Real Life Rock (245 page)

5
Bill Fitzhugh,
Highway 61 Resurfaced
(William Morrow)
A lost-tapes mystery—all blues mysteries are lost-tapes mysteries—but unlike the rest, this pays off with a climax so rich you want to hear the tapes as much as the people hunting them down.

6
The Pine Box Boys,
Arkansas Killing Time
(Trash Fish)
Murder ballads one after the other, and, not halfway through, enough to make you queasy. Especially the indelible little number “The Beauty in Her Face,” which goes as far into the mind of a killer as anyone needs to. You know how it's going to end before the first verse does, and you spend the rest of the song trying to make it come out differently.

7
Paul Muldoon, “Sillyhow Stride,”
The Times Literary Supplement,
May 31
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, guitarist for the Princeton band Rackett, and sometime song-writing partner with Warren Zevon (“My Ride's Here,” from 2002, one year before Zevon's death at 56), a long elegy for the old California rounder. It starts off straitjacketed with song titles and lyric quotes; then the ground of the poem begins to slip, the room grows close, and more than anything you want a breath of fresh air. Which you get: “Every frame a freeze-frame/Of two alcoholics barreling down to Ensenada/In a little black Corvette, vroom vroom.”

8
Michelle Polzine, Chosen Best Pastry Chef by
San Francisco
magazine
The former guitarist in Special Agents of Her Majesty's Secret Cervix, now at Range, a gem in the Mission District: “If people like what you're doing when you're playing punk, you're doing something wrong. As a pastry chef, I can please people and still retain my integrity.”

9
“Marin Center Presents: Ian Anderson Plays Jethro Tull,” Advertisement,
San Francisco Chronicle
“Ian Anderson, founding member of the legendary rock band Jethro Tull, has long been considered to be the foremost and to many, the only exponent of rock-style flute”—and God knows being the only is a sure way to being the foremost. Not to mention appearing as your own tribute band.

10
Hem,
Funnel Cloud
(Waveland)
Chamber folk music from Brooklyn, but where the 2002
Rabbit Songs
could get under your skin like a disease, here Sally Ellyson's singing is all but willfully pallid, and the music goes nowhere. Except in the instrumental “The Burnt-Over District”—named for the section of western New York that in the 1820s was so inflamed by revivalism that by the time Joseph Smith led his flock west there was hardly anyone left to save—which weaves the theme to
The Manchurian Candidate
into “Shenandoah” and goes all over the country, from then to now.

NOVEMBER
2006

1
The Drones,
Gala Mill
(ATP/R)
I was attracted to this solely because the title of the band's last album,
Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By
, echoes two of my favorite band names: When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water and And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. How could
Gala Mill
be anything but great? Sure, dull title, but according to the press release, this Australian four-piece, led by singer-guitarist Gareth Liddiard, recorded on “an isolated 10,000-acre farm” in Tasmania. Eat your heart out, Nick Cave.

None of that—and none of the band's earlier music—is any preparation for what happens here, from the first moment. “Jezebel” is a long, delirious song that seems
to suck all the chaos and horror of the present moment into a single human being, who struggles to contain that world inside himself. Especially on the choruses, when a drone comes up, hovers, waits—and it's unnerving, waiting for the sound to break—you can't tell if the singer succeeds or not, or if it would be better if he succeeded or failed. Better for who? You are dragged into this song as if you were a prisoner. The performance is a shocker—and the album, casting off its echoes of Neil Young and Eleventh Dream Day, staking out its own territory in song after song, can hardly recover from it. Not until the final number, a nine-minute reenvisioning of a traditional Australian convicts' ballad—and after that, you really will know this band by their trail of dead.

2
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin,
Broom
(Polyvinyl)
Okay, but they don't do “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—Boris's favorite song.

3
Clerks II
,
written and directed by Kevin Smith (The Weinstein Company)
Last line of the film: “ Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.” Immediately jettisoned by Soul Asylum's suicidal “Misery.”

4
The Grates,
Gravity Won't Get You High
(Dew Process)
For “Inside Outside”—fast, desperate, cool, absolutely unafraid of how smart it is. “I might live to tell the tale,” says singer Patience, “of how young girls once rode a whale.”