Long time, no post.

Been busy.

Been shooting and editing music videos for folks like Thomas Patrick Maguire, Brook Pridemore and Schwervon!

Been compiling and readying the July release of the first album by Joe Crow Ryan, which will be the first non-Elastic No-No Band release on my label, Weemayk Music.  (You can pre-order it at this link right here.)

Been writing articles for Jezebel Music.  You can read them here: http://www.jezebelmusic.com/tag/justin-remer

Been spending time rearranging my living space now that my girlfriend has moved in with me and my 3 roommates.

And, of course, been trying to finish the next Elastic No-No Band album, the forthcoming double-CD Fustercluck!!!  Most of the recording is done, but there's still quite a bit to go.  My hope is to have the album done by the fall, but two of our band members have been afflicted with extreme medical conditions (e.g., our piano player Herb has been told not to use his right arm 'til further notice), and you just never know...

But while we're waiting, I did manage to scrape 6 more songs* from the album to make a little sampler, Manboobs, titled after the first track.  It is available as a giveaway at our shows this summer, and you can also hear it streaming from our Myspace page RIGHT NOW!!!

Considering that the finished Fustercluck!!! should have about 45 songs on it, I think we can spare these 6.  I'm simultaneously really excited to get this massive slab of music out into the world, and frankly, a little tired out by the process (doing all these other projects probably helps tire me out too).  But you can keep tabs on how finishing the album is going at this new blog I just created: http://fustersongs.blogspot.com where I will write about just that and post exclusive tracks and do whatever else.

It'll be a more conventional blog than My 3 Addictions: An interactive album was, but hopefully it'll be just as cool.

Well... 'til there's more to say,
Justin

*This is in addition to the 3 songs from the album that are on last year's The Meow Bits EP

Brook Pridemore posted a note on Facebook with a list of 20-plus albums that changed his life, so I wrote a response note with 20-plus of my own.

I liked what I wrote, so I'm posting it here too.

20-plus albums that changed my life: a list like Brook Pridemore did
(in vaguely alphabetical order)

*Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique: I was late to liking a lot of things, like Nirvana and Beastie Boys. I had License to Ill on vinyl when I was 6 or 7, but I was too scared of getting yelled at by my parents for listening to rap, to actually listen to it often or at a level above number 3 on the volume dial on my bedroom stereo. I liked "Sabotage" when it came out, but I only ever heard it on MTV or the radio. In '98, I picked up Hello Nasty on vinyl, because it was orange vinyl, and I inevitably worked my way back into the catalog, and yeah this album's a masterpiece.

* Beck - One Foot in the Grave; Nirvana - Bleach: I would listen to these 2 cassettes in my walkman nonstop on the bus rides to and from Start High School. They were both black cassettes with white writing, which was a switch from the norm (tapes were usually greyish with black writing), so these albums felt very Different and Modern. And the equal amounts of ache, rock, and weirdness made this my essential high school soundtrack.

*Bjork - Homogenic; Miles Davis - Kind of Blue: One of the biggest joys me and my best friend Zach had while working on the high school newspaper was listening to music on the newspaper's computers while typing. Initially we worked together during an early-bird hour before school had technically started, but the following year, Zach was gone, Newspaper was a regular mid-day class, and the staff was tripled in size. I would continue to listen to music I liked, and sometimes it would cause concern to other staff members. I remember the act of listening to Kind of Blue one day forced a fellow staff member to tell me "that noise has got to go!" I don't have a specific anecdote for the Bjork album, but I remember it caused the same type of reactions. And it put me in a weird spot; I felt the world at large had acclaimed the music I was listening to, how come the kids in the newspaper room didn't appreciate how smart I was being? I wonder now if I was just being a precocious nerd, or if this is just an early indicator of my ongoing marginalization in relation to pop culture.

* Elvis Costello - My Aim Is True: I bought a used vinyl copy of this in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while on a field trip in high school. I loved the shit out of it. From then on, I would go to Ann Arbor looking for culture, and I would slowly begin to build my Elvis Costello-on-vinyl collection.

*DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist - Brain Freeze: I love soul music, I love 45s, and I was slowly getting into hip-hop after decades of neglecting/ignorantly disdaining it. My best friend Zach burned me this, and since then, if I ever stick it in, I pretty much remember every second of it by heart.

*Lee Dorsey - Yes We Can: Just an amazing, funky, brilliant album, produced and mostly written by Allen Toussaint, with The Meters as the backing band. If I ever made a desert-island list, this would definitely be on it.

*Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits; Bob Dylan - Self-Portrait: For the longest time, I only knew Bob Dylan as the butt of standup comedians' jokes. I knew he was incoherent and that he mumbled. Then I heard the Greatest Hits album (vol. 1), and I was hooked forever. Much later, a few years ago, I was working the midnight shift for a friend, doing assistant-editing work on a TV show he was cutting, and I would explore his iTunes, and one of the albums he had was the much-maligned Self-Portrait by Bob Dylan. At 4 in the morning, sleep-deprived, with too much coffee and tea in your system, logging footage into Final Cut Pro, Self-Portrait becomes the most insane, best album ever. It's pretty good in the middle of the day too.

* Footloose soundtrack; Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual; Michael Jackson - Thriller: These are the first 3 pop albums I remember owning. On cassette. When I started listening religiously to my walkman in high school, I revisited these albums, and they continued to be some of the best pop-rock the '80s had to offer. (Okay, maybe not Footloose, that's just pure nostalgia.)

*Genesis - Invisible Touch: Another one of those formative pop albums; part of the reason I love the gated drum sound and prog-rock (which, despite popular belief that Phil Collins forced Genesis to abandon prog sensibilities, is still somewhat present on the longer cuts on this album) to this day.

*Jackie Brown soundtrack; Out of Sight soundtrack: I've always loved soundtracks, and the end of the last century felt like a high-water mark, where folks were creating really out-of-the-ordinary scores and songscapes for their flicks. Pulp Fiction's soundtrack might have made the greater cultural impact, but Tarantino's follow-up for Jackie Brown was much bigger for me (it's a much tighter mixtape too) and sent me off on countless musical and film expeditions just trying to find out about all the stuff on it. Oddly enough, the other Elmore Leonard adaptation from that time, Out of Sight, also had a kickass soundtrack, mostly of original DJ music that still sounds good, unlike those Fatboy Slim CDs I used to like then too.

*The Moldy Peaches - The Moldy Peaches: I felt like I knew these people when I first heard this, and I was astonished when I found out people I met from other cities really liked it too. I have little doubt that the homemade nature of this record opened me up to the possibility of trying to become a music performer.

*Willie Nelson - Phases & Stages: Like hip-hop, country was a genre I long ignored, because it seemed like everybody ignored it. When I finally started to play catch up, I realized that I love a lot of country music. Willie Nelson's '70s stuff is kind of visionary in a low-key way, and while Red Headed Stranger is more famous, this one does pretty much the same brilliant thing, but touches me a little deeper. Plus, I ripped this album off for My 3 Addictions.

*Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea: Similar to my experience of The Moldy Peaches, once I had a rudimentary idea of how to play the guitar, I realized that this album -- which my best friend Zach had burned for me, calling it akin to Sgt. Pepper's-- was really easy to play on guitar, and that it was the emotion (and the arrangement of the other instruments) that mattered. This was a big boost to my fledgling songwriting career in that respect, although I haven't listened to it in years.

*Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense (reissue): Seeing Stop Making Sense during its '99 theatrical revival run was one of the best moviegoing experiences I've had. The reissued soundtrack album, which includes all the songs from the concert film, instead of the handful on the original LP, is one of the most joyous collections of performances put to disc.

*Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat; Tom Waits - Small Change: Some time in high school, I went to a garage sale and bought a bunch of records for a twenty-five cents apiece. These two were included in that purchase. I had never heard music from either act before, and you can pretty much say that I've never been the same since.

*Brian Wilson Presents Smile: Having little history with the Beach Boys besides what played on oldies radio, I had no reason to be disappointed with Brian Wilson's release of Smile when it came out. I thought it was visionary and astonishing. I'm still not disappointed. It's one of the best fucking albums ever, gahdammit.

I've been thinking a lot about double-albums lately, not least because the next Elastic No-No Band album, Fustercluck!!! (due [hopefully] this summer), is intended to be a double-album (although if it ends up being 79 minutes of music, I'll not hesitate to jam all that onto one disc). I was talking to Brook Pridemore about how, as I've been listening to new songs as we record them, I inevitably have thoughts like, "That one will go somewhere in the first three songs on disc 2," "That one will probably be near the end of disc 1," "That could go in the middle of either disc," etc. etc.

It's a bizarre fascination/compulsion to have, because I don't think track order matters as much with a double-album. I was listening to the White Album by The Beatles today, and found myself kind of scratching my head at the sequencing choices, the songs bump up against each other and progress from one to the other, sometimes with a discernible flow and often without. At a certain point, the content -- all those songs -- rather than the presentation is what matters. People want to hear "Blackbird" or "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" or whatever; it doesn't really matter where it lands during the album's play.

(Now of course with the double-disc concept album, that's a different case. If the band is trying to tell you a story, even if it's only a story that makes sense to them, the order in which the songs show up usually matters.)

The Clash's Sandinista! -- whose all-over-the-placeness and extraordinary length (36 songs, originally on 3 records) was a big influence on my initial approach to Fustercluck!!! -- has 2 songs I really like, "The Magnificent Seven" and "Police on My Back." The first song is the first track on the album and easy to find, the second is like... track 4 on side 3, or something. But it doesn't matter. I like Sandinista! because it's all over the place, and somewhere in there it contains those songs I like.

Now some double-albums can be real focused and conceptual, not just in a storytelling way. Maybe disc 1 is rockin' and disc 2 is stripped-down (my favorite example of this is Taj Mahal's Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home -- he even bothered to give each disc a different name). Maybe the two discs explore distinctly different lyrical or musical themes.

These are not albums I am concerned with.

I'm pondering the albums where the artist or the band obviously just had too much to say in too many different ways, or they just had too much time to fuck around, to put the end result on one measly LP or CD.

A couple of weeks ago, I got Squeeze's East Side Story out from the public library, and at first, it seemed like the perfect follow-up to Argybargy, a new-wave/pub rock album that includes tons of gems, but especially "Pulling Mussels From A Shell" and "Another Nail In My Heart." But then... East Side Story started to go in weird directions -- that perennial '80s blue-eyed soul track "Tempted"* crops up, and then there's a tune with weird psychedelic organ touches, and then there's a country song! Shit, despite being a single disc, this feels like a double-album. A trip to Wikipedia reveals that the album was going to be, but was scaled back. But you see, I could tell.

Somehow, a double-album is a state of mind rather than a running time.

A perfect example of this would be a recent acqusition: Benji Hughes's debut album A Love Extreme, a double-CD despite only being about 65 minutes long. But my man Benji goes this way and that, from dance music to '70s-style rock to low-key singer-songwriter to ramshackle garage rock and beyond. And after the album, you are tired. You need these tunes broken up a bit for you.

Hmmm... Well, Fustercluck!!! is going to be a full-band rock album, mixed with some stripped-down solo stuff, a lot of collaborations with a bunch of different featured performers, there's gonna be some children's songs, some covers, a lot of new original material, some goofy little throwaway tracks, some tracks which we've been recording in segments for months, and some tunes we're just gonna rock out live in one take.

I think maybe even if it ends up clocking in at 50 minutes, this thing is definitely gonna be a double-album.

Justin

*It was interesting to find out too that the guy who sings "Tempted" was only in Squeeze for one album and only sang on this song. Later, he joined Mike + The Mechanics and sang "The Living Years".

Now, I know Elastic No-No Band has no fans. But I expect we have enough friends (not of the Myspace variety, mind) that some people give at least somewhat of a shit about what we do.

And I hate to simultaneously please and displease you, Possible Friend, by telling you that there is another Elastic No-No Band release on the horizon, and no: it is neither the album Fustercluck!!! nor the 6-song EP which will include mostly songs from that forthcoming album, tentatively titled Manboobs* (an EP coincidentally featuring a song about the shame about manboobs). No, this new EP of which I write is an expansion of -- and sequel of sorts to -- an existing ENB entity, the Elvis Costello covers album, Every Elvis Has His Army: ENB Does EC (you can download the whole thing illicitly from the Discography page on our website, just scroll down... almost to the bottom -- you'll find it).

It is an Elvis Costello covers EP called Every Elvis Has His Impersonators: 7 Homemade Remade Elvis Costello Songs.

WTF? Why now? Why at all?

Well, here's a few reasons:

1.Major Matt Mason USA, who has been recording the majority of the material for Fustercluck!!! -- and more to the point, who has been recording all the stuff on the Manboobs EP -- is currently on tour in Europe. So as far as that goes, it's been recording downtime. I mean, there are a lot of scattered pieces for the album that I could be working on in the meanwhile -- and I have been: Brook Pridemore and I wrote a splendid number called "The Color Machine" which we will record soon for the album, and I did one of the other intended songs as a solo home recording.

2. I'm pretty broke. So as far as getting some other pro or semi-pro person to record ENB right now, that's not feasible. Home recording it is.

3. People like ENB's Elvis Costello covers. Of the 100+ mp3s available free on our website, the Elvis Costello covers -- especially "Pump It Up" -- are consistently the most-downloaded. Why not put "Pump It Up" on iTunes, and see if it'll sell? After figuring out how to legally include 2 covers on the EP The Meow Bits, why not do it with the most popular tune on our site? After all, I'm pretty broke.

But immediately I felt like it would be a ripoff to take "Pump It Up" off the website, put it up elsewhere online for sale, and call it a new release. So I got a notion to record some new songs at home. There are often Elvis Costello songs I like to play, either at open mics or while busking in the subway, that are not on that old CD-R album. Why not record those? And hey wouldn't it be fun to record "Toledo", since that's where I'm from? And what about...?

Soon, I had enough potential songs to do a whole other album... which I didn't want to do. So I whittled the list down to 7: 5 new recordings and 2 old ones from the CD-R releases. Here is the tracklist:

1. Pump It Up
2. You Belong To Me
3. Monkey To Man
4. Battered Old Bird
5. Toledo
6. High Fidelity
7. I Want You

(17 DECEMBER NOTE: I made an edit here to correct some things, mostly because I changed the track order after I made this post.)

That's it for now. Hopefully the EP will be available for release in late November or December, with the Manboobs EP seeing the light of day in February (17 DEC. NOTE: This second part is a lie).

--Justin

*The previous tentative title was "The Shame About Manboobs" and other songs about how you look and how we feel, but I finally got tired of typing that whole thing out when writing about it, so I went shorter. (17 DEC. NOTE: This footnote is completely useless, since this EP will no longer be released and the material from it will just be issued on the forthcoming Fustercluck!!! album. Sorry to waste your time.)

So, I just put out a new download-only EP called THE MEOW BITS, which features some solo songs I've been working on for Elastic No-No Band's next album, Fustercluck!!! -- due hopefully sometime next year. They won't all make the cut, but that doesn't really matter since I'm releasing them all now as this EP anyway.

You can get the EP now from CD Baby, from iTunes, or from Amazon.com.

Here are the songs, with some backstory, in EP order:

1. Emotional Tourism. This is a really old song I wrote about sitting through open mics, listening to confessional songwriters. I know I wrote this before some of the stuff on The Very Best of Elastic No-No Band So Far, so I'd put it at originating somewhere in 2005. I basically shelved it because it seemed like such an out-of-character song. Now, nothing seems out of character. And also my fear of offending those confessional songwriters I saw at open mics is gone. The recording process for this took a long time, because every passing month or so, I would get dissatisfied with the then-current version and add another element until finally you have the slightly overstuffed arrangement that's there now.

2. I'd Love Just Once To See You. Fustercluck!!! is going to have a lot of collaborations on it, and some covers. This song is both. I was listening to a lot of Beach Boys songs this last winter, and I sent Toby Goodshank two Beach Boys songs for us to possibly cover, this one and "Take a Load Off Your Feet" -- both kind of obscure post-Pet Sounds tracks that would be novelty tunes, if they weren't so sincere. Toby couldn't get into "Take a Load Off Your Feet" but he fell in love with "I'd Love Just Once To See You." I had Toby over to practice the song, and he said, "Why not just record it now?" So I pulled out the laptop and we recorded it in Garageband. If you listen closely you can hear street noise (and a siren) from out of my window, and at one point, while waiting to overdub backing vocals, I mention to Toby as I'm listening to the track, "It's the 'meow' bit." And so, the EP has a name.

3. I Want To Hold Your Hand. There is no good reason for me to cover this song. It's not a particular personal favorite, and I don't think the world needs another cover of it. But I had just been chatting with my roommate Joe Crow Ryan that I had figured out the chords to it while absently strumming my guitar, and somehow the notion of doing it in the style of latter-day Johnny Cash came up. I tried it like that and really liked that sound. Within the week, I was recording just such a version with Major Matt Mason USA at Olive Juice Music... and now within the month, it's available for download from iTunes. This track had the fastest turnaround from conception to release of anything I've ever done so far.

4. Suffering From 7. Similarly, this tune was written and recorded only a few days before "I Want To Hold Your Hand," meaning that it's going out into the world still a little raw and untested. I started writing this song sometime last year, but I didn't finish the fragment until the end of August. I initially recorded it as a solo demo in Garageband on my laptop, but I didn't like that. So I recorded it again in Garageband, and tried filtering and degrading the audio to make it sound more lo-fi, and then bizarrely I started layering more sounds on top of it, to make it sound more hi-fi. The end result is therefore sort of the bastard spawn of home recording and the Wall of Sound. But I like it.

5. Hangover Dial. This song is about a year old. Not really much to say about it, except that it is based on actual events which I did... or witnessed... or heard about... or... I added the intro at the last minute because I was looking for public-domain telephone sound effects and came across this outstanding PD film: We Learn About The Telephone. It doesn't completely tie in thematically with the song, but there's telephones! What else do you need!?

--Justin

This is the last of 3 reviews I wrote for Urban Folk (follow that link for pdf versions of UF back issues) that will not be printed until 2009. For that reason, I'm "leaking" them here.

The past 2 reviews -- for new CDs by Frank Hoier and Debe Dalton -- were posted yesterday and the day before.

Here's one for the new vinyl 7-inch by M. Lamar.


M. Lamar
7" EP - "Dirty Dirty Nigga"/"White Pussy"/"The Conquest"

M. Lamar is not for all tastes, not that that's a bad thing. Recently, I was at an M. Lamar show, and I heard someone comment with annoyance that Lamar's music was like a "vicious buzzing" in the poor listener's ear. Singing in a register better suited to a female soprano like Leontyne Price, and taking inspiration from the theatrically imaginative but polarizing Diamanda Galas, M. Lamar plays minimalist piano and spews provocative lyrics about sex, race, life, and death. In other words, don't file this under "easy listening."

On his new white vinyl 7-inch ("though 9 ½ would be more appropriate," Lamar quips in his publicity), M. Lamar presents three songs.

Side one plays at 33 1/3 rpm and features two of Lamar's more infamous provocations. "Dirty Dirty Nigga" is a rebel's strike against the conformity of the past. Lamar talks about his grandmother working as a cleaning lady and his mother telling him to stay clean. Lamar instead decides to be a "dirty dirty dirty nigga," an intention he declares as he clanks down hard on the piano, violent but also appealingly funky. (As Lamar later sings, "I don't even clean my ass/'Cause I want the funk to last.") "White Pussy" sounds like the come-on of the piano player in a brothel located somewhere between 1920s New Orleans and Hell: "They eat the pussy... They drink the pussy... White pussy for sale." Both of the side one tracks repeat the provocations of their titles again and again as M. Lamar wails and pounds the piano keys.

The track on side two, which plays at 45 rpm (a fact which I missed at first, and led to a moment of puzzlement as a much deeper voice than expected came out of my stereo speakers), offers -- probably intentionally -- a different side of M. Lamar's writing. "The Conquest" seems to conflate the war-stricken state of the world with M. Lamar's philosophy in the bedroom. Far less cynical and in-your-face than the songs on side one, "The Conquest" maintains the atmosphere of Lamar's other tracks but isn't satisfied to repeat a mantra-like verse. Instead, Lamar goes in for the sensual seduction -- "My weapon's yours to feel," he generously offers. But make no mistake, M. Lamar is an aggressor; as he declares in the song's first line, "Defeat is not an option."

All in all, this 7-inch is a solid introduction to the music and personality of M. Lamar. It certainly will be a helpful tool to decide where you stand on the love-him/hate-him divide. But I'd even recommend those folks put off by the upfront taboo-shattering of side one to still give the sultry cut on the flip side a chance.

--Justin

If you want to know why you are now reading a CD review on this blog, check out yesterday's entry, and come back tomorrow for a review of M. Lamar's new 7-inch.


Debe Dalton
Live At Sidewalk

If you go to see a show or attend the weekly Antihootenanny open mic at the Sidewalk Cafe, you're likely to see Debe Dalton.  Many casual Sidewalk patrons know her as one of three things: 1) The lady with the multi-colored hair; 2) The lady who plays the banjo; or 3) The lady with multi-colored hair who plays that song on the banjo about waiting to play at an open mic.  There's more to Debe Dalton than just that, but, if not for the new CD Live At Sidewalk, your casual listener might never have known it.

Debe Dalton is notorious for being reticent about, or just uninterested in, recording her music.  Before this release, there had only been a single recording of that "open mic" song of hers on the Anticomp Folkilation two-disc set from 2007 (the title of that tune is actually "Ed's Song," by the way).  Luckily, four of Debe's friends decided to take matters into their own hands.  Debe agreed to have her shows recorded at Sidewalk Cafe's soundboard, and then Rachel Devlin, Brian Speaker, Frank Hoier, and Dan Costello clandestinely compiled and tweaked a CD's worth of highlights from two years' worth of shows.  At a Sidewalk show celebrating her 56th birthday, Debe was presented with her first CD.

The new compilation, Live At Sidewalk, is a revelation.  Not only does the album miraculously hold together as 70+ filler-free minutes of enjoyable music, but it highlights Debe as both a soulful interpreter of folk classics and an underappreciated songwriter.

Structured like a super-sized set, the disc opens and closes with a few beloved numbers, while lesser-known but startlingly beautiful gems occupy the middle.  Well-known as a fan of Stephen Foster, Debe is featured here doing versions of "Oh! Susanna" and "The Crawdad Song,"* the latter with help from Frank Hoier, who contributes guitar, harmonica, and some singing to four tracks on the album.  When she tackles these tunes, Debe does it with a passion that really knocks the dust off these old numbers, without adding any unnecessary bells and whistles in the process.

As reverent as she is with other people's material, she sometimes shows irreverence for her own.  The version of "Ed's Song" included here begins with the aside, "This one, I can play in my sleep."  The rest of her performance is full of similar little asides and mini-digressions – she even loses her place in the lyrics at one point – that might not benefit the song but shows her charming rapport with the audience.  In a similar way, she quickly throws in explanatory asides into her performance of a song she wrote in the '70s called, "Sorry Joan," about how she punched out a potential sexual assaulter.  She sings the title line, and then quickly adds, "It's Joan Baez, by the way."  It's a Pete Seeger-type of move, to guarantee everyone in the audience fully appreciates the song, and it's a move that works.

The bulk of her original material occupies an introspective, sometimes dark, often bittersweetly comic territory, like when she sorts out past relationships in the songs "Blue Backpack" and "Pain Medication" ("You ask me if I'm mad at you/Well, 'mad' is something I don't do/I hate you now").  While there aren't any love songs in this collection, there are a handful of songs about missed connections like "Another Glass" ("The first time we sat next to each other/I thought, I could stay here forever/I didn't know you from Adam/I didn't know you from Eve/But my heart kept sighing,/'Oh please please don't leave'") and "Anything" ("I said, 'Give me a call'/But you don't/I said, 'Anytime at all'/But you don't").

The album ends with a one-two punch of emotional uplift, with a rousing cover of "Pack Up Your Sorrows," a tune which frequently highlights Debe's shows, and a final quiet, thoughtful original song called "And You Ask Me," where Debe is accompanied by Magali Charron on violin.  "And You Ask Me" is simple advice for a lost soul: "At the end of the day/You still cry, 'What am I doing here?'… And you ask me, how do I keep on doing it?/Well, I sidestep the end of the day."

The recordings sound surprisingly good, considering the offhanded way they were recorded (I've had several shows recorded at Sidewalk, and only a few compare to the sound quality of this entire album), allowing this collection to not just be a document or a compilation, but a real start-to-finish album that is easily one of the best of the year.**

*At last night's show at Sidewalk, Debe mentioned that the liner notes crediting Stephen Foster with "The Crawdad Song" is factually incorrect, but I'm too lazy to restructure that paragraph now.

** I know I said Frank's album was one of the best of the year in my last review too.  I'm not lying in either case.  After all, why do you think I was compelled to make sure these reviews got out.

As you might know, I used to write for Jon Berger's Urban Folk black-and-white fanzine/tabloid/paper thingy (originally started by Dave Cuomo).

And as you also might know, Urban Folk is pretty much defunct. It's going to start reappearing as part of Boog City, another independent publication, but it's no longer its own thing. Also, Jon Berger just informed me that the first Boog/UF co-produced issue won't come out 'til 2009.

Well, gahdammit, I have some CD reviews already written for that issue and it seems stupid to let them sit shelved for four months or more. Here is the first of the three I already have (who knows, maybe there'll be more). It's for Frank Hoier's new album; the other two are for the new Debe Dalton disc and the new M. Lamar 7-inch, and I'll post those here in the next couple of days.


Frank Hoier & The Weber Brothers
Lovers & Dollars

Brooklyn (via Southern California) singer-songwriter Frank Hoier has just finished a full-band rock album that sounds much less like the dreary pop or emo of today and more like something you'd find in a used record shop, shelved appropriately between copies of The Band's Music From Big Pink and John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album. Frank's album is called Lovers & Dollars. I was present for most of the recording of the album, and I have just finished a documentary film about the recording process. Therefore when you read my next sentence, you might expect that I'm lying or biased. Believe what you want, but I have to say that Lovers & Dollars has a shot at being the best album of the year.

Frank's live performances are usually done solo, with just Frank and an acoustic guitar. In 2006, Frank recorded 9 songs like that, and put it out as an album called Love Is War. Since then, Frank has referred to the album as a "demo CD" and has refused to reprint it after selling out all of his copies, even though the lean production and straightforward performances resonate like the work on Bob Dylan's early albums, without sounding too much like a guy who's just trying to copy Dylan.

Frank takes a handful of tunes from the Love Is War disc and re-records them with a full band for the new album, and the new arrangements are hardly redundant. For example, the album opener, "I've Made Up My Mind" has mutated from a mournful complaint about a dishonest lover to a foot-stomping rocker, complete with a searing electric guitar solo and a freeform fade-out jam that is nearly as long as the song that preceded it. Similarly, the sepia-toned fugitive story "Heartless Words" (here slightly re-titled "A Fool's Heartless Words") gains a greater immediacy with its new train-rhythm drums and a healthy slathering of moody electric slide guitar.

Half the album, however, is purely new material, such as the tender infatuation ballad "We Both Live in Brooklyn, Babe," where Frank asks his prospective lover the worthwhile question, "Do I have to know your faults if I'm to say that I love you?" Later, Frank spins a dark character study called "Ninety-Nine Thoughts" whose tormented alcoholic hero ponders suicide and might have committed murder, but maybe it's all just in his head. The man's agony is accentuated by an organ part and an e-bowed electric guitar part that feel like something out of an old horror movie.

Frank is backed on most of the album by a band full of singer-songwriters, all friends and friends of friends. On lead guitar (doing those searing solos) and bass are the co-billed Weber Brothers, Sam and Ryan, a pair notable not only for their own raucous work but for being the current backup band for rock legend Ronnie Hawkins, the guy who recruited the outfit that would become The Band. For Lovers & Dollars, the Webers recruited multi-instrumentalist Timothy Bracken to play drums, while Frank brought in Andrew Hoepfner of Creaky Boards to do piano and organ. There are also a couple of guest appearances by Feral Foster on harmonica and Eli Smith on banjo.

The band is most in its element on songs like "I Don't Care If The Sun Don't Shine," an Elvis cover that's done as a full-on rockabilly workout with a few Beatles-style bridges tossed in for good measure. But these rockers certainly don't bungle the more tender numbers like "One Hundred Miles From Any Road," which lilts gently and features lyrics that would qualify it as baby-making music for white people.

Rounding out the disc are two numbers that Frank performs solo: an intimate version of the folk favorite "Moonshiner" and a toe-tapping slide blues number that is the title track.

"Lovers and dollars," Frank sings, "they may come and go." With the album Lovers & Dollars, it looks like Frank Hoier's time has finally come, and it doesn't look like he's going away any time soon.

Visit Frank's myspace for info on getting a copy of the album, and visit my myspace filmmaking page to see a few clips and find out how you can get a copy of my making-of documentary.