Local Music Blog: The Walkmen, Regina Spektor and Edward Shapred Make This a Pretty Good Week!

Yikes! I goofed. Last week I promised to review the Beach Boys, Patti Smith and a David Bowie remastered reissue, but in my headlong flight to prepare for a Memorial Day soccer tournament, I inadvertently jumped to June 5!

The week of May 29 actually brought new releases from The Walkmen, Regina Spektor, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and a remaster of Small Faces self-titled debut album. So we’ll be talking about those instead.

And we’ll start with the surf rock quintet from Gotham City, The Walkmen. Though it’s never a good idea to try and peg our favorite bands, having fallen in love with the echo-laden, retro beats of their previous effort, Lisbon, I have to admit I was looking forward to more of the same.

But as I’m often prone to pronouncing, Heaven is a bit of a departure. In fact it’s so different from their previous six studio albums that it took some getting used to. But after three spins, I’d have to say an alternate album title might well have been The Boys are Growing up and are Grateful for Their Good Fortune.

Dedicated to all of their children and “those to come,” Heaven summarily disproves that old rock notion that you have to miserable to make good music. They ready and willing to admit they’ve started to settle down a bit and that’s just fine with them.

Heaven tackles the topics of just how important good friends are, that romantic infatuation can give way to something even better, responsibility isn’t always a bad thing, and loyalty might turn out to be more rewarding than giving in to the passion of the moment.

In other words, the boys are growing up, and that’s a good thing. It’s heaven! Ain’t it funny what having kids can do to you? Had you told me I’d ever be a youth soccer coach, I’d have laughed until I passed out.

Given that sentiment and some great music, I can heartily and highly recommend Heaven.

Speaking of settling down, I find myself wishing that Regina Spektor would do just that. Please don’t get me wrong, I love my feminine avant garde artistes—Bjork, St. Vincent and Julia Holter—and I generally love a good musical sense of humor, but sometimes Spektor gets too silly.

The album title, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats, is perfect. I love her sense of adventure, I love her Moscow-born perspective, and I love the amazing things she does with her voice which even overshadows her accomplished piano playing, but on this, her sixth studio album, I once again feel pulled in too many directions

Sometimes it all comes together like it did on her lone hit, Fidelity, but more often than not, you get the feeling that the producer’s sole task is to try and contain her. You find yourself yearning for the record company to either set her free, but then you get an unlistenable mess like Soviet Kitsch—or force here to pick a musical theme—which may kill the muse.

All I can say is when she starts repeating lyrics over and over like she does on Patron Saint, it drives me nuts.

Spektor breaks into a full-blown Italian accent on the silly soap operatic Oh Marcello. She ponders creation’s mad dash toward entropy on Firewood when singing that her piano “is not firewood yet,” but it might be someday. On Open, her audible gasping nearly sent me into a asthma attack.

The best track, All the Rowboats, laments the fact that art masterpieces are “serving their maximum sentence” in a museum. It makes you pine for what might be if she would just settle on one musical thought per album.

Despite my issues with Cheap Seats, considering her amazing talent and breadth, it’s worth a listen and thus, I recommend it.

On to the gaggle known as Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros which, at times, consists of as many as 16 separate musicians. You probably know them from their hit Home which figured prominently in an NFL TV commercial.

The hirsute hippie harkening group plays with the notion of portraying a country gospel infatuated cult that’s gonna do their darndest to convert you when they come to your hometown. And I’m beginning to think they’ll do just that.

Here opens with an homage to the Man in Black, a Cash-esque track called Man on Fire and then moves right into the nasal hootenanny duet, That’s What’s Up. On Dear Believer, lead singer Alex Ebert tells us that “Reaching for heaven is what I’m on Earth to do” and letting go of our trials and tribulations might be the best course of action. The soaring Fiya Water reminds us that we really are all one.

While being too eclectic can kill Spektor, the variety of vocalists and musical styles works well on Here. There’s no sophomore jinx cursing this album. True to their Brother Love and the Traveling Salvation Show persona, Mr. Sharpe and his polar Zeroes make you want to get together with a group of fellow believers in a large tent, raise your tightly held hands up to the sky, and extol the virtue of all creation.

So I’m sure you can see why I’ll highly recommend Here.

Finally, our remastered reissue. (There always seems to be one, doesn’t there?) This week's is the initial offering by a group that would launch the likes of Steve Marriott, Rod Stewart and Ron Wood to stardom: Small Faces.

Heavily influenced by American R&B, these East London lads made the scene in 1965 and, even though the group lasted a short four years, they went on to become one of the most influential of the British Invasion bands.

Chafing at the notion he was part of a “pop” band, Marriott famously stormed off stage shouting “I quit” during a 1969 performance. He would go on to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton.

Remaining band members Kenny Lane, Ian McLagan and Kenney Jones turned to Jeff Beck Group castoffs. Rod Stewart and Ron Wood, dropped the world “Small” from the group’s name and the rest is history. Both incarnations were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year.

This is an album that was way ahead of it’s time—so far ahead that Marriott would often lament they could not reproduce their complex studio sound on stage. Of course, the two-CD set contains plenty of the obligatory bonus tracks and alternate versions in both mono and stereo.

If you want a great piece of rock 'n' roll history then I would highly recommend that you pick this one up

Next week—and I really mean it this time—we’ll have Patti Smith’s first original work in 12 years, the first new Beach Boys album in two decades, perhaps Temper Trap, and the remastered reissue du jour, the David Bowie classic, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

Until then, you’ll probably find me looking at my calendar a little bit more often!