War, Tragedy, and Country Music

Laura Cantrell has a new electronic-only “EP” out and it’s fantastic. I put the term EP in quotes because, while it is the term Laura has chosen to apply to this release, it is actually long enough, at 34+ minutes, to qualify as an album. I guess it’s not an album because it is all covers, and includes some tracks that have been floating around for a while.

But it is great, simple, stripped down country music, perfectly adapted to her evocative and understated voice. Three tracks are highlights, the kind of tunes you would have built mix-tapes around back in the day. The greatest of all is her version of New Order’s “Love Vigilantes.” Now, recording 80s hits in in the idiom of very different musical genres is no longer a revolutionary gesture, given that there is a band out there that does nothing but record 80s music in Bossa Nova form, but this one is a stunner. I remember lying on my bed and listening closely to the lyrics when the New Order single came out, and being totally caught up in the bizarre sentimental tragedy being described. The song’s narrator comes home from the war only to witness his wife receiving a telegram informing her of his death. The lyrics were extremely out of place in a 80s club dance track, to put it mildly.

Laura Cantrell performs another dizzying act of estrangement with the song, but she does so by appropriating it to a genre (country weeper) and to a historical moment (an endless, tragic war) for which the song makes perfect sense: “you just can’t believe the joy I did receive/ when I got my leave.” She has made an excellent choice in actually keeping close to the original rhythmic structure of the song (although the arrangement has transformed the pulsing beat from dancey to ballad time, the beat is still emphatic).

Coupled with her compilation cover of “Sam Stone,” Laura has now recorded two of the most interesting war-themed songs during the Iraq debacle, both notable for being narrated by very sympathetic soldiers.

The other absolutely killer tracks here are the title tune, a Burt Bachrach number that also sounds utterly at home as a country standard, so much so that listening to Laura sing it made me forget where it came from and I had to go look it up, and one of my very favorite Merle Haggard songs, the picture-perfect composition “Silver Wings,” about a lover flying away on an airplane, that manages to sound both ultra-country and ultra modern despite being composed in the mid 70s.

There are many other great moments on the EP too, these are just the ones that stand out the most. If you download it, make sure to go over to Laura’s website and throw in some of the great free covers she has made available there, such as her (in my mind definitive) version of Elvis Costello’s “Indoor Fireworks.”

to recap:

Trains and Boats and Planes EP at Emusic

More free DLs at Lauracantrell.com

And listen to “Love Vigilantes” and “Trains and Boats and Planes” at her Myspace

The Moldy Peaches Made Me Do It

I’ve been messing with blogs as cheap and easy web pages for posting files etc., but somehow listening to the Moldy Peaches singing “Anyone Else But You” (I’ll admit it, on the Juno Sdtrk) convinced me that I should try to do an actual blog, given that I have so much to share. But you have to admit, “Shiney Happy Fits of Rage” is way too obvious as a blog title.

At the bottom of the page is the only contribution I ever made to the long projected project of “The Untimely Review: The Review of Old Books.” Or actually its blog incarnation. In fact I wrote the essay for Lorin Stein, who at the time was under the impression that he had been installed as the literary editor of The Rubber Band Gazette, a former trade publication, by the artists Komar and Melamid, who had taken it over in a coup. Lorin soon learned, however, that the coup was on him. At least that’s what he told me to explain why the piece wasn’t being published. And no, I did not get a kill fee.

“Invisible Restaurants” I dreamed up with a grad school buddy ages ago. I will try to add entries…