Sarah White’s Austere Folk; Coke Makes Jamaican Toaster Trinity Soft; The Donner Party

All right.
That’s long enough. Now let’s be serious.

Let’s
talk about the sound of loneliness, the sound of a generation living under the
shadow of a bomb, the sound of youth torn away from their parent’s cradle
and sent to kill and be killed in some foreign country they had absolutely no
interest in. Let’s talk about the 60s, and more specifically the genius,
finely wrought harmonies of Simon & Garfunkel. I’ve never understood
those who felt the Forest Hills duo sounded sterile or too polished: taken within
the context of their times, their tastefully arranged orchestration and plucked
acoustic guitars are truly chilling. Is it possible to listen to a song like
the doom-laden “The Sun Is Burning” or voiceover classic “7 O’Clock
News/Silent Night” without the chill of mortality reaching your spine?
In Paul Simon’s rounded vowels, in Art Garfunkel’s choirboy harmonies,
there’s the sound of distant terror, of napalm falling, of a thousand lonely
ex-schoolboys thrown to uncaring society. Fair enough, songs like “Peggy-O”
and the dire “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” grate in their inoffensive
blandness–but for every “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall”
there’s a mind-bendingly good “The Boxer” or “The 59th Street
Bridge Song.”

Don’t
dismiss songs through over-familiarity. Sometimes the cream does rise. One listen
to Aretha Franklin’s cover of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” should
prove the soul behind this most famous of folk-rock duos. Toward the end, Simon
& Garfunkel even started to sound like the Zombies (“Hazy Shade of
Winter”) and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. “Mrs.
Robinson” still sounds superfine after all these years, a magnificently
chirpy reversal of the usual sexual stereotyping.

All this, and
“The Sound of Silence”…

The Rollins
set starts with the first album he played on for Riverside, Thelonious Monk’s
Brilliant Corners. The Riverside period was perhaps the last great era
for Monk (the later Columbia stuff was kinda stolid) and Rollins’ appearance
in his band was a definite plus (he’d been playing with Monk, off and on,
since 1948). On “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues Are” we get to hear good elliptical
solos from not only Rollins but altoist Ernie Henry (who apparently faded into
oblivion shortly thereafter), sandwiching a Monk piano tour de force. Rollins’
next outing was for Contemporary, as a leader, and it’s a classic. Way
Out West has a double meaning actually: on the one hand, the title refers
to the fact that Rollins cut it in L.A. when the West Coast seduction of “cool”
stylings (Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, etc.) was in full swing. On the other,
there are a lot of Western motifs on the LP (“I’m an Old Cowhand,”
“Wagon Wheels” and the title cut) and Rollins was clearly having fun
on this one (he wore a 10-gallon cowboy hat on the cover). Playing with the
sparse accompaniment of Ray Brown on bass and Shelly Manne on drums, Rollins
gets to stretch out and Way Out West is arguably the best album he ever
cut.

Then there’s
four tracks Rollins did for a Kenny Dorham album in ’57 called Jazz
Contrasts. All and all it’s kinda conservative (as Dorham’s were
wont to be) although Sonny’s solo on “My Old Flame”–strictly
in the smooch vein–is all right. The Sound Of Sonny, Rollins’
first album for Riverside, follows. The band is better (Roy Haynes being a way
preferable skins-man to the overrated Max Roach) and on tracks like “The
Last Time I Saw Paris” Rollins shows he was definitely reaching his stride
as a sax player, perhaps due to the competition of another up-and-coming tenor
man, John Coltrane. “It Could Happen to You” is a solo piece that
foreshadows another great Rollins solo improv from a few years later, “Manhattan.”
One imagines that during the ensuing layoff, the lone notes that Rollins was
blowing nightly on the Williamsburg Bridge where he practiced sounded something
like this.

Coltrane definitely
benefited from his role as sideman during the period in which The Complete
Columbia Recordings were waxed. Miles, after all, had the tightest band
in the biz, and as such recordings as “Two Bass Hit,” “Ah-Leu-Cha,”
“Budo,” “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Tadd’s Delight”
(all on the first disc alone) prove it was the meter of this stuff, like a well-oiled
machine, that made it such a suitable vehicle for the band’s improvising.
And they were moving in leaps and bounds (giant steps, as it were)–just
listen to Coltrane’s playing on a subsequent version of “Two Bass
Hit,” recorded a couple years later and heard on Disc Two, to see how far
he’d come as an improviser. When Coltrane would form his own band a few
years later, he would borrow many of the concepts first learned here: tight
arrangements, melodic soloing and almost mechanically precise interchange between
the various musicians.

Davis really
hit his stride with the landmark Milestones in ’58, and of course
reams have been written about Kind of Blue. Both of those albums are
here, with alternate takes. The 1958 live sides, from performances at the Newport
Jazz Festival and the New York Plaza Hotel, respectively, show that Coltrane
was soon to outgrow his role as sideman once and for all.

Live at Mother Blues,
1964
Terry Callier (Premonition)

After The New Folk Sound,
Callier did some ace r&b songwriting for the Dells and other Chicago vocal
groups. Then he started making his own solo records, which are almost psychedelic
in their blending of folk intimacy, soulful vocals and full-blown jazz orchestration.
He made three records for Cadet; left stranded by the death of his producer
and mentor, Charles Stepney, he then signed to Elektra and made two terrible
funk-fusion LPs before calling it quits in the early 80s to raise his family
and–this is the part that always gets ‘em–begin a career as a
dedicated computer programmer, a job he holds to this day. After some British
dance dudes started sampling his old songs, Callier started to get back into
the game in the 90s, and in 1998 he played his first New York concert in 25
years.

Lifetime, released
late last year by Talkin’ Loud, the British acid-jazz label that has championed
Callier for the last 10 years, is Callier’s second new-era album, after
TimePeace, which he recorded for a pre-Seagram’s Verve two years
ago. Lifetime is pretty much the same animal as its predecessor, no surprise
there. It shows a Terry Callier who is trying to pick up where his career left
off in the 70s, with confessional, poetic lyrics and a maximal approach to songwriting
and arranging. When it’s not intimate and delicate, there are forbidding
bass and horn parts, twinkling percussion and unknown stringed instruments plucking
radiant harmonic notes.

Thematically, it’s
just as quixotic. It moves like a sadly nostalgic old man from the quiet reverie
of “When My Lady Danced” to a sermon on the evils of the world in
“Sunset Boulevard.” They’re slight throwbacks to older Callier
songs, especially “Dancing Girl,” but in 2000 Callier is wiser, sadder
and less libidinous. He sounds like a sage father figure on a lot of the album,
when he isn’t heading into some dangerous dinner-table pontificating about
“blame,” in “Fix the Blame” and “Nobody But Yourself”
(to blame, of course). Cynics will call this lite jazz, but only if they ignore
its emotional intensity. Beth Orton makes her umpteenth guest appearance with
Callier on the album. She sings a nice, jazzy duet with him, “Love Can
Do.” They sing beautifully together, as always, but to me it doesn’t
make up for the way Callier was buried in the mix on “Pass in Time”
on Orton’s overrated last album, Central Reservation.

Callier collectors have
recently been given a gift from heaven, and should snatch it up as soon as possible:
Live at Mother Blues, 1964, a live gig at a Chicago coffeehouse, is a
fantastic document of a side of Callier that is little known but perhaps musically
superior to his later work. Until now the only way to hear Callier’s extremely
innovative folk side has been through a hard-to-find CD reissue of his impossible-to-find
1964 Prestige LP. The disc is an overlooked masterpiece in 60s folk, and an
unexplored direction in music of the same degree as his later soul-jazz material.
In Callier’s hands, traditional folk ballads like “Cotton Eyed Joe”
and “Promenade in Green” are merely the raw matter for long, probing,
mesmerizing singing, and the songs themselves are transformed by the instrumentation
of two stand-up basses and an acoustic guitar. (He was inspired by Coltrane’s
Olé Coltrane, legend has it.) The same lineup is in effect here
and the results are stunning. Even as a 19-year-old, Callier’s fatherly
baritone was fully developed, and in some ways more powerful than ever, since
the instrumental sparseness of the music forces his voice to carry so much emotional
weight. He comes across as a timid, earnest young man whose inner emotional
burning comes out in a strong, slow stream as soon as he begins to strum his
guitar. In an odd way, Live at Mother Blues is a prescient summary of
Callier’s entire career, right at the moment where it began: wise, gentle,
inward-looking and doomed. As such, it may be his greatest.

9.11
Zzz…
The Codfish Suit
Leif Elggren & Thomas
Liljenberg (Firework Edition)

These are three of the oddest
discs I’ve come across in some time, by conceptual artist Leif Elggren,
who’s responsible for the imaginary Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland and
last year’s Ghost Orchid, a spoof on supposed celestial voices lurking
in household electronic appliances. For these latest efforts, Elggren and fellow
brainiac Thomas Liljenberg take up the entirety of two discs, sleeping on one
and laughing on the other. On a third, The Codfish Suit, they read dadaist
letters they’ve sent to various celebrities around the world. These guys
have been working together since 1978 and self-publishing slews of offbeat books
and recordings all along, but until recently they haven’t been available
in the States.

The Codfish Suit,
from 1996, is a sound version of Elggren and Liljenberg’s book Experiment
with Dreams. The texts are hysterically funny. In 1995, for example, they
wrote the following letter to Brigitte Bardot: “We are planning to start
a fish factory in Lofoten, Norway. Our plan is codfishing, but we are not interested
in the fish, but what’s in the stomach of the codfish. So we will have
a lot of fish-refuse that we now will offer you. We know that you are a great
friend of animals and perhaps this could serve as catfood? Looking forward to
your answer.” Similar letters are written to Elton John, Neil Armstrong
and Yasir Arafat, among others. The CD is these letters read aloud during a
gallery performance in affected voices, treated with primitive echoes and electronics.
It’s a low-tech outing and makes a better read than it does a listening
experience.

9.11 and Zzz…,
on the other hand, are wonderful audio documents. Had Andy Warhol done sound
pieces, this is what he might have conceived of; but this isn’t what they
would have sounded like. Elggren and Liljenberg are not really
sleeping and laughing–they are only pretending. As such, its fiction is
more akin to hysterical Artaud-inspired theater than to documentary. Both discs
start off straight enough: the beginning of Zzz… simply sounds like
two people sleeping, a snore here, a cough there. But as the work progresses,
the snoring gets more theatrical and obnoxious until, about halfway through,
it turns into a snoring opera, with the two protagonists taking turns belting
out twisted arias of snorts, yawns and honks. Same goes for 9.11 (desperation
is the mother of laughter): The first few minutes are just two guys sitting
around laughing. Thirty minutes into it, it’s obvious the exercise is verging
on the absurd and the laughter becomes forced and sinister. By the end of an
hour, it’s positively painful to think that two men have been laughing
as hard as they could for such an extended period of time.

File these discs with your
artists’ albums: they’ll go nicely with Terry Fox’s recordings
of 11 cats purring for half an hour, Erik Belgum’s “opera” of
people screaming obscenities at each other for 60 minutes, Lauren Lesko’s
squishy contact-miked vagina and Roman Opalka’s lifetime project of counting
from one to infinity. (The 40-minute LP excerpt from 1977 is all you really
need to hear.)

Released in
1970 and ’71, respectively, these albums help make a good argument that
a bee was definitely abuzz in the bonnet of hippie complacency. Along with groups
like the Stooges, the MC5, Mott the Hoople, Slade and a handful of others, the
Groovies were all about reversing the more rarefied (not to mention pompous)
tendencies rock ‘n’ roll had taken on during those years of arty experimentalism
in the late 60s. In the Groovies’ case, this couldn’t have been easy,
considering that they hailed from San Francisco (whose organic music scene no
doubt energized them in a positive way). Although they were looked on as outsiders
to this scene (as were Creedence Clearwater Revival, to whom they were closer
in spirit than any of the other SF bands), their proximity to it helped secure
them a contract with Epic in 1969.

The Groovies’
first album, Supersnazz, was a quirky, energetic record with a retro
spirit. A lot of bands from that era, fed up with psychedelic foolishness, were
spearheading a kind of back-to-the-roots revival (check out how many records
in ’68-’69 had a title or subtitle about “Good Old Rock ‘n’
Roll” or something similar). Supersnazz featured covers of Little
Richard, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran and other 50s icons. Although they soon
left Epic, after being persuaded by super-hip New York underground producer/journalist
Richard Robinson to come over to Buddah, the band never abandoned its roots.
However, the influence of Robinson coupled with the Groovies’ observance
of the wild antics of Detroit contemporaries like the Stooges and MC5 led to
a general toughening-up of their sound. This was first evidenced on Flamingo.
They’ve turned up the guitars a notch, and there’s more general attitude
(read: “punk”). They’ve also, despite one exception (Little Richard’s
“Keep a-Knockin’”), traded the oldies for an album full of smoking
originals that showcase a broad range of influences, from rockabilly (“Sweet
Roll Me On Down”) to country (“Childhood’s End”) to psychedelic
(“She’s Falling Apart”). Lead singer/guitarist Roy A. Loney was
establishing himself as a composer of considerable merit, particularly on the
breathtaking “Second Cousin,” which took all of the group’s 50s
influences and turned them into forceful high-energy rock on an almost MC5 level.
“Headin’ for the Texas Border,” meanwhile, was an instant classic,
with its pounding riff and lyrics about going home to see Mom and Dad, but not
telling them about the parties, or the women or “the nights I had to sleep
out in the rain.” Material like this was quickly establishing the Flamin’
Groovies as one of the true “underground” sensations of the day. But
the best was yet to come.

Teenage
Head, their second and final LP for Buddah, was an even more fully realized
opus. With Robinson once again at the helm, the band had finally come up with
the perfect union of roots and punk influences. The album seems particularly
informed by the kind of rustic overhang that had overtaken the Stones around
this period with albums like Let It Bleed. Apparently, Mick and Keith
liked it enough to supposedly remark: “Oy, it’s better than Sticky
Fingers, init?” And whether that was actually true, one look at the
list of dedications on the back of the album–Lenny Kaye, Lisa Robinson
(Richard’s wife), R. Meltzer, Danny Fields–proved that the band had
“arrived.”

They heralded
their coming-out with the most solid set of their career. Alternating between
pulsating rockers like “Have You Seen My Baby?” (written by Randy
Newman, who was supplying songs to just about everybody) and bluesy material
like “City Lights,” rockabilly like “Evil Hearted Ada” and
pure Stones rips like “Yesterday’s Numbers,” there’s nary
a wasted note on Teenage Head. As Mike Saunders once put it: “That
squashed plexiglass rhythm guitar sound–totally unique.” It definitely
influenced Mike, who parlayed its influence stylistically in the “canoe
guitar” he utilized in later incarnations of the Angry Samoans. Another
person who caught wind of it was John Felice of the Real Kids, who went so far
as to quote verbatim the “too many crazy people here” line on Flamingo‘s
“Comin’ After Me” in his own “Outta Place.”

Great band,
great songs, good (bad) reputation. So what happened? Same thing as ever: the
record label got impatient waiting for them to break big, and inter-band squabbles
broke them up (they were probably tired of waiting as well). Over the years
their reputation would continue to grow until the big moment when punk happened,
and history came to reclaim them. But by then it was too late. The moment had
passed.

These three
important new albums from core practitioners of the glitchwerks movement represent
the next step in the genre’s evolution. While the first batch of glitchwerks
releases (reviewed here a year ago) tended to stress the formal aspects of the
music, these new offerings begin to take the cold digital source material and
add emotion and warmth to it. It’s fascinating to witness the melding of
a didactic approach to computer-based work–some genuinely personal statements
emerge.

Out of the
thick waves of white digital noise, melody begins to appear. Christian Fennesz’s
latest begins with a soft atmospheric track–an electronic Satie-esque tune
awash in sensual, transistor-radio-like static; it’s a thick, calming,
digital fog. The fourth track starts out with standard skipping glitches but
soon shifts focus to a piano, which is digitally mangled, creating a savvy binary
update to Cage’s prepared piano–think of it as a “processed piano.”
The piano serves as a melodic basis for the piece, which is constantly interrupted
by mechanical noises of every stripe. It’s a great metaphor for the way
electronics are altering the function of traditional concert hall instruments,
giving them entirely new leases on life. A track in the middle of the disc at
first sounds like a sheer assault on the ears, but as the piece progresses and
your ears become accustomed to the volume, a gorgeous melody emerges from the
density. It’s a bit like listening to Morton Feldman–once you get
on Fennesz’s wavelength, small, unexpected occurrences leap out of every
nook and cranny of the recording. It’s a complex, varied and luscious landscape,
echoing the cover art, which features photographs of lush, green landscapes
that have been altered in some way by man and machines.

Peter “Pita”
Rehberg’s new release, Get Out, pretty much sticks to the agenda
of first-wave glitchwerks esthetics of abstract computer-generated noise, but
one 11-minute track makes an incredible break from what would otherwise be a
rather typical endeavor. Using what sounds like an alternating electrical current
as a rhythm track, Pita weaves a sensuous melody in and out. It’s plaintive
and sweet, and has the heroic, monumental feeling of Jack Nitzsche’s “The
Lonely Surfer” or the Nitzsche-produced tracks from Neil Young’s Harvest,
“A Man Needs a Maid” and “There’s a World”; in fact,
this piece owes a lot to Young’s eponymous first album and cuts like “I’ve
Been Waiting for You” and “The Loner.” It’s wonderful to
see Neil Young return as an influence in the most unlikely of places: he had
a revival early in the 90s as the godfather of grunge, now electronic artists
are picking up on his post-Phil Spector density and sensuality.

But just because
you’re funky doesn’t mean you can’t get paid. Take Galactic.
This New Orleans quintet must make a pretty good living touring and playing
for most of each year to college kids and Phish followers (by no means mutually
exclusive). A mostly instrumental outfit with a solid rhythm section, a great
saxophonist and an analog-obsessed keyboardist, their strong new Late for
the Future documents what they do best–funky, gritty soul that’s
more old than new. They borrow liberally from the new-jack soul jazz juggernaut
of immediate forebears Medeski, Martin & Wood, but Galactic’s is a
more classic, grounded sound, inspired by funky, greasy Prestige and Blue Note
jazz sides of the 60s and 70s, the Stax empire and even James Brown’s angular
instrumental workouts. “Bakers Dozen,” “As Big as Your Face,”
“Doublewide” and “Hit the Wall” flex their chops, giving
a clear idea about the funky magic they can work live. Galactic’s secret
weapon, though, is vocalist Theryl de Clouet, heard here on five cuts. On tracks
like “Thrill” and “Century City” his gritty, plaintive tones
melt in your ears like butter and do justice to his vocal descendants Al Green,
Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding, adding two tons of legitimacy to Galactic’s
street cred.

Maceo Parker,
meanwhile, remains one of the most distinctive saxophonists of all time. Dial
M-A-C-E-O is the follow-up to 1998′s Funk Overload, and while
he treads dangerously close to the “smooth jazz” side of the scale
on a full third of the album, there are still several nuggets. “Coin Toss”
(featuring Ani DiFranco) is exemplary of Maceo’s live show, with lots of
grit underneath, silky soloing in the middle and just enough slick frosting
to make it all work. “Simply Tooley” is a tiptoe funk number, wafting
along with a lightly sprinkled hint of dirty soul; a cover of the Isley Brothers’
“I’ve Got Work to Do” is a hip-shaking tribute and a nice collaboration
with the idiosyncratic musician I’ll still call Prince; “Baby Knows”
(the hidden track at the end, not the touted “Greatest Romance Ever Sold,”
which is painfully sappy) round things off. As anyone who’s seen him live
recently can tell you, Maceo’s still got it, and with new blood like Galactic
both paying homage to his funk lineage and opening doors and minds for the younger
generation, it’s all good. Maybe funk ain’t such a bad word after
all (again).

Brian Coleman

You’d
be hard-pressed to find a record that sounds more austere than Bluebird.
But austerity isn’t always such a bad thing, and in this case it’s
just fine–the stark arrangements and deliberate pace highlight the songs’
depth. The weird thing is that Bluebird isn’t really as stripped-down
as it initially sounds. Superficially speaking, it’s a folk album, with
White’s acoustic guitar at its center, but other instruments show up to
fill out the sound: a cello or viola here, an accordion or dulcimer there. But
the arrangements are so spare that they almost sound naked–there’s
never a wasted note, much less a flourish, and the drums, when they appear,
drag heavily on the beat. It’s an incredibly reserved approach–think
of it as sonic laconic–and it plays particularly well with White’s
vocal style, which is often a bit indirect, as if she’s not quite looking
you in the eyes. She’s not so much emotionally detached as emotionally
ambiguous, a tendency she exploits in her lyrics. When she tells an estranged
lover, "I got you back," for example, it’s not clear if she’s
means that she’s reclaiming him or exacting a measure of tit-for-tat revenge,
and she milks the tension between the two possibilities for maximum effect.

Like most acoustic
singer/songwriters, White occasionally succumbs to lyrics that read like bad
junior-high poetry ("If I had a fancy sash/My love would find me fair"–ugh),
but for the most part she avoids this problem and does a good job of investing
her songs with small details that stand out amidst the music’s bare sound.
The high point is "Bride," where she sketches the scene of a gorgeous
country wedding and then, in the last verse, sings, "The weather, it came
down"–this simple line is so devastating you can practically see the
groom in his rain-drenched tux. Like almost everything else on Bluebird,
it’s a great example of White getting a lot out of a little. (1703 N. Maple
St., Bloomington, IN 47404; www.jagjaguwar.com.)

Trinity has
a powerful voice and rides the roots cuts here with assurance, delivering a
lot of straight-up Rasta content that that flirts with the line between conventional
and cliched. He sometimes lets loose with endearing, not to say alarming. gasps
and moans and falsettos ("Oh my God, my God") and on some tracks he
plays with the rhythms in a most impressive manner. At other times he seems
to be fumbling a bit, disjointed, lyrically and musically, and the production
follows suit. There are terrifically dark and reverb-heavy horn tracks recycled
from earlier hits. Then there’s "Quarter Pound of Ishens," in
which Trinity complains about coke making him soft. The tracks not on the original
LP generally feature a slightly more melodic delivery and lusher production.
A couple are others’ songs followed by the Trinity version, or Trinity
and a dub.

Blood and Fire
is a UK label dedicated to rereleasing lesser-known Jamaican artists, like Cornell
Campbell and Children of Jah, who had one or two hits and are probably known
in the U.S. only to hardcore fans of the genre. Shanty Town Determination
isn’t the product of a master, but producer Vivian Jackson knew enough
to recycle the best of the time and place, and Trinity knew enough to model
himself on them. Its very lack of originality makes it great fodder 20 years
on. Better than being forgotten, I hear them say.

When Cullinan
surfaced next, he was fronting the brilliant Faith Healers, one of London’s
most underrated bands at a time when most folk were looking to the tired Bowie
mannerisms of Suede and Blur for their cheap thrills. Faith Healers was an odd
band. I could never work out if they ever had any structures (that was probably
the experimental Sun Ra jazz influence coming to the fore), or indeed songs.
Yet they were so great. Whatever. I had the chance to pick up a single of theirs
for $5 (NZ) in Auckland recently, and failed the acid test.

Quickspace,
who were formerly Quickspace Supersport, have been around for several years.
Hardly new, unless you want to take the description as a reflection of their
sound: Quickspace have never stopped sounding totally in love with music and
totally like they’re having fun, even as they fuck with conventional time
signatures and catharsis. For example: how good is the theremin sound on the
second track here, "They Shoot Horse Don’t They"? Please note
the singular. It’s like minor key melodic magic had never disappeared.

Don’t
read anything into the album title. It’s perhaps a reference to the way
the mysterious North London quintet often sound simultaneously astonishing,
ravishing and most becoming on this, their third album, fusing heartache and
Space Age moog synthesizers, engorged female/male vocal interplay and old-fashioned
guitar dissonance, usually within one song. Death takes on its old-fashioned
meaning as "minor orgasm." (As in.: I died a thousand tiny deaths
listening to the resigned, warped opus "Gloriana" on the new Quickspace
album.)

Here’s
a quick checklist of bands you might want to compare and contrast Quickspace
with: Supergrass, Stereolab, Faith Healers, Clara Bow, Van Morrison. Here’s
a quick checklist of tollbooth baskets you might want to deposit your head in
afterwards, for being so simple: the one between Newark Airport and Manhattan
will do. This is such a wonderful, spirited, heartening album…and I haven’t
even mentioned the finest track, the country-ish "Rose" yet. Now I
have. And now you have no excuse.

Which is a
shame, because The Donner Party is a truly sensational album, full of
dynamite guitar hooks and some fantastically warped songwriting that favors
topics like decomposing bodies and Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. In fact,
when you consider the record’s consistently high quality and the abysmally
small number of people who’ve heard it, it probably qualifies as the great
lost indie album of the 1980s. The only reason I ever got to hear it myself
is that I was publishing a music zine in 1987 and had landed on Cryptovision’s
mailing list. I knew how miserable the label’s releases tended to be, but
I was in one of those naive periods when I’d listen to anything at least
once if it came in the mail for free, and I can still remember how surprised
I was when I stuck my promo copy of The Donner Party onto the turntable
and discovered how terrific it was.

The Donner
Party, which broke up in 1989, was led by Sam Coomes, who later surfaced alongside
Elliott Smith in the Portland band Heatmeiser and now fronts the deservedly
lauded duo Quasi. The Donner Party is at least as good as anything he’s
done since, and now it’s finally available again as part of this double-CD
collection of the band’s work. The anthology also includes the group’s
mediocre second album, which was released in 1988 on Camper Van Beethoven’s
Pitch-A-Tent label (and was also self-titled, which probably added to the obscurity
of the Cryptovision release, since some people might have asked their record
store for "the self-titled Donner Party album" and ended up with the
wrong one), as well as a third album that was never released and a handful of
live tracks.

Frankly, much
of the material after the first album is uneven, but the 15 tracks that comprise
the band’s debut LP are worth the price of admission all by themselves.
The songwriting–mostly cheerily absurdist rants with titles like "Godlike
Porpoise Head of Blue-Eyed Mary"–bears no resemblance to the morose
black-humor tunes that Coomes now writes for Quasi, but it works. The swirling,
buzzing guitar sound owes a lot to other mid-80s indie bands like the Volcano
Suns, and at times also feels a bit like the great New Zealand band the Clean,
with some occasional banjo or fiddle tossed in to give the proceedings an appealing
hootenanny feel. But comparisons do a disservice to a record as fully realized
as this one–it’s a tremendous album that’s gone unheard for far
too long. Get it before it falls out of print again. (PO Box 411241, San Francisco,
CA 94141; www.innerstate.com.)