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To those well-versed in Ilyas Ahmed’s mysterious, vast, and vigorous discography, the opening guitar phrase of Goner might seem puzzling at first. It’s not puzzling in a “this is strange and bad” sense, but puzzling in a “fresh and right on!” sense. “Earn Your Blood” rips in with heroic guitar-action, summoning the lost Gods of Rock rather than the Esoteric Gods one frequently encounters on journeys through Ahmed’s mythogenic-ontology. "If only," Ahmed must be thinking, "there were some way for these long lost and separated Gods to assemble," and then he unites them. What happens when rock rediscovers its primordial cloak, namely that sole force that can resist the superficiality and banal transparency that would eventually go from being its passing plague to its seemingly immutable second nature? With the opening ofGoner, Ahmed traverses the treacherous space between these two worlds in order to reunite us with the cloak.
The thick electric-action returns throughout the album, but it's especially forceful on the first two tracks. This might seem like a sharp departure from the acoustic journey of Through The Night or Century Of Moonlight’s temple-bound sage-wanderings, but considering Ahmed’s discography as a whole, these heavier elements were always lurking underneath, anticipating the perfect moment for disclosure. On 2008’s The Vertigo of Dawn, he merges a raga-rock feeling on tracks like “Under The Singing Sea” in such a way that a terrifyingly profound darkness rumbles perfectly alongside the most intense meditative and spirit-summoning passages. With Goner, Ahmed has made his best attempt thus far at expressing the struggle between the many forces at work within his thought and aesthetic. The album embodies and exemplifies not just the eternal battle between opposed spiritual forces out in the world, but the battle between the aesthetical worlds that have motivated Ahmed’s music.
The new electricity and production modes, however, do nothing to disrupt the organic feeling that pulses through Ahmed’s worlds. The percussion, a bass drum and tambourine, remain bravely minimal while simultaneously pushing the traveler along with a determined fury. On “Enter A Shadow,” the drum seductively builds up the suicide trance, luring the listener into the shadow-world hidden inside the empirical world of things. The gone-ness might be a death-ness. The ultimate journey Ahmed has invited us on is obscure. The haunted ghost-vocals that narrate the transitions provide us little to hold onto other than some sort of mesmerizing terror that signifies the spiritual and emotive seriousness of the story without providing us the content of the story itself. But Goner calls forth images of a furious sea rather than a dry desert. Our hero seems to be confronting a life-threatening storm, with waves constantly toppling an already insufficient mode of flotation, rather than dragging himself across fiery sands. It’s as if the traveler has already made her way to the end of land, faced the dizziness of night, and must now set out from there to whatever is next, compelled to go further despite the lack of knowledge about where and what. There is danger and a destination, but it is not clear what they are.
With the arrival of “Exit Twilight,” Ahmed’s fleeting whispers vanish, replaced by the angelic, soothing voice of Grouper’s Liz Harris. Harris offers a moment of tranquil completion after the vehemence of Goner’s mission. The fulfillment of this task, however, does not signal the arrival of a celebration. The mood is solemn, perhaps devout, as the world gradually disappears completely. And with the dissolution of one world, Ahmed establishes for himself a new task: to return from total darkness and to construct a new one. Until then, the listener must think of the possibility of the new world.
1. Earn Your Blood
2. Love After Love
3. Some of None
4. Enter a Shadow
5. Out Again
6. As Another
7. Two Breaths
8. Exit Twilight
A native of Virginia and resident of Philadelphia since 1998, Jack Rose first rose to prominence with the drone/noise/folk unit, Pelt. Pelt can be counted among the early influential new music underground bands such as UN, No Neck Blues Band, Charalambides, Tower Recordings and Six Organs of Admittance. Rose recorded and toured with the band up until 2006. Rose released his first solo LP in 2002, "Red Horse, White Mule", of post-Takoma, American primitive guitar. Along with the influences of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, Rose also incorporated North Indian classical, early American blues, bluegrass and minimalism into his singular style. 2005 saw the release of his fourth LP, "Kensington Blues", which incorporated all of the aforementioned influences and his playing/composing fully flowered. That LP is now considered a classic of contemporary guitar music.
In 2008 and 2009 Rose released "Dr. Ragtime and Pals" and "Jack Rose and the Black Twig Pickers" respectively. Those recordings featured many additional players like Glenn Jones, Micah Smaldone, Harmonica Dan and the Black Twig Pickers. The songs drew heavily on pre-war influences, either written by Rose or were his arrangements of early American classics. "Luck in the Valley " will be the third album in this set of recordings that Rose jokingly refers to as his "Ditch Trilogy". Rose continues his exploration of pre-war American music with a set brand new material featuring the Twigs, Jones, Harmonica Dan and Hans Chew along with a handful of solo pieces. This recording set out to capture the energy and feel of the classic three-track shack recordings by the Wray Brothers and Mordicai Jones. "Luck In The Valley" was written and recorded over a period of nine months off the road, an unusually long time for Rose to be at home and woodshedding. The album finds Rose employing new themes and techniques that haven't appeared on previous releases.
Like all pre-war recordings and all of Rose's releases, this album was recorded live. It was not created using overdubs but rather by recording a few "takes" and selecting the best performance out of those. Rose stated, "I wanted the songs to have an immediacy and spontaneity as they were being recorded. All the musicians chosen for the record know how to play the songs without overworking the material, but at the same time creating memorable accompaniments on the spot." Several of the songs are in fact the first takes like “Blues for Percy Danforth”, “Lick Mountain Ramble” and "Woodpiles on the Side of the Road". Also Included in the set are three covers: “St. Louis Blues”, “Everybody Ought to Pray Sometime” and “West Coast Blues”. All of these pre-war classics are Rose’s unique arrangements.
The album title refers to the old red light section of St. Louis and was a code for procuring the services of a prostitute. Says Rose "I read about it on some liner notes to a reissue of pre-war St. Louis recordings and I liked the ring of it." An avid record collector with an encyclopedic knowledge of pre-war American music, Rose has been acknowledged as a rising star among contemporary guitar players. "Luck in the Valley" finds Rose at his best surrounded by like-minded friends on a recording that is enriched by a sense of history but entirely new, vibrant and warm. (Thrill Jokey)
Three years ago, Midlake released The Trials Of Van Occupanther, a sweetly harmonized, intimately rocking sophomore album that took them far away from their native Denton, TX, placing them on big tours and year-end lists and the like. This third album's taken time, by design. As they told Jessica in their Progress Report, "We didn't know exactly what we wanted, but we know we didn't want to make the same album as last time. We could have made 10 albums with the amount of time we've spent, but that doesn't mean they'd be saying anything great." Instead they committed to 40-hour work weeks in order to move away from the last record's "Fleetwood Mac-y America" with a shift toward, at least in part, "British folk scene of late '60s stuff." The set finally has a release date -- 2/2 via Bella Union in the States, and the day before in the UK -- and an official title in The Courage Of Others. That's its art above, here's a tracklist and the first few dates of a tour that will take the quintet well through 2010:
01 "Acts Of Man"
02 "Winter Dies"
03 "Small Mountain"
04 "Core Of Nature"
05 "Fortune"
06 "Rulers, Ruling All Things"
07 "Children Of The Grounds"
08 "Bring Down"
09 "The Horn"
10 "The Courage Of Others"
11 "In The Ground"
On tour:
01/05 Baton Rouge, LA @ Spanish Moon
01/06 Tallahassee, FL @ Engine Room
01/07 Orlando, FL @ The Social
01/08 St. Augustine, FL @ Cafe Eleven
01/09 Mt. Pleasant, SC @ Village Tavern
01/10 Asheville, NC @ Grey Eagle
01/11 Memphis, TN @ Hi-Tone
01/12 Little Rock, AR @ Rev Room
01/22 Newcastle, England @ The Cluny
01/23 Leicester, England @ The Musician
01/24 Cambridge, England @ Junction2
01/27 Norwich, England @ Arts Centre
01/28 London, England @ Tabernacle
taken from Stereogum
Link removed by request