Tag: bob marley

Day’s Plays Guest Post: Renata Ocampo

[You can hear Renata’s music here or here, and see her embroidery here.]
Anohni, “It’s All over Now, Baby Blue“ b/w “Be My Husband” (2020): Ok, I know this is just a single but I was way too excited by those 2 covers that Anohni released in the beginning of August. I’ve always had fun trying to decide what’s the best cover for Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and I really think this is a winner. Anohni recorded this song and some other Dylan’s covers with Kevin Barker in one afternoon a few years back, encouraged by Hal Willner who just passed away from Covid 19. She said she listened to it recently and it prompted, “a nausea of nostalgia for the suffering of the present, or even the future.” The other cover on this 7” is “Be My Husband” by Nina Simone and it’s actually a live recording from a show at the Knitting Factory in 1999. I had the pleasure to see her live about 14 years ago and it was one of the best shows I’ve seen. It was just her and her piano and I remember she would tell us anecdotes and jokes between every song. Everyone left the room with a smile on their faces.
Moraes Moeira, Moraes Moreira (1975): This is Moraes’s first solo record after playing with one of my favorite bands Novos Baianos. This record came out 3 years after Acabou Chorare and it’s just an explosion of Brazilian influences and rhythms like samba, choro, frevo, and baiao mixed with straight up rock and classical music. He’s definitely a Brazilian darling and we all felt deeply when he passed away from a heart attack back in April. He’s such a legend with his sweet and beautiful voice mixed with his amazing guitar playing. I admit I cried for a whole day when I heard about his passing. We were so lucky to have him.
Os Mutantes, Mutantes e Seus Cometas no Pais do Baurets (1972): I’m going to disagree with the whole world and call this my favorite Os Mutantes record. This is the last recording of the band with singer Rita Lee, that quit to pursue her career as a solo artist. I’m almost tempted to say this record sounds like a good mess but I’m just gonna go and say it’s more like a perfect salad. This record has everything: Brazilian popular music, rock, latin rhythms, jazz… It’s such a fun record and it brings so many good memories of when I was a young teenager in Brazil that it’s almost impossible to imagine that they were not getting along during the recordings. I had the pleasure and honor to open a show for them a couple years ago with my band Warm Sun at the Black Cat, DC. That was the third time I saw them live and it’s always such a party. First time I saw them it was back in Brazil on their first “reunion” show with Arnaldo Baptista and it was an intense emotional trip. I know it’s not the same with just Sergio Dias in the band but it’s still worth it to catching them live.
Bob Marley, Catch A Fire (1973): Will this record ever get old?I remember being 14 and being hooked on this. I try to revisit it every couple years and it really keeps getting better and better. I’m temped to say this might be my favorite record. I recently worked on a PBS documentary about the recording of it, and even though I always say this is a record I would have liked to produce, it doesn’t seem like Chris Blackwell or Tony Platt (producer and engineer) were having the time of their life. It was also interesting to see John Bundrick and Wayne Perkins trying to understand what they were supposed to do in it and getting instructions and encouragement from Marley even though they didn’t quite understood what he was saying. When Marley was asked if Chris Blackwell was his producer he responded, “No, he’s my translator.” He was so right. The record does sounds like nothing else though. I love it.
Cymande, Cymande (1971): I was on a first date with this guy back in Brazil when all of a sudden he gets out of bed and starts playing this to me. I feel like this would’ve annoyed me in any other situation but immediately the first song caught my attention and we spent the rest of the night just talking about the record. I still can’t stop listening to it. This is one of the records that if you start playing everyone will ask about it and you could literally do anything with this in the background. When Devin and I got married, this was playing on repeat in our wedding reception since we couldn’t afford a proper DJ.
The Up On In, Steps For The Light (2000): Yes Zach, I’ve actually been listening to this recently! This record was BIG in the Brazilian punk scene. There was a time when everyone was recommending this record to friends. It was also the first time that I heard drums as its own separate instrument and not just used to keep a beat or tempo. I must say that this record inspired me to be a drummer and still influences me a lot. I’ve been taking a lot of walks recently and I enjoy listening to this while I do so.

Day’s Plays Guest Post: Blake Schwarzenbach

[You can hear Blake’s music here, here, and here.]
Van Halen, s/t: Like so many, the global pandemic has left me with enormous pools and pockets of unaddressed rage and sadness. Rather than post hateful memes or celebrate America’s racist achievements, I have been finding aggressive music to be a pretty vital antidote. Thus, Van Halen’s freshman entry into the hard rock canon. What strikes me at this time is how much Dave carried the band — his wry persona and volcanic charisma really leave the listener with no choice but to laugh or get steamrolled. Also, Alex Van Halen: never gave him much thought other than that he was the scary guy in the band, with those reptilian sunglasses and Freeway Killer aura. Now I’m thinking that the ride cymbal is really his signature — he does a lot of solid work over there, in a place where showier drummers might not waste screen time. And his snare drum is pretty fucking iconic — that hollow, airplane hangar thwap that still retains some mysterious bottom end. Finally, Michael Anthony. Totally under-appreciated. The bass on this record is so dry it sounds like it was just put directly into the board. There are moments where it punches through the mix in a really nasty way, like a garage band, and it delivers the savagery of a Pasadena basement band pummeling their way to momentary freedom.
Nine Inch Nails, With Teeth: I’ve seen hardcore fans trash talk this record as being soft or not experimental enough, but that fails to take the record on its own terms. For my money, this is Trent and his associates delivering a really high quality hard rock album, a little more focused on songwriting than on deep noise tangents. This is an album in the classic sense: beginning, middle, end — an emotional journey with a series of crescendos and denouements. Two songs that were never singles rank among NIN’s finest: “You Know What You Are?” and “Right Where It Belongs.” These are representative of the width of this album’s vision: the first just feral and ecstatically hateful, the second distant and morally wary. Trent, despite his earlier heyday in 90s despair, is a pretty formidable thinker and wan reflector of social and civilizational decay. There is a deep moral compass that often gets overlooked in the broader commercial assessment of his catalog.
Powderfinger, Odyssey Number Five: Look, I love a big rock and roll record — a Superunknown, a Vitalogy, a Powerage — and I’d put this album in that category. It’s also got a beautiful psychedelic through-line that hearkens to The Posies Frosting on the Beater and the like. This is the kind of album where you welcome the lush production, the massive compressions and thoughtful reverbs sprinkled throughout. But mainly, it’s a showcase for Bernard Fanning’s beautiful voice and often surprising lyrics. Surprising for being smarter than you would expect on a big record like this, but also totally basic in the way that radio lyrics can be in a good way. The other thing is the drums. The drums! These are meat and potato, I’m-gonna-give-you-every-inch-of-my-love drums. Not afraid of the big power fills and wet cymbals. I love it and you will too.
Comsat Angels, Sleep No More (YouTube): Lest we forget that everyone is needlessly dying and the industrial giants are profiting from the charnel house of the poor and disenfranchised, Sheffield’s finest, Comsat Angels, bring the urban estrangement and bleak English skies. This album is on a par with Unknown Pleasures as a wholly consummated vision of despair and civic failure. This is a mood as much as it is an album — kind of one long meditation on existing outside of myriad failed systems, looking in glumly from the dole line or beside a poisoned river. It sounds like they ran a final master through another hall reverb, but in the best possible way, evoking a vast wasteland pinned down by leaden skies. In the early days of the pandemic I would walk beside the cemetery in Kensington and find my mortal equanimity with this album. A life saver!
Bob Marley and The Wailers, Exodus: The title track alone makes this record immortal. Its a faster song than you realize at first, with the rhythm section really laying down the urgency of the exodus, of displacement and return, a truly righteous track of a dispossessed people trekking with unity and purpose. There’s something deeply confident about putting all the politically committed tracks on Side A and holding the hits for Side B. “The Heathen” is another standout track for me — a harsh and pithy rumination on survival. The breadth of Marley’s vision really comes together on this record with every member playing at the top of their game. If Sleep No More is about undead perseverance, Exodus is about armed hope and the triumph of revolutionary love.
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Chasing Yesterday: This album unexpectedly became my MVLP of the summer.  Like most good records it wasn’t until the fifth or sixth spin that I began to respond to the music, at which point it became my reflexive choice for soundtrack to walking through the COVID ruins of NYC.  The playing is above and beyond, particularly the drum and bass arrangements, which always serve the overall jam with restraint but tons of nuance and english (by which I mean, attitude or spin on the ball).  You know a record is good when it holds it’s most obvious single (“You Know We Can’t Go Back”) until second to last, after the listener has done the heavy lifting of wading through the deep pyschedelic bog of the album’s main body.  To me this feels like the band that Noel Gallagher has always dreamed of being in, probably closer to “Standing On The Shoulders of Giants” in spirit and musicality, more about a band playing as one than a hit-machine churning out pub bangers