Billy + Joe is the duo of Vancouver-based songwriter Billy the Kid and Richmond’s Joe McMahon, who fronts the rock band Smoke or Fire. Their first collaborative project was a youtube onslaught of 31 cover songs in 31 days this past January. Now, they’ve released their first batch of original songs–the Breathe EP. You should listen to it.
They make such interesting partners–Billy’s songs sound a little like a Smoke or Fire singalong anthem, and Joe’s songs seem to owe a lot to Billy the Kid’s bedroom chorales. The back-and-forth between them isn’t cheap lust, it’s total respect–like a Gaye/Terrell duet. They bring out the best in each other, they make riskier choices on this EP than in their solo work. It’s rare to hear a duo wherein both the male and female voices can be both muscly and vulnerable. It makes for a balanced album and a ton of great choruses. Listen to this if you like Archers of Loaf or Aimee Mann or if you know what’s good for you.
Levon Helm was the man who left the infamous Bob Dylan 1966 tour early because he couldn’t take the boos. He was the man who led the once-elite The Band back into dive-bars and oldies circuits in the 80′s because he couldn’t stand the silence. It was a degrading routine that contributed to the deaths of his bandmates Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. He bore tremendous guilt for that decision. He lashed out at Robbie Robertson for not sharing songwriting royalties, blaming Robbie’s greed for Richard’s and Rick’s deaths. He dedicated each album he released since then to them, his brothers.
Levon Helm was, without question, among the best rock drummers ever. He was the backbone of The Band, their only American member, the singer of their most popular songs. He was one of the five souls in that group that changed the way art and folk music interacted with rock-and-roll. He played a gorgeous mandolin. He released pretty ok solo albums in ’78, ’80, and ’82. He had a significantly better acting career than Robbie Robertson.
Levon Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer in the early 90′s. But he beat that shit. That frog-howl of his floated on. He brought the W.S. Walcott Medicine Show back to life, hosting raucous Midnight Rambles at his barn-studio in Woodstock NY to pay for his medical bills. Musicians brought their instruments to sit in with Helm; fans brought potluck food and booze to sit and share and watch him. When his voice was strong, Levon sang the whole night. When it wasn’t there, he drummed, and let his collaborator Larry Campbell, his daughter Amy Helm, or whoever that night’s guest was take over the vocals. The Ramble’s resurgence led to live albums and DVDs, then, finally, to the comeback album Dirt Farmer, and it’s follow-up Electric Dirt–his opuses to his Arkansas childhood and the southern farmers’ cause he’d championed his whole career.
When I would come home from middle school and my parents weren’t home, I would put on the DVD of The Last Waltz and play a harmonica I didn’t know how to use, in the wrong key, along with The Band’s songs. I memorized all of their interview monologues. I learned their songs by singing them while I walked my dog in the morning, and while I drove to nowhere in particular at night. I put every penny I earned in high school towards collecting their entire discography–Big Pink through Islands, Jericho through Jubilation. When we learned rhetorical devices in high school, all of the sentences I wrote for practice were about The Band. They were the first band I obsessed over.
Now, seemingly all of the sudden, the cancer caught up with him. The man is gone, but, cheesy as it sounds, his beats live on. He was incredible and bitter and resilient, strong and beautiful. Mostly, he was the coolest mutherfucker ever in those Elliot Landy prints.
Listen to “The Weight” and “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (The Last Waltz version is the best) on your own time. Right here, let’s go deep, with a million thanks to Levon Helm.
It’s so damn hot. Get to the coast, I tell you, and stay under water. Listen to these albums on the way out there and keep cool with the coolest of music: surf rock! Surf-drowned garage rock, whatever!
The band Nude Beach from Brooklyn has just released their sophomore album Nude Beach II on their Bandcamp for a pay-what-you-want purchase. They ride killer Elvis Costello vibes and just kick all-around ass and all asses around.
Also new and for free is the new album by the Austin-based band Literature, Arab Spring. They’re more jangly, like a coastal Kinks or Libertines. More fun than imagining Morrissey in a baggy swimsuit.
Cheap Girls dig in igneous garage rock. They get profiled in High Times. They have been Replacements-gade wrecks on stage. They have brought 90′s slackerdom into the Aught’s with hazy songs about thinking about doubt and doubting your thinking. And yet on Giant Orange, their third full-length, the seemingly nostalgic Cheap Girls have the wits to write the line, “Repeating never got you where you needed to go.”
Bands with nothing more to offer than nostalgia don’t write lines like that. Modern, terrified, uncomfortable bands write lines like that…and follow it up with the line, “I’d do anything to just move backwards when it all feels bad to stay and worse to leave.”
There’s no pretense in Cheap Girls music, no posturing, no certainty (so far); it’s all up-front fear and disorientation—great places for generationally relevant music to come from. Giant Orangeis a neurotic negotiation between stagnation and self-propultion; the way that their second album My Roaring 20′s is a negotiation between maturation and cluelessness; the way their first album Find Me a Drink Home is a negotiation between being drunk and more drunk.
Nick Faye & the Deputies are a rock band from the big middle part of Canada where they film all the movies supposed to be set in the big middle part of America. Where they wait until the sun starts to rust the sky, ignite the wheat fields, tell the actors to put on their rugged faces, and start shooting. In those terms, The Last Best West sounds like a soundtrack to Days of Heavendoneby Built to Spill.
The Deputies’ method welds looping guitar hook to dirgeful chorus, building the song into a familiar frenzy. It’s a familiarity like the closest thirty miles of state road—it won’t take you anywhere you haven’t been, but it’ll take you. If you don’t have a film crew at your disposal to make your personal crises look biblical, The Last Best West will serve you memorably as you sort it out on a less-lonely drive through the magic hour.
