What to Download Tuesday: Jack White

What can I say about Blunderbuss? Not much, actually, but that's not because there isn't a lot to say. If anything, Jack White's first solo LP promises to be the most written about, most dissected, most widely praised album of the year. And it's an album more than worthy of the attention. Not only does it have an epic rock 'n roll back story (i.e., "the coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time" rebounds from the breakup of his generation defining band), but musically Blunderbuss is arguably as strong as anything White has done in nearly a decade. In his review for Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield calls Blunderbuss White's "most expansive and most masterful record since The White Stripes 2003 classic Elephant" while the Guardian's Alexis Petridis refers to it as "White at his most strange, contradictory, and unfathomable, and therefore at his best." Indeed, if you're already a fan of Jack's, then there is little doubt that you are going to love Blunderbuss. While I certainly wouldn't categorize it as the best record that he has ever worked on (that honor finds De Stijl and White Blood Cells in a tie), it is perhaps the most quintessentially "Jack White" Jack White album ever released. Similarly to what Wilco did on Wilco (The Album) or R.E.M. with Collapse Into Now, Blunderbuss might perhaps best be understood as a distillation of all of the various styles and genres that White has worked in or toyed with over the years into one defining statement, a kind of stylistic retrospective that one reviewer has surmised constitutes a "shaking up (of) his past (in order) to move forward into the future" (Michael Roffman, CoS). I'm not sure I buy the suggestion here that Blunderbuss serves as a transitional piece for White. Not only does the record seem like a fairly defined and sturdy moment all its own to me, but musically speaking Jack's future has always been rooted in the past; and on Blunderbuss it's simply his own past that takes precedence. The result is an album that, while perhaps scattered stylistically, seems about as confident and as comfortable a statement a first time solo artist could make. Of course, it helps when that first time solo artist is the coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time.

As I suggested, there is much more to say about Blunderbuss. The brevity of my review is no reflection of the record itself or of my desire to say more about it. It is kind of a period of upheaval here at Cigarette Tricks. The postings have been a little thin the last few weeks, I know, and that is because there is some behind the scenes work that has been taking precedence. That should all change soon. In the meantime, be content with a great week in new releases, which in addition to Blunderbuss entails that Ty Segall & White Fence collaboration that we've been talking about, the self titled debut from the Deer Tick/Black Lips/Los Lobos "super group" Diamond Rugs, and the Waco Brothers collaboration with Nashville scenester Paul Burch, Great Chicago Fire.

Happy Record Store Day!

It's Record Store Day! How did that happen? It seems like it was just yesterday, or, well, March 24 actually, that we were looking ahead to all of the wonderful releases to-come. And now, poof, here we are. What did I do in that time? Ate some chips... watched a whole lot of Game of Thrones and Justified... bedazzled my jean jacket... scooped some cat litter... But nothing else, really. That can't be... God, I have nothing to show for a whole month of my life...no, a whole year... more... God, I am wasting my life... Anyway, it's Record Store Day, not Sober Reflection on How You're Wasting Your Life Day (that's typically what I do on my birthday). Today is a day for celebrating not only music but also those fine homo-sapiens who are still fighting the good physical release fight. So get in line, get ready to shove your fellow record lovers out of the way to get your mitts on that Buck Owens coloring book and whatever else you had your heart set-on. On my way to work this morning I saw them lined up down the block to get in to see the fine folks as Grooves. And that's just in boring old London Ont. I can only imagine that in bigger cities, such as King's Landing, Winterfell, and Lexington (did I mention I've been watching a lot of Game of Thrones and Justified?) things are even crazier. So get out there today and buy a record or two. It's your duty today as a music lover. But, please, if you don't mind, leave one of those Buck Owens coloring book for me. Check out the official Record Store Day site here.

R.I.P Levon Helm

The Band's Music from Big Pink and their second album, The Band (otherwise known as the "Brown Album") were in my parent's record collection. The latter, especially, I remember fixating over from a very young age. Not even necessarily the music itself, but the LP as a physical thing. In the case of the Brown Album it was that cover, the image of those five men, looking like a posse of cowboys from some dusty turn-of-the-century photo. Before I even knew what music really was, or who or what musicians even did, I was confronted with that image. And along with the covers for Sundown, Harvest, This Time, and a few other choice selections, it just feels burned into me. But if the cover peaked my curiosity for music, it's what was contained in those grooves of vinyl plastic that ultimately shaped my life its core. And Levon Helm's voice was so much a part of my musical education, my musical upbringing, that I simply feel inextricably tied to him, even as I never met him, never even saw him live. That formative experience of sitting by the record player in the basement, filing through what seem like an endless collection of records, and returning again-and-again to that band of cowboys, and those songs about a "Rag Mamma Rag," a place called Cripple Creek, and that one I didn't really understand but that went, "Laaaa La La La La La..." and was kind of sad. Levon Helm's twangy, rugged voice, so friendly and playful at times, so sorrowful at others, has just always been there with me. It helped instill in me a love and a passion for music. And without that I don't know where I'd be. So thanks Levon Helm.

I kept up with Helm, and in many ways I got reacquainted with him in the 2000s. It was a wildly prolific decade for a man recovering from lung cancer treatment. In keeping with his history of musical collaboratoin, he assembled an impressive cast of players known as The Levon Helm Band, and hosted a stunning number live shows at his home studio in Woodstock NY. Calling the shows "Midnight Rambles," the names of the artists who took part over the years is a veritable who's-who of roots rock royalty -- from Leon Russell, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, and Robert Earl Keen, to Steve Earle, The Black Crowes, and Lucinda Williams. Inspired by these shows, Helm hit the studio in 2007 for the first time since the early '80s, producing Dirt Farmer, an Grammy winning album that featured Helm's take on such songs as Steve Earle's "The Mountain," Buddy Miller's "Wide River to Cross," and the Traditional "The Girl I Left Behind." Electric Dirt came just two years later, and it was another triumph. For starters, the track "Growing Trade," co-written by Helm along with Larry Campbell, was one of my favorite tracks from that year. And, oh yeah, Electric Dirt also won the inaugural Grammy Award for Best Americana Album in 2010, an award Helm for a second time for his ridiculously good 2011 live record Ramble at the Ryman. While Helm's voice had been damaged from years of lung cancer treatment, I honestly don't hear that on those last three records. His voice may sound like a little weakened, but no more so than any other road-worn performer his age. Most importantly, he sounds like Levon Helm -- and for this music fan that sounds like the spirit of music itself. And with those records coming some twenty-five years after his last studio effort, and after almost a decade of cancer treatment, they really are something to be thankful for.

Check out the New York Times obit for Helm here. Click after the jump for some performance clips over the years.

What to Download Tuesday: Spiritualized

Jason Pierce doesn't have an easy time making music. Spiritualized records, it seems, are almost always the products of suffering. From a debut album, Lazer Guided Melodies, crafted around the drawn out dissolution of Spaceman 3, to their 1997 masterpiece, Ladies and Gentlemen...We Are Floating in Space, which was written in the wake of frontman Peirce's messy breakup with girlfriend, and then Spiritualized keyboard player, Kate Radley (she left Pierce in 1995 for The Verve's Richard Ashcroft, so, yeah, maybe Pierce should just be thankful she left before he ended up doing something regrettable like Human Conditions). The last Spiritualized record, 2008's Songs In A & E, came on the heels of Pierce's near death experience after a bout with double pneumonia landed him in ICU battling type 1 respiratory failure. So, in the four years in between Songs In A & E and the release of the new Spiritualized record, Sweet Heart Sweet Light, you think life would have handed J Spaceman an easy one. But no. Instead,  Peirce was diagnosed with a life threatening liver disease ("My liver was gone, basically," he told The Guardian's Dave Simpson). He has spent the last couple of years undergoing an experimental drug therapy, taking a chemical cocktail originally given to leukemia patients to combat his degenerative liver disease. Sweet Heart Sweet Light, the seventh Spiritualized album, out today on Fat Possum, was made during this treatment process; and the irony of the fact that a man who used to be in a band whose motto was "taking drugs to make music to take drugs" made an album on life-saving medicines has not been lost on anyone, including Pierce himself. "I decided to make a record on these drugs," he joked with Simpson, adding, "[t]he further I get away from the treatment the more I feel it wasn't me making that record...It was like I wasn't in my own head."

Sweet Heart Sweet Light is a Spiritualized record. Unmistakably. It touches on all of the thematic hallmarks that Pierce has wrestled with since his days in Spaceman 3 -- primarily, death, desperation, Jesus and Rock 'n Roll -- and doing so in Pierce's trademark mash-up of the blues, gospel, psychedelia, and rock. And while Pierce has never made a bad record, Sweet Heart Sweet Light is hands-down the best thing he has done since Ladies and Gentlemen...We Are Floating in Space. It's the most immediate, most sincere, most fragile that Pierce has sounded on a record since that 1997 classic, and the batch of songs here is arguably the most varied and accessible batch of his career. I've already written a little bit about first single "Hey Jane" in previous posts. But it's a brilliant song, whose lyrical themes and musical brilliance are indicative of the album as a whole. At nine-minutes in length, "Hey Jane" starts out as a balls-out rocker, with the singer urgently wondering about the trials-and-tribulations of daily life, which the every person "Jane" of the title performs without any larger meaning or purpose, let alone even time to think about these things: "Said you ain't got time to search for...running so fast you get no place." Eventually things crash, for "Jane" and, musically, for the song itself. Around the three minute mark the song unravels into a mess of guitar and cymbal crashes. From here, "Hey Jane" transforms both musically and lyrically into a spine tingling meditation on human limitations, death and the redemptive power of love. And so by the time the refrain "Sweet heart, sweet light/sweet heart, love of my life" kicks in to close out the track out, what started out as a balls-out rocker has transformed into a thing of beauty and transcendence that, for me at least, hits me in the gut every time (and being absolutely winded by the AG Rojas directed video probably doesn't help with this feeling). It's quite a thing. And it's only one such moment on Sweet Heart Sweet Light, an an album that meditates over-and-over again on questions of human weakness and desperation, but which not only seeks solace from these existential limitations in music, but which still believes in, and searches for, that transcendent moment in music -- and in Rock 'n Roll in particular.

Album closer, "So Long, You Pretty Things," admits some defeat here. I was wrong to previously worry about the inclusion of Pierce's daughter, Poppy, here. The sense of both frailty and optimism that her voice brings at the opening of the track only highlights the overriding themes of the album. A nod to the Bowie classic, and in turn to era and the idea of rock 'n roll decadence, the first half of "So Long, You Pretty Things," meditates on failure and loss, with Pierce pleading to Jesus for guidance, hoping for a reason to go on. But just as the sense of defeat here seems insurmountable, the track suddenly transforms into an Oasis-style sing-along that both laments and celebrates the death of rock 'n roll dreams: "So long, you pretty things, God save your little soul/The music that you played so hard ain't on your radio/And all your dreams of diamond rings and all that rock 'n roll can bring you/Sail on, so long." And even as it marks another moment of failure -- i.e., the death of a scene, the inability of music to overcome inevitable defeat and loss -- it's another beautiful musical moment. At the very least, it makes me want to sing along. And that's what, at its best, Sweet Heart Sweet Light accomplishes: even as these songs let us know that we are all ultimately going to be losers at the game of life, they makes us all feel like beautiful losers for singing along.

Other notable new releases this week include Spencer Krug's new Moonface record with Finish band Siinai (that's one, like the Spiritualized record, that we've been looking forward to for some time). Twee-poppers Allo Darlin' release their sophomore record Europe and another Curb compilation looking to cash in on Hank III but which is still nevertheless worth checking out -- it features six covers and some outtakes from Hank's first two Curb records. Full list after the jump.

Cloud Nothings, "Stay Useless" Video

What better way to mark the end of the work week than with the Cloud Nothings anthemic ode to doing nothing, "Stay Useless," in our heads. The Cleveland band has released an animated video for the Attach on Memory standout, and it is a veritable Magic School Bus on acid. Directed by Jack Kubizne, the clip follows a Kenny-esque protagonist as he encounters a a roadblock or two on his way to school. It's a fun clip and the song will rock your socks off -- unless of course you're familiar with it already and have taken the necessary precautions to reinforce or tighten your socks accordingly. Either way, socks on or socks off, enjoy the "Stay Useless" video. Attach on Memory is out now on Carpark.