27 June 2013 (Day 178) – Where Imitation Is Sincere

It is amazing how concepts about my day’s listening occur to me as I sit down to write these posts.  Take today acts for example; a relatively new county/bluegrassy band, an undefinable singer/songwriter and a now veteran US West Coast punk band. The similarities are all trivial and relatively unimportant - they’re American, relatively unknown, highly regarded by their peers and, most insignificantly of all, have found their way into my collection. 

And yet when I look at my music journal, one thing stands out from my notes.  It is that each of the albums I played today appears to owe a stylistic debt to another act or musical style.  I’m not suggesting for a moment that the acts in question are rip off merchants; they’re all much too clever for that.  Rather the albums see to me to be either musical tributes/homages or are experimental in the sense the act is attempting to learn something by recording tracks in the spirit of the influence.

(# 477) Zac Brown Band – Uncaged (2012)

I first heard about this band earlier this year when I read that Bruce Springsteen had checked out the band’s Melbourne gig at the Myer Music Bowl on one of his nights off here.  That was good enough for me to do some investigating and my purchase of this album was the result.  It’s easy to see what Springsteen was drawn to; the band plays a mixture of fiddle accented country, folk and mostly southern rock that vaguely reminds me of the sound The Boss got on his Seeger Sessions project. There is nothing seriously amiss with the album but, then again, nothing to get all that excited about.  Everything here is much too clean and precise when a little bit of dirt and raggedness is required.   I suspect this could be a classic case of an act that is much better live than in the studio. 

(# 478) Micah P. Hinson – And The Pioneer Saboteurs  (2010)

Micah P. Hinson is a singer/songwriter from Texas and this is his sixth album, most of the predecessors being named after what I assume is his backing band at the time. This is the only album of his that I own or have heard and, for most of it, the clearest reference point I can discern is Nick Cave.  Many of the tracks here appear to be about the trials and tribulations of frontier life, a theme of Cave’s albeit in a different country and context.  On some of the tracks,  particularly on 2’s And 3’s and She’s Building Up Castles In My Heart, Hinson sings is a Cave like voice.   Some of the musical arrangements, especially on the opening couple of numbers, The Striking Before The Storm and The Cross That Stole This Heart Away are also reminiscent of Cave’s soundtrack work.   The similarities end with the incredible final track, The Returning, a massive sounding instrumental that inhabits the same territory but by invoking the spirit of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse or even Sonic Youth.  My Australian edition also contains a couple of bonus tracks after this, the latter of which, the original version of Watchers Tell Us The OF The Night is very much in the spirit of The Returning.

(# 479) Pennywise – From The Ashes (2003)

I bought this album cheaply from the op shop I wrote about recently because it had a bonus DVD attached.  The packaging didn’t provide a description and it turned out to be about the making of the album.  Had I know this, I wouldn’t have purchased this, felling that owning all of the albums that preceded it was sufficient.  And this one does suffer from a marked drop in quality, on many of the tracks it seems that the band were content to produce music very much in the same vein as The Offspring albeit with better lyrics.  This Is Only A Test stands out in this company for bucking the overriding trend.