"Friday Night Frolic" — Pretty Little Lamb(chop)

Look, with an album named Mr. M, cryptic lyrics hidden therein, boys slinking about their own island, scratching and whispering, mocking emotion, well, it seems this evening calls for the proper attire—though, the Suburban Soliloquist is having difficulty locating her black Ray-Bans. (Maybe that's because she doesn't own black Ray-Bans.)

But she's got the T-shirt and she's guessing the geeky Kurt Wagner wouldn't mind her slipping it on. Not at all. Especially if she were pouring him a glass of white. Which she is. He will arrive, Wagner, yes, this very night (tell her traveling hubby and she will deny it), but she can't tell you when or how, or else...

And because the Suburban Soliloquist is in the midst of packing (of which she can't, or won't?, again elaborate), and feels at this moment that she can say it no better, she will permit the Village Voice—which does not hide, scratch or whisper—to speak for her. But first, she'll tell you this: Lambchop is a band. True. Lambchop is  also a...

...vanishingly rare band allowed to exist over several geologic eras of pop-culture time, pursuing a singular, demented muse. Lambchop is an island, removed from the squalor of everyday world, so terrifically inscrutable that you even start looking for significance in their name: not pork chop, but lamb chop. Surely that must mean something. 

Mr. M is, at once, one of the band’s most open-hearted and acidic records. It opens with a flourish of strings that invoke memories of Frank Sinatra’s great, gloomy indigo-jazz records with string arranger Nelson Riddle. The clothes are old ones, slightly threadbare, and they are ones Lambchop have a winking relationship with, dating back at least to 2001′sNixon. You can smell the used-record-sleeve on them. And so, apparently, can Wagner, something he’s quick to draw your attention to. When he enters the song, he appears to be both commenting ironically on its motion and somehow directing its action: “Grandpa’s coughing in the kitchen/ But the strings sound good/ Maybe add some flutes/ And how do get the cups out from over there?”

  Lambchop - If Not I'll Just Die by MergeRecords

*   *   * 

And now, she's pouring him that glass of white...

  Lambchop - Gone Tomorrow by City Slang

The wine tasted like sunshine in the basement.  (For some peculiar reason, this little nugget nudges the Suburban Soliloquist to reach for her 1960s flashcards.)

What were they doing in the basement? Hmm...

Wagner, and his pretty, pretty Lambchop. How they do it they'll never tell.


Listen to more Lambchop here. Lambchop visits Jimmy Fallon, late night, tonight.

(To be honest, er, um, the Suburban Soliloquist has no secret information, she's not even sure who wrote this post.)

(But, the wine did taste like sunshine in the basement.)

Friday Night Frolic — Pointed Weights

Kandinsky

It would seem Friday has become the place where the Suburban Soliloquist goes for a third person point of
view and a stiff drink. She steps inside its faux finished walls, glazed with a red lacquer, grabs a canapé and a dirty martini at the bar where she thinks she can also swap her first person POV for a third person POV as easily as Tim O'Brien did in The Things They Carried.

Oh, those stories are haunting, says the bartender. And, well, O'Brien is a wizard. What do you want to trade for, anyway? Stick with what you got, kid.

She gets it. She's knows she's not writing a classic. But she reasons. She says her pencil's not so sharp. And if her pencil's not so sharp, it's going to make some mistakes. Sometimes the pencil has trouble deciphering fact from fiction, or deciding which it prefers. She can barely get it to draw a straight line, and it spends too much time in the margins.

In that way, she tells the bartender, she's very much like the pencil.

And it weighs on her. She's thinks about embellishment. She considers stripping down to her skivvies.

Hey, look lady, this ain't that kind of place! the bartender growls.

She wonders if she ought to trade in the manual sharpener for an electric one. She wonders. Acoustic or synthesized? Bamboo or floral? Hardwood or carpeting? Paint or wallpaper? Verbose or succinct? Pointed weights or weighted points?

How come you don't ever have any music in here? she asks the bartender.

Lady, these walls aren't real. You get a band in here and the walls will crumble, he says, shaking his head as he towel-dries a brandy snifter. You do know this ain't real, right?

Hmm, she sighs. Yup, I know. I think I'm going to refinish my hardwoods tonight. Or maybe I'll paint my walls. My real walls.

Ok, Lady, the bartender laughs. You have fun, now. That's right, keep it all real and don't be switching viewpoints! 

Actually, she brightens, I'm going to go write a poem. With a pen. Then she walks out the door and shuts it, maybe a little too hard, and the walls fall down.

And she grins.

Rusty Belle, hailing from Amherst, Massachusetts, was formed in 2006 by siblings Matt and Kate Lorenz, and friend Zak Tojano. From their About page: "...rusty belle swings easily from sweet, simple melodies, whiskey lullabies, blood ballads, busted bluegrass, and folk-punk anthems, to tongue-in-cheek sleaze-rock, glossy-mag candy-pop, and down-home porch-tunes.  the remarkable thing is that its all done with honesty and respect for the music..."  

I think I'm going to have that martini now...

Friday Night Frolic — Hacking Through The Jungle

Oh, I could only dream of the dreams we’d have, 

how our hearts would be entwined, 

if you would let me be the one 

to open up your mind.

                                                           -Jeff Tweedy, lyrics from Open Your Mind

[source]

And speaking of September 27th releases...

The unraveling of  the alternative country band Uncle Tupelo, in 1994, left an ensemble of talented musicians to grapple with what next. But singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy swiftly gathered the same musicians, minus Jay Farrar, and knotted together the band known as Wilco (an acronym for two-way radio voice procedure). Tweedy, Wilco's mercurial frontman, tours occasionally on his own and is especially brilliant when he does so. As in this performance:



[Joy of joys—the lyrics to Open Your Mind, along with the chords, can be found here! And they're all pretty simple chords except for that dang A minor, but yes! I am warming up the banjo.]

It's  impossible not to hear the influence of early country and folk genres, as well as punk and alternative rock, and artists like Neil Young (for whom Wilco has opened), Johnny Cash and Tommy Stinson in Tweedy's songs, nor see the pilferage of classic literature in his pure, honest lyrics. With the Chicago based Wilco, Tweedy's music assumes a thick, bittersweet consistency—the likes of which he deftly jars—such as this emotive, demon-filled, uh... um... ballad:



Here, Tweedy spills out his weighty contents once again:



More about Wilco, from Wikipedia, here. Wilco's The Whole Love, to be released September 27, 2011, can also be found in that overgrown, thicketed jungle  if you hack your way here. Seriously, bring your machete.

Friday Night Frolic — Heading for the Fir Lined Hills

The Juveniles Children in N.H. Fall 2009.

To New Hampshire I go, I go
Oh yes, it's so, it's so!
for my sister waits
for these special dates
in the hills of the Great White North.

With she I find my best friend,
this sisterly love we tend
strolling the wispy-haired summit
its rocky paths down we plummet
the grand hills of the Great White North

Bathing in its giggling brooks
with smooth stones underfoot
the wade shan't be brief
as we covet relief
of heat cloaking the Great White North

Spouses away the weekend
this, being when we pretend
to have no annoyance or burden
until we recall we've the juveniles children
in the hills of the Great White North

Still, we ladies have one another
the juveniles children not too much bother
behaved, they'll  allow us to gossip
lest they desire a backhand wallop
in the HILLS of the Great White North



Right now, I'm feeling as giddy as Jade and Alex. Ready to hit the road with my babes and clamber beyond Franconia Notch to where Backwoods Betty makes her beautiful hillside home. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, who helped usher in the current folk-rock revival, are fired up to make the journey with us.

There's been mountains of rumor as to whether or not their euphoric sound is drug induced. They—Alex and Jade, at least—appear so enraptured by life, in love with their music, it's almost impossible to believe it's a natural high, a rush at the peak. But Alex Ebert and his alter ego (Edward Sharpe: "a messianic porn star whose mission to save mankind is disrupted by a series of romantic entanglements with beautiful women") has cleaned up his act since leaving Ima Robot (see him here, with Ima in a very different, darker role), and now stands high on love and life. The anthems he composes are gleeful and brimming with hope.

New Hampshire-bound jingles and hymns that set our spirits free. (Maybe I'll even turn off the droid.)

Betty: I'm coming up!

Backwoods Betty's place -- a/k/a Maggie's Farm
(photo from Design New England)