339: King Hokum, by C.W. Stoneking

C.W. Stoneking (Australia)
King Hokum (2006)
11 tracks, 37 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Between covering C.W. Stoneking’s Jungle Blues on this blog and writing a review of his latest, Gon’ Boogaloo, for fRoots Magazine, with today’s entry I’ll have ended up writing about all his (official) releases in one form or another. I even wrote an article for fRoots that now serves as the biography on Stoneking’s own website, which I’m particularly proud of. All of which is to say, I obviously can’t stop going on about him. For good reason, too.

Seriously, I would struggle to think of an artist with a more perfect discography. Across those three albums, there is barely a song that is anything short of fantastic. He doesn’t stay in the same place, either. Today’s album, King Hokum, was released first and has a very pre-war country blues feel; Jungle Blues is more of a vaudevillian set with a few calypsos thrown in, and then Gon’ Boogaloo changes it up even more, switching the acoustic guitar and banjo for an entirely electric guitar-based album of gospel, jump blues and rock’n’roll of the rootsiest flavours.

Like I said in my entry on Jungle Blues back in June, I feel like I could write at length about every song that man’s made, and King Hokum is no exception. Well, I’m not going to write at length. But here’s a run-down of each, because god knows I have other work to be doing today and I will not miss this opportunity to procrastinate in the name of productivity:

C.W. Stoneking’s King Hokum Track-by-Track Commentary by Your Host, Jim Hickson

• ‘Way Out In the World’ – A great opener with a chunky-sounding National Resonator guitar plonking out a moan that feels like it could be 100 years old. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Don't Go Dancin' Down the Darktown Strutter's Ball’ – One of my favourites from Stoneking. Brilliantly simple tenor banjo work and some of the most beautifully subtle blue note bends in his old man’s voice make my neck-hair stand on end. Slightly menacing but sadly imparted words of advice. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘She's a Bread Baker’ – An upbeat one! The first of the album, and a typical jelly-roll blues with all of the word play, metaphor and witty couplets that you’d expect. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Dodo Blues’ – Probably the most well-known song on the album. Actually quite a touching song of heartbreak, wrapped up in a sketch about a ‘singing’ dodo at a market – the last one in existence. In that context, the lyrics are even given an additional layer of poignancy, ridiculous as it sounds. Fair play. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘On a Christmas Day’ – A guest appearance from Kirsty Fraser, who joins Stoneking for some over-the-top festive horniness. Filled with groansome innuendo (in the best way) and brazen smut. ‘I’m so glad, I’ve waited ‘round the clock / I’ve been wantin’ all year for a suck of that – yeah!’ indeed. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Charley Bostock’s Blues’ – A really moving piece. Based on the true story of the death of Stoneking’s old bandmate. Really emotional, and really well-written. Watching him perform it live is always a special, heartfelt moment. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Goin' the Country’ – In which the artist embodies two separate personalities in one song. A great and light-hearted take on the romantic rail-hopping story archetype. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Bad Luck Everywhere You Go’ – A real chugging-along blues that sounds like it’s been curdled at the bottom of a swamp and slowly risen to the surface like a sluggish bubble. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Rich Man's Blues’ – A Tory’s anthem. Tongue firmly in cheek. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘You Took My Thing and Put It In Your Place’ – Fraser’s back for another round of innuendo blatant enough to make a herpetologist blush. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Handyman Blues’ – Another great song, and with a wonderful performance from the horn section too. More sly innuendo, but in a darker musical tone this time. Stoneking’s delivery of the word ‘handyman’ in the chorus is spine-tingling and even more so when joined by the horns in harmony when it’s performed live. That little innovation was added after the album recording though. Still, it’s recommended all the same.

Well there you have it. 11 brilliant tracks from a brilliant musician. I think that’s probably enough procrastination for me to be getting on with for now. And for you to be getting on with: listen to everything of C.W. Stoneking’s work you can get your hands on. And whenever he gets around to releasing his next album, you can be sure that I’ll be writing about it in some form, somewhere or other. I can’t wait!

308: Les Aborigènes: Chants et Danses de l’Australie du Nord, by Djoli Laiwanga & David Blanasi

Djoli Laiwanga & David Blanasi (Australia)
Les Aborigènes: Chants et Danses de l’Australie du Nord (1980)
20 tracks, 41 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Of all the music in the world, that of the indigenous Australians is thought to be the oldest living tradition – music performed today is part of an unbroken lineage stretching back 40,000 years. Listening to indigenous Australian music is a special experience that carries with it many millennia of human history.

The music on this album is in that deeply-rooted traditional style performed by songman Djoli Laiwanga and the mago (didgeridoo) player David Blanasi as well as dancers David Gulpilil and Dick Plummer whose stomps, clapsticks and vocal interjects can be heard on the record. The performers are of the Mayali and Mandalbingu people from Arnhem Land in the very north of the country. If you can conjure the sounds of Aborigine music in your head, the chances are it is these musicians that put it there – they were the first group of traditional Australian musicians to perform around the world and on television in the 1960s; for many, this was the first time they’d ever heard this music.

There is really nothing quite like this music. The mago itself is a unique instrument. A long, hollowed-out wooden pipe, it is blown into to produce just one single note, its duration indefinite due to its player’s use of circular breathing. A lot can be made of just one note, however, and the mago’s distinctive sound comes from the player changing the shape of their mouth, altering the pressure within the cheeks and the amount of air being passed through the instrument, and simultaneously vocalising while playing. This creates a rolling, ever-changing tone that creates a bed for the song as well as providing rhythms and mimesis – the imitation of natural sounds. The very first track on this album sees Blanasi imitating the sounds of a dingo with his mago, which would accompany a dance with movements based on the wild dog.

The songs themselves are equally as distinctive in the musical patterns they trace, whether they start at a high pitch before gradually (or dramatically) falling to a low register over the space of a line, or whether they stick to just one or two notes, chanting rhythmically and providing, with the mago, more layers of drones and building up a whole landscape. They sing of profound topics: the beginnings of Earth and of human, the movements of the spirits and the lessons of the ancestors. Famously, many songmen do not credit themselves as composers, as songs are given to them in the Dreamtime and can use them to navigate the world around them.

Listening to this album, it’s hard not to be in awe of this music, which echoes throughout history and still sounds so powerful today. However, it can still bring to mind more contemporary music. The last track, here simply entitled ‘Didjeridu’, is a solo mago piece, but instead of being based on direct natural imitation like the album’s opener, it is a simple pattern of stressed and unstressed ‘syllables’ that cycle across different inherent rhythms. It’s incredibly hypnotic, but what it reminds me of is deep house music. Stick that track on a loop with some heavy bass speakers and a repetitive beat and you could keep a club happy for hours, I’m sure of it. Whether good music is developed yesterday, or in far prehistory, it can always give the listener the same feeling of excitement and pleasure. There’s little better way of experiencing that than by listening to the stuff that came first.

306: Grim Fandango Remastered: Original Soundtrack, by Peter McConnell & Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Peter McConnell & Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (USA/Australia)
Grim Fandango Remastered: Original Soundtrack (2015)
37 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

With bony hands I hold my partner

On soulless feet we cross the floor

The music stops as if to answer

An empty knocking at the door

It seems his skin was sweet as mango

When last I held him to my breast

But now we dance this grim fandango

And will four years before we rest

Olivia Ofrenda

Well. Surely this is serendipity at its finest? Today is the 2nd November, otherwise known as Día de Muertos – the Mexican day of the dead – and here we have an album dedicated to just that day. Surely there have been some ancestral forces at play in determining that. Thank you, ancestors!

I say the album is dedicated to it, it’s actually the game of which the album is the soundtrack that is dedicated to it. Grim Fandango, originally released in 1998, is one of the best video games of all time. The gameplay itself is in the classic LucasArts puzzle-solving adventure style, but it is its aesthetic and narrative that make the game truly iconic. It is a stunningly beautiful world with a unique and genius set of influences. The setting is the Land of the Dead whose architecture is a mix of art deco, Aztec and Latin American styles. The story is a classic film noir conspiracy and its cast the souls of the departed, making their way to the next world. They are reapers, gangsters, beatniks, revolutionaries, grizzled seadogs, colossal elemental spirits driving tricked-out hot-rods, and many more innocent dead caught in the crossfire. And all of this is set across four days: the Day of the Dead, four years in a row. I’m getting excited about it just writing about this game: that’s how much it impacted me.

The music is such an important part of this world building too. It suits the locations and the atmospheres to a T, and it uses just as many (if not more) influences. Throughout the soundtrack, composed by Peter McConnell, are elements of Mexican son and mariachi, Andean music, Indian classical, surf rock and tango, which all fit in and alongside the main sounds – cool and smoky jazz, frenetic bebop and dramatic and occasionally avant-garde classical orchestral music. Not only is it the perfect soundtrack to Grim Fandango, but it’s also just an amazing album.

The particular album is actually not the soundtrack as heard in the original 1998 release of the game, but of the 2015 ‘remaster,’ in which the game underwent a full clean-up, transforming the incredibly polygonal models for shiny, round, high-definition ones without losing any of its unique visual style. The music underwent an overhaul, too. The original soundtrack had been created with a handful of musicians and a huge library of sampled sounds to recreate the immense textures of orchestras and big bands. The problem was that, although the music sounded real enough for a 90s video game (when gamers were still used to music made up of bleeps and bloops), the timbres sounded dated in the 2010s. So, they went back to the original scores and re-recorded the lot of it from the ground up, with all live musicians and a full symphony orchestra. It sounds absolutely luscious.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t really intending to buy the remastered album; after all, I already had the original soundtrack and those slightly clunky sounds had their own charm to them. I had the remastered version of the game to listen to the new recordings if I wanted to, so what’s the point. But then I heard the new version of the piece ‘Casino Calavera’. Here is the 1998 original:

And here is the 2015 remaster:

For the first chunk of it, it’s pretty much what I expected: the same piece of music in every way, a swanky big band toe-tapper with a slightly dark edge to it, sounding lovely and polished by its performance by human musicians rather than computers. But then…an extended, improvised Latin jazz trombone solo! I wasn’t expecting it at all, and to hear a piece of music you know so well and love changed up in that way is like finding that your favourite book had a handful of equally-enjoyable chapters at the end of it that you’d never noticed before. The solo finished and I was already getting my bank card out to buy that soundtrack when…a clarinet solo! Oh man. Is it silly to be that blown away by the soundtrack to a video game?

I love it, I love it, and I will recommend Grim Fandango to absolutely anyone. If you have any interest whatsoever in video games, film noir, jazz culture or just great storytelling, you owe it to yourself to experience this game. Delve into its world and you’ll find something truly wonderful and a spectacular piece of art. And if all you want is a great and varied hour of music to divert you, the soundtrack will do just that too. Happy Day of the Dead!

217: Tender Prey, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Australia)
Tender Prey (1988)
11 tracks, 54 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I don’t know why, but this album always makes me think of the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers. I reckoned it was because it may have been used as part of the soundtrack, but I looked it up and nope, no Nick Cave there at all. I think it must be because they both share a similar vibe, or maybe aesthetic. The most memorable and exciting moments of each are made up of an unsettlingly entertaining combination of ultra-violence and bleakness with a twinkle-eyed but pitch-black humour and a haunting beauty. Tender Prey’s songs are catchy like pop songs, but you won’t want to catch yourself idly singing these lyrics in public.

I really like the subversion of styles that Cave uses here, and things are never usually as they sound. ‘Deanna’ is an up-tempo gospel song that tells a gruesome story with a bug-eyed and manic delivery from all musicians involved; ‘Up Jumped the Devil’ is a work song suitable for mining brimstone in hell. The album is also relentless. There is a darkness to every single track in some way, whether it be subject matter, musically or just in the slightly weird and disturbing production. It’s also in the tracks themselves: both ‘The Mercy Seat’ and ‘Up Jumped the Devil’ end up in just a rolling and roiling jumble of sounds, repeated and overlapping phrases that get more and more demented the longer they tumble along together. As an exercise in atmosphere curation, Tender Prey is a masterwork.

And for all that, Cave doesn’t enjoy it at all. He’s been quoted as saying he doesn’t particularly like the songs, or the performances, or the production. His later disappointment (even revulsion?) in the result is a little understandable from a personal level – the album was made at a dark point in his life, at the height of his heroin abuse, living in a foreign country with a band wracked with disagreements and divisions. I reckon it’s natural to resent anything that comes from those origins. But those pressures somehow resulted in – from a neutral standpoint – an amazing album that reflects the darkness of its birth without seemingly any effect on its quality as a piece of art. This is not an album I could listen to every day. In fact, I’ve not listened to it for years. But when I do break it out, I revel in it all over again in disconcerted joy. Back into the CD rack for another few years, then.

169: Live in the Street, by Dub FX

Dub FX (Australia)
Live in the Street (2008)
10 tracks, 52 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

In 2019, when the beatbox-and-loop-pedal, ‘all from the mouth’ sort of thing is now a well-known gimmick, the music of Dub FX still stands out as great music regardless of how it’s made. It is true that all the sounds on this album come from the mouth of Dub FX (as well as a couple of guest rappers on two of the tracks), at least at the beginning of their journey. Those sounds then go through so many layers of looping and processing that they come out as a whole selection of synths and drum machines.

What I find especially impressive is his range of production skills that are conducted entirely live and, for the most part, with his feet. As his name suggests, dub is a huge part of his sound, and he uses a lot of the same techniques as a dubmaster in his performance. Not only does he build up the loops seamlessly, he then takes the various ‘live’ looping samples of the track and process them all separately, dropping them in and out of the mix as appropriate, apply different effects and huge delays on each individually, all to craft and change the atmosphere throughout a piece. That these dub techniques are utilised on his own sound that is actually a mix of varous hip-hop and electronic styles give a really unique spin on the solo beatbox trope. And Dub FX’s use of beatbox doesn’t stray too far away from its original purpose either – at the end of it all, his dance-and-trance-inducing soundscapes are a wonderful vehicle for his raps, which he tumbles into with supreme flow.

Obviously, this album was recorded entirely live, and entirely on the street. It’s his very first album, made to sell while busking, and I really think that’s the perfect setting for his music and performance. I've seen him live in busking mode many times, actually – sometimes by chance, sometimes by design, and the connection that he shares with his audience as they all stand on the same level, just a metre apart is truly special. It sort of reinforces the whole ‘live’ nature of the performance, that even though the music has the sound of perfectly crafted electronica, at the heart of it it’s still all done on-the-fly, and the audience affects it in a very real way, whether literally getting up and taking a turn on the mic (he’s always open for new musical friends – even I’ve had the pleasure of jamming with him under a bridge in Berlin) or just in the reciprocal vibes that pass between everyone present. I caught him doing a show once on a proper stage, raised up and apart from his audience, and while the music was technically fine, the atmosphere was just shot. The street is his real home and the ideal place for his art.

I feel the same way about Dub FX’s albums. He’s released quite a few studio recordings after this one, and to be fair, they are actually really good – that production wizardry is even more in evidence when he’s behind a mixing desk rather than a bunch of effects pedals – but for me, this debut perfectly captures everything that he and his music are all about: getting down on the level, crafting the sounds organically among people, and letting the whole vibe flow easily through the microphone.

154: Jungle Blues, by C.W. Stoneking

C.W. Stoneking (Australia)
Jungle Blues (2008)
10 tracks, 40 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

I’ve talked a lot about C.W. Stoneking in the past – most recently in a big article for fRoots not too long ago, which you can read over on my other blog – and I’m sure I will continue to for a long time to come. I’m an unabashed fanboy of Stoneking’s. I’ve seen him more times than I can count and I’ve listened to his albums enough to know each song by heart. But as with many of his fans in the UK, my first exposure to him was his second ‘official’ release, Jungle Blues.

In his first album (which we’ll come to on here sooner or later), Stoneking’s sound is very much based on blues, but on Jungle Blues he branches out. Blues is still at the core of his work, but he also brings in many closely related genres from the time when all that stuff was less closely defined: there’s vaudeville, calypso, early jazz, country and gospel and it’s all jumbled up together, giving it all a 1910s-early 1950s vibe, depending on the track, which is all enhanced by his fantastic, 80-years-old-and-no-teeth voice (which contrasts with his youthful figure) and sparkling wit.

Every track here is perfect, to be honest. While there are big hitting tracks such as ‘Jungle Blues’ and ‘The Love Me or Die’, having seen Stoneking so many times, what strikes me the most when I listen to this album now is what you don’t get on stage. There are two performances in particular that I would absolutely love to see. Firstly is Chris Tanner on clarinet; he contributes to the horn section all through the album, and the shrill woodwind of the clarinet contrasts and complements the lower brass of the sousaphones, trombones and even trumpets and adds a light giddiness as it flutters around, klezmerish on occasion, above the rest of the sound. I never saw Stoneking with a clarinet in his set-up, and now he seems to have ditched the horns in his touring band for good, maybe I never will. Secondly is the voice of actor Kirsty Fraser, who also happens to be Stoneking’s wife. She leads the housewife’s lament ‘Housebound Blues’ with a smouldering fury, and her voice fits the music’s vintage sound just as well as her partner’s.

Really, I could do a deep dive into every song in C.W. Stoneking’s repertoire, and I’m sure I will probably do that at some point (365 C.W. Stoneking Songs for 2020, anyone?). But until then, I will have to suffice with saying, just get your hands on anything you can by the man and lose yourself in his world. Definitely see him live – he’s a great showman and comes around to the UK, Europe and the US fairly often – but it’s also interesting to hear how his shows differ from his live performances.