Real Life Rock (273 page)

8
Tom Jones,
Praise and Blame
(Lost Highway)
The seventy-year-old-onetime Welsh R&B stomper goes back to his blues and gospel roots, digs them up, tosses them in the fireplace, and with John Lee Hooker's 1959 “Burning Hell,” burns down the house.

9
Crooked Still, “Henry Lee” from
Some Strange Country
(Signature Sounds)
A carefulness, a flinching hesitation, has boxed in Aoife O'Donovan and everyone else in this sensual old-timey band since their
Shaken by a Low Sound
four years ago. But on this ancient, mystical murder ballad, they make a labyrinth, and don't even try to get out.

10
Bret Easton Ellis,
Imperial Bedrooms
(Knopf)
His second book named after an Elvis Costello song: a sequel to
Less Than Zero
. “Our reunion tour,” says E. C.

OCTOBER
2010

1
Corin Tucker Band,
1,000 Years
(Kill Rock Stars)
There are strings on the first music to be heard from Tucker since Sleater-Kinney left itself behind in 2006; on “Riley,” which seems to dig down farther with every deep, slowly exhaling breath, all the strings do is emphasize. In moments you might hear Christine McVie in Fleet-wood Mac—the clear voice of “Spare Me a Little of Your Love” and “Over My Head”—but the toughness you could miss with McVie remains the motor of Tucker's music. The trouble can come at any time, and it does, over and over.

2
Elizabeth Cook,
Welder
(31 Tiger)
Country is not supposed to be this frankly salacious, whether about quaaludes or sex, or the difficulty of telling one from the other—but Cook was probably not raised to become the woman she is, writing and singing about “making love in the disco era,” which somehow summons up the specter of a single act of intercourse lasting at least five years and a joke the singer will be telling for the rest of her life. “My hands were in his mullet,” she laughs, at the time, the guy, and herself, but why not? She bends around the corners of her stories until her voice cracks, and her nostalgia is inseparable from her pride. That's what anyone might most carry away from this record: you couldn't find regret with a Geiger counter.

3
Carlene Carter, “Me and the Wild-wood Rose” (YouTube)
Her grandmother Maybelle sang it with the Carter Family; her mother, June Carter, sang it. After wonderful records long in the past, a lost career, arrests for heroin, a marriage to Nick Lowe that must seem like someone else's Hollywood movie, the death of her mother and her stepfather, Johnny Cash, Carlene Carter plays the song as if it's the home where when you come back knocking it has to let you in.

4
John Mellencamp,
No Better Than This
(Rounder)
Mellencamp had a ridiculously precious idea: record a set of new songs in the Sun studio in Memphis, where Howlin' Wolf and Elvis once walked the few square feet as if it were the earth; in the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, a stop on the Underground Railroad; and in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where in 1936 Robert Johnson faced a wall and sang “Cross Road Blues”—and not just put the thing out on CD and vinyl, but do it all in
mono
.

Slowly, tune by tune, and so imperceptibly that each time you play the album it might seem to shift at a different time, the muffled sound of the music begins to work on the ear as something not old, but looking back at the singer from a future he may not reach. Nothing is rushed; in “Save Some Time to Dream” (Memphis), “Thinking About You” (Savannah), and “The West End” (Memphis), Mellencamp's voice sounds like something he had to scrape off the back of his throat. And then comes “Love at First Sight” (Savannah). The singer passes someone on the street, and glimpses their whole life together. It takes him four and a half minutes to tell you everything that happened, the music bouncing lightly up and down, back and forth, like hopscotch, but with every detail—a smile, a kiss, her getting pregnant, them getting married, her leaving him for another man—you never don't know that the singer saw it all in an instant, and you know that on any given day, you could, too.

5
15-60-75, a.k.a. the Numbers, “Matchbox Defined,” from
The Inward City
(Hear-than)
Formed as a blues band in Kent, Ohio, at the end of the '60s, the Numbers have ground on ever since, as if searching for the end of time, or a solution to the mysteries of the songs they still can't get out of their heads. Here the guitarist, Robert Kidney, who now uses a cane, takes up a song that made its way from Blind Lemon Jefferson in the '20s to Carl Perkins in the '50s to the Beatles in Hamburg in the early '60s to, you can be certain, the Numbers not long after, and which, regardless of how many times Kidney has sung it, still makes no sense. So with a harmonica solo that could
have come off of the first Cream album and a train-whistle guitar solo that summons up the Yardbirds at the Fillmore in 1968, Kidney takes up the tune as a philosophical investigation. It was a lifetime ago, he says, when an old blind man asked him if a matchbox could hold his clothes—“And I shook my fist and I said, old man, how could a matchbox hold my clothes?” But almost every word is its own line as Kidney relates the tale, Jefferson stepping out of the grave to taunt him—“The old / blind / man / asked me”—and the almost violent hesitations churn up drama. “And I / thought / about it / for /
ten years
”—you know he's never going to get out of this. But then comes a hangover, when everything is slowed down, every thought the lifting of a house, and everything is clear. The singer sees his wife watching TV; he could walk out the door right now, “with
nothing
”—the nothing of her not even noticing he's gone. Kidney tells the story as if he's opened that door a thousand times and closed it and walked back into the kitchen for another beer just as many. But it doesn't matter; he's seen through his life, and now he can sing the song as if he owns it, instead of the other way around. If he ever could close that door behind himself, “And where you're going nobody knows / Then a matchbox will hold your clothes.”