a Cross Maker’ and making references to esoteric literature. People who went out for a Friday night didn’t want to hear that, just like they didn’t want to hear Charles Mingus. Americans just want to partay — that’s cool — but that’s why she did better in England."

It’s no surprise, then, that Sill obsessives like O’Rourke and Roques still feel protective of her, careful about sharing their love for the dark lady of a sunlit Topanga Canyon whose revelations were forged on the grittily glamorous, sadly battered streets of Los Angeles and who, ironically, seems a perfect fit for yet another turn through Hollywood. "She was out there on the edge," Roques says, "and though I don’t think she ever talked about women’s lib, she was a very ballsy chick and knew what the fuck she wanted and just went and did it. And she evolved into a fantastic person — there’s no one like her" — although, apparently, listeners keep looking. "I search for tapes and talk to musicians endlessly," he continues. "And if you go on these sites, you’ll see everyone wants to find the next Judee Sill — and none of them can even touch Judee Sill." *

Something in the Water

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Franco Battiato’s 1972 album Fetus, reissued by Water, is the kind of recording that transcends a record-store genre category such as Italian prog rock. For starters, the keyboard freak-out at the close of the title number is something today’s army of Kraftwerk drones should covet.

Beginning with the sound of a heartbeat and moving through transmissions from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin about purple rocks on the moon, Fetus repeatedly journeys from micro to macro and back again with ease. The spiraling keys of "Meccanica" could spook Goblin — or for that matter Alan Sorrienti, whose cronelike cackles and cries on another Water reissue, 1972’s Aria, presage Devendra Banhart’s running for the hobbit hills. And a ceaselessly splendid song such as "Energia" could teach Os Mutantes a lesson in mutation: it keeps moving from bambini babble to folk passages and gleaming synth vistas until it’s formed an exhilarating circular pattern — all in four and a half minutes.

Marvelous in form while Battiato’s lyrics marvel at the wonder and horror of life, Fetus has eight compositions. But they contain countless rich passages that flow into one another so seamlessly that the whole thing only seems to have one beginning and a single end that arrives too soon, after a truly epic half hour. One year later, with Pollution (also reissued by Water), Battiato brought the world the loveliest song ever recorded about plankton and a 20-second audio version of Y2K that proved to be more frightening and interesting than the real thing. But he still might have been at his best in Fetus form. (Huston)

The hot rock

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It’s strange taking on a profile of a band so steeped in a musical language with which you were once not just fluent but even obsessed. I would have adored New York City rockers Battles when I was 19, their power-through-precision métier appealing to my penchant for all things prog and post, the words "ex-Helmet drummer" (that would be the band’s John Stanier) acting as foolproof elixir. But if I’m not so easily impressed by intensity and general hugeness these days, that only makes my response to the evident dynamism on Mirrored (Warp) seem all the more incontestable.

Not that anyone ever doubted Battles’ credentials: in the school of rock, these guys are definitely PhDs. Beyond Stanier’s heavy days with Helmet, Ian Williams’s guitar tapping was a cornerstone of Don Caballero’s pioneering math rock. Guitarist Dave Konopka put in time with Lynx. Multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton still gets tied to his dad — avant-garde jazz colossus Anthony Braxton — though it’s worth noting he’s done lots of compelling work on his own, including 2002’s History That Has No Effect (JMZ).

There’s plenty of firepower here, though Mirrored doesn’t sound like the work of a typical, ego-fueled supergroup. Reflecting on the ensemble’s beginnings in 2003, Williams relates, "It was about starting from scratch rather than having it be the guy from Helmet doing what he’s supposed to do and the guy from Don Cab doing what he’s supposed to do and so on." Battles’ music is certainly cohesive, to the point of being migraine inducing. Williams is on the road between shows in Charlotte, NC, and Atlanta when we talk, and he sounds a bit mystified that some people still view Battles as a side project. "The reality is this band has taken up all of our time these past few years."

Part of this lingering getting-to-know-you talk clearly has to do with the group’s measured ascent: Battles took four years to release their first album, after all. While Williams says that part of why Mirrored took so long is simply a matter of the logistics of England’s Warp Records repackaging the band’s 2004 EPs — EP C (Monitor) and EP B (Dim Mak) — it’s clear that there were designs to build from the ground up. "One thing about the EPs was that they originally came out in the States on three separate small indie labels, and it took people a while to find out about it, and that was a conscious thing … just to have it be more word-of-mouth," Williams explains. "Another purpose of taking our time was in wanting to find our own sound, our own reason for being a band."

That sound — fractal, propulsive, profoundly stimulated — is mapped out in Mirrored‘s opening minutes. A tightly wound snare part rides the rails of muted guitar runs before "Race: In" blooms into a giant, Tortoise-size crescendo. The quartet then doubles back on the core rhythmic elements, which are projected through a half-dozen modes during the song’s five prismatic minutes. The video for the full-length’s glam-inflected single, "Atlas," offers a spot-on visual approximation: the band members play in a mirrored cube, their bobbing, duplicated forms angling in on one another as their respective parts interlock in so many different combinations.

"I guess it is a tension between enjoying far-out music that can sound inaccessible … but at the same time not thinking it should be unnecessarily difficult," Williams says of Battles’ strategy. "I think our approach is that there’s no reason it shouldn’t hit you on a primal level … even though you can take it in a thinking way too." I think it’s safe to say plenty of people are, none more than the 19-year-olds surely losing their minds to Battles and Mirrored this very minute.*

BATTLES

With Ponytail

Mon/2, 8 p.m., $15

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

The fundamentals of Fucked Up

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You needn’t be too wary of the dialogue surrounding Fucked Up, Toronto’s jewel of esoteric hardcore punk. The members’ beliefs and their names are hidden, but they’re not out to brainwash anybody. And they’re certainly not hiding anything in the songwriting department: the melodies are blistering and as uninhibited as the band, which has a knack for subverting punk conventions.

"For hardcore bands especially, politics are often made out to be black-and-white," rhythm guitarist 10,000 Marbles says on the phone from Toronto. Critics and listeners have puzzled aplenty over this pseudonyms-only band in their attempts to pin down Fucked Up’s political allegiances. Before releasing its debut, Hidden World, on Jade Tree last year, the band had spent the prior five years releasing 17 vinyl singles with artwork and lyrics that cited magick, anarchism, the Spanish Civil War, and André Gide. These may look to be the makings of a bizarre cult agenda, but Fucked Up’s "culture of confusion" and conflicting political ideas — the most bizarre instance coming in the form of a photo of a Hitler Youth rally on the cover of its 2004 split single with Haymaker on Deep Six Records — are more about kick-starting independent thought than advancing any specific, concrete ideas.

"We originally wore the anarchist tag pretty proudly," rhythm guitarist Gulag says, also calling from Toronto. "But now we’re more interested in leapfrogging cultures and ideas. It’s a more fulfilling way to live, if a little unprincipled." As amorphous as the members’ personal beliefs may be, Fucked Up doesn’t express any disdain for punk as a sound: Mustard Gas’s bass lines and vocalist Pink Eyes’s deep growl-howl are quite reverent toward the ghosts of hardcore past, and surprisingly enough, the band’s new 12-inch, Year of the Pig, marks its first waltz with rhetorical clarity and straight-ahead activism. The A-side title track examines the ongoing problem of violence toward women through the lens of prostitution, which is legal in Canada. It’s the culture of repression and guilt surrounding these subjects that has inspired the unusually pointed song, 10,000 Marbles says: "It’s taboo issues like sex work that people like us have a responsibility to talk about."

"Year of the Pig" is pretty daring stylistically and structurally, but to Fucked Up’s great credit, it’s also fantastic. Eighteen minutes long and starting as something of a twee shuffle before shifting into organ-backed operatic bellows from Pink Eyes, the song deftly delves into pummeling, psychedelic kraut rock riffage the likes of which might make Earthless or Major Stars jealous. Fucked Up’s sheer disregard of genre pigeonholes is especially evident in its recent doings. "We’re trying to bring in the electronic crowd now," Gulag says. "We just recorded a cover of [French dance duo] Justice’s ‘Stress.’ "

Venturing into Daft Punk–related territory: there’s a first for hardcore! It’s this staunch avoidance of cliché and political boundaries that very nearly makes Fucked Up punk for the Reading Is Fundamental set. More than anything else, the imperative is to ignore convention and get informed, which isn’t a fucked-up MO at all.

FUCKED UP

Sat/30, 8 p.m., $7

924 Gilman, Berk.

(510) 525-9926

www.924gilman.org

Also July 4, 9 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Wayfaring stranger

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"I never imagined doing this." It’s a sentiment that Mariee Sioux, a singer-songwriter from Nevada City, returns to many times in our phone conversation: specifically, her genuine surprise that adapting her poetry to music has resulted in a life as a touring musician. "I was terrified playing at that show," she says mirthfully, describing her first big out-of-town gig at Brightblack Morning Light’s Quiet Quiet Ocean Spell Festival in Big Sur. "The whole tour that followed helped me get used to performing…. It sucks being scared all the time."

Sioux did seem a little shy — or quiet, anyhow — the first time I saw her play, but it only served to underline the concentrated energy of her music. Spiritual poems attuned to animals and ancestors, songs like "Wizard Flurry Home" and "Buried in Teeth" burrow deep inside you, with reams of words propelled by intuitive, circular guitar patterns. The circumstances of the show — organized by friends in a eucalyptus grove overlooking Berkeley — certainly helped, though I imagine Sioux’s diamond-in-the-rough talent would have been just as readily apparent in a club.

The compositions Sioux performed that night — most from her self-released EP, A Bundled Bundle of Bundles — seemed pointedly unhurried, more akin to the folk sprawl penned by Michael Hurley and Joni Mitchell than your typical verse-chorus-verse songwriting. Her guitar melodies are often a step behind her alliterative narrations, so it makes sense that the words came first. "I always wrote, since I was little … weird writing," she explains. "And I was just surrounded by music, so I guess this all started when me and a couple of friends wanted to start learning guitar. We formed this little girl band." She laughs. "And on my own time I started making these songs."

As is so often the case, the turning point came on a journey. "I left for Patagonia for three months, and I took my guitar with me because that was my new thing I had found. So I took it with me, and I had lots of solitary time in Patagonia," she recalls. "So I just wrote more songs and practiced and basically taught myself guitar." It was only through the prodding of friends that Sioux entertained the idea of recording these new songs: "I wouldn’t have even thought that people would want to hear it."

If word hadn’t gotten out of Grass Valley, it’s easy to imagine Sioux’s music being rediscovered some years down the line. Unshaped, personal to the point of being hermetic, this is the stuff record collectors live for. As it happened, though, Brightblack Morning Light has employed the singer-songwriter in a steady opening gig following that Quiet Quiet appearance, and now Nevada City’s Grassroots Records is readying her first full-length album, Faces in the Rocks, for a September release.

When talk turns to the album, Sioux gushes about collaborating with Gentle Thunder, an American Indian flute player who "felt this immediate connection to the project," and her bluegrass musician father (the two duetted at the Great American Music Hall a few months ago). And it sounds like she’s found a good partner in Grassroots, a homespun label with plenty of singer-songwriters on the roster. Label founder Marc Snegg writes, "Mariee’s songs, poetry, singing and performance dig deep in time, soar high in spirit, and possess a breadth of natural wisdom beyond her years or any years."

Still, while it might just be the jet lag following a European tour with Brightblack talking, Sioux sounds a little tentative about the musician’s life on the phone. She’s stoned on the album but wondering when things might settle down. "I’ve just been going for over a year. I haven’t really lived anywhere. I need a fixed point…. I want to decorate a room," she says. When focusing on the music, though, her view on itinerancy takes on a different, more redemptive cast. "It’s hard to pour your heart out so many times," she muses, "but it’s also refreshing, or even renewing in a way."*

MARIEE SIOUX

With Alela Diane, Aaron Ross, and Lee Bob Watson

Tues/26, 9 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Revenge of the nerds

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"Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!" Rodney Dangerfield’s character, Al Czervik, says in one of the classic lines from Caddyshack. Oakland’s Replicator sample the line as the tag end of "Delicious Fornicake," the opening track of their new album, Machines Will Always Let You Down (Radio Is Down). The inclusion is telling: Caddyshack celebrates the redemption — nay, triumph — of the little guy, the lowly, the nobody, the nerd, the caddy, for chrissakes, despite the oppression of greedy, classist boors. Machines is, in its way, a tight, terse, aggro, nerd-rock opera, with tweed cubicles replacing expansive set pieces, and hard, noisy post-punk reminiscent of geek-rock kingpins Big Black, in an alternate universe where Steve Albini doesn’t take himself so seriously. "It’s kind of, for lack of a better term, big rock," vocalist-guitarist Conan Neutron says over the phone from his apartment. In the opening track, the narrator, with the help of "a few beers, some Scotch, and a pack of cigarettes," builds "a robot with which to have sex." In "Payment www.yzzz.rd" (pronounced "wizard"), Neutron, an IT guy for a "major financial institution" when not living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, sings, "I just got paid / So come get my cash / Come take my money / Come get it fast," the refrain of wage slaves everywhere.

The next track, "Assloads of Unrespect," is in the voice of a degenerate dot-com millionaire, the kind who crawled the Bay Area like a new species of roach in the mid- to late ’90s: "Let me begin / By saying I’m rich / I’m well-dressed / Good-looking / Hey — ain’t that a bitch? / Because I own you / That’s right, I own you." In an example of Neutron’s biting, often hilarious lyrics, the boss we love to hate goes on: "I heard it said the meek shall inherit the earth /Well, just make damn sure to shine my shoes first." The album goes on to tackle such subjects as time travel, the Enigma machine, and the spy-versus-spy uses of nanotechnology, before ending with the Office Space–like "Login with My Fist" — the battle cry of cubicle commandos everywhere — which winds down in a cacophony of screams and guitar squall, an implacable Commodore VIC-20–style voice repeating, "It does not compute," in the background.

It’s worth noting that the disc isn’t a celebration of all things techie, often a nerd stereotype. Rather, it’s a scathing denunciation of technology, or, more accurately, the devious and inhumane uses that technology has been put to in the hands of the powerful and ethically impaired. When the nerd class stops letting itself be pimped out for the glory of so-called pure science, then maybe it’ll inherit the earth. And when people stop being enamored of machines making life easier, maybe they’ll realize they’re being enslaved by technology — that, indeed, machines will always let you down.

"We make music for very pissed-off smart people," Neutron says. He goes on to acknowledge that this target demo is a small slice of the music-listening public: "Our music isn’t very popular." Formed in 1999, Replicator — Neutron, Ben Adrian on bass and keyboard, Chris Bolig on drums, and "junior partner" Todd Grant on guitar — have seen trends come and go. "First everyone was really into indie pop," Neutron says. "Then everyone was into sounding like Radiohead and then garage rock and then everyone wanted to, like, wear a mask and not really play music."

Through it all, Replicator have released three pissed-off, smart records, toured heavily, and brought to mind a time "when it was not an insult to be considered brilliant," as the lyric on "Login with My Fist" goes. I’m not saying they’re brilliant — nor am I saying they’re not — but what they’re attempting doesn’t accept mediocrity. This uncompromising approach often seems to have relegated them to the middle slot of shows while the underground flavor du jour headlines above them. Like Dangerfield, they get no respect.

One of the titles kicked around for the new album was Fuck You, Still Here. "I see bands that are more careerist," Neutron says. "They have this idea: ‘Oh, we’re going to get signed and then we’re going to make this video and go on tour with this band.’ That seems to be their end goal.

"Our end goal is to return the ass-kicking that music has given us."

REPLICATOR

With Moggs and Colony of Watts

June 30, 9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Smells like DIY spirit

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

K Records founder and ex–Beat Happener Calvin Johnson once wrote in New York Rocker, "Rock ‘n’ roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages — they could be 15, 25, or 35. It all boils down to whether they’ve got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit."

That sentiment still holds for the Olympia, Wash., native, who will turn 45 this November. The deep-drawling baritone is probably best known for spreading Beat Happening’s jangle-pop gospel from the mid-’80s to the early ’90s. Yet he also formed the recently reunited Halo Benders with Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch, as well as Cool Rays, the Go Team, and Dub Narcotic Sound System. He’s collaborated with groups such as the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mount Eerie, Mirah, and the Blow and has helped organize the International Pop Underground Festival, in addition to the forthcoming Helsing Junction Sleepover in Thurston County, Wash. And throughout his quarter-century pursuit of youthful verve — whether as bandmate, producer, label owner, or festival organizer — Johnson has kept the company of those who share his distinct brand of DIY devotion. Rather than being concerned with aesthetics or lack of talent, he and his peers know it’s more essential to be sincere, truthful, and confident with what feels natural when it comes to music making.

Some of those chums include K alums Jason Anderson (Wolf Colonel), Kyle Field (Little Wings), and Adam Forkner (White Rainbow), the three of whom Anderson deemed the Sons of the Soil and who tagged along with Johnson as his backing band on a 2003 West Coast tour. Johnson said over the phone from his K Records headquarters in Olympia that Anderson approached him in 2003 about sifting through Johnson’s solo work and other projects and revamping them with a rock outfit. Johnson, who usually simply plays acoustic sets during his live performances, didn’t need much persuasion.

"The arrangements on some of the songs vary greatly from the recordings that I had previously done," he explained. "Particularly ‘Lies Goodbye,’ which on my solo album was just me with an acoustic guitar. And here it’s more of an upbeat, rocking number. That all came out of the fact that when we first started playing together, the arrangements all came naturally."

At the tour’s conclusion, the foursome agreed to enter Johnson’s Dub Narcotic Studio and lay down songs from their excursion. "It was just a band we put together for a tour, but then we were, like, ‘Oh, we’re all practiced up — why don’t we document this?’" Johnson remembered. The result of the sessions, released almost four years after the fact, Calvin Johnson and the Sons of the Soil (K) is a buoyant, funk-charged listen, updated by the quartet in a manner Johnson himself may never have envisioned. At times romantically soul-driven ("Can We Kiss"), at other times bluesy ("What Was Me"), the album mainly consists of high-spirited, bass-heavy rockers ("Tummy Hop," "Sand").

"I’m really happy with the way the record turned out," Johnson said, "because it was fun to make and I like the way the songs are interpreted."

Two live interpretations of "Tummy Hop" and "What Was Me," drawn from the band’s tour, pop up on the CD, both containing interludes during which the group quietly plays in the background while Johnson rambles on like a lounge singer. At one point during the latter, he states, "So people say to me, ‘Calvin Johnson … who are you?’"

I think it’s safe to say that question’s already been answered. *

CALVIN JOHNSON

With Julie Doiron

Fri/15, 6 p.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

Moderne folk sans borders

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Some years after she took the City of Lights by storm, the great African American chanteuse Josephine Baker famously sang, "J’ai deux amours / Mon pays et Paris": "I have two loves / My country and Paris." For the neofolkish, introspective French singer-songwriter Keren Ann, the journey has been the opposite of Baker’s.

After establishing herself with a pair of fine, well-received folk-pop albums in her native France, Keren Ann went bicontinental, establishing a base in New York City, and started recording songs in English. I’m Not Going Anywhere (2003) was her critically acclaimed first English-language effort, for Blue Note’s Metro Blue imprint. That was followed by the superb 2005 English-French hybrid Nolita (named after her New York neighborhood north of Little Italy) and now her latest, a self-titled, all-English CD. Not content with having just deux amours, however, she has truly become a singer without borders. Though mostly recorded at her home studios and in commercial facilities in New York and Paris, the new album includes songs that were cut in Reykjavik and tapped members of the Icelandic Culture House choir; other tracks were laid down in Avignon in Provence, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv.

In fact, when Keren Ann calls me for an interview in mid-May, she is ensconced in a Tel Aviv recording studio, working on — get this — a Christmas song for a Starbucks compilation. Any perceived irony aside, this fits into her plan of recording wherever and whenever the inspiration strikes her, as was the case throughout the making of Keren Ann.

"I mostly adapted the recording to other things I was doing," she says cheerfully in a lightly accented English that has become even more Americanized in the two years since I last interviewed her. "I didn’t want to schedule recording periods for the album. I’ve done that in the past, and I’m sure I’ll do it in the future, but it was more interesting to be able record wherever I was, whether I was working with a choir on another project or touring or being somewhere on vacation. I always carry tapes and hard drives with me, so I could record and add things.

"On this album, sometimes I wanted to re-create different studio environments I found myself in — like high ceilings in one, wood in another — and twist it around so it sounds homogenic." (I think she means homogenous. Although Keren Ann speaks English well, she does come up with the occasional charming syntactical curiosity — but rarely in her songwriting.)

Raised mostly in Paris by a Russian Israeli father and a Javanese Dutch mother, Keren Ann Zeidel knew from an early age that she wanted to be a singer-songwriter. Influenced by French singers she heard on the radio and on albums, she also gravitated toward confessional writers from across the Atlantic such as Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. While still a teenager, she started making tapes of her own songs on a four-track recorder. Indeed, she has always had a studio of some sort wherever she lives, and she knows enough about engineering to make elaborate demos at home or add overdubs to tracks recorded in conventional studios. Her two French albums were collaborations with the noted producer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Biolay, and some of his innovative production ideas have clearly rubbed off on her.

Her albums are quietly powerful. Though her fragile voice rarely rises above a breathy whisper, her songs can still be quite intense, thanks to her often unusual arrangement ideas: effected guitars that bring to mind New York’s Bill Frisell and others, striking keyboard patches, atmospheric trumpets, elegant violin and cello, and stacks of ethereal backing vocals.

"I naturally have a melancholic side," she says, "and I like to mix that feeling with luminous melodies so there is a balance. It’s the same with the productions: I might want to have a quiet vocal with something more aggressive underneath it to balance it."

Asked about current influences in her music, she offers, "Not really much in the area of pop music. The person whose music has touched me the most, recently, is Phillip Glass. I love the way he gets so much emotion out of repetition and the way he builds his pieces."

She says she feels equally comfortable writing in English and French — "whichever one works best for the emotions I’m feeling at the time" — though she admits her choice is also affected by geography. "Any language is expressive," she adds. "Had I started writing in English, maybe for a challenge I would have needed to go to France at some point and write in French, because I like challenges and I like working with languages — I think they open up different aspects of your way of thinking and your character. I have that need to absorb and be absorbed by different surroundings and then take them into my work." (Blair Jackson)

KEREN ANN

With Jason Hart

Sat/16, 9 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.musichallsf.com

Welcome to my pop nightmare

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Gazing disdainfully from the cover of their album Strange House (Loog), the Horrors greet listeners with the air of Edward Gorey characters on a smoke break. Together, they are a scarily beautiful organism: a slick plastic spider with 10 spindly legs and a penchant for manic, blood-soaked coffin rock. Their shows, in contrast, are short, riotous affairs that revolve around a schizoid brand of gothabilly and the shrieks and antics of lead vocalist Faris Badwan. The Horrors have graced the cover of NME, dumped garbage on industry bigwigs at South by Southwest, and amassed a throng of fans worldwide. They’ve also, of course, sent the pointy-shoe market skyrocketing.

The Horrors were born, appropriately enough, in the bowels of a rotting Victorian hotel, the home of the fashionable Junk Club in Southend-on-Sea in London’s neighboring Essex County, in the summer of 2005. Rhys "Spider" Webb, keyboardist for the Horrors, recalls that the transition from clubgoers to band was not a prolonged one. "We were actually sitting around a table, and it was, like, ‘Let’s go into the studio for rehearsal next week.’ Faris had a couple of cover versions he wanted to work on. We’ve been playing ever since, to be honest."

One of the covers that Badwan had chosen, Screaming Lord Sutch’s "Jack the Ripper," eventually became the Horrors’ debut single. It was paired with an original composition, "Sheena Is a Parasite," a bombastic microtune of a minute and 42 seconds, the tale of an enigmatically vile heroine set to a pulsating bass and a skittering, looped backbeat. The song attracted the attention of one Chris Cunningham, the creative force behind Aphex Twin’s infamous "Come to Daddy" and "Windowlicker" videos, who allegedly found it on MySpace. Cunningham had soured on videos and hadn’t made one in seven years when the Horrors caught his ear and sent him into a storyboarding frenzy. Webb remembers, "He contacted Polydor and said, ‘Who’s doing the video? I’d love to do it.’" The finished product shows Samantha Morton falling victim to her own exploding viscera amid a frenetic doomscape. Apparently not bothered by disemboweled women, MTV banned the video for its use of strobe lights, promptly creating more publicity for the piece — and the Horrors — than it would have otherwise garnered.

As heirs of death rock, the Horrors come across like the naughty grandchildren of the Birthday Party, with Badwan channeling bits of Nick Cave as he screams his ghoulish repertoire, his large frame weaving across the stage. (In fact, Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos appears in the credits for Strange House, having produced their single "Count in Fives.") But while blood pours out of their lyrics and violence peppers their shows, it is the Horrors’ love of music — all music — that grants them a sense of humor and keeps them from buying into their gloomy hype. A club DJ for many years, Webb explains that playfulness further, saying, "The music I like to buy could be Robert Johnson or the Sonics, the Contortions, or DNA." He recalls a group walking into the Horrors’ dressing room and getting a surprise: "I think they expected us to be listening to ’60s garage and punk and rhythm and blues, and they caught us all dancing to drum ‘n’ bass records."

In the song "Draw Japan," Badwan tackles manifest destiny as Bauhaus beats rush past and Webb’s organ hiccups away in counterpoint. "I will draw Japan with a ravenous pen / Hungry for oil and iron and tin," he barks. It’s almost more Christian death than the Cramps, a perfect example of the Horrors’ genre blend ‘n’ bend. The key to that meld is guitarist Joshua Third, a.k.a. Joshua Hayward, possessor of the Horrors’ hugest mane of hair and, coincidentally, a physics degree. Webb describes Third as "a bit of a mad scientist" who spends his free time "locked in his cupboard, building strange components." For a recent issue of the band’s fanzine, Horror Asparagus Stories, Third taught readers how to build their own effects pedal. Webb is already gearing up for the next edition, having created a compilation called "Top Tracks about the Unstable State of Human Minds."

For all their conceptual flourishes, the Horrors have encountered a backlash from people who take exception to their meticulously crafted aesthetic. Webb concedes, "If you see a band like us, it looks like this kind of package," but notes that their look is inspired by friends such as album artist Ciaran O’Shea, who worked with Webb before the Horrors existed. Detractors aside, the tacit test for the Horrors will be their upcoming US tour. Webb recounts being warned before their first transatlantic jaunt that crowds in the States would be anything but enthusiastic. Instead, he was happy that "we’ve never found that anywhere in the world. The music provokes the same kind of reaction wherever we are." *

HORRORS

Tues/19, 9 p.m., $13

Popscene

330 Ritch, SF

(415) 541-9574

www.popscene-sf.com

I just wanna testify

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In high school I was a band geek. OK, not quite: I was never cool enough to make it into the inner circle of the Blackbirds Marching Band, and so — odd duck that I was — I’d be left flapping around on the outer margins of the football stadium bleachers while all the hilarity and revelry that a pack of gangly teenagers in polyester and feathery headgear can muster would carry on without notice of me and my forlorn little trumpet. I ain’t saying you need to shed a tear or anything, but I did drop band hot potato–style mid–sophomore year and switched to a cappella choir, became a theater fag, and found my badge to wear in the relentlessly status-conscious gauntlet that is the American high school. I never picked up that trumpet again.

Which I suppose means I might still be working through those high school slights every time I throw myself full force into the ecstatic horn frenzy of the Gomorran Social Aid and Pleasure Club, but what the hell. Add these East Bay bacchanalians to the serious brass lovefest being led by the likes of DeVotchKa, Beirut, and a Hawk and a Hacksaw, and I think I’ve hit just the therapy I need. Look around: suddenly trumpets, trombones, and tubas are the new guitar. Welcome back to band camp, I tell myself, only this time it’s cool.

Let the healing begin!

And what better way to introduce our six romping, stomping Gomorrans than with a call for rejuvenation? The band name itself is a gospel to them, a platform from which to preach their party-as-catharsis convictions while shaking out some of the most deliriously crooked New Orleans ragtime you’ve ever heard. It’s more than just a name — it’s a way of life.

"The funny thing is, the name existed for probably six months before we were technically even a band," chief songwriter and banjo-playing vocalist Beebe says, chuckling, at a Mission coffeehouse. (At the risk of provoking flashbacks of high school football coaches, members prefer to be called by their last names.) "My brother Adam created the concept, artwork, Web site, everything … even had us all listed in the lineup before we’d even played a note!"

"Yeah, we each ended up finding out when we’d bump into a friend who’d say, ‘Oh, I heard you’re in a new band,’" tuba player Kirley says. "Eventually, we all discovered we were in a band together, so we figured, let’s do it!"

In addition to Beebe and Kirley, four others learned of their band membership: Davis (trumpet, vocals), Lehnartz (clarinet, vocals), Knippelmeir (trombone, vocals), and Westbrook (trash drums). But before we leap to any Maurice Starr–mastermind comparisons, a few facts: all six were already good friends who lived together, as they still do, in a house in Oakland. All were musicians who shared a passion for old-time sounds, particularly those blaring out of New Orleans. All of them have called the Crescent City home at some point. Putting together a band was a natural next step … unless, of course, you’re of a more spiritual bent and wish to call it destiny.

A kind of spirituality does figure prominently in the Gomorran ethic, albeit one that preaches the virtue of whiskey and encourages audiences to bear witness as well. Once a tent-revival level of rapture has been reached, Beebe invites members of the congregation onstage for faith healings, which feed the cycle of sin and salvation. "If I take in some sin, it’s gonna get disbursed," he jokes, bandmates nodding to show they’re willing to share the burden.

Judging from their recent self-released eponymous debut, bearing such a heavy load is not a problem. Recorded in an abandoned hotel and featuring a drum kit culled from junkyard roamings — "I’d much rather put it together myself than have some fancy kit," Westbrook says — the album wobbles with rickety charms while exuding the moxie of a midnight bender in the making. From the clattering pot-and-pan rhythms of "The Westbrook Two-Step," inspired by the train tracks outside the drummer’s workplace, to the humidity dripping from each frantic note of the klezmer-Dixieland fusion workout "Klanzmeirtong" to the boozy testimonial "Whiskey Paycheck," the Gomorrans celebrate wild abandon with, well, wild abandon. They might be playing ragtime, but they’re by no means a ragtime band: "We’re definitely rock ‘n’ rollers playing jazz, not the other way round," Lehnartz explains.

And with this comes the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, I assume? Beebe gives some illuminating confirmation when I ask what inspires their songwriting: "Sleep deprivation, definitely."

Hmm, all that sin disbursing will do that, won’t it? *

"MISHAP SCIENCE FAIR"

With the Gomorran Social Aid and Pleasure Club, Top Ramen, James Call and the Missing Teens, and Brian Kenny Fresno

Fri/8, 8 p.m., $8 or free with erupting papier-mâché volcano, robot, or perpetual motion machine

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(510) 595-7188

www.12galaxies.com

Living in the moment

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Anat Cohen, an Israeli-born New Yorker often found working in Latin bands, seems intent on leaving no jazz style unexplored. Whether on tenor saxophone — essaying the opening melody of Cuban drummer Francisco Mela’s straight-ahead "John Ramsay" from his 2006 album Melao (Ayva) — or soloing on clarinet with the Brazilian Choro Ensemble, Cohen seems to intuitively absorb the musical language she’s engaged in. With a burgeoning reputation preceding her and two new albums in tow, she comes to Yoshi’s this week, performing alongside guitarist Vic Juris and drummer Daniel Freedman. Special guest pianist Jason Lindner, Cohen’s longtime colleague and mentor, will sit in on June 6.

Earlier this year Cohen released Poetica, a sensuous, clarinet-based album augmented with a string quartet, simultaneously with Noir, a film score–ready big-band full-length on which she played mostly saxophone. She produced both records and released them on her up-and-coming independent label, Anzic.

Cohen spoke by phone from Tel Aviv, where she was preparing for a concert with her two brothers, saxophonist Yuval and trumpet player Avishai. The latter sat in with the SFJAZZ Collective this spring when Dave Douglas was unavailable.

She laughed about releasing two albums at once, saying it has raised eyebrows even though that wasn’t her intent. "They’re very different, but it just makes sense to put them out together because they show different musical adventures for me," she said. "Different musical personalities on the instruments and different approaches to the music."

She began Noir almost a year before Poetica, but the big-band recording was more complex to put together. Cohen and coproducer Oded Lev-Ari, who wrote the arrangements, had gathered some musicians to try the music out. The results sounded good, and they wanted to record it, but they needed more music to complete the album.

"It’s a longer process, obviously, because it’s a 15-piece band, and it just takes longer to write everything," Cohen said. The tunes are a travelogue of cultures reflecting Cohen’s journeys that opens with Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona’s "La Comparsa," touches on Sun Ra and Hobart Dotson’s "You Never Told Me That You Care," and closes with music by a couple of Brazilian icons: Hermeto Pascual’s "Bebe!" and Pixinguinha’s "Ingênuo." There are also American pop songs such as "Cry Me a River" and "No Moon at All."

During the making of Noir, Cohen decided she’d like to make a clarinet album and enlisted friend and bassist Omer Avitale to write string arrangements. Poetica includes the old Israeli songs "Hofim" and "Eyn Gedi," the Jacques Brel song "La Chanson des Vieux Amants," and a lush arrangement of John Coltrane’s "Lonnie’s Lament."

Cohen called Coltrane her "constant inspiration." "I’ve tried along my musical path to really be open," she explained. "I have, of course, a passion for the traditionals of the American songbook and the American art form called jazz. But I also fell in love along the way with a lot of world music."

She’s the only non-Brazilian member of the Choro Ensemble but has toured the country several times, taking the opportunity to learn its language, culture, and music.

She’s also immersed herself in the rich musical heritages of Venezuela and Colombia. "I got stuck in Colombia during 9/11, and I couldn’t come back to New York," Cohen recalled. "I stayed there for three weeks, and I learned so much about Colombian music. It was a great adventure, really living the moment."

ANAT COHEN

Wed/6–Thurs/7, 8 and 10 p.m., $10

Yoshi’s

510 Embarcadero West

Jack London Square, Oakl.

(510) 238-9200

www.yoshis.com

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