Including Miles and Miles by The Heavy Heavy in my most recent Sunday Sixfeature made me listen to Life and Life Only, the June 2022 EP, on which the tune by the UK band initially appeared. After starting to check it out, I quickly realized their retro-inspired rock sound is right up my alley.
Led by Will Turner and Georgie Fuller, the five-piece group from the seaside resort town of Brighton in Southern England create what their Bandcamppage describes as “unfettered rock-and-roll that warps time and space, sitting at the reverb-drenched collision of psychedelia and blues, acid rock and sunshine pop.” Their website name-checks Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, British Invasion pop acts like The Hollies and folk-blues duo Delaney & Bonnie. I would add The Mamas and the Papas and Jefferson Airplane.
The Heavy Heavy are led by Georgie Fuller (left) and Will Tuner who their website describes as “lifelong musicians”
I noticed there’s another recent release by The Heavy Heavy, which is also titled Life and Life Only. This album, which came out in March, combines the songs of the EP with four additional tracks, including covers of tunes by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Father John Misty and Jonathan Wilson, as well as a live and an acoustic version of two original songs.
Apparently, The Heavy Heavy are pretty prolific. Their website refers to “hundreds of songs” they have written and recorded in just the past two years. They have also toured “relentlessly” in the United States and Europe and appeared on U.S. national television, including CBS Saturday Morning, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. That certainly ain’t no joke!
Let’s get to some music from the album version of Life and Life Only. Here’s the cool opener All My Dreams. The gorgeous multipart harmony vocals and the retro organ sound are a total turn-on. Immediately, it feels like traveling back to the late ’60s!
Go Down River is the first track Fuller and Turner recorded as The Heavy Heavy. “I’d had this song a while and couldn’t quite finish it, but then once Georgie added her vocals it all came together,” Turner recalls on their website. “The male-female harmonies gave it this whole new sound; it just felt like lying in the green grass on a hot sunny day.” Another outstanding tune!
Man of the Hills is “a groove-heavy homage to Turner’s otherworldly hometown” of Malvern, notes the group’s website. While I’m not familiar with the spa town in the English countryside of Worcestershire, I know this: This song certainly rocks!
Since I just covered Miles and Miles I’m skipping it here and go the catchy Why Don’t You Call, which features more seductive harmony singing.
Frankly, I could highlight any of the album’s remaining tunes. I’d like to leave you with one more track, which is one of the aforementioned covers: Real Love Baby, written by Joshua Tillman, aka Father John Misty, who recorded and released it first as a non-album single in 2016.
Life and Life Only is beautiful with a seductive late ’60s flower power vibe. It’s perfectly timed for summer. Here’s a Spotify link to the album.
Sources: Wikipedia; The Heavy Heavy website; The Heavy Heavy Bandcamp page; YouTube; Spotify
Celebrating music with six random tracks at a time
It’s Sunday and I hope everybody is feeling groovy. Let’s embark on another journey to the magical world of music to leave any worries behind, at least temporarily, or simply have a great time! As usual, the trip is eclectic, involving six tunes from different decades in different flavors.
Thelonious Monk/Ruby My Dear
Today, our time machine first takes us to the year 1951 and beautiful music by American jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. The second most recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, Monk was active as a jazz performer mostly from the early 1940s until the mid-1970s. Apart from a sizable amount of releases under his name, Monk also recorded as a sideman with the likes of Art Blakey, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. During the final 10 years of his life, he only made a small number of appearances due to his declining health. Monk passed away from a stroke in February 1982 at the age of 64. Ruby My Dear, one of his many compositions that became jazz standards, was first recorded in October 1947 for Genius of Modern Music, a compilation of Monk’s first recordings as band leader for the Blue Note label, which exists in four different versions released at different times. The earliest came out in 1951. Aw, so soothing!
Tonio K./I Can’t Stop
Next, we jump to the late ’80s and a tune by Tonio K. The American singer-songwriter first entered my radar screen in December 2021 when I featured You, a gem he wrote together with John Shanks and Bob Thiele for Bonnie Raitt’s 12th studio album Longing in Their Hearts released in March 1994. K. (born Steven M. Krikorian) has also penned tunes for Al Green, Aaron Neville, Chicago and Wynonna Judd, among many others. In addition to that he has released nine solo albums to date, something fellow blogger Max from PowerPop reminded me of the other when he posted about Life in the Foodchain, K.’s solo debut from 1978. This brings me to I Can’t Stop, a funky song from his fifth solo release Notes from the Lost Civilization, which came out in 1988. Beware, this song with its cool guitar and organ parts is pretty infectious and couldn’t have a better title!
The Youngbloods/Foolin’ Around (The Waltz)
No Sunday Six journey can leave out the ’60s. This time, our stop is January 1967, which saw the release of the eponymous debut album by The Youngbloods. Oftentimes, the American rock band is only remembered for their sole U.S. top 40 hit Get Together, which upon re-release in 1969 peaked at no. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. While they may have been a one-hit wonder, the group had other great songs. But they never achieved widespread popularity and disbanded in 1972. After a reunion in late 1984 for a brief tour, The Youngbloods broke up again in mid-1985. Coming back to their first album, here Foolin’ Around (The Waltz), written by co-founder Jesse Colin Young. If I see this correctly, this wasn’t released as a single – perhaps the unusual change from 4/4 to 3/4 time signature didn’t make it particularly radio-friendly.
Alice Cooper/School’s Out
The other day, I found myself listening to the radio in my car while running an errand when School’s Out by Alice Cooper came on. Christian couldn’t help himself but turn up the volume and sing along full throttle – it was probably a good thing no one else was around and all car windows were closed! This tune took me back to my school days and my only spontaneous protest against teachers when singing along to Pink Floyd’sAnother Brick in the Wall (Part 2) during a classroom party. When our classroom (English) teacher walked in, he briefly smiled before putting on a more serious facial expression. We quickly stopped singing. Anyway, that’s my longwinded intro to the great Alice Cooper tune, which first appeared in April 1972 as the lead single to the rock band’s fifth studio album with the same title – also a good reminder that before Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier) started performing solo under this name in 1975, there was the band Alice Cooper, which 16-year-old Furnier co-founded in 1964 as The Earwigs with four high school mates to enter a local talent show. After cycling through a couple of other names, they became Alice Cooper in 1968. School’s Out, credited to all members of the band, became their biggest international hit and arguably their signature song. Feel free to scream along! 🙂
The Verve/Bittersweet Symphony
And we’re on to the ’90s and Urban Hymns, the third studio album by English Britpop band The Verve, which appeared in September 1997. Seven years after their formation, not only did it bring them their first no. 1 album in the UK but also broad international sales and chart success. In fact, Urban Hymns became the group’s biggest seller and the 19th best-selling album in UK chart history. It almost didn’t happen. After The Verve had gone through some physical and mental turmoil, frontman and lead vocalist Richard Ashcroft broke up the group in September 1995. While he reunited with two of their members a few weeks thereafter, guitarist Nick McGabe at first refused to return. In early 1997, Ashcroft changed the guitarist’s mind, and he rejoined the band for the ongoing Urban Hymns recording sessions. But the group’s biggest success couldn’t prevent their second split in April 1999. They reformed one more time in 2007 and released one additional album the following year before breaking up again in 2009 – this time for good. Bittersweet Symphony, written by Ashcroft, first appeared as the lead single from Urban Hymns in June 1997. But the single’s success was, well, bittersweet. Following a lawsuit finding The Verve illegally had taken a sample from a 1965 version of The Rolling Stones’The Last Time by The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, all royalties were relinquished and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were added to the songwriting credits. In 2019, after the death of Allen Klein, the Stones’ manager at the time of the litigation, Jagger and Richards ceded the rights to Ashcroft.
Jonathan Wilson/Love to Love
And once again, another Sunday Six trip is reaching its final destination, which takes us to the current century. When my former German bandmate and longtime music buddy recently recommended that I check out Fanfare, the second studio album by Jonathan Wilson, the name rang a distant bell. I couldn’t help and search my blog, which revealed Wilson produced Misadventures of Doomscroller, the excellent eighth studio album by American rock band Dawes, which I reviewed here in early January. Apart from his work as a producer for 10-plus years, Wilson has also released a series of solo albums and EPs since 2007. The above-noted Fanfare came out in 2013. Here is Love to Love, which like most other tunes on the album was solely written by Wilson. I’m really beginning to like this man!
I’m thrilled my first full-fledged album review of 2023 is music by a contemporary band. While I featured Dawes and their song Ghost In The Machine in a Best of What’s Newinstallment last July and also highlighted the great tune again in part 1 of my 2022 year-end feature, it wasn’t until this past Saturday that I finally listened to Misadventures of Doomscroller, their latest album released in July 2022, which includes this track. It was pretty much instant love – something that rarely happens to me, especially when it comes to contemporary artists!
Dawes emerged in 2009 from rock band Simon Dawes after that group’s co-songwriter Blake Mills had departed. This led them to both shorten their name to Dawes and change from a post-punk to a folk rock-oriented sound. AllMusicdescribes it as “influenced by the gentle acoustic style and rich vocal harmonies of the Laurel Canyon sound (Crosby, Stills & Nash, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell) as well as the shambling, romanticized Americana of the Band.” That’s a great characterization. For this album, I would add a pretty sophisticated, progressive rock-like complexity to their music.
The current line-up of Dawes features brothers Taylor Goldsmith (guitars, vocals) and Griffin Goldsmith (drums), along with Wylie Gelber (bass) and Lee Pardini (keyboards). Misadventures of Doomscroller is their eighth studio album. According to this review by Entertainment Focus, it was produced by the Los Angeles band’s longtime collaborator Jonathan Wilson, who has also worked with Angel Olsen, Benmont Tench, Jackson Browne, Margo Price and Father John Misty, among others.
Dawes (from left): Griffin Goldsmith, Wylie Gelber, Taylor Goldsmith and Lee Pardini
“We’ve always prided ourselves on being minimalists. With this record we set out on being MAXIMALISTS,” the band’s main songwriter Taylor Goldsmith told Entertainment Focus. “Still a quartet. Still not letting these songs hide behind any tricks or effects. But really letting the songs breathe and stretch and live however they want to. We decided to stop having any regard for short attention spans. Our ambitions go beyond the musical with this one.”
I’d say it’s time to take a closer look at some of the goodies. Opening the album is the impressive medley Someone Else’s Cafe/Doomscroller Tries to Relax. Like all other tracks except for one, it was penned by Taylor Goldsmith. The two tunes are connected by a middle section, creating a feel of a song suite. “The first half of this song could be about tyrants,” Goldsmith explained to Entertainment Focus. “But it could also be about anyone who thinks that a little more control is gonna make everything ok. The second half is a response to that developing reality of the first half. The world might be a scary place sometimes but, to some degree, I want to believe I can decide how I respond to it.” Check out this neat sound and cool groove – so good, all of its 10-plus minutes!
The next track I’d like to call out is Comes In Waves. In a news post on the group’s website, Goldsmith notes: I had this riff and one of the verses for a while. Griffin, Wylie and Mike Viola came over to my backyard (this was peak covid) to just play music together for one of the first times since lockdown. I started sharing the song and Griffin and Mike started singing their background parts you hear on the choruses on the record immediately. It inspired me to finish writing it. The lyric is about the arbitrary demands I make on myself. I want to perceive me or my life a certain way but I make no exceptions for an off day or a misstep. Whether it’s a win or a loss, it’s all transient, and only when I can live in some version of that awareness (which is itself transient) am I able to bat away any fears or anxieties or the consequences of an over indulged ego.
Since I already covered the excellent Ghost In The Machine twice, I’m skipping it in this review. Instead, the last tune I’d like to highlight is titled Everything Is Permanent, the only track on the album Goldsmith co-wrote, with Jimmy Joliff. Evidently quoting Goldsmith again, the above news post notes it’s a song (about how everything about us is tracked, documented, recorded, filed, mined, bought, sold, etc. etc. on some level) that is wrapped around a molten core of a breakdown/ freakout/majorminorinterweave that is probably the moment I’m most proud of on the whole record. After showing you the blood and guts, we gently sew the song back together again and end with what could be the tagline for all of social media and the screen-life-culture that we subscribe to these days to varying degrees: “Did you really need to cry? Or be seen crying?”
Misadventures of Doomscroller is an album I can highly recommend. To start with, Dawes are really fine musicians. If I would have to call out anybody in particular, I would pay close attention to drummer Griffin Goldsmith. I also love Wylie Gelber’s melodic bass playing. The other thing that stands out to me is the group’s neat harmony singing. The comparisons to CSN and The Band are not off-base!
Last but not least, here’s a Spotify link to the album. In case you don’t know it already, hope you will further check it out and dig it as much as I do!
Sources: Wikipedia; AllMusic; Entertainment Focus; Dawes website; YouTube; Spotify
Christian's Music Musings 