Reviews by kuvien

At this point, I’ve heard a lot of jazz, and I’ve heard a lot of saxophone in jazz, but my breath is taken by the refrain of the first track. It is, to my ears, perfect saxophone phrasing, making the most of its spiritual quality. It’s a deep cry of love and longing, and I won’t deny its immediate resonance with me. The rest of the album is excellent free jazz spiritual meandering. Piano, bass, and Ibarra’s drums accompany, none of them afraid to innovate around Ware’s explorations and ascensions.

I thought the Wardruna project was finished, and this album coming out of nowhere has disappointed many fans who think the project should have been closed. In a way it is, though, since what's happening here is a skald (a composer and reciter of poems honoring heroes and their deeds) singing of the epic events that occurred in the Runaljod cycle all those many many years ago. Understood in that context, this album makes sense. The vinyl LP insert makes this apology: “Skald was recorded live in the studio with the intention of capturing the uncompromising energy of a live performance rather than aiming for a flawless and polished expression. It sets out to give voice to the ancient craft that once lay at the heart of the Norse oral traditions, presented as it takes shape in the hands of a humble contemporary skald today.”

Side A
Part two of the Runaljod trilogy starts off with a bang--an all-male chorus as charged as the accompanying tribal drums. Yggdrasil is full grown, and the worlds ripen like fruit on its ancient boughs. We hear the voices of the Northmen for the first time as they call out from their wintry deeps. Women and men raise their voices in wonderment at the aurora borealis. The wonder the giants once felt at the beginning of Creation is reflected here. There is a festival, but the first hint of sorrow comes with the high cry of a grieving man. Death has come, and now the Northmen know that this beautiful world is also cruel.

Side B
Horses gallop through gathering storms. The shaman witches step forward to offer their insight, for the Northmen must make a long journey. They need answers. They meet other clans along the way, and the herald of the chiefs calls for others to join them. The new men answer his call. The heavy, solemn strings dominant in this section evoke the slow-moving migration of many people. The sounds of the warriors' wooden shields knocking against their saddles and axe-handles call to mind Yggdrasil once more. Heavy feet crush the new-fallen snow, packing it down, and dragons with mouths of fire sail the dark, wintry skies. Siegfried girds his waist and arms himself with his bright sword, but his counselors advise caution against the Wyrm.

Side C
Our hero climbs the mountain in search of the Wyrm's lair, and the witches augur for his success. They dance in a frenzy, caught up in an apocalyptic vision. Yggdrasil's branches stretch out before their one shared mind's eye like the shining synapses of the human brain, a network as complex as it is inscrutable. And then they see him: Odin, hanging on the World-Tree. But they cannot hope to approach his wisdom. We hear a nascent theme strike up that will later be developed in. This is the Northmen's first war song...and it will be their last in the fullness of time. It is a recounting of many victorious battles by different chieftains. Then comes the birdsong. The warriors have traded stories and drunk the whole night through, but here comes the dawn. Siegfried returns from slaying the dragon, and he is met by maids preparing his bride. All celebrate.

Side D
Hel rides from Niflheim, sorrows increase, and battles multiply. A chieftain and his chieftainess talk of what it all means and what is to come. Fires burn all around until out of the blaze steps one ancient scop who sings of the death of Baldr beautiful. All stands still. In that moment, even the fires refuse to consume. Thunder rolls across the sky as a portent. That same chieftain--a distant descendant of Siegfried--has gone to find the truth of the disturbances beyond mortal ken and happens upon Baldr's funeral at the seaside. Crows caw, and rain soaks the chieftain in a sudden deluge. And he stands alone, singing his own quiet dirge for Baldr beautiful.

Side A
That distant rumble isn't thunder. It's flames. The world is on fire, for Baldr is dead. The drums and horns of war summon Tyr, god of battles and justice. The northmen call to him for defense and vengeance, for the wrongs done against them in these latter days are myriad. Fenrir's snarls fill the still of the night after the wild summoning has ceased. Cavalry ride boldly in the distance, and the ever-hungry wolf bides its time. He, too, seeks vengeance. The beast has an old score to settle with Tyr. (The best track in this whole futhark trilogy is "UruR".)

Side B
The shield-maidens add their strength to the northmen's cavalry, and their chorus is mighty enough to make the stars quail. There is concord among these soldiers in arms, and the men gladly accept the help of these brave women in the coming battles. There is momentary joy, and the war trumpeters stand on hilltops making their last calls to any stragglers. Now is the time to join the final war. The first of the last battles is engaged, followers of Tyr against Fenrir's dark forest dwellers, beasts and shadows.

Side C
The northmen at last take a look at the ancient runes of Odin and learn what they can of their shadowy, otherworldly foe. Reading the runes, the warriors see in visions the birth and growth of Yggdrasil, the unfathomable void of Ginnungagap, and the giants in the wondrous infancy of their godlike race. Knowledge of the runes brings power, and thus men add sorcery to their arsenal. This new-found power grants them victories, but still the fires consuming the world strengthen, only serving to deepen the shadowy places they cannot yet reach...places where wolves stalk and slake their bloodthirst on men.

Side D
All the children, both living and dead, of the northmen sing one last time to the armies, telling them that all their futures are dead. There will be no more generations. So many have been slain on both sides, and now the soldiers of Tyr and the minions of Fenrir prepare for their final battle: Ragnarok. Then the drums, the fanfare of Tyr, begin. The one-handed god has arrived, and he speaks, crying out his challenge to his ancient foe, Fenrir. The Valkyries ride into this Final Battle as the Wolf comes to meet Tyr on the field of battle. Worldfire lights their bloody stage, and there they slay each other.

Side A
The ancient horns blow through Ginnungagap, the primordial void, heralding the birth of Yggdrasil, the World-Tree, from which spring the roots that will one day connect all worlds. Rain comes, a sprinkling of life-giving water to coax the sapling from the rich soil of nothingness. The universe's potential is bound up in Yggdrasil's seed. Accompanying the rain and thunder is the chorus of the fated Powers, adding their voices to this cosmic birth. Drums sound steadily through what is swiftly becoming a vanishing void--and time is born. Creation awakens. The giants sing as they walk out on the World-Tree's young, limber branches to see what there is.

Side B
The stars sing back to the giants, revealing a universe of extremes, both hot and cold. The music of the spheres begins, and the giants are content to sit and listen to this new world awhile, both out of curiosity and out of fear. It is in this quiet that the giants and the gods first become aware of each other. A single line of wavering tension is all that separates them.

Side C
The gods see how things can be, and they take counsel. Only the giants stand in their way. The tree-nourishing rain has fallen to such an extent that rivers flow through the deep and down the bark of Yggdrasil as the World-Tree grows stronger, though still young. When the first rains finally stop, the gods march to war.

Side D
The giants, however, are made of the bones of Creation and are not so easily overcome. The struggle begins, but neither is the master. The combatants are obliged to come to a compromise. Some of the gods go to live among the giants, and some giants come to live with the gods as a seal on their peace. Loki enters the picture. The ancient horns blow once more heralding the coming of a new age. Yggdrasil's branches have grown strong. The pathways among the worlds stabilize. The time is ripe for man's arrival.

I love the arc the Wardruna project has taken, and I've been following it since the beginning. First comes the trilogy of mythopoeic albums that are not the record of mythological events but the musical equivalent of the events themselves. Then comes Skald, the recording of a single warrior-poet re-telling a selection of the events from the trilogy. And then comes Kvitravn, where the mythopoeic is stripped away to reveal the voices of the people, of the sailing, marching, plundering horde. This album feels like the warrior-poet has strapped on his armor and girded himself with his broadsword, and his people--male and female--are all around him, responding to his song and joining him in the hunt.

Beautiful, simple children's songs by the legendary Argentine poet, María Elena Walsh. Lovely voice, simple guitar work, and just the cutest little sneeze with a percussive flourish at the end.

I'll be recommending this to my old friend Bruce. Me and Bruce hardly ever overlap when it comes to music, so when we do, it's something noteworthy. This album borders on being bullshit without stepping into the cow patties. Just stands there teetering on the fence with a tape recorder.

the half star goes without saying, maybe this is the worst thing ever made by a human

Coppola lured Waits back to LA, taking him away from his newfound love for the NYC creative atmosphere, to write a soundtrack in the vein of Waits' earlier stuff, a sound the singer was trying to break away from. I like to think it was fate that brought him back to the West Coast, because if he'd not torn himself away from NYC, he never would've met his future wife (who worked in the film studio), and the latter part of his discography probably wouldn't have been as wonderful as it is. The beauty of that alone is, in my mind, worth the making of this overwrought, schmaltzy album. I'm sure Crystal Gayle is a fine singer, but her energy just doesn't work when mixed with Waits. There's just something about duets like this that drives me crazy. Like, the back and forth is just so cheesy? Don't think of this as a Waits album; it's a collaboration as much a Gayle album, which, in my book, is a hard pass. This album is sanitized Tom Waits.

Man, Saturday night’s a bitch. Sometimes it’s me putting on a tie, you putting on a dress, and we go out and laugh at the bloodshot moon in the burgundy sky. Other times it’s us fighting like cats and dogs, but that’s all right, I guess, since it’s raining cats and dogs, anyway. While you’re out catching your death walking, I’m so lonesome I might as well be a sailor in the middle of nowhere. Both of us stumbling into the heart of all that revelry and heartbreak. Shiver me timbers, but Saturday night can be a real bitch!

This is fine, but I'll just spin the studio albums, since I love pretty much everything Waits has done.

In some ways, this is like a lot of Waits' other work, but in other ways, it's completely different. It's got all his grit, of course, but as far as I know Waits doesn't have another operatic concept album like this. (He has the "Franks Wild Years" show, but it was never made into a concept album.) Also, this is the only time he strikes me as creepy (not throughout, just in spots). This album isn't as highly regarded as his giant albums, but I think it's worth anyone's time to give it a close listen. It'll make you wince until it goes down smooth and you're craving more. Basically, this is the creative result of a theatrical collaboration Waits had with a stage director and the famous Beat generation writer William S. Burroughs. This opera is a retelling of the German "Freischütz" myth, about a gunslinger who makes a deal with the Devil for a number of magic bullets that unerringly hit their targets. All but one. In a classic Faustian twist, there's one bullet that's under control of the Devil. In this story, a mild-mannered clerk makes the deal to win the hand of a huntsman's daughter. He must prove his worth as a hunter, and with the magic bullets he does, but on his wedding day, the final bullet under Satan's control kills the clerk's young bride. And in a Greek tragedy parallel, the clerk, like Orpheus in his inconsolable grief, disappears from society. Orpheus is driven to wandering and drink, and in the end he is torn apart by Dionysus' maenads. The clerk joins Satan's carnival, losing his heart, soul, and mind to the infernal pleasures of the circus. This work first appeared as a play in 1990 in Hamburg before being arranged into a concept album.

This album seems to me to be a track by track play of a piano player working at a blues bar who likes to partake of the firewater along with the customers, so by the end of Side A, he’s had one too many, and he has to blame it on the piano. Apparently this is a common occurrence, though, because he alludes to his bad liver later on. But everything will be all right, because his shift is just about to come to an end, and he’s looking forward to getting off work and going home to see his girl.

This is all guitars, and percussion. Sounds like he's flirting with some of those popular indie rock sounds that swirled around the beginning of the century, yet this is typical Waits experimentation, so he makes whatever he's doing his own, transforming it through his dark meditations on sin. Brennan influences so strong here that she's basically become a co-songwriter at this point. Here, at the end of his career, the 70s Waits is finally, at last, dead. Some sinister, black ghost has risen in his place, grinning shamelessly. Though this is Waits' only studio album I don't gush over, I understand a little better what he was talking about in one of his interviews: about how he feels angrier as he ages, and how percussion sounds better because of it. If you follow the mule from Mule Variations, it'll lead you into the barn of Real Gone. And if you follow the mule, don't complain when you get dirty.

Imagine Waits being your dad and having him tell you a bedtime story where you're all alone on the planet, the moon is a piece of rotten wood, and the Earth is an overturned piss pot. Imagine Waits being your zoology professor, revealing the brutality and grittiness of slavery and copulation at all levels of the animal kingdom, including you and your neighbors. Imagine Waits doing an album of nothing but Child ballads...oh man, I'm gonna send him a letter! This is not some kind of greatest hits compilation. Quite the opposite: it's got rarities and unreleased tracks, those orphaned songs that "fell behind the stove while making dinner". You ever clean out the gunk that falls behind the stove? It's greasy, grimy, and probably full of flavor if you could just be brave enough to try it. Them. Not "it". Though these were released together as a three-disc set, they were consciously separated along lines of influence and style. Brawlers explores the blues and consequently rock, Bawlers sees Waits diving into heart-wrenching ballads, and Bastards focuses more on his megaphone-toting, carnivalesque experimentation. Waits excels at all three, of course, but you can pick what to listen to based on your mood or interest.

I feel that if people didn't realize this was a Waits album, they'd rate it higher. People bring baggage into a Waits listening experience, and if the expectations aren't met, well, there's bound to be some disappointment. First of all, Waits' voice is conspicuously absent throughout most of this soundtrack, as the artist decided--unlike with One From the Heart--to focus on instrumentals. Thus this recording lacks the full Waits experience fans grew to love, providing more of an overall noir-jazz soundtrack feel than having anything specifically to do with the voice of the broken-down, boozing loner our itching ears want to hear.

Whenever I start a Waits album and try to write some of my thoughts down, I find it difficult to say much because I feel like I lack perspective. When you adore pretty much an entire discography, you realize you're just a fanboy and therefore aren't sure you have anything useful to say. Here Waits is gritty once again, but it's like he's a hobo singing in some dirty alleyway, singing through a metal can, using whatever he's got within reach for percussion. (A connection to the bone machine?) This music sticks to me like hot summer, sticking to me like unshakable memory. Like most Waits albums, this one, too, is a cathartic experience, but unlike other Waits' recordings thus far, this one is "surrural", meaning the themes are about rural American life, but since they're stories told by Waits, they going to be a bit surreal, aren't they? Waits won a Folk Grammy for this one, having drawn heavily on blues field recordings as the main influence. Yeah, shows that the Grammys don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.

Ol' Tom was an indefatigable pursuer of miscreants in the music, film, TV, and commercial industries, and after having successfully sued, like, four major corporations/outlets for using his songs without permission, Waits developed quite the reputation as someone not to be fucked with. He would hunt your ass down if you tried any funny business. Same went for this tour. He had his people require ticket holders to produce valid ID at the entrance to the show, and if the name didn't match the ticket, the concert-goers were denied entry. This was a massive "fuck you" to scalpers. Surely with Tom's litigious history and his tireless pursuit of integrity, the touts should've known better. I'm glad Waits did one last tour at the end of his career so we can hear him revisit his classics across all his albums. Not only the songs but the spoken-word anecdotal parts are snippets taken from ten different shows during the tour. So when you get to disc 2, don't think that Tom just stood there telling stories for 35 minutes straight.

You’re a lonely, heartbroken truck driver going down a dark highway to drop off a load at an amusement park, but the park is abandoned with all the lights on and the rides operating. So you go wild, dragging your heels across the cracked pavement, looking up at the stars and growing ever more dizzy watching them wheel through their orbits. And the narrative of this album plays like a movie in his mind.