Loose Fur - Born Again In The USA

The second album from Jeff Tweedy and Jim O'Rourke's Loose Fur side-project was released in 2006.  If anything, it's less cohesive than the debut.  Instead of going for a purely immersive effect, they've decided that rocking out might be worth a try.  Hey Chicken swaggers in on Stones-y rock riffs, and rocks out for a solid three minutes before checking out.  The Ruling Class follows, all country strumming and good-natured whistling.  Stupid as the Sun is a kind of boppy rock song, sung by O'Rourke, it's not unpleasant but a bit forgettable.  The clattering Apostolic and Pretty Sparks are less pleasant, you could live without them.  Thou Shalt Wilt and Wanted are easy enough to listen to, if a little anonymous.

For those who enjoyed the first Loose Fur album they are best directed to the more introspective tracks here.  Answers To Your Questions sounds more like a Jim O'Rourke track than anything else here.  A gentle ballad sung by O'Rourke, it's a quiet beauty with a fine touch of steel guitar.  The instrumental An Ecumenical Matter, has gorgeous summery guitar licks and nice bit of piano.  At eight and a half minutes, Wreckroom is the longest track here, and its ebb and flow would not have been out of place on Wilco's A Ghost Is Born album, with fine guitar work ranging from lazy licks to full-on pounding riffs.  The last four minutes of the track or mainly a muted, piano coda with a hint of percussion.

So a fairly mixed, and mixed-up album, one that doesn't hang together particularly well but has its moments.

Loose Fur - Loose Fur

Loose Fur was a project featuring Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche from Wilco along with Jim O'Rourke.  They released their first album in 2003, which is fairly much as you might expect, six longish songs with Tweedy and O'Rourke sharing vocal duties.  Many of these songs, such as Laminated Cat are a little on the repetitive side, with a rolling guitar groove that repeats itself ad nauseam without really going anywhere.  The O'Rourke-sung songs such as Elegant Transaction are brighter and more enjoyable in a kind of meditative way.  So Long is odd, in a good way, in that it's reminiscent of the more stripped down and tripped out moments of Queens of the Stone Age.  You Were Young sounds like Wilco flecked with Sonic Youth and is therefore the song that suits Jeff Tweedy the most - it's the one track here that would work on a Wilco album.  The instrumental that follows, Liquidation Totale is pure Jim O'Rourke, while Chinese Apple sounds like what it is: Tweedy singing an acoustic Jim O'Rourke song.  There's lots of guitar noodling on show here so if you tolerate this, there's much to enjoy here.

Jim O'Rourke - Halfway to a Threeway

It opens with picked guitars and smooth harmonies on Fuzzy Sun, and these guitars grow progressively more lovely, reaching Marr-like proportions.  The addition of piano creates a lovely sound as the track evolves, packing a lot into its relatively (2.34) short running time.  The summery instrumental Not Sport, Marital Art follows, this one is kind of jazzy, along the lines of The Sea and Cake, particularly when brass enters the fray.  On the other hand the seven minute The Workplace has a kind of faintly embarrassed tone to it, along the lines of mid period Smog with some decidedly odd lyrics about what kind of clothes women and men "look good in" (each others). You can't help feeling there's more to this one than meets the eye, that O'Rourke is scratching the surface of something or other, though later we get a gorgeous coda with guitar picking and relaxed "da da da dom" vocals.  This relatively short EP finishes with the title track, the sparsest thing here, a kind of simple folk song.  There are worse ways to spend 20 minutes.

Album Review: Smog – Knock Knock

Bill Callahan again worked with Jim O’Rourke on this 1999 album. It’s more expansive and diverse than previous album Red Apple Falls, indeed almost poppy, though it features a downright odd picture of a cat on the front!

The album opens with a sparse simple track, Let’s Move To The Country, consisting of Bill Callahan singing over a cello and a barely strummed guitar, but he follows this up with guitar anthem Held, which contains a great riff and beat. River Guard is a somewhat lengthy track, starting with the merest of guitar strums, before a wonderful piano part enters the mix. It’s a beautiful melody which builds up with percussion and more piano, before a great electric guitar before the end and gripping images in the lyrics (“stand there on a cliff with gooseflesh”).

He completely changes the mood with the first of his experiments featuring a children’s choir, the throwaway No Dancing, to which he sees fit to add heavy guitar and horns. He called this his album for teenagers, though I can’t imagine this being a teen anthem, however singalong it is! Teenage Spaceship is another brooding track with more gorgeous piano, while Cold Blooded Old Times is another uptempo, poppy tune featuring “the type of memories that turn your bones to glass” over strummed guitar.

After the moody Sweet Treat, Hit The Ground Running is another track featuring the children’s choir over a Velvet Underground-ish groove while Bill Callahan drawls agreeably through the song. The final 2 tracks return to the default Smog setting of sparseness. The album is a bit all over the place so it’s not a good one in terms of setting a mood, but it is probably his most trademark album in terms of the ‘Smog sound’.

Album Review: Smog – Red Apple Falls

Smog’s 1997 album saw mainman Bill Callahan team up with producer/multi-instrumentalist Jim O’Rourke to flesh out the sound with French horns, trumpets, piano and steel guitar featuring prominently in a bid to shrug off the ‘lo-fi’ tag. Whatever lo-fi means.

Callahan still had his rickety buzzing guitar at this point, and a fair degree of vulnerability (gone in his most recent work) remained in his vocals. This combination, along with generous helpings of horns and piano is how the album kicks off with the track The Morning Paper. The music mirrors the subject matter, sounding a bit like dawn breaking, the piano in particular here is quite lovely. Callahan’s vocals on this one sound a little ‘generic singer-songwriter’. Things get a little darker with Blood Red Bird, where Callahan retreats to his electric guitar and his lower register for a somewhat brooding number.

Red Apples is a pretty sparse gothic dirge featuring mainly piano as he sings about going “down to the river to meet the widow” and sleeping “in her black arms for a century”. I Was a Stranger picks up the tempo and the country influence with prominent steel guitar. To Be of Use is as vulnerable as Callahan gets as he sings in a high register for him over gently plucked guitar, with some borderline disturbing lyrics: “most of my fantasies are of to be of use.” Red Apple Falls, the title track continues with the ‘red’ theme in the song titles, and combines some warm countrified music reminiscent of Joni Mitchell's Amelia, again led by steel guitar, with harrowing subject matter (“when I think about my brother dying and my parents trying to slowly do themselves in”). You almost feel like you’re intruding, eavesdropping on a private catharsis.

Ex-Con lightens the mood, an almost jaunty, trumpet led song backed with some gentle synths, though lyrically it’s far from light, this time singing about kidnap and abduction, Inspirational sounds like a country song written by Lou Reed, strange to say as he hasn’t recorded any country music to my knowledge, before the final number, Finer Days, which is sparse enough featuring mainly bass and guitar and some muted horn. The atmosphere of this track is like the coda to the album, taking the musical themes from The Morning Paper and putting a nice twist on them to resolve the album.

Avoid this one like the plague if you’re a country music hater.

Album Review: Sonic Youth – Murray Street

This 2002 Sonic Youth album was a return to form as far as I was concerned. It’s very definitely a more mature Sonic Youth, perhaps due to the presence of Jim O’Rourke, who had joined the band for this album.

There are only seven songs on this album but the first 3 (all sung by Thurston Moore) are damn near perfect. Empty Page is probably the poppiest one here, which starts with a fairly unadorned clean-sounding guitar in the verses before leading into a slightly heavier chorus. The whole thing is quite concise and is over in just over four minutes. Although Sonic Youth were no slouches when it came to guitars before, they really excel themselves here. O’Rourke’s presence on bass frees up Kim Gordon to join Moore and Lee Ranaldo on guitar. Disconnection Notice is a slower, more complex track which unfolds slowly with a taut guitar line leading the track and the rest of the band joining in, driving the track on to a career high (and there are many for this band). What makes this track particularly enjoyable is that they threaten noise and feedback without delivering, which makes the track tense but thrilling.

Rain On Tin is like Television’s Marquee Moon updated for the 21st century. Guitars in the midsection of this song reach Verlaine-esque heights from about 02.40 on before returning to the structure of this song. The track is almost 8 minutes long but it doesn’t feel like it, thanks the superb musicianship displayed.

After this the album takes a bit of a dip. Karen Revisited, is a Ranaldo-sung track, which starts out fine, till we get to a tedious noise section in the middle, which is dragged out for the remainder of the 11 minute long track. Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style is a definite improvement, a bit more rockist with it’s Lou Reed references, before climaxing in a noise-fest at the end.

Kim Gordon gets to sing Plastic Sun, which is a typical Gordon shouty song, but she also gets to sing Sympathy for the Strawberry, a longer drawn out song, in a similar vein to last year’s Massage The History off The Eternal. For the first 3 songs alone, it’s worth checking out.