Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #19 by Stephen McClurg

Silica Gel: May Day (2020)

Silica Gel’s May Day opens with the title track, a lilting version of an estampie by twelfth century troubadour de Vaqueras. The liner notes say, “We hope our rendition, with drums-a-pounding and whispering voices reminding you of all you love but cannot possess allows you to dance the heartsickness away.” Since the title at once references revelry and rebirth, International Workers’ Day, and a distress signal, the title serves the playful seriousness and layers of sometimes contradictory meanings of the music. Silica Gel’s approach on this tune is to take folk and classical vocal forms, harmonious and airy vocals, and meld them to brute percussion and jarringly contemporary electronics.

May Day features gorgeous artwork and engaging liner notes, sometimes historical, sometimes poetic. The lyrics range from a variety of early song texts, notably twelfth and fourteenth century folk songs, and originals. Silica Gel is not a period-specific revival band. Instead, they commit to having old songs speak to contemporary times, honoring traditions while commenting on contemporary life.

My first reaction to the album was that it was a kind of folk horror score written by Julia Holter. Silica Gel, and the label Sweet Wreath, often create with seasons and cycles in mind: sounds and songs become articulations of light and weather and water and thunder. Similarly, the songs here connect to the physical, emotional, and liminal: these are songs of art and thought and love and protest, topics that cycle through humanity’s collective life and creativity. “New Year’s Dream” evokes not only the larger seasons and cycles, but also the scene of an early morning, vaguely lightheaded walk after a party to watch the sun rise.

It’s difficult to balance these conceptual and thematic threads, but the album manages it well. One of the best examples is “Pan Pan Medico,” a title that itself was used as a former distress signal. The song seems obscure at first, but every listen brings in more clarity, but also other layers of ideas. Playful and dark themes combine with folk songs, children’s songs, codes, and a sequence from “Yankee Doodle.” The ending deconstructs “Sweet Home Alabama,” one of the most unexpected, eerie and sublime moments on the album.

This is a collection speaking toward similar themes and ideas rather than a straightforward narrative. Like much folk music, it can be at once abrasive and balming.

Silica Gel’s May Day is available on Bandcampthrough Sweet Wreath.

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #18 by Stephen McClurg

Christopher C. King’s Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe’s Oldest Surviving Folk Music (2018)

In an interview, Christopher C. King said that he doesn’t listen to music after 1940. The least generous image that came to my mind was a Mr. Show segment in the episode “The Velveteen Touch of a Dandy Fop” in which a man offers a doughnut to someone who refuses and says he doesn’t eat food “approved by the masses.” He also carries a mini-Victrola and says it’s the only modern piece of equipment he will touch. When asked about listening to a CD, he says, “People were not meant to hear music with such clarity. People need to hear snaps and pops and that shit.” This leads to a skit about two rival megaphone crooners, who I believe are meant to be stand-ins for the East Coast/West Coast hip-hop rivalry of the time.

I’ve come to appreciate King’s perspective, though alien to my own. He offers the most generous image of the dandy fop, which turns out to be neither dandy nor fop, but an idealist searching for the point where music and humanity meet. The lament in the title is a type of music, but also meant to be a longing for music lived within a community, when music was the fire and breath of a people responding to the immediate world around them. This is music not as commodity, but as air taken in during celebrations and mourning, but also part of living daily life. The lament is not just an Epirotic genre that King gives us insight into while relating it to other forms like the memento mori, but also the lamentation for music in general and how we have chosen to relate to it.

Epirotic music comes from the Epirus region of northwestern Greece. This folk music is frequently driven by mournful clarinet or violin melodies set to drones or dancing rhythms. Think of something like Appalachian fiddle improvisations with lots of trills interspersed between long notes or imitations of bird song while being played as Roma ballads.

The book offers a listener’s journey, maybe something more fanatical in collectors like King, who travels to Istanbul and around Greece searching for living and recorded forms of Epirotic music, the focus of the book and considered to be the oldest surviving European folk music. This particular journey is cushioned in the ideas of the larger journey of how we search for meaning in our lives. Evidently, he is willing to take in certain types of live music performed obviously past the 1940 expiration date for recordings, though I’m sure the date holds for the time of composition of said live music. Given this, King has to weigh in on one of the trickier terms that one hears in relation to music and music criticism: authenticity.

Though the writing is worth reading on its own merits and covers related music history and theory in ways any reader can enjoy, I think even King would find it strange for someone to read the book without going to the music. There is a spectacular collection made for the book, and since its release, several of the artists have also had newly issued collections of their own work.

The music is undeniable, earthly and ethereal. Somehow familiar, but in total also not like anything I have heard. I hear qualities of American Appalachian music, itself borrowing from various European, African, and Native forms; there are drone qualities reminiscent of Eastern or Middle Eastern styles, elements of klezmer, Roma, and imitations of vocal and natural sounds. Taken together, the book and the music collection make a spectacular project.

Christopher C. King’s Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe’s Oldest Surviving Folk Music is available online and at book stores. The Lament from Epirus soundtrack is available from Tompkins Square Records.

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #17 by Stephen McClurg

J.J. Anselmi’s Doomed to Fail: The Incredibly Loud History of Doom, Sludge, and Post-Metal (2020)

A music history flavored with memoir, Doomed to Fail could be a user’s guide for anyone interested in metal and its hideous progeny. Along with histories of the guitar and distortion effects in popular music, JJ Anselmi trudges into the story of metal, its argued origins, various subgenres, and its connections to the wider world of music from Ma Rainey to La Monte Young. If you’re not sure where to start in terms of listening, the book has value alone in several years’ worth of suggestions within the text and in a great annotated discography at the end.

Anselmi offers a few reasons how such an ugly music creates such a devoted fan base. Metal, like horror movies, allows fans a catharsis. Many fans—including Anselmi himself—have pessimistic personalities and look for ways of purging emotions that they feel living in a world out of tune with their own ideals of justice, art, politics, etc.

JJ Anselmi

In terms of culture, Anselmi suggests that young, creative people related to metal and then reacted to it in the way early punks did to prog rock and disco. While metal was appealing, the music became more and more technical and out-of-reach, and guitarists who didn’t want to spend time practicing as opposed to creating songs or expressing themselves began playing slower and heavier, a response already encoded in metal’s DNA through tracks like “Black Sabbath.” It’s a reaction similar to youth art movements that make do with what they have, from B-boys and scraps of linoleum to Z-boys and empty concrete pools. Anselmi mentions the intoxicating rawness and immediacy of the music and the tribal effect of shows in general as characteristics that bind the audience to the music.

The typical chapter opens by highlighting an important band within a sub-genre followed by shorter sections given to other bands, which then ends with a listening guide. If I have a criticism, I wish the band profiles profiles were longer, which isn’t necessarily the project of this book. I’m eager to find Anselmi’s other music writing.

Along with the sometimes comical expansion of subgenres, the expansion of the mindsets of metal listeners and performers is welcomed, interrogated, and celebrated in Doomed to Fail. A music known for attracting outsiders all over the world, metal is sometimes too well-known for problematic misogyny and homophobia. Obviously intellectually interested, but also passionate about the music and what it represents, Anselmi highlights problematic aspects of bands and band members, even as he values their music. Some chapters are specifically devoted to women and members of the LGBTQ+ community in metal.

While I’ve listened to bands that might fit here, discovering Sun O))) through the book is something I can give Anselmi thanks for. Sun O)))’s Monoliths and Dimensions (2009) is now a favorite record of mine in any genre. A partial collaboration with composer Eyvind Kang, and containing a tribute to Alice Coltrane, it’s not what I originally had in mind as doom metal. It’s also a spiritual record. On a good sound system it pulses through one’s body.  It’s terrifying at first, though ultimately, completely vivifying.

Doomed to Fail: The Incredibly Loud History of Doom, Sludge, and Post-Metal is a wonderful addition to metal literature.

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.

Lost Chords & Serenades Divine #16 by Stephen McClurg

Dua Saleh: Rosetta EP  (2020)

The songs on Dua Saleh’s Rosettasurge through rap, pop, and rock–sometimes in the same track. Considering the namesake of the EP is Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Dua Saleh’s Sudanese-American Musilim background, the record expresses the desires, joys, and challenges of a multi-hyphenated existence.

A video of “Umbrellar” has qualities of both ‘90s hip hop and Afrofuturism. It’s a catchy single and evokes a similarly nostalgic, yet uplifting mood as something like Chastity Belt’s “Different Now.”

“Smut” begins as a rap that gets pitched into alien voices and then transforms into an electronic R&B track while holding threads from the opening. Toward the end, a guitar line comes in that would sit comfortably on a Cure album. The unique structure of “Smut” keeps growing on me.

“Windhymn” features organ, percussive sounds, and wailing among several vocal overdubs. There’s an effective whispering voice featured on this track and throughout the record. Here it makes sense as a wind hymn. The track ends not in a whisper, but in a rupturing jazz sample. One of Rosetta’s characteristics is the unexpected noisy qualities at the end of most tracks.

Like Dua Saleh, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is difficult to describe. Mostly well-known as a gospel artist, she played gospel in jazz settings and also is considered the Godmother of Rock and Roll. Though she was married a few times, she also had relationships with other women. Check out her record Gospel Trainfrom 1956. The first track “Jericho” is one of my favorite performances, as is this live performance of “Didn’t It Rain” that proves what a goddess she was.

Bandcamp is one of the best ways to support living musicians. Rosetta and other recent singles and EPs are available here.

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He co-hosts The Outrider Podcast, writes at Eunoia Solstice, and infrequently blogs. He has contributed music as a solo artist and with the group Necronomikids to past episodes of The Drunken Odyssey.