Pickathon 2018

[Ojai Sam]

Pickathon is back and MusicGourmets has it! Portland's annual "roots meets rock festival returns in August for its 20th anniversary. For some background, take a look here:
https://1859oregonmagazine.com/think-oregon/music/into-the-woods-pickathon/

Last year we did a series of posts here that featured all of the acts, accompanied by this Spotify playlist:

This year Pickathon has assembled another outstanding roster of acts from all over the world. My approach is to post the most recent album by each act with a brief introduction. The new playlist is here:

Feel free to chime in with comments, as many of you are doubtless more familiar with these artists than I. We should be able to post all of them before opening day on August 3.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Broken Social Scene - Hug Of Thunder (2017)

I'm unfamilar with BSS, so I'll let Wiki tell their story:

Broken Social Scene is a Canadian indie rock band, a musical collective including as few as six and as many as nineteen members, formed by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning. Most of its members play in various other groups and solo projects, mainly in the city of Toronto. The group's sound combines elements of all of its members' respective musical projects, and is occasionally considered baroque pop. It includes grand orchestrations featuring guitars, horns, woodwinds, and violins, unusual song structures, and an experimental, and sometimes chaotic production style.

Not surprisingly, the Pickathon staff really like Hug Of Thunder:

...[T]hey have created one of 2017’s most sparkling, multi-faceted albums. On Hug of Thunder the 15 members of Broken Social Scene – well, the 15 who play on the record, including returnees Leslie Feist and Emily Haines – refract their varying emotions, methods and techniques into something that doesn’t just equal their other albums, but surpasses them. It is righteous but warm, angry but loving, melodic but uncompromising. The title track on its own might just be the best thing you will hear all year – a song that will become as beloved as “Anthems For a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” from their breakthrough album, You Forgot It In People.

I do too.

on the Sam-O-Meter, subject to increase with further plays.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Shakey Graves - Can't Wake Up (2018)

I decided to spin Shakey right after Broken Social Scene for contrast, based on my recollection of him as an eccentric Austin-based Americana singer-songwriter. My error - this record takes the loping twang out of his offbeat songs and adds looping psychedelia instead. I haven't experienced this much whiplash since the first time I playedTheir Satantic Majesties Request.

"Mike" on Amazon gave it , saying:

"I know there will be some fans that are disappointed by Shakey's shift in style on this record, but I see this as a necessary and refreshing evolution of his sound. The brilliant lyrics and song craft are still there, but each song has dense layering of drums, vocals, and guitar. If you have been following his career closely, this is not that much of a shift. Even his first record, Roll the Bones, showed signs of his love for vocal layering and creating dense soundscapes. The difference is that these songs are polished and constructed in a much more meticulous way."

on the Sam-O-Meter. I share Mike's view that these songs work better against a layered background. I'm just not that impressed with Graves' quirky songcraft.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Rising Appalachia - Alive (2017)

This is a by design a subversive record. The innate conservatism of bluegrass is not merely a musical style. The artists, their songs, and their audiences all tend to reflect the patriotic and religious views of their rural red state origins. Rising Appalachia is something very different. Its website explains:

Led by the collective voice of sisters Leah and Chloe, and joined by their beloved band – percussionist Biko Casini and bassist/guitarist David Brown – Rising Appalachia is a melting pot of folk music simplicity, textured songwriting, and those bloodline harmonies that only siblings can pull off. Listen for a tapestry of song, clawhammer banjo tunes, fiddle, double bass, acoustic guitar, djembe, barra, bodhran, spoken word, and a wealth of musical layering that will leave you called to action and lulled into rhythmic dance simultaneously. It is both genre bending and familiar at the same time. Proudly born and raised in the concrete jungle of Atlanta, Georgia, sharpening their instincts in the mountains of Appalachia, and fine tuning their soul on the streets of New Orleans they have crafted a 6-album career from the dusts of their passion.

Pickathon? Sure. The Red White and Bluegrass Festival? Not likely.

This live album shows the group to great advantage. They begin with simple acoustic mountain music and interweave it with threads from all over the world. With songs like "Occupy" and "Medicine" (dedicated to natural foods), their progressive agenda is there for everyone to see. But unlike their humorless predecessors-sisters like The Indigo Girls and Natalie Merchant, Leah and Chloe seem to find great joy on stage even as they turn the rural string band norms upside down.

on the Sam-O-Meter. Courage and creativity.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Rasheed Jamal - Indigo Child (U Ain’t The Only 1!) (2017)

Jamal is a natural choice for Pickathon since he is based in Portland. This year, he will open Day 1 of the festival. Anyone who samples Nina Simone is ok with me.

We Out Here magazine sez:

Jamming 13 songs into 46 skit-free minutes, Rasheed masterfully executed his vision for navigating his continued existence in a flawed world, shrugging off his own self-doubts in the process. The Resistance vet married his Southern roots with the vibrant and unapologetic culture of North Portland rap, creating a dark and moody yet danceable project with excellent production and even better thematics. Despite varied sources of production the project flows incredibly well; it’s the type of album you can play straight through and just bob your head to, or you can sit down all day and unravel the dense lyrics with the help of the rewind button.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Tinariwen - Elwan (2017)

I've been a big fan of this group for several years after discovering them on Slacker's World Station. Their trancelike guitar blues reminds me a bit of James Kimbrough.

AMG sez:

Tinariwen is a Tuareg group that performs a guitar-centric branch of Malian music that, to the untrained ear, is reminiscent of Ali Farka Touré's, but is far more rock-oriented and
percussive. All of the band's musicians originate from the southern Sahara; the group's name, meaning "empty places," is a reflection of their land of origin. The band formed in the rebel camps of Colonel Gaddafi, as each of the musicians had been forced from their nomadic lifestyle into involuntary military service. Surrounded by a displaced nation of their peers, Tinariwen forged a new style of music, trading their traditional lutes and shepherd's flutes for electric guitars and drums. The style that resulted was dubbed "Tishoumaren," or "the music of the unemployed." Their music addresses issues such as political awakening, problems of exile, repression of their people, and demands of sovereignty.

Elwan finds the group in exile from the militant Islamist government at home. It was recorded in two sessions. The first in Joshua Tree added Kurt Vile, Mark Lanegan, Alain Johannes and Matt Sweeney. Later, they made field recordings in a tent at an oasis in Morocco with local youth and a Berber gnawa trance outfit.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Alela Diane - Cusp (2018)

Alela is a California-born singer songwriter now based on Portland, somewhat in the mold of Carole King. This intimate album focuses on the birth of Alela's second child. She switched from guitar to piano for this record because she broke her thumbnail shoveling snow.

on the Sam-O-Meter.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Wild Child - Expectations (2018)

From the Pickathon website:

Now a seven-piece pop mini-orchestra (Kelsey Wilson on violin and vocals; Alexander Beggins on ukulele and vocals; Sadie Wolfe on cello; Matt Bradshaw on keyboards, trumpet, and harmonica; Tom Myers on drums; Cody Ackors on guitar and trombone; and Tyler Osmond on bass), Wild Child shaped their last record, Fools, in the shadows of more than one failed love, and Expectations, as the title suggests, is a continuation of that personal experience into an awakening. Wilson and Beggins, whose voices fit each other as naturally as any family act, pushed their boundaries as writers, drawing freely from the stories they’ve lived as well as the artists around the world that have inspired their growth. Their rate of output over that last year got them thinking differently about producing, focusing on one track at a time. “We’ve always focused on the record as a whole. We wanted to think about each track as it’s own piece- but somehow it all fits together” Wilson says of the approach.

That route took them around the globe — from Chris Walla’s (Death Cab For Cutie) studio in Tromsø, Norway, where the Northern Lights are the brightest in the world, to a home-built warehouse studio on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where Dr. Dog’s Scott McMicken picked up the bass and “joined the band for a week,” arranging harmonies and sharing living and recording space. Back in Wimberley, Texas, Matthew Logan Vasquez (Delta Spirit) set up a makeshift studio in Kelsey Wilson’s beloved childhood home — abandoned since the floods of 2015 — where they found the muses were eager to resurface. The group also tapped the talents of frequent tour mate Chris Boosahda (Shakey Graves), Atlantic Records recording artist Max Frost, and Grammy-winning producer Adrian Quesada (Groupo Fantasma, Brown Sabbath, Spanish Gold).

This sparkling indie pop mixture from Austin-based Wild Child comes across as more cohesive that this description would suggest. Some fine songs here and Kelsey Wilson's versatile voice works across a wide emotional range. For example, the title song is an attention grabbing rant, which segues into the late night pathos of "Sinking Ship:".

on the Sam-O-Meter. Actually 4 1/4. stars, maybe it will hit on further listening.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Frazey Ford - Indian Ocean (2018)

Frazey was a founding member of one of my favorite groups, The Be Good Tanyas. For this record, she went to Memphis to record with the Hi Rhythm Section who supplied more than a soupcon of soul to Al Green and countless others over the years. Sounds wonderful, but the results are very disappointing. Why?

- All of the songs share the same mid-tempo groove.
- Frazey mumbles the lyrics to the point that I was lucky to catch the title.
- Most fatally, she delivers everything in the same disaffected, disappointed, disillusioned voice. That makes two of us, Frazey.

on the Sam-O-Meter. Minus 1/2 star for making the hidden track a lame acoustic version of a song already on the record. Kinda proves my point about redundancy.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Joshua Hedley - Mr. Jukebox (2018)

All you really need to know is that Joshua is a headliner at Robert's Western World, the home of traditional country music on lower Broadway in Nashville (where else can you get fried pickle spears and a pork chop sandwich?) Robert's was where revival kings BR5-49 got their start years ago. Joshua takes the same approach: go out on stage in a sequined suit and play straight ahead honky tonk music with fiddles and steel but without a hint of irony or condescension. As long as there's PBR beer, that will probably work.

on the Sam-O-Meter.

As a bonus, I threw in this fiddle tune by Caroline Oakley, self-described musician, dance caller and community organizer, who will kick off the first evening of Pickathon with a square dance:

 

[Ojai Sam]

Black Pumas - Black Moon Rising (2018 single)

The Black Pumas are a new Austin-based psychedelic soul band. The Austin Chronicle sez:

“Black Pumas, the beat-heavy psychedelic soul project anchored by vocalist Eric Burton and guitarist Adrian Quesada, are Austin’s must-see new band. Week two of their ongoing Thursday night C-Boy’s residency saw a guest spot from Charlie Sexton. The sextet, featuring members of Hard Proof, Soul Supporters, and PR Newman, have already been secured a slot at Oregon’s Pickathon Music Festival and have a debut LP slated for Ohio’s Colemine Records label.”

Based on the evidence offered by this single, the album should be a real scorcher.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Mapache - Mapache (2017)

Mapache is the Aztec word for "raccoon". Pickathon sez:

Close your eyes and imagine the Everly Brothers wearing Tie-Dyed Nudie Suits. Okay, now open them. There’s Mapache.

Youngn’s Clay Finch and Sam Blasucci, the Mapache boys, are barely in their 20s and are already rising to the top of the new wave of West Coast Cosmic Americana. Born and raised in Glendale, California, their breathtaking harmonies and heartfelt yet heady sound, was honed by surfing the beaches and exploring the deserts and canyons of their native California.

Clay turns out to be a cousin of Chris Gunst, founder of country rockers Beachwood Sparks. Maybe that's why this album has such a strong link to the old El Lay kicker sound that got swept away by alt country. I like this one a lot.

 

[axolotl]

^ They kinda look like Batdorf and Rodney.

 

[lpfreak1170]

Joshua Hedley - Mr. Jukebox (2018)

All you really need to know is that Joshua is a headliner at Robert's Western World, the home of traditional country music on lower Broadway in Nashville (where else can you get fried pickle spears and a pork chop sandwich?) Robert's was where revival kings BR5-49 got their start years ago. Joshua takes the same approach: go out on stage in a sequined suit and play straight ahead honky tonk music with fiddles and steel but without a hint of irony or condescension. As long as there's PBR beer, that will probably work.

on the Sam-O-Meter.

As a bonus, I threw in this fiddle tune by Caroline Oakley, self-described musician, dance caller and community organizer, who will kick off the first evening of Pickathon with a square dance:

Great country music!

 

[Ojai Sam]

I'm With Her - See You Around (2018)

So far, this folk supergroup is my favorite discovery of this year's Pickathon. Their debut album inhabits the zone where folk, pop and bluegrass intersect. The band's website sez:

2018 is shaping up to be a highly successful year for I'm With Her, the band of Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O'Donovan. They released their debut album, See You Around (Rounder Records), in February. Co-produced by Ethan Johns and recorded in Box, England, See You Around has garnered praise from NPR, who instantly hailed the collection as "willfully open-hearted” and The Guardian calling their sound both "ethereal and purposeful”. Since their formation at an impromptu show in 2014 at the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride, Colorado, I’m With Her has formed a special, family-like chemistry, garnering acclaim for their unique blend of instrumental interplay combined with their indelible harmonies, as the New York Times describes, “... that could be sweetly ethereal, or as tightly in tandem as country sibling teams like the Everly Brothers, or as hearty as mountain gospel.” The multi-Grammy-Award-winners have individually released nine solo efforts, co-founded two seminal bands (Nickel Creek and Crooked Still), and contributed to critically acclaimed albums from a host of esteemed artists.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Sam Amidon - The Following Mountain (2017)

Some fusions work better than others. This cross-pollination of folk and avant garde jazz meanders too far into aimlessness for me, but YMMV. The Pickathon website sez:

Though he cultivates the appearance of a folk singer with his shaggy hair, flannel shirts and jeans, Amidon operates more like a freewheeling jazz improviser. He uses traditional material as a point of departure for his own melodic explorations; he reassembles time-worn lyrics into evocative new cut-and-pasted texts. On The Following Mountain, his affinity for the more experimental side of jazz, which he has admired as a fan since he was a teenager, explicitly informs these new pieces, several of which have their roots in an epic jam that Amidon and his long-time collaborator, the multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, organized at a Brooklyn recording studio last spring.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Lonnie Holley - Keeping A Record Of It (2013)

Any album that leads with a song called "Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants" is giving fair warning that you will be challenged. The Guardian placed it on the list of "101 Strangest Albums on Spotify", saying:

There are many remarkable things about the artist and visionary Lonnie Holley and only one of them is the vulnerable beauty of this record. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1950, the seventh of 27 children, and claims he was traded for a bottle of whiskey when he was four. At five he got a job picking up litter at a drive-in cinema and left school for good before he was a teenager. In his late 20s he began creating sandstone tombstones after the death of his two nieces in a house fire. As a child he had watched his mother hunt for what clothing and food she could find and so it was that Holley began to collect materials for his own artworks. Now a father himself – to 15 children – he still lives and works in Birmingham, where he creates pieces that celebrate the area's African-American community and vast industrial heritage. These recordings were made in 2010 and 2011 and it's all completely improvised; each Holley performance is a unique, evolving lifeform and the ones gathered together here sit somewhere between the highly personalised social commentary of Gil Scott Heron, the revelatory folk-soul bliss of Terry Callier and the experimental deep-space blues of Sun Ra.


This one isn't strange enough to be all that interesting, but maybe it would have more impact if you experience it simultaneously with his art.

 

[axolotl]

Sam Amidon - The Following Mountain (2017)

Some fusions work better than others. This cross-pollination of folk and avant garde jazz meanders too far into aimlessness for me, but YMMV. The Pickathon website sez:

Though he cultivates the appearance of a folk singer with his shaggy hair, flannel shirts and jeans, Amidon operates more like a freewheeling jazz improviser. He uses traditional material as a point of departure for his own melodic explorations; he reassembles time-worn lyrics into evocative new cut-and-pasted texts. On The Following Mountain, his affinity for the more experimental side of jazz, which he has admired as a fan since he was a teenager, explicitly informs these new pieces, several of which have their roots in an epic jam that Amidon and his long-time collaborator, the multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, organized at a Brooklyn recording studio last spring.

If this be jazz, I have just heard a slowcore subgenre.

 

[Ojai Sam]

House And Land - House And Land (2017)

The Pickathon website sez:

House and Land is the duo of Sally Anne Morgan (fiddle, shruti box, banjo, vocals) and Sarah Louise Henson (vocals, 12-string guitar, shruti box, bouzouki). Sally and Sarah started playing together after Sarah opened for The Black Twig Pickers for whom Sally plays the fiddle. The duo quickly discovered that they were both interested in the same very specific forms of traditional music. Additionally, they both viewed it through the lens of their shared love of modern, experimental and minimal music. “We honor what two voices and bodies can do in one moment in time. It totally shapes our sound.”

Their playing together is wholly unmediated, without amplifiers and using just two sets of hands and voices. With a minimalist approach, their music considers the space between notes as much as the notes themselves. The material on their debut is drawn from traditional southern hymns and Appalachian ballads that originated in England and elsewhere hundreds of years ago. Microtonality is as essential to certain Appalachian vocal styles as it is to a Tony Conrad composition and the often spare adornment to their singing puts these complexities on full display. The songs, however, are not entirely unadorned. Sally and Sarah are both masters of their instruments and on several tracks they bring in percussionist Thom Nguyen, who plays with an improviser’s ear.

As Junior Kimbrough did with the blues, H&L strip the ancient folk ballad down to its basics and in the process come up with a droning sound that seems postmodern in its stark simplicity.

on the Sam-O-Meter.

 

[Ojai Sam]

Sera Cahoone - From Where I Started (2017)

Pickathon sez:

The world of American roots music is no stranger to Seattle songwriter Sera Cahoone. Even though her last three albums were on Sub Pop Records and she spent years at the top of the indie charts, she’s always had a streak of Americana that ran through her music, a love of the humble folk song that bolstered her art. She’s returning now to these earliest influences with her new album, From Where I Started. Growing up, Cahoone first found her voice in Colorado dive bars, backing up old blues musicians at age 12 on the drums. Her father, a Rocky Mountain dynamite salesman, took the family along to mining conferences and old honky-tonks in the state. The sounds she heard there—the twang of country crooners, cowboy boots on peanut shells—have stayed with her all the way to Seattle, where she lives now, and the seminal indie rock bands she’s been a part of in the city (Carissa’s Weird, Band of Horses).

Sera has an intimate, confessional singer-songwriter style. Her well-crafted songs of love and loss work well against the countryish background of piano, steel and occasional banjo.

on the Sam-O-Meter.