Posts Tagged ‘Glenn Kotche’

DYSON STRINGER CLOHER – ” Dyson Stringer Cloher “

Posted: October 7, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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The debut self-titled album from Dyson Stringer Cloher (out Oct 4th) was recorded at Wilco’s The Loft studio in Chicago April 2019 with Grammy Award winning engineer Tom Schick and Wilco’s Glenn Kotche on drums.

There’s an undeniable intimacy to this collaboration between Jen Cloher, Mia Dyson and Liz Stringer. The powerhouse singer-songwriters released an EP and toured extensively under the Dyson Stringer Cloher moniker in 2013, before splitting off to conquer their own corners of the local and international indie music scenes.

It’s quite a show. The trenchant, Cloher-led rocker Falling Clouds frames the album as a manifesto for women and gender non-conforming artists too often relegated to a supporting role: “Nothing against Paul or Nick, but if you want to be remembered then you better have a dick.” Such gendered iconoclasm broils along in the background and comes to a head later on in the album with the equally resounding Be Alone, a boot-stomping statement about self-actualisation, where to be alone is a gesture of power rather than passivity or failure.

Dyson Stringer Cloher’s ten tracks happily plumb an array of modes and moods. There’s an energy to the album that seems to have absorbed the entire oeuvre of women-led rock music. With My Hands delivers its chunky guitar riff and rimshot-driven chorus with a swagger worthy of The Runaways; it is tailor-made to get audiences jumping. Elsewhere Believeris stadium-sized rock that winks at The Jezabels.

Now, nearly three decades later, these three artists are inspiring a new generation. Supergroups don’t always work, but this is a winner.” – STACK

“A manifesto for women and gender non-conforming artists too often relegated to a supporting role.” – The Music 

“An album that celebrates the importance of music in each of their lives.” – The Australian

‘With My Hands’ from Dyson Stringer Cloher’s self-titled album is out October 4th, 2019 on Milk! Records.

The arrangements and musicianship are as solid as the songwriting is memorable – from the tightly wound beats and dialogical guitar section that steer future road trip anthem The Other Side down its sombre highway, to the brushed snare and picked guitar that bring colour and texture to the bitingly confessional Young Girls. All of which provides a perfect setting for the three-pronged vocal onslaught, the contrast and complementarity of the singers’ voices helping to ensure that this collaboration is as aurally rich as any.

Lest you fear that Dyson Stringer Cloher are taking themselves too seriously, for a change of pace there’s, well, Too Seriously a tongue-in-cheek gospel-country romp delivered with alternating lead vocals and honky-tonk flair, and more than a little Wilburys-esque goofiness. It’s a moment to both celebrate and lampoon this whole supergroup business, albeit coupled with a little obligatory hard-bitten wisdom about rising above life’s more bruising knocks.

Be Alone’s pounding drums and haze of fuzz guitar bring things to a rousing climax ahead of the album’s stunning benediction, Can I Borrow Your Eyes. Sung largely a cappella, aside from a wafer-thin bed of synth, the closing track finds the singers’ voices blended in perfect three-part harmonies, their contrasting styles united into a singular vision. It sums the album up nicely, and leaves the listener to slip back into the world warmed by the knowledge that these are three artists who’ll be remembered, together and alone.

Mia Dyson – Vocals / Guitar / Bass
Liz Stringer – Vocals / Guitar / Bass / Keys
Jen Cloher – Vocals / Guitar
Glenn Kotche – Drums / Percussion

WILCO – ” Everyone Hides “

Posted: October 5, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Wilco

Ode To Joy. Featuring 11 new songs written and produced by Tweedy and recorded by Wilco at The Loft (Chicago, IL) in January 2019, Tweedy and Glenn Kotche were the launching pad from which most of the songs on Ode To Joy materialized – Kotche’s percussion propels the music forward while Tweedy’s measured words flesh out the cleared paths. As a result, the album is comprised of “really big, big folk songs, these monolithic, brutal structures that these delicate feelings are hung on,” notes Tweedy. Across the entire album, drums pound and plod with a steady one – two pulse, meant to mimic the movement of marching – a powerful act utilized on both sides of the authoritarian wall. There’s also a sense of comfort that comes with the rhythmic marching sound.

The album largely does away with conventional rock and folk song structures; instead, it embraces spare, impressionistic arrangements—often led by booming, elemental percussion—to create one of the moodiest and most haunting records in Wilco’s catalog, more movingly understated than the experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and darker than the uptempo Americana of Sky Blue Sky. “For this record, we tried to intuit rock music pretending we hadn’t heard any…we’d tell each other what we wanted to hear,” Tweedy says. And while he is quick to acknowledge that the band didn’t exactly “reinvent rock music,” it does sound, to a certain degree, like they reinvented Wilco. As Ode to Joy makes clear, from the tense and restrained opening track “Bright Leaves”—which hangs glimmering sonic textures on thumping drums like ornaments on a Christmas tree—all the way through “An Empty Corner,” the mysterious heart-wrenching waltz that closes the album, Wilco have built nothing less than a world unto itself;

“Ode to Joy” – Wilco’s 11th studio album – will be released October. 4th, 2019 via dBpm Records. The album features 11 new songs written and produced by Jeff Tweedy and recorded by Wilco at The Loft (Chicago, IL) in January 2019. “Everyone Hides” is the second single from the forthcoming release.

LOOSE FUR – ” Laminated Cat “

Posted: February 10, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Loose Fur - credit: Stefano Giovannini

Jeff never disappoints. Totally dig everything he’s done. This is no different. Great record.  The “supergroup” featuring Jim O’Rourke, Glenn Kotche, and Jeff Tweedy, who all together make Loose Fur ! If you were ever curious, their debut, self-titled record leaves no doubt – these dudes can really fuckin’ play!

Recorded during downtime on “Foxtrot” and refined in the two years since, however, this experiment mostly serves to reinforce what we’re already well aware of: Jeff Tweedy’s formidable strength as a songwriter, the pervasive nuance of O’Rourke’s by-now trademark production, and Glenn Kotche’s unconventional, sometimes overly ambitious approach to percussion.

Oddly, the most predictable elements of Loose Fur are its most “arty” and “experimental”– songs that either follow the laws of entropy and dissolve in a rising swell of dissonance (Like the opener “Laminated Cat”) or defy them entirely, allowing melodies to emerge gradually from the sonic clutter (“So Long”). Despite its relative brevity (six cuts over forty minutes), Loose Fur establishes a familiar pattern early on, and it’s actually the more conventional music– exhibiting Tweedy and O’Rourke’s common soft spot for classic rock– that leaves a more lasting impression.

“Laminated Cat” will be instantly recognizable to Wilco archivists as a more sedate reading of the Foxtrot castoff “Not for the Season”. In its original incarnation the song was a somewhat generic rocker drawn by loops of distorted guitar and gently evocative laptopery into an improbable seven-minute jam. Tweedy’s lyrics are mostly incidental to the tidal pull of the rhythm and O’Rourke’s otherworldly fuzz– a stoner’s recognition of time passing exponentially faster, years spent accumulating piles of books “not worth reading.” Kotche’s percolating thumps grow progressively (and predictably) louder as the tune ambles self-consciously towards the imploding plastic inevitable.

Loose Fur released Domino Recording

WILCO – ” Schmilco ” Best Albums Of 2016

Posted: November 29, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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For over 20 years, Chicago Americana troupe Wilco has been a band of depth and intricacy. Singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy has served up his personal insights on the mic as a revolving backing band of ace multi-instrumentalists dressed them in the Alt-country repose of A.M. and Being There, the ‘70s pop sheen of Summerteeth, and the minor symphonies of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. By 2007’s Sky Blue Sky, the band settled on what would be its first stable lineup: Jeff Tweedy and his former Uncle Tupelo bassist buddy John Stirratt, experimental drummer and percussionist Glenn Kotche, guitar god Nels Cline, knob twiddler Mikael Jorgensen, and alt-country session hand Pat Sansone. The lineup honored Wilco’s commitment both to country and to pushing the envelope of this genre, but 2009’s Wilco (The Album) and 2011’s The Whole Love, the pair of full lengths that followed Sky Blue Sky, maybe fizzed when they ought to have popped.

Last summer’s surprise free release Star Wars was an attempt to redirect the band’s energy. At just over 33 minutes long, it’s the shortest Wilco studio album.

The songs were two- and three-minute pop-rock confections that pulled off the difficult feat of sounding both thoughtfully arranged and off the cuff. This month’s Schmilco seeks to extend the streak, revisiting the wiry energy of Star Wars over a dozen quiet acoustic tunes. Most of the new album’s songs were conceived around the same time as Star Wars, but Tweedy made the peculiar decision to split the fertile sessions in two: “The alternative to making two records would have been to spend another year really honing everything, all of it, getting it all right for that kind of release.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUjXMw4114

The irony of the Star Wars/Schmilco project is that the decision not to whittle everything down to a single body of work is its saving grace.

If the major strength of Star Wars was getting Wilco, a band whose finest albums are also their busiest, to strip down, Schmilco’s is figuring out how to stash six players into the quiet of a backyard jam. “Normal American Kids,” introduced at a live show earlier this year as a solo Jeff Tweedy cut, gets a studio version that sneaks sweet, meandering electric guitar from Nels into the background. A few songs later “Nope” crams stuttering bits of riffs into the margins, the lead guitar coughing and spitting over the tune like Blur ax-man Graham Coxon did on “Coffee & TV.” “Nope” slowly unravels as it trips along, its personnel expanding to no less than three guitarists and two drummers. (Tweedy’s son Spencer lends Kotche a hand on Schmilco’s drums.) Between these extremes is a tapestry of shaggy guitar shuffles like the laconic “Happiness,” the demented, atonal “Common Sense,” and the muted punk blast of “Locator.”

Schmilco’s subtle intricacies provide cover for a series of vignettes of dreamers in various degrees of resignation. From the song titles — “Nope,” “Cry All Day,” “Someone to Lose,” “Shrug and Destroy” — down to the lyrics, Schmilco bleeds sadness. The deceptively titled “Happiness” opens on a devastating observation: “My mother always says I’m great, and it always makes me sad / I don’t think she’s being nice, I really think she believes that.” Album closer “We Aren’t the World (Safety Girl)” devilishly subverts the chorus of the star-studded ‘80s charity single “We Are the World” into a dart about settling: “We aren’t the world / We aren’t the children / But you’re my safety girl.” As a lyricist, Tweedy loves his abstractions. (“I am an American aquarium drinker / I assassin down the avenue”?) So Schmilco’s snap focus on dejected character studies, like the hopeless barfly of “Quarters,” who sweeps the place for quarters to play music on the jukebox, is jarring, but like the elegant arrangements that swirl and sputter underfoot, it feels like the work of a tightly wound unit taking chances. Wilco’s willingness to embrace risk and change at a point in its career where peers often retreat into comfort and self-parody suggests there could be another couple of decades of life left in this 22-year-old enterprise.

Despite playing the game for over two decades, the 49-year-old singer-songwriter has hardly ever sounded so intimate as he does on Schmilco, grappling with the never-ending angst of knowing that you never really can escape yourself. On album standout “If I Ever Was a Child”, he vividly paints this feeling, singing: “I slump behind my brain/ A haunted stain never fades/ I hunt for the kind of pain I can take.” The Chicago rockers add some color to each of the album’s 12 tracks by stripping things down to its core essentials.