I sang in this recording with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. The recording was a live concert recording from Symphony Hall, Boston; the program was also performed at Carnegie Hall in 2007.

The recording won a Grammy in 2010 for Best Orchestral Performance.

Features two epic sequences, the infamous Rogues of Wool and the librarian rap battle, from this increasingly surreal and lovely “comic strip”, online at http://www.littledee.net/.

Really well done set of mashups of Jay-Z and Radiohead. Unlike the Gray Album, this is all albums, all periods from both artists.

http://www.jaydiohead.com/

I’d listen to Shannon Worrell sing the phone book, I think – her voice is that mesmerizing – and it’s nice to hear the voice again. The rest of the album is deceptive. There’s more open space in the arrangements – quite a few of her old tunes were all vocal, all the time, while the very first track of the new album features an extended instrumental break – but there are more musicians in her band, I think, than ever before. It sounds like country, but that’s mostly the pedal steel – there are the same tight sinews underneath that powered her September 67 songs. And then there are the songs that are out of a different tradition: the echo, shuffling drums, and organ of “If I Can Make You Cry” feel like they came from somewhere unstuck in time near Louisiana. “Sweet Like You” is intimate and dreamlike.

But the lyrics. As always, Shannon’s songs are drenched in images, but where on Three Wishes she was tapping Greek myth and children’s TV, here the songs are swaddled in something simultaneously more personal and a little closer to Greil Marcus’s “old weird America.” The narrator of “Sweet Like You” wants to set her love floating down the James River. Kitchen tables rise and fly. Giant stars are removed from mountaintops. And lovers call from countryside bars because the bartender took their keys.

The Honey Guide is better than a note from an old friend: it’s a letter from a strange place. In its deepest waters it feels like a warmer version of Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood; in other places it feels like afternoon by a fire. Highly recommended.

…“What is this shit?”

Sorry. Track 4 kills it for me. Pitch correction makes Baby Jebus cry.

For a 1929 history, the scope of the book, embracing Virginia historic events from Jamestown through the Civil War, isn’t bad. And the conceit—tracing the history of the Tidewater region river by river and town by town—is fine. Unfortunately, “history” seems to have meant “of the Great Men and their plantations,” so the end result, while enjoyable enough for what it is, is still unsatisfying at best, offputting at worst.

This is a free downloadable mashup album, but don’t let that stop you from checking it out. The MCs are pretty gifted and banjo makes a surprisingly effective accompaniment to the beats. Make sure to check out “Dirty Pickin.”

I’m biased about this album because I performed on it as a member of the Cathedral Choral Society. The album is mostly live in concert, but we stayed after the performance with Dave’s quartet and the Telarc engineers to patch entrances and exits.

Dave Brubeck was fantastic to work with, very funny and very professional. When we first met him, our conductor jokingly told him he had always wanted to play something for him, and dashed off the first four bars of “Blue Rondo Ala Turk” — we all cracked up, but Brubeck said “More! More!” And in the middle of the recording session, after the other members of the quartet wandered off they needed to return for some more recording. The announcement went over the intercom for them to return, and as they were coming up the aisles of the Cathedral Brubeck began playing “Oh When The Saints Come Marching In,” and half the chorus joined in clapping and improvising vocal harmonies. (Not bad for a bunch of Episcopalians.)

Who is Black Francis? And where has he been all these years?

The first of these questions seems fatuous, the second coy. Even the 21-year-old hipster who was still eating strained peas and filling diapers in 1987 when the Pixies released Come On Pilgrim knows that Black Francis was the frontman, resident UFOlogist, and tortured lead screamer for this most pivotal underground band that almost made it mainstream — opened for U2 during the Achtung Baby tour, for Chrissakes — before he broke the band up by fax.

And Black Francis hasn’t gone anywhere, despite the fact that there have been no releases on which that nom de plume played from 1991’s Trompe Le Monde to 2004’s “Bam Thwok.” That selfsame callow hipster knows that Black Francis became Frank Black when he went solo in 1993, and released a series of solid, if workmanlike, releases between the debut s/t and 2006’s Fast Man/Raider Man.

So much for the history. The questions remain: where has Black Francis been in Frank Black’s solo work for thirteen to fifteen long years? And who is Black Francis, as opposed to Frank Black, anyway? And, most pertinent to Tuesday’s full-length release Bluefinger, why is this the first release of Frank Black’s career to be credited to Black Francis? These are all related questions with one at their core: what is the Black Francis sound?

As I ask the question, I hear Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, aka Frank Black, aka Black Francis, cough, then laugh dryly, then advise me to go f$cking die.

But there is something to the change of name, for sure. Or else this would have been the fifteenth release credited to Frank Black. So is this a change of soul? Or just of, you’ll pardon this squarest of thoughts, brand?

MBA voice over: The Black Francis brand stands for slicing up eyeballs, screaming, quiet loud quiet, being the band that inspired Nirvana, and being the most awesome band ever. The Frank Black brand stands for a workmanlike approach to rock and roll. Direct to two track. Country rock. Low sales. As he sang in “Chip Away Boy,” “I used to have some fun/Me and everyone/Now I’m just employed.”

And that may be all there is to it. Except:

Exhibit A: “Captain Pasty.” Mars attacking. Irregular meters. And that awesome growl-laugh that opens up the track. It will make your car go like nitrous, if you happen to be behind the wheel when you are listening.

Exhibit B: “Tight Black Rubber,” with its Fugazi meets Nirvana bass + guitar duet settling into a Meat Puppets meets Velvets chugging rocker full of tension and bondage tropes.

Exhibit C: “Your Mouth Into Mine.” Could be a Frank Black song, except the spaces between the verses run over with Black Francis’s love-as-body-invasion imagery at a speed that feels at once relaxed and chemically enhanced. Love never sounded so much like theft.

Exhibit D: “You Can’t Break a Heart and Have It.” The one song on the album that provides a tight connection to the album’s supposed inspiration, Dutch artist/musician/drug user Herman Brood, whose song this was before Black Francis made it his own.

Exhibit E: “Threshold Apprehension.” A romp through Pixies touchstones, from high pitched, screaming vocals to four-chord hooks to girlish spoken background vocals (courtesy Charles’s wife Violet Clark) to two of the finest couplets in post-Pixies rock: “Every little sh*t gotta find his salt lick/If I don’t find my babe I’m gonna be junk sick” and “Grand Marnier and a pocketful of speed/We did it all night til we started to bleed.” The hit single the Pixies should have had in the summer of 2007, showing up first as a bonus track on the best of compilation Frank Black 93-03. Your reviewer was stuck in traffic on the Mass Pike the first time he heard the song and nearly rear-ended the car in front of him, so immediately propulsive was the impact of the song, and so hard was he laughing with the force of the bliss coming at him from six speakers.

Even in slacker moments an animus of tension and anger moves the record forward. “She Took All the Money”’s “shama lama ding dang” chorus is pushed forward by an irritable rhythm guitar, surprisingly sweet backing vocals from Violet Clark, and some impatient drumming that takes the song out on just the right dry note.

So: what makes it a Black Francis work? There are some descriptive touchstones — screaming, odd meters, UFOs, Lou Reed as Surrealist lyrics — that are ultimately insufficient to describe what’s going on here. What this is is nothing more than the rebirth of Charles Thompson, his musical juices revitalized by the 2004 tour with the Pixies. As he says in the publicity notes for the album, reunions “are bittersweet, and all of the rekindled foreplay of performing the old Black Francis songs never warmed to the full coitus of a reunion LP … I privately went back to the old stage name … almost as a joke. I couldn’t get the Pixies back into the studio, but I would transform into my alter ego of yesteryear.” And even if there is no Herman Brood revival as a result of this LP — Wikipedia provides only a Google image search link to his artwork, and only one compilation of his music is available in the usual download sources — the transgressive junkie artist/musician/suicide deserves some posthumous credit for waking up Black Francis and sending him out screaming into the light of 2007.

When an artist is so moved by the release of his new album as to go out and break a world record for highest-altitude concert, it’s hard to avoid puns about other high things: spirits, melodies, hopes. Norwegian artist Magnet raised just such allusions in a March solo acoustic performance of his new album in a plane between Oslo and Reykjavik (in-flight altitude: 40,000 feet; check the video). Now the album is being released stateside, and the question is: will the high spirits of the album live up to the high hopes for its release? Will its world record for altitude take the album to similar heights on the charts?

Before we tackle those questions—what is it about Scandinavian indie rock artists? First Peter Bjorn and John come out of nowhere (er, Sweden) with “Young Folks,” with a whistle hook to die for (and which is already being sampled by Kanye West). Now Magnet, aka Even Johansen, brings a brilliant collection of pop songwriting in his third full-length, The Simple Life, along with pop production that the Shins would give eyeteeth for. What is it about the Scandinavians? Something in the Northern Lights, perhaps.

So, about the music. Some things this release is not:

Instead, The Simple Life is a collection of upbeat, clever pop, propelled by killer horn and string riffs and buoyed by Johansen’s high, aching vocals. Where The Tourniquet’s “Hold On” registers as an urgent, synth-thick plea, many of the songs on The Simple Life are joyous little ditties, including the handclaps of “The Gospel Song” and the bouncy drumline of “Lonely No More.” Throughout, unusual instrument choices pop out of the texture: a banjo here, a treble harmonica there, poking through the horn sections and pianos.

In fact (again apropos given Magnet’s world record), the one adjective that comes to mind over and over again on relistening to the album is buoyant. That is not to say, however, naïve. The song craftsmanship is tight throughout, with “You Got Me”‘s brilliant fingerpicking and horns offset with the string quartet and oboe of “Count.” Buoyant goes a little overboard in the cover of Bob Marley’s “She’s Gone,” including whistle chorus and woodblock percussion. It’s like a meringue, so airy that it threatens to dissolve into nothing at every turn. It holds together somehow, but I sincerely hope a full Magnet/Marley tribute album isn’t in the works.

Is this going to be the album that sends Magnet up the charts, to the toppermost of the poppermost? Unlikely. For all the airiness, there is a depth of sadness and empathy in the lyrics that grounds the album in an un-poplike sensibility. So it is that a wine bottle solo in “Lucid” takes on melancholy resonance that belie the rest of the album’s grin. And this is the ultimate joy of The Simple Life: it bears close examination and re-examination and brings new pleasures in each new light, all while still remaining a hummable pop masterpiece. So, probably no pop stardom for Magnet. But maybe the beginning of a beautiful friendship for the lucky listeners who wind their way into this album.