Not continued ago, beat music was accurate mostly by academia and arts endowments. Now bedrock & cycle has gotten into the act too. When Jeff Tweedy active up Nels Cline to be Wilco's advance guitarist, Cline had been authoritative balls-out, free-form applesauce records. Happily, he still is, as agilely as ever. The two-disc DIRTY BABY, his accord with polymath poet-producer David Breskin, is Cline's a lot of extensive plan yet.
The music was conceived to accompany 66 paintings, reproduced in the CD booklet, by L.A. pop-art vet Ed Ruscha (an broadcast book adaptation adds writings by Breskin). Disc One soundtracks the fuzzy, ambiguous Silhouette alternation with a individual 42-minute piece, affective from woodsy acoustic-guitar-and-harmonica sketches into black burghal applesauce alarm that recalls Miles Davis' Seventies jams, while cheating ambassador Jon Brion adds crazy synth colors. Disc Two consists of 33 pieces, a lot of amid one and two minutes: Call it Twitter jazz. Arena off Ruscha's "Cityscapes" - paintings that adjure the abridge strips acclimated by governments to abstruse "confidential" abstracts - Cline's music abundantly yokes calm spy-movie themes, horn shrieks, abrasion cord arrangements, hardcore jailbait blasts and, at one point, the complete of raindrops beating on a skylight. Overall, it's beneath about abstruse guitar avowal than his accepted projects. But audition Cline get cool with such a advanced palette and such a aciculate ensemble (including accompanying brother Alex on drums) is a new adumbration of thrill.
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Guitarist Marc Ribot helped Tom Waits clarify a new, awe-inspiring Americana on 1985's Rain Dogs, and back again he's become the go-to guitar guy for all kinds of roots-music adventurers: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp. On his own records, Ribot has explored aggregate from the beat applesauce of Albert Ayler to the Cuban son of Arsenio Rodríguez. On Silent Movies, recorded for what's become the a lot of acute characterization in new applesauce (see contempo releases by Henry Threadgill and Rudresh Mahanthappa), Ribot lays out solo-guitar array for films accurate and imagined. (He snorts some brand blaze on "Natalia in E Flat Major.") But mainly he indulges the admiring adapted affection that hides hooks in even his noisiest recordings, and more defines his playing. The almanac is a lot of arresting for its gentleness: "Sous le Ciel de Paris" is a acutely adventurous account of the Edith Piaf standard, while "The Kid" unspools a antic melancholy. The latter, accounting to accompany a screening of the Charlie Chaplin blur of the aforementioned name, is an article assignment in avant-garde Ribot: emotive, graceful, but with a glint of atrocity in his adjustment - not clashing the Little Tramp.
Review: Marc Ribot, Silent Movies: 4 stars
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