Michelle Branch "Creep"

Like me with posting on this blog, only way more extreme, it's been a long time since Michelle Branch has released any new recordings. Apparently, she's had record label problems and what not, but recently posted a cover of Radiohead's "Creep" on Soundcloud:





Anyway, Michelle is one of my favorite musical artists--singer, songwriter, musician--so this is cool to hear. Hopefully, it won't be too long until we finally get another album of original songs from her.

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Music

>>> My favorite newer band. They just blow me away.

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Music Video

This is just one of the best feeling audiovisual things I've experienced lately. Full spectrum gorgeous. I didn't used to have much interest in Justin Timberlake, but a couple of his songs have really meant something to me in the last six months or so.

And I totally want to be him in the performance above, on that stage with that band. Good energy going on, there.

Zepparella "When the Levee Breaks" Video

So, this is not new, but I just came across it today. It's a cover of Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" by Zepparella. I know that there are plenty of Zep cover bands out there, and this is not the only all-female one, but this might be the most that I have ever enjoyed seeing one of them perform:

Sure, other bands might be a lot wilder, with mismatched outfits and under-some-influence antics. But I like this take very much. It has a sleekness to it that keeps locked dead-on to the pulse of the song. The lead vocalist knows exactly what she's doing, and you can hear every instrument. Very cool.


While I'm at it, though, the other Zep cover performance that I really enjoyed (and I'll be honest, I haven't seen that many) was on American Idol a few years back. No, it wasn't Adam Lambert. It was Elise Testone, doing "Whole Lotta Love."

Like this:

Someone made a comment at the time, and I completely agreed, that Elise could be Robert Plant's niece. She absolutely sings the heck out of this song, up one side and down the other. The raspy vocals, the unusual runs and the best crazy-yet-listenable scream that I've ever heard anyone pull off. This song is about attitude as much as anything else, and she nails it.

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Kurt Cobain Post

It may be cliched to write something about Kurt Cobain. However, as the first week of this April marks twenty years since his death, I feel like saying something. It's a complicated subject that has been written about extensively, but an important piece of our cultural identity. And it does mean something to me as an individual.

In 2012, I was in Seattle and visited the EMP Museum, catching the exhibit Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses. Later that year, while driving through Portland, OR in a rental car, the song "Lithium" started playing on the radio. It seemed very appropriate. And of course, this past year has been awash in 90's nostalgia of the most acute kind. It's all gotten me to revisiting the framework of my existence in the context of the era...

I was just a little too young to be on board for the first "Grunge" wave of the early 90's. I started getting into music in the latter half of the decade, and only really became acquainted with Seattle bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Nirvana by reading about them and then reaching backwards in time. By the time I graduated from high school, I owned three Pearl Jam albums and Soundgarden's Superunknown. But to this day, I have never owned a Nirvana album.

One of my friends in high school, not coincidentally the one who sold me my favorite electric guitar, was very much a Nirvana fan. He let me borrow Nevermind and MTV Unplugged in New York, both of which I listened to. He also had a t-shirt with a picture of Kurt Cobain performing with angelic wings behind him, similar to this:

At the time, I found the image inappropriate, or at least conceptually dissonant. Perhaps because I was going through a very religious phase in my own life and trying to be very focused on things positive, I did not see the validity in portraying a rock star, and one who had allegedly killed him self, in that light.

More broadly, I didn't relate strongly to the music of Nirvana at that point in my life. I could appreciate the technical quality and energy of their recordings and performances. But thematically, I found Kurt's songs to be angry and negative. And so many of them are. In fact, the whole Nirvana experience is tinged with something less than uplift, if you look at it from a distance. Why does it, and did it, appeal to people?

The short answer is, in a word: catharsis. It taps into something identifiable and real and calls it for what it is, and more than that is a bridge to release tension. I remember reading a comment somewhere online, a couple of years ago, in which the commentor basically said, "When I heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' it was the first time that I recall ever feeling like a song connected to me and my actual life and what I was going through." It's a safe bet that that person, like most of us, couldn't make out most of the exact lyrics at first, but the power of the track is such that it really doesn't matter.

For whatever it's worth, the lyrics are more intelligible in Tori Amos' evocative cover of the song:

Anyway, fast forwarding slightly through the space time continuum, if it's not too ridiculous a thing to say, I've come to a place where I "get it." (Generally speaking with regard to Kurt Cobain/Nirvana.) The last few years of my existence have not been the easiest, to say the least. It helps to encounter something that makes you feel like you're not alone. That doesn't mean embracing the downward spiral, but feeling empowered to talk about it, to share your feelings. To be real about things.

Kurt Cobain was clearly an unhappy person, suffering on multiple levels and as the saying goes, fighting plenty of his own demons. And it seems that he lost that fight. He's not a role model; it's dangerous to put celebrities on pedestals, especially those who take their own lives, as the gears of the fame machine perversely are wont to do.

But at the same time, it's shortsighted to disregard the positives that can be derived from the experience. It's beyond cliche, having been evoked ad nauseam, to point out that Nirvana is arguably the last American rock band to have made a truly singular, lasting impact on the cultural consciousness. That's the sort of thing that nostalgists and list-makers (of which I am admittedly one) tend to bring up again and again.

More important, though, is that Nirvana helped -- along with many of their peers -- to restore faith in the ability of rock music to be meaningful on a human level. To get below the surface, to the human core of the equation. That necessarily involves painting pictures of things that aren't pretty.

I like pretty things. I like trying to twist words in elegant ways and frankly I often prefer to use euphemisms and metaphors instead of bluntly expressing ragged thoughts. That's just my vocabulary. But pretty lies can be the most ugly thing of all, because they are are fundamental trafficking in falsity. And in a way, the flip side of that rings true -- that there is a beauty in honesty, even if it is jagged or jarring.

While on that thought, here is a video performance that I recently came across of Kawehi performing a solo cover of "Heart Shaped Box" using looped vocals and keyboards. It's very cool:

That song itself is rather...abrasive, one might say, in its lyrical content. But it's also very powerfully expressive, not to mention a very good melodic composition, as Kawehi demonstrates through her arrangement and performance.

I feel like my focus is drifting a little bit. So, to wind myself down before I trail off onto some other tangent...

This week does have meaning to me, in ways that it would not have had in the past. I'm used to that sort of thing, in general. I often find myself liking or appreciating various things either before everyone else, or after everyone else. I'm sort of out-of-phase with mainstream humanity, or something like that. (Did I mention that I might be an alien?) It all kind of speaks to the circular nature of things, I guess.

When I think of Kurt Cobain, the first thing that comes to mind is sympathy. Was he selfish or delusional? Maybe, probably, I guess. But I've experienced enough myself to know/feel that none of us are as far from the edge as we might like to think that we are. I don't view it with cynicism. Tragedy is tragedy. And we can never know what another person is really going through. It's all very sad, in this case.

The positive takeway, and the better note to end on, is that it mattered to people's lives. And improbable though it might be, it inspired people. Not how it ended. (That should not be any sort of anything except a downbeat and a cautionary tale.) But the reason that April 1994 still resonates today is not really about a death, but about the life that preceded it. It wasn't pretty, but it mattered. It did then, and it does now.

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What's The Name Of That One Band?

Well, this is kind of random (even by my standards) but tonight, I found myself obsessed with trying to remember the name of a particular musical group. I often make lists of artists that I'd like to check out at some point. I have spreadsheets full of bands and solo artists, organized by decade, gender and so forth. I've been on a 90's nostalgia kick recently, which has involved me revisiting music that I listened to back then as well as reading up on bands that I never listened to but have retroactively become interested in checking out. Better late than never.

As it happens, through the course of browsing Amazon, I remembered this one band that I had read about and been intrigued by a couple of years ago. I think that my memory may have been spurred by the cover art of certain albums by Lush and Belly, among others. A certain similar mix of colors and very general aesthetic. I could remember almost exactly what the mystery band's CD looked like - a selection of sugary candy, some of it red, surrounded by white frosting - but not what it was called.

Including photos of the aforementioned albums - Lush's Lovelife and Belly's Star - will ultimately paint my thought process in an even more random light (they don't look all that similar, I suppose) but this post needs pictures, so here they are:

I had two other mental leads. First, the word "cherry" was involved in either the band name or the album title. Unfortunately, I could not remember which for sure, and there are way too many musical matches that come up when you search for "cherry." Like, hundreds of pages. I tried any number of searches on Amazon, Wikipedia and the web in general, to no avail.

Second, I remembered that the singer was more famous for her subsequent musical career. It wasn't Fergie or Britta Phillips of Luna, both of whom I double-checked. I felt like I could just almost remember. It was so close, but so far away, one of those situations in which you're probably better off abandoning the search and coming back later. But I was determined to keep trying, then and there.

(To clarify, Fergie was previously in a group called Wild Orchid, which is a faintly similar to the name that I was trying to remember. For reference, here's their album:)

I knew that my mystery group was basically an "alternative pop-rock band" from the 90's. Thus-ly did I finally find what I was looking for. I did a Google search and wound up at the List of alternative rock artists Wikipedia entry. There are a lot of artists, but I started scanning through them, confident that if my band was listed, I would recognize the name. Sure enough, down in the E's, I had my match: Eve's Plum.

This is the part where I have to laugh at myself, so that if anyone else laughs at me, at least I'm laughing with them. Anyway, that's an odd band name. The album that I was looking for in particular is called Cherry Alive. And the singer is Colleen Fitzpatrick, better known as Vitamin C. That's really funny. I think that I must have gotten curious about Vitamin C at some point in the past, and read her biography on Allmusic. Then, I read some complimentary reviews of the album in question and thought, "Hey, that sounds kinda cool." I love power pop, with guitars and melodies in equal measure, and that's what Cherry Alive sounds like.

Without further ado, then, here's my momentary Holy Grail:

Looks sugary and good, right? Hey, I enjoy good, pure pop music in reasonable doses. And this supposedly has guitars, too!

Just to prove that I like rock music and have other posters on my bedroom walls besides Fergie, I cite my recent acquisition of this album:

(I haven't listened to it yet, though, so if it's horrible in some way, I'm still in the dark.)

So, kids, it turns out that even in the Internet Age it's possible to get lost. If you don't have any song lyrics or other clearly defined names or titles to go by, you actually still might be unable to identify music. But if you maintain dogged determination and think about it from every angle, there's a decent chance that your search might have a happy ending.

And that's how I found your mother Aunt Vitamin C. Don't worry. I'll get to your mother eventually.