Don Allred's Pazz & Jop 2005 Ballot & Comments
Albums:
1. Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series, Volume 7: No Direction Home (The Soundtrack) (Columbia/Legacy)
2. Insect Trust: Hoboken Saturday Night (Collector's Choice)
3. Jason Moran: Same Mother (Blue Note)
4. James Carter, Cyrus Chesnut, Ali Jackson, Reginald Veal: Gold Sounds (Brown Brothers)
5. Benny Lackner Trio: Not The Same (Nagel Heyer)
6. Dee Dee Bridgewater: J'ai Deux Amours (Sovereign Artists)
7. Shelly Fairchild: Ride (Sony)
8. Slunt: Get A Load Of This (Repossession)
9. Wide Right: Sleeping On The Couch (Widerightmusic)
10. Sanso-Xtro: Sentimentalist (Type)
Singles:
1. Aaron Neville: "Louisiana 1927"(live version) (no label)
2.Victoria: "Mister Let Me Go" (Shadoks)
3. Dorothy: "Softness" (Crippled Dick Hot Wax)
4. Mary J. Blige with U2: "One"(live version )(no label)
5. Cobra Verde: "I Feel Love"
6. Cobra Verde: "So Long Marianne"
7. Billy Joe Shaver with Big & Rich: "Live Forever"(Compadre)
8. Emmanuel Jal/Abdul: "Gua"(Riverboat)
9. Blind Arvella Gray: "Arvella's Work Song"(Conjuroo)
10. Fiery Furnaces: "Rehearsing My Choir" (Rough Trade)
COMMENTS: NO DIRECTION HOME (THE SOUNDTRACK) suggests that Bob Dylan was always electric. The '59 track, "When I Got Troubles," includes a stop/start passage in the overall groove; already he's slipping a little rockabilly into his bluesy folkiness, a little cumulative mashup. (He already had what Frank Kogan called "the mind of a DJ", re LOVE AND THEFT). It's not a static groove, there's a sense of momentum, of a vehicle sweeping up things it finds along the road, things blowin' in the wind and rattling around the margins. "Rambler, Gambler" further highlights degrees of force and delicacy, detail and pattern: waves and cycles of elements rising and falling in the mix. This can be fluid, and mild or powerful (depending on the size of the wave, the surge of the urge). It can be, by the time of the next (only the third!) track, "Dink's Song," notes gouged from passing, and often painful, insights, impulses. Here, and in "I Was Young When I Left Home," is emotional roller derby, as the narrator sometimes has to deal with isolation, fear, guilt (he's way out/in here; lost, fleeing, drifting, stuck inside a mobile), contradictions that send him crashing into his limitations, and boucing, pulled back into his cycles, in his lot full of his stuff. (Ditto what happens to Wide Right's Leah Archibald, in her hot little apartment, with that damn couch she can't get somebody onto and somebody else off of; ditto the Fiery Furnaces' Grandma Olga, on the train of thought and manic munday transit, spinning yarns of seemingly stranded strands, sics, tics, non seqs, whirlwinds that sort into detail and pattern, stories within stories, memories in their clashy mesh and meshy clash. Like No Direction's Dylan and The Hold Steady's ramblin' urban hicks, runaway pilgrimettes, she's purposefully wandering, off to visit her family plot, its storied, dented inner surface she can't help but fill in with memory's riffing ritual. This process is served). "Masters Of War" shines a harsh, steady light, a backdrop as he calls into the shadows. "Hard Rain's" lighting gets even more theatrical, with the voice getting spiky already, jabbing and wired, seaching the shadows and portents of his profuse imagery, but posing too. "When The Ship Comes In" 's imagery is buggin', its wires raise rocks to stand proud, and everything in it is juiced with poison visions of vengeful victory. "Mr. Tambourine Man" indicates self-awareness of the previously over amped ampitheatre of his mynd. His lot, full of his stuff, while "meantime life outside goes on all around you."But where would we or he be, if, to some degree, he hadn't bought "Advertising signs they con you into thinking YOU'RE the One"? (And also he's got me thinking if Insect Trust created their uniquely, perculiarly satisfying HOBOKEN SATURDAY NIGHT, while destroying themselves as a group: busy being born *and* busy dying, rather than the choices Mr. D. decrees we must make. But then he's got me mixing in "though neither is to be what they claim," from NDH's Disc 2's vibrantly brittle "Desolation Row," speaking of insight gouging notes and ticks and moments). "It's Alright, Ma," source of previously mentioned decrees, isn't on here, but NO DIRECTION's narrative groove leads me through it, through insights and bouncebacks, flux and clues, glimpsed by "Chimes Of Freedom flashing," as the jingle jangle morning becomes more and more electric, and Baby Blue's reindeer armies roll down all roads to Mr. Jones' rolling stoned mirror, and vice versa.
Disc 2 starts with the immaculately rowdy "Maggie's Farm" (hard to imagine why some, not all, at Newport found it so immaculately frightful).Almost too hip, "Desolation Row"(with guitars and hardassed attitude carving graffiti chronicles in the near hopelessly sere surface of the costly, protectively low Row) and some others don't quite have words and/or vocal nuance (yet) to match their music. And by "music," I mean to include the sheer crackling resonance of Dylan's stalwart to stoic voice, but "Visions of Johanna," in particular, lacks the master take's intimacy and shading: it seems too brash, yet Dyl's force pokes holes in his cool mask (he knows he needs 'em), letting more light, closer listening into the music's fever sheen. "Inside the museum, infinity goes up on trial," and he seems ready to judge, strutting with his unmellow fellows, brushing sparks from the exhibits, still under construction in his scrawled halls. Manchester '66's "Ballad Of A Thin Man" (only the last two tracks have previously been issued; legitimately, anyway)is as triumphantly derisive as the studio master take, but also already becoming as self-mocking as Before The Flood's '74 comeback tour performance is wrenchingly, wretchingly purgative. Here, he's persecutor and lost victim, O'Brien ("he was obviously quite mad") and Winston Smith, both occupants of Orwell's Room 101, and what a workout band the 101ers are. "Like A Rolling Stone" celebrates its Titantic infinity, electocuties parading an anthem no scarier than anyone born to sing it, and who isn't? "How does it feeeluhhl," comin' round the swaying, plugged in mountain again.
¶ 2/02/2006
