Nowhere Lights

I’ll admit, my country-music credentials are piss-poor, but the first time I heard the Patrons album All That Is Tied (Raggmopp), I liked it because I thought it was good country music. That is, it sounded like the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” Which, when I told Patrons lead singer and guitarist Jonah Kraut about it, made perfect sense to him. After all, Kraut pointed out, “Dead Flowers” was inspired by country-rock deity Gram Parsons, and Parsons was in turn inspired by the whole Bakersfield scene of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and Gram was a big part of where the Patrons were coming from.

There are no “pure” American roots genres, country least of all. But a shuffle beat and the whine of a pedal steel guitar go a long way toward defining it — that and hooky verse-chorus arrangements and story-filled lyrics. The Patrons combine soul and blues and rock (check: the Stones, the Band, Dylan) with the clear textures and swinging ensembles of Nashville session-man heaven. And when I heard the band live (at Tír na nóg, where they return on August 25), their “roots” were apparent in the covers: the Band’s “The Weight” (in an arrangement true to the original in assigning each verse to a different voice), Owens’s “Act Naturally,” Doug Sahm’s “She’s About a Mover,” Dale Hawkins’s “Suzie-Q.” Those are broad roots, but the Patrons — with their piano-and-guitars instrumentation and vocal harmonies — have a sound that says they know what they’re shooting for.

When I get together with Kraut and drummer/vocalist Ryan Barrett at the 1369 in Central Square, Kraut cites chapter and verse from the discographies of Parsons (including the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Byrds), Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet, Texas Tornadoes), and guitarist James Burton (Elvis, Ricky Nelson, and that original of “Suzie-Q”). The Patrons are experts at delivering pedal-steel-driven country love songs like Kraut’s “I’ll Be Betting All My Love on You,” and you can hear the honky-tonk in the fast-walking foxtrot of his “It’s All He Knows,” with its string of joke verses in which every slight is excused with the title line. But making selective use of a sax-and-trumpet section, the Patrons also find that place where country met blues and soul in the Muscle Shoals studios. This is especially true on the CD’s longest track, “Darling, Once Again,” which even includes a “talking” lover’s plea reminiscent of Norman Meade & Jerry Ragovoy’s “Time Is on My Side” (written for Irma Thomas, but a hit for the Stones in ’64). You can hear it too on Kraut’s title track, which amounts to a soul ballad done country style, with swelling horns and triplet piano figures ratcheting up the tension against the 4/4 beat on the bridge. - Boston Phoenix

Michael Murray, Style Matters

Album Review
By John Pritchard [07.09.08]
TAGS: albums, music

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* Michael Murray (MySpace)

Also by John Pritchard

* The Le Duo, snwstrm
* Josh Brooks, Lesson Learned
* Tapis Bleu, Tapis Bleu
* Mailbox, Get Lost
* The Beautiful Ride, Live Nectar

Articles in music

* Dangerbird, Dangerbird EP
* Gordon Stone, Night Shade
* 'Tis the Season?
* Whales and Wolves, Green and Grey
* The Heckhounds, Bad Dog

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* albums

(Raggmopp, CD)

Guitars have a tendency to collect dust in Boston. There seems to be one in every disheveled Cambridge living room, one hidden in every closet in Somerville. Many of their rusted strings are played furiously in obscurity, never to be heard outside coffee houses or late nights in crowded apartments. Records like Michael Murray’s Style Matters should be savored that much more with these things in mind. Every so often, something escapes the din.

Murray is an intrepidly honest songwriter. His lyrics punctuate a strong backing outfit that delivers an impeccable performance throughout. From the album’s introductory postcard offering “Drunken Prayer” to the blues-tinged “In the Country,” Style Matters is a potent collection of chronicles in a classically American pop-rock vein. Despite an acoustic foundation, there is not a meek indie-rock whisper to be found in Murray’s structure: He is refreshingly unconcerned with waking neighbors, expressing subtle romantic inclinations or making tricky allusions to the obvious. Drummer Paul Caldes deserves some credit here, backing the record with a variety of terrific snares, and bassist Neil Lawrence has a knack for finding its many low-end hooks.

It’s hard not to conjure the more contemporary, post-Pixies catalogue of the deified, Massachusetts-born songwriter Frank Black in tracks such as the bright “Apricots” and the vivid “Take a Walk With Me.” But, while Black might pen an abstract melodic ode to an onion, Murray’s lines are charmingly accessible to the less conceptual set, inviting listeners to map the old cities’ terrain: “Maybe in Cambridge, / But in Medford / You’re a stranger; / Come look for me at Citizen’s Coffee.”

If Style Matters has a fault, it’s that it ends in something of a whimper after its auspicious start an inherent risk, given its hearty helping of 14 tracks. The glowing vocals and robust harmonica of “Out Again” would have been a more apt curtain call, and the same could be said of the piano ballad “Feel on the Walls for Familiar Things.”

“Out Again” Murray’s comparison of relationships to the tides of the ocean is particularly sharp. “I try so hard to be your rock / But the tide comes in and takes me out again,” Murray laments, escorting a lavishly expanding sing-along chorus capped by a somber harmonica. - Seven Days

Changing pop
Sankai's soukous brings a little Africa to Somerville
by Alan Waters

In theory, if you concentrate enough hard-working musicians and enough devoted fans of their type of music in one place, you get a local music scene, with the creative interchange and competitive pressure generating a standard of excellence. This has actually happened with African pop music in Boston during recent years. The latest and most accomplished band to emerge from the Afropop scene, Sankai, will celebrate the release of their homonymous debut CD with a performance at Johnny D's this Saturday, September 7.

Sankai's music is rooted in modern Zairean soukous, but they're not exactly an orthodox soukous band. Fellyko Mbuji-Mayi Tshikala plays lead guitar, sings lead vocals, and arranges the band's material. Although he's from Kinshasa, he spent nearly a decade in Paris working with such legendary soukous stars as Tabu Ley Rochereau, Papa Wemba, and Emeneya. He sings in French, Lingala, and his native Tshiluba; on stage he directs the band with a commanding and graceful presence.

During our conversation he stresses that Sankai do not want to cling too tightly to the soukous label. "We don't follow rules that say, `This is blues', `This is funk', `This is reggae.' We just play music -- in the way that we feel it." Certainly you can hear a broad range of influences woven into the band's repertoire, including zouk and South African township jive. As a guitarist Fellyko admits to a deep admiration for B.B. King and Jimi Hendrix, as well as for the tradition of great African guitar players from Dr. Nico to Diblo Dibala.

Sankai are blessed with a fine rhythm section of Ralph Gasparello on bass and John Glenshaw on drums, two veterans of Boston's international-music circuit. What's striking about Sankai is the way the bass and drums create a pulse that has the locked-on feeling of a metronome but still breathes and feels natural. Glenshaw describes how the band put together the album's seven tracks: "It has a solid, disco-wise, dance sense, but it's also a live recording, and that's what we were going after." With the aid of John Hanley on second guitar, Gasparello and Glenshaw generate grooves that are fluid and lean. Dido Bha contributes backing vocals and supplies what is known in the Zairean context as animation -- that rave-up combination of bodily movement and verbal declamation designed to bring the audience to a feverish pitch of excitement.

This past spring the band were well received at the Louisiana International Festival in Lafayette, Louisiana, and at the Houston International Festival. Fellyko explains that the word "sankai" can be translated from Tshiluba as an exhortation to "get happy" or "get enjoyment," and in the videotaped performance from the closing night of the Lafayette festival you can see this message come to life. Their set is filled with improvisational segments, dramatic tempo-bending endings, and spicy guitar solos. This is a band who are confident in what they're doing, who are not content to languish.

Gasparello's take is that "we want to create something of our own and to push it out into the world." Concerning the obstacles to launching an African music project here in North America, he adds, "People will come, people will enjoy it. They don't always want to go out and hear the same kind of music every night. It's the ultimate alternative music."

In recent years African pop music, as it's reached an ever wider audience, has tended to slip into commercial and formulaic molds. There's been a recognizable and pervasive "Paris influence" on a lot of Francophone African music. Recordings tend to be made by producers as opposed to musicians. The stuff just seems to get cranked out, without much care for the details and subtleties of the styles. But then a band like Sankai come along with an approach that says, "Hey, things don't have to go in this direction."

"Soukous is changing now," Fellyko points out. "It's a great music, but we want to add something to it." Indeed, Sankai are now poised to make their contribution, to move the music forward, to help it change and to help us to "get happy." - Boston Phoenix