Album Review: The Foghorns – Turn to the Moon

Posted on June 17, 2022 by Jon Rooney

The Foghorns – Turn to the Moon
(Self-released, September 2021)

“Apocalypse (for Alan Wilson),” the opener on the Foghorns’ recent Turn to the Moon album, is hands-down my favorite song from their vast, expansive catalog. It’s the simplest of arrangements – a singer and an acoustic guitar – and yet it’s a world in and of itself. Lead Foghorn Bart Cameron sings to an unknown person who’s not necessarily a lover or a child or even a friend. All we know is that this person is disappearing into suffering and the narrator is reaching out with mercy and mysterious hope. While it seems tailor made for the dystopian terror of living in Trump’s America or the isolation and fear of the recent pandemic, I know that this song, and this recording of this song, predates both eras. Recorded, per the Foghorns’  production taste, on basically a steam engine some years ago, “Apocalypse (for Alan Wilson)” is sublime and impossibly human, imploring “Don’t wait for the apocalypse / Do not hold out to the end. / Before it all gets too much for you to stand  / Come back to me again.”

“40 Watt Light” adds harmonica to the sonic palette, imploring the listener “If you see my 40 watt light, drive on by” in a lonesome cowboy blues. The woozy starkness carries on through most of the record, pulling in characters like the “Queen of Decatur” and “The Boy on the Bus Again” before meditating about how “Sean’s Gone” when, in fact, you’re actually Sean. The missing persons drawn across Turn to the Moon struggle to temper the despair with resignation, but the levee never fully breaks. Two cover songs shift the temperature – a cover of Casey Ruff’s dollar-draft friendship anthem “You Don’t Bother Me” and a fleshed out, faithful cover of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that offers relief by putting on a dignified costume and escaping to another time.

My runner-up favorite song on the record is the semi-cryptic “Night of the Comet,” a folk song packed with low culture references leading back to wisdom about the comforting delusion of distraction,  how, at “the end of the empire,” “I found my peace in a scream queen / The decimation of man is a happy ending.” I know my record collection and vintage Heavy Metal magazines and ’70s Euro horror DVDs (yes, I still watch DVDs – don’t @ me) and bagged and boarded Bronze Age Marvel beauties won’t save me, but Jean Rollin’s gossamer female vampires make me happy and I need to feel happy now and again.

The album ends with a beautiful bummer of a song that looks outward, placing the lost soul in the social sphere with the brilliant lyric “Police take your belt, they take your shoestrings. / They take your fingerprints and they give you a warning. / If you wake in the morning, they’ll take your pride.” We’re not just lost and alone in here, we’re screwed out there too.

Circling back to “Apocalypse (for Alan Wilson),” Alan Wilson is a sort of skeleton key for Bart Cameron and his Foghorns. Alan Wilson was the singer and guitarist for the ’60’s acid country band Canned Heat who, before he died at age 27 in 1970, gave us two classic songs, “Going Up Country” and “On the Road Again”, while musically mixing it up with the likes of John Lee Hooker and Son House. Wilson’s an obscure mythical figure, nowhere near as popular as Hendrix or Janis or Jim Morrison, but mythical nonetheless for American musical alchemists and doomed purists who refuse to believe our entire cultural legacy adds up to Rock Star artifice and the self-consuming nostalgia factory at the end of history. Wilson wrote a Master’s thesis on Charlie Patton, hung around John Fahey and reportedly coaxed Son House out of retirement, teaching him his own songs to help him record Father of the Delta Blues in 1965. He was the real deal who did real things of beauty and substance. All is not doomed, there’s a light to search out in what might feel like utter darkness.

When you hear the dogs and they are screaming
And the trees they’re starting to burn
And if you’ve had enough of this Earth you feel like leaving.
Turn to the moon.
I’ll turn to you.
Turn to the moon.

Who am I kidding? If you’re reading this you’ll be there on Friday night at the Sunset Tavern when the Foghorns headline a show with Sam Russell and his Harborrats along with Casey Ruff and the Mayors of Ballard. Follow that up with the Ball of Wax Volume 68 release show on Saturday at Cafe Racer and your Cascadian weekend will be one for the ages.

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Ball of Wax 68 Songs: THEATH / MANNING – “The origin of consciousness”

Posted on June 16, 2022 by Levi Fuller

Our old pals THEATH and Marc Manning have returned with another collaborative piece designed to expand and interrogate our minds. This particular piece is, according to the duo, from an upcoming collection of songs inspired by the concepts of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – a fitting theme for an adventurous duo to delve into, to be sure. Tinkling keyboard keys and a subtle bell start us off, before an overwhelming bass drone bubbles up from below, providing a foundation for a pair of guitars picking  the same line in slightly different ways, one in each ear (ahhh, there’s that bicameral mind!). The drone and guitar continue on their way, the bells and synths phasing in and out of the foreground, creating a soundscape somehow both sinister and serene. Both halves of my mind are very much looking forward to hearing the rest of this project.

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Album Review: Sam Russell and the Harborrats – Ocean Shores

Posted on June 15, 2022 by Jon Rooney

Sam Russell and the Harborrats – Ocean Shores
(self-released, October 2021)

Seattle-based musician Sam Russell has spent the better part of a decade building a vast universe of anthemic, full-throated rock and roll. With his band the Harborrats, Russell bears witness to the unearthly awe of obsession, love, memory, lust, and doubt in songs that are both overwhelming and essentially innocent. He doesn’t waste his powerhouse crooning on riddles, obstruction, or abstraction; he gets right to the job of mining the deep recesses of the self to form connections and conjure jean jacket euphoria. There’s a song on his latest epic release, Ocean Shores, titled “The Kenosha Kid” that’s neither a put-on nor an awkward misstep – it’s gripping and thrilling, easily the best song ever written sporting the lyric “I’m a piece of processed cheese” before exploding into a crescendo of “ooh, ooh, ooh”s. Easily. Every crevice of memory and unsullied hope is grist for the mill of transcendence. Coming to terms with this idea is step one of yielding to the power of Sam Russell and the Harborrats.  

Ocean Shores throbs with a heightened sense of epiphany seeded by Russell’s evangelical Christian childhood in Wisconsin and framed by his slow-burning rock and roll adulthood. Lyrics recall conversations that bring up memories which invite you to get lost in your own head. Every interaction in these songs, whether with his brother or a crush or an ex or some jaded scenester, feels crucial – a breathless confession or buzzed theory to make any kind of sense of the nature of love, the thrill of fantasy, and the weight of aging and loss. Ocean Shores, like pretty much all of Russell’s catalog, is interior, introverted music for people dying to connect with a university of lovers, brothers, bandmates and drinking buddies. “Cohorama Kool-Aid” tells an anecdote about talking to a woman at a wedding . . .  singing “oh, we could’ve been so close” which sums up the record, and Sam’s whole project, in six words. 

The memory, ambition, and disappointment of romance work overtime on Ocean Shores, to dizzying effect. Sam’s music is a perpetual magic machine, churning out moments of sorrow and bliss for age 7 or 13 or 24 or 37, like the movie Stand By Me cross-bred with the Up series from the UK. And this machine is relentless in its pursuit of connection, as evidenced by “Poetic Turn” with “I wish we could keep talking / until I find a way to describe / but you stop me after 3rd attempt / not letting me get to the seventh try.”

Given the chance, Ocean Shores vows to make a 70th or 700th try for connection, either through sprawling aural “liner” notes found on the bonus CD (yes, I still listen to CDs – don’t @ me) or the various Sam-ified covers of songs by Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa and Whitney Houston included in the maximal digital release. But like all things Sam, these covers are earnest and moved by the spirit – seriously, just listen to this:

Like always, Sam goes for it on that tune and he gets there, thanks in large part to his unflappable Harborrats, the mighty Aimee Zoe on drums and all-around-amazing-dude Ken Nottingham on bass (Ken also plays in my band, Virgin of the Birds, but his amazingness is known far and wide). Ocean Shores overflows with grand, lovelorn tunes that are so fundamentally human as to be both essential and beguiling. These songs burn with life and the throbbing heat that compels us to continue even when we have no idea what to do, where to go, or how to find somebody to go with us.

Skeptical that this music is so powerful and beguilingly good? See for yourself this Friday night at the Sunset Tavern when Sam Russell (celebrating his birthday!) and his hearty Harborrats join their brothers-in-arms Casey Ruff and the Mayors of Ballard and the Foghorns.

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Ball of Wax 68 Songs: Squanderers – “Musics of the no sex trio #4”

Posted on June 15, 2022 by Levi Fuller

One day (I’m not sure when), a musician (I’m not exactly sure who) found a copy of Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly (I don’t know which one) while flipping through the shelves at the St. Vincent De Paul thrift shop in Port Orchard, Washington. Some time later, one of his collaborators began submitting odd and delightful sounds – quite possibly produced via musical instruments procured at that very St. Vincent De Paul – to this here audio quarterly, and, well, here we are. Squanderers, however they came to us, clearly belong here. The sense of delight in experimentation, in making noises together and seeing what works, in finding out what strange and satisfying sounds you can wring from (according to their liner notes) $12.50 worth of musical instruments, is palpable and infectious. Thank you for finding us, Squanderers! I’m looking forward to hearing more.

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Album Review: Casey Ruff and the Mayors of Ballard LP

Posted on June 14, 2022 by Jon Rooney

Casey Ruff – “Casey Ruff and The Mayors of Ballard” LP
(self-released, January 2022)

The “Casey Ruff and the Mayors of Ballard” LP makes me feel a little drunk. Casey Ruff’s growl makes it ok to feel woozy and warm, like I’m floating in my own skull a bit. My breath smells like Rainier and my shirt stinks like secondhand smoke. A laughing gang of musicians are on stage and they’re playing decidedly American music with a relaxed, unadorned joy that seems anything but American per the contemporary catastrophic zeitgeist. I hear the opening cowboy strum on the “The Loudest and Proudest” and before I know it I’m swept up in the strut of the band. The horns are sad and friendly and probably a few Rainers deep themselves. Casey’s charismatic yowl crests in the bridge before the “bop bop bop do da do da” chorus takes me gently out to sea. Wily whistling opens up “Deep Sea Diver,” a country shuffle adorned by back-to-back piano and guitar solos that bring down the house. Things get a bit less playful with “Real Fun Funeral,” another full-band burner that slips in the question “what’s been given / by everything taken away?” before handing center stage to another hot-shit guitar solo.

A lonely piano melody opens the ballad “(Seriously) Stop Me From Loving You” that shows another side of Casey’s ample talents: heartbroken crooning. “Move Me” takes a turn toward R&B with a groovy bass vamp and electric piano, but the vibe is tense and a little dark, like the second act of a crime movie. There’s a brief little horn part halfway through the 6 minutes of the song that’s intricate and rad, another example of how Casey built a sonic cathedral around his gritty grace on The Casey Ruff and the Mayors of Ballard LP. 

“Born to be Dead” is frantic truck stop prog that twists, turns, and chugs throughout its brief 2:38 runtime, stopping only briefly to take a breath before charging through the outro. Closing things out is “(It’s Hard to Live in) Hardin, Montana (But It’s Still Better Than Hysham),” a personal, parochial epic that winds through hard times in towns too small to see on most maps complete with false endings, codas and all sorts of maneuvers.

Casey Ruff is a Seattle music institution, the friendly phantom of Ballard Ave, a charismatic Palidan entrusted by the throne to deliver and protect the party (in both senses of the word). “Casey Ruff and the Mayors of Ballard” LP is his thesis statement about good times with your friends and the bad times when you’re alone. The Mayors are a machine matched to Casey’s charm and guts, making this collection of songs worthy of really digging into.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself this Friday night at the Sunset Tavern when Casey takes the stage as the electric ghost in Seattle’s wooly trinity alongside the Foghorns and Sam Russell and his heavenly Harborrats.

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Ball of Wax 68 Songs: The Vardaman Ensemble – “Twilight Blue”

Posted on June 14, 2022 by Levi Fuller

What happens if you throw This Heat and Chico Hamilton into a mixer, shake vigorously, and serve to a spirited group of musicians wielding drums, guitars, bass, french horn, trumpet, and other assorted instrumental oddities? Our Portlandian pals the Vardaman Ensemble have submitted the results of this experiment in the form of “Twilight Blue,” a delightful jaunt that merges jazz, proto-post-rock, and other experimental weirdnesses into a surprisingly tuneful and cohesive whole – which, now that I think of it, might not have been out of place earlier on in Can’s fictional set at that fictional German beer hall from a few reviews back.

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Ball of Wax 68 Songs: David Forlano and Dave Moir – “Clown’s Lament”

Posted on June 13, 2022 by Levi Fuller

There’s already been a lot of talk about soundtrack music in relation to the tracks on this all-instrumental volume, but it turns out David Forlano and Dave Moir’s “Clown’s Lament” was actually created to be used in a film to be shot next year. Specifically, this piece is meant to represent a clown character in the film. Based on the title and the slow, mournful gait of this tune, all breathy sax and whole-note upright bass, I’m going to guess this is one of those sad clowns we’ve all heard about. I can just picture them, staring balefully into the mirror as they apply an exaggerated red smile to their downturned mouth, giving their nose a whimsical test-honk even they sniff back tears in contemplation of another day on their clowny grind. I don’t know if this movie will be as good as the one already taking shape in my mind, but I do know it will have some beautifully conceived and executed musical accompaniment, courtesy our new friends David and Dave.

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Ball of Wax 68 Songs: Bike Monday – “Sweepers”

Posted on June 10, 2022 by Levi Fuller

With “Sweepers,” Bike Monday – the spoonerized pseudonym of Mike Bundy (of many things, but most currently half of Orion) – gives us the retro-futuristic movie theme we didn’t know we’d been waiting for. I know there’s already been a lot of reference to movie soundtracks and scores in the reviews of these instrumental tracks, and I know it’s an obvious reference, but sometimes things are obvious because they’re right. We’re also in a moment where a fondness for a certain form of nostalgic synthesized cinematic music is on the upswing, due to a certain wildly popular streaming television shows. But “Sweepers,” while certainly mining territory and instrumentation that will be familiar to anyone who lived through the ’80s or has watched Netflix in the ’20s (oh my god we’re in the ’20s, that still kind of blows my mind), also brings us into its own unique world, rather than, say, aping one particular style or composer of film scores.

Employing all manner of synthesized devices and doohickeys I don’t know the first thing about, “Sweepers” has a consistent forward movement to it, an appealingly charming, relaxed propulsion – like a street sweeper with polka dots and big, wobbly antennae humming down the road. It sweeps you along with it, you bob your head amiably and bounce along as you watch it turn the dirt and grime of the city into sparkles and bubbles, leaving wonder and good feelings in its wake.

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Ball of Wax 68 Songs: Virgin of the Birds – “And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur”

Posted on June 10, 2022 by Levi Fuller

Virgin of the Birds’ “And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur” – named (minus an exclamation mark, for some reason – I mean, how could you say that sentence without exclaiming?) after a visionary painting by Leonora Carrington (only original wiki-rockers Virgin of the Birds could hip me to a mid-20th-century surrealist I’d never heard of by way of an instrumental track) – seems to be two pieces in one. The first act is a simple, low-key groove, anchored by a syncopated, almost funky bass line, joined by scattered percussion and sparse fills of guitar and keys. This movement calls to mind Can winding down an epic set at the end of a long night of German beer and sausages. (I don’t know if Can played epic sets at venues that served German beer and sausages, or even if they were the sort of band to wind down sets or if they just went full bore until something burst or somebody collapsed, but just go with me on this.) Then, about halfway through, the rhythm is gone, most of the recognizable instruments are gone, and we just have drone – beautiful, woozy drone – and a few sparse piano notes. Maybe most of the band has packed up now, the bassist left their instrument leaning up against the amp, and someone ambled up on stage to pick out a few phrases on the old upright piano up against the wall as the drunks stumble out into the night? Sure, why not?

But why, I hear you asking, why was this what Virgin of the Birds created from a painting of a bull goddess in a red robe, two children in black, floating bubbles, clouds in the rafters, a fallen rose, and, well, everything else going on here? And again I say, why not?

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Ball of Wax 68 Songs: Jeff Tobias – “Holiday Music Pt. 1”

Posted on June 8, 2022 by Levi Fuller

Jeff Tobias, where have you been all my life? There is a delightfully demented, playful energy coursing through “Holiday Music Pt. 1” – and much of his album Recurring Dream, from whence it came – that seems like it was tailor made for my ears. The artfully heavy-handed drums, the whirlwind of instrumentation, the insistent burr of the bass clarinet – and then the way it all just stops on a dime, giving way to an interlude of piano and increasingly manic saxophone, building and building until that bass clarinet has no choice but to bring back the main riff for another run, before finally letting the bottom drop out on the whole piece, leaving you wanting more more more. Fortunately there is a whole album – including “Holiday Music Pt. 2”! – and I would absolutely understand if you need to pause Ball of Wax 68 and take a detour over there for a bit, just to see where it all goes. We’ll be here when you get back.

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