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Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Latin music live chat with Paul Saucido Thursday at 2 p.m.
Join us Thursday at 2 p.m. for a live chat about Latin music in Austin and beyond with guest host Paul Saucido. Until recently, Paul served as Latin Music Director of ME Television where he hosted the groundbreaking show “Sonido Boombox.” Paul also hosts the annual Rock ‘n’ Roll Dia celebration which brings to the stage a broad mix of local and national Latino artists. You can catch Paul on the Internet at rockyrollradio.com where he hosts a weekly Webcast featuring excellent local, national and international Spanish-language music mixed with entertaining chat. New shows air every Monday and Friday and old shows are archived for your listening pleasure.
(Pictured: Paul Saucido at the 2007 Rock ‘n’ Roll Dia. Photo by David Weaver FOR AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
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Escovedo plays DNC today
Alejandro Escovedo’s first appearance in a month will be today at the Democratic National Convention, playing a solo acoustic set as opening House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland).
On an unrelated note, Bruce Springsteen (D- New Jersey) is playing the convention Thursday.
Escovedo returns to Austin Thursday to headline a benefit for the Child Guidance Center at Antone’s. The Reivers and Ian McLagan are also on the bill at Antone’s
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CD review: The Game ‘L.A.X.’
Game
“L.A.X.”
(Geffen)
The Game’s debut “The Documentary” could have been a 50 Cent album. He was its biggest star - the co-executive producer featured on the first three singles. Game name-dropped G Unit incessantly, while bragging about a past (Compton gang-banger, five bullet holes) suspiciously 50-like.
His second album “Doctor’s Advocate” revolved around Dr. Dre, who had chosen 50 over him after a feud between the two Dre proteges. It was a conflicted album, both defiant (full of Dre-sounding beats that screamed “I don’t need you”) and plaintive (with lyrics that begged for forgiveness).
So who exactly is he without 50 and Dre? That’s the question he faces on his third album “L.A.X.”
Even without his mentors, the record doesn’t lack in star-power. The endless guest-list (Nas, Lil’ Wayne, Ne-Yo, Ludacris, Ice Cube and Common, just to name a few) leaves room for only three solo tracks. An equally impressive group of producers keep the G-Unit meets West Coast sound of his first two albums.
Game isn’t overshadowed, thanks to his commanding and self-assured baritone straight out of gangsta rap central casting. But for someone from Compton, the birthplace of gangsta rap, his ghetto tales are so unimaginative they could be a parody: “Come to my hood / Look at my block / That’s my project building / Yea, that’s where I got shot.”
He’s interested not in gangsta rap but gangsta rappers; he’s more fan than rapper. He incorporates other musicians into every subject imaginable - from civil rights to sex. They’re signposts in both time (“Everybody’s first bootleg was Boyz ‘n the Hood”) and place (“I’m from a block close to where Biggie was crucified”).
On “Never Can Say Goodbye”, the album’s most ambitious track, he raps as Biggie, Tupac and Eazy-E on the eve of their deaths. It’s expert mimicry, but if he wants to join the ranks of his idols, he’ll have to find a voice of his own.
Recommended: “My Life,” “Game’s Pain”
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Review: MMJ at ACL
Like a cross between… nothing. J. James and co. warm up for ACL
Although often considered interchangeable terms, there’s a big difference between inspiration and influence. My Morning Jacket is a band that sounds influenced by no one and yet the songs of Jim James are inspired by the smell of rain, a good meal, Prince, “Nebraska” and how it feels better to sleep on bed sheets that have come off the clothesline instead of out of the dryer. They’re pure, organic, truly original and a little boring, but that’s OK because they’re also inspired by the fact that it takes more muscles to yawn than it does to hoot.
I had never seen My Morning Jacket live until last night at their “Austin City Limits” taping and had only listened to one of their albums, the new “Evil Urges,” a couple of times. The band of mountain men from Kentucky had slinked onto the national scene after my run as music critic evolved into a more general feature writing role. Having ditched my old faves Wilco after they started sounding more influenced by Radiohead than inspired by a warm day in winter, I wasn’t really looking to be challenged by another Midwestern band with a new way to (not) rock.
But my dear friend V is a major MMJ fan (so much that the initials could stand for My Michael Jordan), so I tagged along to that windowless world at Guadalupe and 26th. While ACL tapings generally lack the energy of a concert- any way to darken the faces of audience members?- they are a good way to study a band, as if under glass. My analysis turned up a couple of major points in the band’s appeal. First, James is an exceptionally intuitive singer who can turn it off and on like a faucet. His songs sound like he was raised in a bunker miles from anywhere, out of radio’s range, but with the instinctive knowledge that Motown and the Grand Ole Opry existed. Second, the band stays out of his way and he rewards them with the occasional instrumental freakout (actually the weakest part of their m.o.). Also, there’s no way to overstate just how vital the drummer is to the band’s genre-jumping abilities. No other caveman could lay down such a perfect disco beat.
You’ll note the lack of song titles in this “review.” Just look at the track listing on “Evil Urges.” That’s the set list, scrambled up. According to V, the band also played a couple of never-recorded songs and ended with a couple of fan faves from the LP’s “Z” and “It Still Moves.”
My Morning Jacket is a band that people follow, though not as blindly (or deaf-ly) as Deadheads. They remind me, more philosophically than musically, of another band from Louisville, NRBQ. My favorite adage about NRBQ, those musicians’ musicians from the ‘70s and ‘80s, is that when they’d travel by car they’d never play the radio. Instead, someone would name a song- “Chestnut Mare” by the Byrds, for instance - and the four members would think about that record in silence for about as long as it lasted. Then someone would name another song.
So much happens in the head before it ever makes it to the hands. What I got out of last night’s taping is that My Morning Jacket makes music of the mind, that playground of inspiration.
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