A couple years back, I accompanied the wife to the actual Wammie award ceremony, and we were both amazed by this:

You can actually see her perform in this one – at about 4:55 – but the audio quality is significantly poorer. That girl’s got a lot of voice.

To Dead Men’s Hollow, my wife’s band, on winning what is I believe their eighth Wammie award.  The Wammies are the Washington area’s regional grammy-equivalent and this year they won for Best Bluegrass Recording for their album Angels’ Share.

Angels’ Share is Bluegrass Gospel, and its some good stuff.  Strangely, they don’t seem to have any songs from the new album on their page, but you can hear snippets on the amazon page I linked above.  You can download some older live recordings here, or listen to more stuff on the band’s myspace page.

My wife’s band is better than your wife’s band.  Unless you’re Mike, Gavin, or Ari.  In which case your wife’s band is my wife’s band.

Because John Lanius reminded me of this.

Johno peeks his head from his burrow and sends us this:

My wife and I are working on a secrit project, one which involves downloading a vast amount of public domain texts from a variety of sources.  One of the sources we are using to guide our choices of which books to download is the list compiled by Harold Bloom at the end of his book, The Western Canon, the Book and School of the Ages.  Mrs. Buckethead, in interpreting some of the vaguer entries in the list (like, Robert Burns, Poems) has had recourse to looking over the interwebs for guidance on what Mr. Bloom meant when he said, “Poems.”  Universally, she has found comments criticizing Bloom’s list.  For being Eurocentric.  That’s like complaining that African-American History month is afrocentric.  Did they read the title?  Sheesh.

But, while trolling around being completist on the works of Ambrose Bierce, I found this:

Apparently, this is Johnny Depp’s directorial debut, and the story for the song – Unloveable by Babybird – is from Bierce’s classic story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”  If you haven’t read it, you should.  This story blew me away when I first read it at 13, and just did again.

Some years ago, before I had kids, Mrs. Buckethead and I used to have fun.  We’d go out and see bands play.  We’d drink and laugh.  We saw our friends.  Sigh.

Where was I?  Back about a decade ago, shortly after we moved to DC, we were taking in a show at the Iota, (probably my favorite venue in the area) and the headlining was Mount Pilot, an alt-country, bluegrass, blues-rock, country gospel band out of Chicago.  Their live performance blew me away; fantastic playing and incredible energy.

I was so impressed, I bought the album.

That album – Help Wanted, Love Needed, Caretaker – has been one of my favorites for the last decade.  But something like my curse on tv shows I like seemed to be operating that night, and the band split up shortly after.  I knew of a second album – their second, self-titled release; but never could I find it, despite having the awesome power of the internet at my command.

Until yesterday, that is.  Every year or so, I look to see if the disc is for sale anywhere, typically a futile and frustrating endeavor.  But late last night I saw the disc for sale through the good graces of Amazon and the ill-named 2DollarMusic.  Add to cart?  Yes!  The magical disc will arrive sometime between now and July 1st.  (I appreciate an online retailer with that level of precision.)

I’m all a-tingle.  My ten year quest will soon be over.  Now, I’ll be free to resume my plans to take over the world.

[wik] I was talking with Patton the other day about The Hickories, another alt-country band whose base player was an ex-blogger and friend of Perfidy Phil Dennison.  Their stuff is available on iTunes and CDBaby.  Well worth a listen.  I wonder what Phil is up to?

There comes Lopt, the treacherous
Lusting for revenge
He leads the legions of the dead
Towards the Aesir’s realm

They march in full battle dress
With faces grim and pale
Tattered banners and bloody flags
Rusty spears and blades

Cries ring out, loud and harsh
From cracked and broken horns
Long forgotten battle cries
In strange and foreign tongues

Spear and sword clash rhythmically
Against the broken shields they beat
They bring their hate and anarchy
Onto Vigrid’s battlefield

There comes Lopt, the treacherous
He stands against the gods
His army grim and ravenous
Lusting for their blood

Nowhere is longer safe
The earth moves under our feet
The great world tree Yggorasil
Trembles to its roots

Sons of muspel gird the field
Behind them Midgaard burns
Hrym’s horde march from Nifelheim
And the Fenris wolf returns

Heimdal grips the Giallarhorn
He sounds that dreaded note
Oden rides to quest the Norns
But their web is torn
The Aesir rides out to war
With armor shining bright
Followed by the Einherjer
See valkyries ride

Nowhere is longer safe
The earth moves under our feet
The great world tree Yggorasil
Trembles to its roots

Sons of muspel gird the field
Behind them Midgaard burns
Hrym’s horde march from Nifelheim
And the Fenris wolf returns

Listening to this makes working at home really, really tolerable.

Matt Barr, once of the blog BTD, which now seems to be a weird forum thingy, tagged me in with this delightful little meme.

“Go with your gut here. These are the songs that emotionally resonate with you, that linger in your head long after they’ve played. Every time you hear one of these songs, all you can think is, “Damn, that’s a good song!”

Toss logic, reason, and ideas about what music “should” be out the window. We’re going for pure gut response here. Maybe it’s the beat, a great guitar riff, or just the lyrics, but something about each of these songs should really strike a chord inside of you. These may not even necessarily be your favorites, just the songs that really “sock it to you” on a fundamental level.”

This is what I came up with:

Conquistador, Procol Harum
Life During Wartime, Talking Heads
Death’s Black Train is Coming, Gob Iron
God’s Gonna Cut You Down, Johnny Cash
Cure for Pain, Morphine
Tremor Christ, Pearl Jam
Broken, Beat & Scarred, Metallica
Lonely Avenue, Ray Charles
One Way Out, Allman Brothers Band
Ball and Chain, Social Distortion
Ashes to Ashes, Tarbox Ramblers
Blood and Roses, The Smithereens
Pride and Joy, Stevie Ray Vaughan
World Leader Pretend, REM
Cinnamon Girl, Neil Young
Soundtrack to Mary, Soul Coughing
Would?, Alice in Chains
Kansas City, Wilbert Harrison

I cheated, and put 18 on the list because I just run like that.

I also just noticed that only two maybe three, songs on this list could be even remotely be called happy. I must be more depressed than I realized.

From that compendium of wonderful things, boing boing, we find this:

My current favorite metal band, Amon Amarth is not on this flowchart, but I imagine it would be under “Foriegn Sounding” under a new bubble for “Invented Languages” or “Elvish.” Clicky on the pic for the flowchart in its full, uh, flowcharty glory.

Until you become a parent, you simply can’t imagine the compromises you make without a thought to accommodate the needs of your children. Quite apart from the poop factor (in which the pre-kid categories of “no poop” and “poop” are joined by new states of being like “just a little poop,” “no visible poop,” and “I don’t smell anything, let’s make dinner”), all parts of your life are subtly altered in ways you don’t even notice until something throws the changes into stark relief.

Take music, for example.

My kid turned one year old this week, which means it’s been a pretty cool year. He’s already musical, capable of banging a drum in time for up to five beats in a row or strumming my guitar with his little fist if I make a chord for him. That’s wonderful, but it also means that he cares what noise is on the stereo. Therefore, anything that isn’t kid-approved has for now mostly passed from my life.

The Boy’s favorite music is metal (Iron Maiden, Amon Amarth, Metallica), bossa nova, and bluegrass, which mean’s I’m an incredibly lucky person with an incredibly hip youngster. But his favorite favorite music is one specific lullaby album that he needs to hear every night at bedtime, and often at naptime too. Given that bedtime can ramify without warning from a fixed moment in time into an exhausting four-hour campaign of sorties, clever feints, temporary détentes, and diplomatic appeals to reason (lost, by the way, on the infant mind) which only through Herculean effort grinds toward a denouement in which our little angel drifts away to dreamland, sometimes that damn CD gets played straight through five or six times.

The upshot is, no matter how much NPR and jaded indie-rock I can cram during the daylight hours, the last twelve months of my musical life have been owned by “Dancing with Bears” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

Which is why the latest release from the New England-based Midriff label has been so welcome. The 2006 release by their flagship band, The Beatings, titled Holding On To Hand Grenades, was my favorite album of that year, and several other Midriff releases have come close to that very high standard. Since Midriff is essentially “the Beatings and their friends and collaborators,” the various projects, side projects, solo releases and guest appearances add up to something like a white, postcollege Wu Tang Clan. Protect ya neck, New England!

The latest Midriff release is called The End of the New Country, and is attributed to a duo calling themselves Get Help. Get Help is a collaboration between Beatings guitarist and vocalist Tony Skalicky and New York musician Mike Ingenthron, who began writing songs together as a break from writing ad jingles. If Midriff has a GZA, it seems to be Skalicky, who has a very clear idea of what he wants his music to sound like and sticks to the plan like a pro.

What this means on vinyl (or in bits or scattered photons) is that like many other Midriff releases, Get Help drenches well-written songs and strong melodies in layers of fuzzy guitar and feedback which gradually build and ebb between enormous climaxes and quiet moments, a sound that is definitely, undeniably, refreshingly adult – not at all for little kids, and not at all like jingles.

Ok. I will admit, even without a kid in the picture this kind of stuff is like catnip to me. I can’t deny it. Give me some reverb, some layers of distorted guitars, and a slightly downcast lyric and I’ll go for it like a sucker. But – and this is important – at the end of the day, the songs need to be good. Without a great song, pretty sounds are just pretty, and the bloom quickly comes off the rose. That’s the story of dozens, if not hundreds, of albums that have crossed my path in the last two decades, and you probably haven’t heard of any of them.

Luckily, at least half of the songs on The End of the New Country (due out October 14) are very good indeed, with Skalicky’s brittle baritone voice (which resembles a cross between Ian Thomas of Joy Division, British folk icon Richard Thompson, and Jimmy Buffett) and Ingenthron’s lighter voice cutting through the sumptuous bed of dissonance and soaring overtones that is one of the Midriff label’s trademark sounds. The musical DNA is Sonic Youth, Morphine and My Bloody Valentine, but Skalicky and Ingenthron manage to invoke the sounds of their influences without becoming a thin imitation of them. (Does the fact that all the comparisons I can draw with Get Help are a decade or more old say something about them, or about me?)

But I did say “half.” One weakness many musicians have in common is an attenuated ability to self-edit. Call me old fashioned, but it’s usually a mistake to assume that just because a CD can hold 74 minutes of music, it therefore should. That’s so wrong. An album takes as long as it takes — and that time is generally under twelve songs and 45 minutes. Ask the Ramones; given half an hour, six microphones, and four chords you can make an all-time classic.

In the case of The End of the New Country, the album opens and closes extremely well, but the sheer number of songs on the record (fifteen), and a tendency toward sedate tempos and plush guitars means that the middle sags somewhat and some gems get buried. “Traveler’s Shave Kit,” which opens the record, and “Growing Circles” which closes it, are good enough to amount to statements of purpose. However, apart from the excellent title song I find myself hard pressed to identify standout songs when playing the record straight through.

Take for example “The Town Fires,” which is the twelfth song on the album. It’s a quiet and understated song that in the context of the album fails to stand out. But when it emerges in a random playlist it turns out to be a very welcome, winsome, and lovely three minutes of music. I guess too much of a good thing amounts to too much of a good thing.

The End of the New Country is a jumbled and slightly messy project with stretches of real beauty, strong melodies and sumptuous production. But on the songs that aren’t standouts, the production is merely soothing rather than dramatic. This record is worth buying, ripping, and then making your own ten-song version out of the raw materials presented. Most importantly for me, this album does include at least ten very good songs that provide an alluring and mature break from lullabys and “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

Previously published on Blogcritics