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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2008 > June > 23 > Entry
Three great local releases out this week
We profiled these three excellent local albums in the June 12 edition of XL. They hit stores Tuesday morning.
Alejandro Escovedo
‘Real Animal’
(Back Porch/Manhattan/EMI)
He’s never shied from personal albums, but No Depression magazine’s 1990s artist of the decade has never made one this straight-ahead autobiographical. And as such, it’s in the idiom he loves more than any other: straight-ahead, two-guitar, 4/4 rock ‘n’ roll, the kind he made with Rank and File and True Believers and not nearly enough since. In his words, from “Chip ‘n’ Tony”: “All I ever wanted was a four-piece band.” Co-written with Chuck Prophet, “Real Animal” is a grown man’s ode to punk and its discontents, a weirdly successful bid to recapture the sound of kicking out the jams while taking stock of the events that surrounded doing it in the first place. Glam-guru Tony Visconti mans the boards for a sympathetic production job. With its strings, sax and back-up gals, “Sensitive Boys” could be a “Transformer” outtake. (He’s never getting over Lou Reed, is he? Well, most folks don’t.)
“We came to live inside the myth of everything we’d heard,” Escovedo sings on “Chelsea Hotel ‘78.” The date’s important — Escovedo was 27 that year. It’s a cursed age in rock music (Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain are only the most famous of the 27 Club), but Al was just getting warmed up, hurling himself into a life of rock ‘n’ vice he’d only dreamed about.
He’s not adverse to name-dropping either — Neon Leon and “Nancy in her black underwear dead on the bathroom floor” show up in “Chelsea,” Lester Bangs in Austin with the “Vick’s Vapor eyes” shows up in “Chip ‘n’ Tony.” “Real as an Animal” is an ode to Iggy Pop (“Five feet four, trailer park kid”). “Nuns Song” shouts out his old band: “We don’t want your approval /It’s 1978/We know we’re not in tune/We know we’ll never be great.” Nice sentiment, but you can’t help thinking of it as a track from “Al’s Story: The Rock Musical.” Nevertheless, it’s a startlingly alive album from a guy whose life has been written off more than once. Welcome back, rocker.
Recommended: “Always A Friend,” “Sister Lost Soul” and “Nuns Song”
— Joe Gross
Reckless Kelly
‘Bulletproof’
(Yep Roc)
At this point, Reckless Kelly had to make a bold move without losing what they’ve built up over the past 12 years. “Bulletproof” is a statement record: We’re a rock band that writes country songs. And with “American Blood,” the Reckless ones brilliantly stand up for their country, while blasting the Bush administration (“sitting with his feet on the desk, when the boys have got theirs in the sand”). Under a sturdy rock riff tempo, Willy Braun forcefully sings the story of a kid not old enough to drink, yet sent to Iraq to fight. At 23, he’s old enough for booze, but his legs are gone, so he gets drunk and shouts “God bless America, but God (expletive) Uncle Sam!” It’s the most powerful moment in an album full of them.
Musically, R.K. is subtly subversive, although over the long haul of this album (14 tracks) the songs do tend to sound the same. The save man here is guitarist David Abeyta, who sets off the band’s Steve Earle tribute act with stunning guitar fills that sound based more on ’70s arena rock (bet he loves Queen’s Brian May) than on the usual chunk-and-twang such songs receive. When he’s got great material to work with, such as “Love In Her Eyes” and “Ragged As the Road,” Abeyta adds just enough sweetening without getting in the way. When he’s asked to carry a sleepwalker, such as the title track, he rips out an arsenal of swampy riffs that make the tune.
“Bulletproof” is an aggressive album with an anti-war song that outprotests James McMurtry. Even in the most stagnant of subgenres (alt-country), the Kellies strive to remain fresh and when that fails, they have Abeyta to fall back on. It’s a good album, perhaps their best, but it would’ve been better with a bit of the deadwood cut out. Can we somehow pass a city ordinance that limits the number of songs on an album to 12?
Recommended: “American Blood,” “Love In Her Eyes”
— Michael Corcoran
Ian McLagan and the Bump Band
‘Never Say Never’
(Maniac)
Because he’s such a monster keyboardist, best known for backing the likes of Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones, Ian McLagan is a woefully underrated singer and songwriter. While Stewart is printing money by pillaging the Great American Songbook, it’s the man they call “Mac” who’s following through on the Faces legacy with pub rockers such as “I’m Hot, You’re Cool.”
He’s also finding new styles of tenderness with “An Innocent Man,” an acoustic guitar song about being lost and lonely.
The overall theme of “Never Say Never” is using music as part of the grieving process. (The official release date is June 24, although it’s been available online for awhile.) “Nothing that I can write can help you,” he sings on “Where Angels Hide,” his voice almost breaking. It’s a sad and beautiful song, as is album-closing “When the Crying Is Over,” which is practically a gospel song.
Anybody who ever saw Ian and Kim McLagan together, so perfectly prepared to grow old together, knows that when Kim died in a car accident in 2006, a big part of Mac died, too.
But, as evidenced by this record, which has its light moments with parlor tune “Killing Me With Love” and the naughty, smoky “A Little Black Number,” perhaps a new part of McLagan has shown itself. He’s been to a place we all pray that we’ll never have to visit and somehow he’s getting through it. With his music. With his band. With his friends. With his memories and dreams.
McLagan couldn’t have written “An Innocent Man” three years ago. A minuscule concession, to be sure, but in McLagan’s quest to make sense of the senseless, he’ll help others understand along the way.
Recommended: “Never Say Never, “An Innocent Man,” “A Little Black Number”
— Michael Corcoran
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