Go Left, Go Right
Office Dog, Helado Negro, Jimmy Rushing, Eddie Hazel
New Releases
Office Dog - Spiel
Since I first heard this album, when it was released in late January, I don’t think I’ve made it a day without listening at least twice to “The Antidote.” As Laura put it, this song was designed in a lab for me. The droning, angular melody driven by deep, bass-y guitars; the vaguely incomprehensible lyrics that find their shape and sound and meaning from the music behind them (“Well I was slipping / Through the city / Nothing with me”); the brief reprieve of the lighter chorus that sends you back even harder into the main riff. Will this be my top song of the year? Maybe. Probably. I highly recommend listening to it over and over until you agree with me.
Office Dog are Kane Strang, Rassani Tolovaa, and Mitchell Innes—on guitar, bass, and drums—which puts them in my favorite category of music right now: the slacker math punk trio, as exemplified by bands like Moontype, Wombo, and Patter. Though Office Dog, a New Zealand outfit, have a bit less prog and jazz to them than their American counterparts, and a little more metal. Less math, more punk, in short. (But still plenty of math!) As immediately as I loved “The Antidote,” I still wasn’t fully sold on Strang’s vocals, and the two opening tracks didn’t impress me, so it took some time getting into the rest of the album. But the patience paid off. “Tightropes” is another stand-out, which works despite (because of) a vocal melody that almost never changes notes, through verse and chorus.
In general the back half is stronger than the front. “Cut the Ribbon” is a great slower song, with an Elliott Smith-like vibe, and closer “Spiel” is a worthy title track. I’d also recommend “The Crater,” which is more poppy and, well, just makes you feel good. I’ve said it before, but that’s what I love so much about these trios—you can tell they’re having a good time writing and playing these songs, so you feel good listening to them.
Helado Negro - PHASOR
Helado Negro is the stage name of Roberto Carlos Lange, a fellow Floridian, born in 1980 to Ecuadorian immigrants. I’ve been a fan since 2019, when I first heard his song “Running,” which to me has a kind of magic aura, the piano balanced perfectly with the drums. It remains my favorite of his, but that’s out of a nostalgic loyalty at this point, given how many great songs he’s released over the past five years—nine of which make up the tracklist of PHASOR, a strong album from front to back. Compared to the last two efforts, this one feels a touch more experimental, with more electronic flourishes, making certain songs sound like Caribou remixes.
I first listened to this album on a train, between NY and DC, riding along the Chesapeake Bay, and I now associate it with the grays and blues outside the window. The train may in fact be the ideal listening environment for Helado Negro’s music—it moves at just the right pace and you can kind of check out to it, letting it carry you along.
I’d be surprised if this album doesn’t make my top five this year, and “Colores del Mar” my top thirty songs.
Y no quiero, quiero, quiero,
quiero, quiero, quiero, quiero,
quiero, quiero que me buscan
Old Discoveries
Jimmy Rushing - Every Day I Have the Blues (1967)
I’m always on the hunt for good late night blues—the kind of music you can put on when the dinner’s over and the snifters come out. Blues with a heavy jazz influence and silky vocals and occasionally bawdy lyrics. The paradigm for me has long been Jimmy Witherspoon’s Blue Spoon, from 1964 (be careful, the album is paired, on Spotify at least, with a live album, Spoon in London, so only the first ten tracks belong to Blue Spoon) and I’ve struggled to find an equally satisfying singer. Then along comes another Jimmy!—Jimmy Rushing (1901-1972), known as Mr. Five by Five (a reference to his build: “five feet tall and five feet wide”). Through the mid-’30s and ’40s, Rushing was the featured vocalist of the Count Basie Orchestra, but what I like are the later recordings, especially Every Day I Have the Blues and Living the Blues, from 1967 and 1968, four years before his death. The former features an orchestra conducted by Oliver Nelson, of The Blues and the Abstract Truth fame, with Clark Terry on trumpet and Hank Jones on piano. There’s even a track, “Evil Blues,” with organist Shirley Scott and guitarist Kenny Burrell. A pretty incredible crew, for a vocal jazz album. And it opens with the provocative “Berkeley Campus Blues,” which takes aim at college activists.
Gonna wear tight pants and grow me a cool Van Dyke […]
Gonna be the kind of cat them bashful Berkeley co-eds like.
Trying to do my work but the time just slips away […]
‘Cause we live it up all night and sit around and gripe all day.
We’ve got sit-ins, dropouts, and freedom fighters too […]
We’ve got kooks and politicians, everything but kids in school.
Go left, go right, it’s still the same dead end […]
Better sing the Berkeley blues ‘cause Ronnie Reagan’s round the bend.
The ideal late night blues track here is “I Left My Baby,” with a sparse and ominous arrangement to back Rushing up—one that reminds me some of “Losing Hand,” a favorite from Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis’s second live album, Here We Go Again.
The other star here, who appears on both Every Day I Have the Blues and Living the Blues, is trombonist Dicky Wells, another Count Basie veteran. Wells wrote, and can be best heard on, the excellent “We Remember Prez,” which honors American saxophonist Lester Young—another member of the Count Basie Orchestra, who left shortly after Rushing and Wells joined up.
Eddie Hazel - Games, Dames and Guitar Thangs (1977)
A couple weeks ago some guy on Twitter posted his top ten funk albums, and then, naturally, a bunch of people complained about what he’d left out. One of the ones a bunch of people were pissed he’d left out was Eddie Hazel’s Games, Dames and Guitar Thangs, and I decided to give it a listen based on the cover art alone. Hazel was the lead guitarist for Parliament-Funkadelic, and the backing band here is pulled from among the their ranks. There’s even a kind of Funkadelic cover, “What About It?,” which is a reinterpretation of the guitar part to Maggot Brain’s “Wars of Armageddon.” Hazel slows it down a bit, and I think it’s even better than the original. It’s also the main reason I decided to write about this album.
The rest of the record is solid, with a cover of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” that surpasses the Beatles version, which isn’t saying much, and an excellent cover of “California Dreamin’,” which doesn’t surpass the Mamas & the Papas version, though that’s pretty impossible. My feeling, in the end, is that the Twitter guy was probably right all along. This isn’t a top-ten funk album. But it’s still one worth spending time with.
**All new songs added to the bottom of the playlist**