SOUL SURMISE

DUSTIN KENSRUE - Thoughts That Float On A Different Blood

Dustin Kensrue has filtered theology through the post hardcore screams of Thrice on Island Records and led worship in the controversial conservative Mars Hill Church in Seattle. He lives in that territory that I love to wander in where the line between sacred and secular is so blurred that we finally know that there is no line!

On Thoughts That Float On A Different Blood, Kensrue takes the songs of others and does that blurring the lines thing. Radiohead, Patty Griffin, Counting Crows, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen have songs redeemed, drawn out of their own worldview and given the Jesus slant to their work another emphasis with that huge evocative voice. It's all done live, with just a guitar and that voice!

Brand New’s Jesus Christ gets a thorough exploration to throw content into the debate all over music forums asking whether they are Christians are not.

Kensure's voice is his card and what he does here all live with just a guitar is to use it to wail and whisper. He bleeds and gives heart wrenching emotion to the heartache of Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball and Patty Griffin’s Cold As It Gets.

The guy in Counting Crows’ Round Here losing himself and seeking some soul substance gets a perfect narrator and Springsteen’s Statetrooper gets urgency, drama and alienation that begs to termed definitive version.

Kensure takes his own ownership of Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me To The End Of Love like Jeff Buckley once did with Hallelujah and takes it across the borders of romantic waltz into a spiritual adventure.

Tom Waits gives the whole dissertation a Gospel conclusion. You wouldn’t say that Waits’ songs carry smiles in their chorus but it’s Down There By The Train that Kensrue redeems the whole darn tootin’ thing.

There's a place I know, where the train goes slow

Where the sinner can be washed in the blood of the lamb

There's a river by the trestle down by Sinner's Grove

Down where the Willow and the Dogwood grow

...

If you've lost all your hope, if you've lost all your faith

I know you can be cared for and I know you can be safe

And all the shamefuls and all of the whores

And even the soldier who pierced the side of the Lord

Is down there by the train

Hearing this in that Kensrue voice... Gospel doesn't get much more authentic!

BRIAN HOUSTON - SONGS FROM MY FATHER

Yer a quare brave man, Brian Houston! Albums of Irish traditional songs have been done before and when you go this road you are immediately competing with Van Morrison and Brian Kennedy. 

Well, as usual Houston more than holds his own. Though I love Morrison’s Celtic Heartbeat, a collaboration with The Chieftains, and Kennedy’s two On Song albums Houston just has them. Songs From My My Father is a little more focused and more carefully constructed than Van’s and has a little more rock n roll authentic clout than Kennedy’s. 

When I say more carefully constructed, there are not the number of instruments at work in Houston’s songs. It is based around Houston’s guitar which might have been flashier across his catalogue but rarely as dexterous, rhythm driving or authoritative as on Whiskey In The Jar or Irish Rover. Added to Houston’s maturity of arranging and playing there is really only uilleann piper and low whistler John McSherry. 

West Belfast’s McSherry’s trad genius is what sweeps Irish grace notes across the piece. Indeed the throwaway pipes jam Ode to Jenny, that became a Houston/McSherry original, might be the song that would be most at home in a West Belfast bar session. East and West of Belfast collaborating in a toe tapping celebratory jig for these wonderful new peaceful days of our city. More of that says I!

Indeed the record is topped and tailed by songs that speak into these Northern Irish post conflict days. The Battle’s O’re strikes a chord, with its: 

 

“March no more my soldier laddie,

There is peace where there once was war.

Sleep in peace my soldier laddie,

Sleep in peace, now the battle's over.”

 

Then at the end, and maybe the highlight for me, is the least Irish song on the collection. The Band Played Waltzing Matilda was written by a Scottish born Australian Eric Bogle. Though covered by Irish folk singers like The Dubliners, Liam Clancey and Christy Moore ,it is very much about Australian soldiers fighting in Gallipoli in the First World War. That experience was probably very much what Houston’s East Belfast fellow citizens experienced at The Somme which we remember 100 years ago this July. The song is as good a piece of art about the futility of war as any poem from Wilfried Owen or Siegfried Sassoon and Houston gives it a powerful poignancy, McSherry tugging emotions throughout.

Songs From My Father is exactly that, songs Brian Houston’s father used to sing. It is Brian Houston ploughing new fields. It yields a wonderful harvest. There might be more to glean. Across the hedge from this field, a neighbouring field has fertile collaborating instruments of fife and drum. I’d be fascinated with what that might conjure… and an album of Houston/McSherry originals would be very welcome too… maybe with fife and drum on them!

In the meantime… I'll take four nights in Ballygrand... Sweet!

GOD DON'T NEVER CHANGE; THE SONGS OF BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON

Soul Surmise regulars will now that my thing is theo-musicology. It is that intersection where music, in my case rock, folk, blues and sometimes pop, meets God stuff. In my case it is not so much the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil for musical genius but where we actually might find our souls though the musical genius of others. This blog is bunged full of songs and records and live concerts where I have had the Spirit whisper to me some spiritual truth or had my soul soothed or inspired or corrected.

Well if that is my thing in general then it was obvious that this record was going to grab my attention in particular.  As tribute records go, this might be as good as it gets? This is a collection of some of my favourite artists who have had many words typed about them on Soul Surmise - Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Cowboy Junkies, Sinead O’Connor, Rickie Lee Jones, Blind Boys Of Alabama and even Maria McKee. It was actually Maria McKee’s Facebook page that tipped me off to this a good while back and I my soul has been drooling ever since. 

Many of my favourite artists doing Blind Willie Johnson songs; the salivating thickens (yuch!). When it comes to Blind Willie Johnson then the songs are going to be strong and the spiritual is going to be in abundance. Blind Willie recorded a formidable collection of songs between 1927 and 1930. The American depression killed his recording career. He ended up preaching and singing on street corners, living in the rubble of his burnt out house and dying of malaria as a result.

His life, going blind at a young age probably as a result of a fight between his parents and the tragic circumstances of his later years say two things to me. Firstly, we are lucky to have the songs at all and secondly, these are songs hammered at the anvil of real experience. 

These songs are the blues. For any who take a lazy differentiation that the Spirituals are of God and the Blues of the devil, then they have not really listened to the blues of Blind Willie Johnson or the blues of the Old Testament Psalms for that matter. 

Here we get a collection of Psalms recorded by some of the heavyweights of the 21st Century. Soul of a Man challenges the seemingly clever who dismiss the spiritual: 

 

I saw a crowd stand talking, I came up right on time

Were hearing the doctor and the lawyer, say a man ain't nothing but his mind

I read the bible often, I tries to read it right

As far as I can understand, a man is more than his mind.

 

Tom Waits’ voice is perfect for it as it is for the apocalyptic John The Revelator. Lucinda Williams voice is also prefect for the confessional Nobody’s Fault But Mine and the belief in the hard times Psalm, God Don’t Never Change:

 

God in the time of sickness

God in the doctor too

In the time of the influenza

He truly was a God to you

Well he's God, God Don't Never Change

He's God, always will be God.

 

Maria McKee is also the perfect voice for Let Your Light Shine On Me:

 

I know I've got religion and I ain't ashamed

Let Your light from the lighthouse shine on me

Angels in Heaven, done wrote my name

Let Your light from the lighthouse shine on me.

 

If I still had my radio show I would sequence this into Lone Justice’s You Are The Light. McKee brings that light of hope to her songs and it is perfect bright shade to some of the honest shadows found across this record. 

I could go on but I won’t. If you are remotely interested in where contemporary music meets songs of faith then this is a must buy. It is perfect in voices, performances and spiritual authenticity. 

GEORGE FEST; A NIGHT TO CELEBRATE THE MUSIC OF GEORGE HARRISON

I love George Harrison. So a George Fest is right up my street. And I am loving this album. Some might be critical and say that most of these covers are too reverential to the original. Maybe. However, I would suggest that this record is exactly what it says on the tin; A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison.  Recorded in a live concert on September 28th, 2014 at the The Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles, this is indeed a celebration and a joyous celebration at that. This gig is a rollicking good time with a great artist’s brilliant songs.

That’s the first reaction. The songs. Harrison is always the third Beatle. Lennon and McCartney most times get the genius status. Yet, night’s like George Fest make you aware of the brilliance of Harrison’s songs coming at you like machine gun fire; Something, Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth), My Sweet Lord, Here Comes The Sun, Taxman, Behind The Closed Door, Handle Me With Care, Isn’t It A Pity… You are caught up in the melodies, the arrangements and the astonishing guitar riffs.

Where the whole thing might be seen companion piece to the 2003 Concert For George, perhaps that evening was too close to George’s untimely death and is a little more sad and sombre. The curator of the George Fest operation is Harrison’s son Dhani and the fresh energy present might be as a result of the fact that this line up, maybe apart from Brian Wilson, is a gathering of Dhani’s peers, not his father’s.

His father’s best mate Ravi Shanker’s daughter Norah Jones does exemplary versions of Something and Behind That Locked Door. Dhani’s fellow band member in the Fistful Of Mercy Ben Harper does a bottle neck guitar beauty of a version of Give Me Love (Give Me Piece On Earth). Brandon Flowers struts the stage with Got My Mind Set On You. Strokes’ man Nick Valensi knows how to fuzz up the guitars in Wah Wah. The more interesting and reworked songs come from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club with Art Of Dying and The Flaming Lips making It’s All Too Much as eccentric as they did with their entire Sgt Pepper release.  

Though George and I differ in how to get there, both of us have in common a passionate seeking after God. Though on my path I will not be chanting the Eastern Mystic Gurus that Brian Wilson and his singers do on My Sweet Lord there is some spiritual uplift in making it my own. Similarly with Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth) I can use it as a musical prayer and I always find Any Road good advice to everyone who hears:

 

But oh Lord we've got to fight

With the thoughts in the head with the dark and the light

No use to stop and stare

And if you don't know where you're going

Any road will take you there.

 

Anyway, this is a must for all Beatle fans and a great introduction to a younger audience to the songwriting genius of George Harrison. I think it is also asks the question, why is Dhani Harrison, so like is dad in looks and voice and guitar chops not a better known name in his own right. George Fest a joyous treat indeed!

DAVID C CLEMENTS - THE LONGEST DAY IN HISTORY

Back in 2005 when I was a radio DJ with some clout on the Belfast scene someone slipped me a CDR marked Clemo. I was told not to tell anyone. Oh dear I just did! They were demos from Six Star Hotel boy David Clements. I hoked it out last week when David C Clements released his debut solo album, a whole decade later. For a few years people have been telling me that I would love David C Clements. People whose opinion I respect. As I have argued, The Longest Day In History hasn’t been rush job!

This is a mature and carefully constructed piece of work. It is layered in arrangement, in production and in the lyrics. It is a layered testimony to one young man’s life. It is about growing up, leaving naivety behind, discovering that life is not so much about flying on wings as eagles but more a crawling through the muck of a life whose hopes gets battered, faith gets questioned and where love needs hung on to even when you don’t feel like you can.

This week I had the album playing in the car on the school run. As we left the driveway Caitlin said, “Is this Iain?” Our girls know their Iain Archer and are quick to recognise sounds and voices. I don’t think Caitlin got it wrong here. In Clements’ early days making music Iain Archer was the highest standard of Belfast music. If he took time off writing for Jake Bugg, James Bay and Steve Mason then this is the kind of record he might make. 

There are traces of Archer’s Magnetic North and To The Pine Roots here. It is contemporary in its soundscapes. You might think The National or even Sigur Ros in its atmospheric crescendos. Yet, beneath it all, it is more like Jason Isbell; the song is the core of this album’s soul. Gary Lightbody might call Clements’ Belfast’s Springsteen. I stick with Isbell; more contemporary. Yet Archer supersedes them both.

Like Archer and Isbell, David C’s lyrics need time. They are poetic, deep and at times ambiguous. I listened to the record on a car journey on a dark night and the flickers of light in the dark seemed a perfect visual companion. I found myself pondering two things; what these songs are about, line after line, and what my life is about, every line opening up those thoughts. 

There’s a lot of fear, loss and making sense of a future on here and an awful lot of seeking home. I was taken by the first lines of Afraid Of The City

 

“Well I felt that winter on the night before

And I lost my summer and I lost the Lord

I get pain in the back of my head

When I hear the chord

Don’t want to hear those songs about getting it right

When I keep getting wrong” 

 

I’m Still Alive has the beautiful: -

 

“Sometimes at night

The sound of the forest choir

Echoes through the pine, a song from a different time

Just like after the flood

That came in the form of a dove

Now it's in the tone of your voice

Oh when it called for us

'Cause I can hear the words coming down

They're singing "I'm still alive”

 

And in the end there is hope and love and peace in Hurricane’s epic conclusion:

 

“So we gather up our autumn sins as winter stole our colours

And we put all of our matches to our hearts we kept in boxes

And we watched the colours take our mothers

Sisters may we know what love is

Love us till we're lovers just as fire turns to colours

We observe the streets and rivers as our thoughts turn

To our fathers just as we began to see you flow like rivers to the seas

And we imagine how our father sees our lives as short as day

And we remember all the day could bring

So come on rivers

Take us to the sea”

 

The songs are so strong, the melodies so incessant, the words so stimulating. It has been slow to get out and it is a slow burn that seeps in. Worth the wait!

GLEN HANSARD - A SEASON ON THE LINE

When Glen Hansard’s Didn’t He Ramble album (read my review of Didn't He Ramble here) was released last September he did what he has been doing since I bought The Frames 7” single The Dancer back in 1991, he became my favourite artist on the planet yet again. His concert at the Ulster Hall in December (read my review of the Ulster Hall gig here) solidified that position and Didn’t He Ramble beat off all competition to be hailed my Record of 2015.

That end of year concert had me intrigued. A song called Way Back In The Way Back When stood out that night with its riffed up electric blues. I actually assumed that it was blues cover. YouTube very quickly put me right and I wanted more.

More is what we have got. Less that six months after Didn’t He Ramble you can buy Didn’t He Ramble. Sounds Irish but actually the song Didn’t He Ramble was not on the album Didn’t He Ramble but it here it is alongside the aforementioned Way Back In The Way Back When. 

Both songs are guitar driven spurts of energy. They are Frames-like in loudness but song structured like the Didn’t He Ramble songs. Indeed the song Didn’t He Ramble has that horn section of The Lowly Deserter but you can tell that these two songs are from another session, apparently between American shows last Fall. They stand alone hence the luxurious need of an EP.

The other two songs Let Me In and Return seems were from the Didn’t He Ramble sessions and are the other side of Hansard, acoustic, sparse and sensitive. 

My theo-musicologist gets most kick out of Way Back In The Way Back When which sounds like the exodus of the children of Israel - “broken battered but believing…”

 

“I sang my song until I knew what it meant

What back in the way back when

Prayed to God he had a hand to lend

Way back in the way back when”

 

My goodness but I cannot tell you how much I love that line - “I sang my song until I knew what it meant”. It is like Springsteen’s Promised Land or Land Of Hope and Dreams but it it not a looking forward but a looking back to a pilgrimage that was experienced and can be brought to mind when the tough times come again. Hansard’s voice wails like a battered believer full of resistant strength. 

Indeed, the versatility of Hansard’s voice is one of the many things showcased in this 4 song treat of a release!

DYLAN & PETTY - LIVE IN RADIO '86

It was 1986 when Bob Dylan made Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers his backing band and toured the world. I loved the idea and when I got to hear the bootleg tape, purchased on O’Connell bridge, I love the sound too. Thirty years later (30!!! How can it be 30!) you can buy the CD on Amazon. All theses new “unofficial” but “legal” live recordings are a fans dream. Springsteen fans have been particularly blessed. Well here is one for Dylan fans and Petty fans too! Called Live Radio 86 this one gives us ten Dylan songs with four from Petty in between. I am loving it.

I am currently reading Warren Zanes biography Petty and it is hard to believe that during this tour Dylan was feeling that his vocation was at an end until an epiphany reinvigorated him on stage in Switzerland. The sense on these songs, and any other recording I have heard from the Dylan/Petty/Heartbreaker thing, is of joyous abandon.

The Heartbreakers were at the top of their game in 1986. Mind you, when have they not been. Their cuts in this CD tell us all we need to know about their rock roots and credentials. They cover Chuck Berry’s Bye Bye Johnny and The Byrds' So You Wanna Be A Rock N Roll Star as well as their own riffed out groove of Breakdown and the spikey Spike. 

The Heartbreakers rock n roll match fitness rocks Dylan and rocks him well. To put the Lynch/Epstein back rhythm behind Dylan, give him Mike Campbell’s guitar spark, then add the grace-notes of Belmont Tench on piano and hammond organ, all hailed forward by the energy that is Tom Petty. Wow. It works. There is a tight as there can be looseness about the sound and Dylan sounds easy and free flowing in his singing. 

There’s an upbeat Positively Fourth Street. Blowing In The Wind is a whirling, swirling version that has the same feel that The Waterboys were emitting that very same year, just without Steve Wickham’s dervish fiddle. Like A Rolling Stone literally rolls and rocks and Knocking On Heaven’s Door is a duet with Petty that might be my favourite version.

If the Official Bootleg Series could grab a double album of this Tour it would a wonderful thing.

 

IAIN ARCHER - TO THE PINE ROOTS

Iain Archer is like a musical diamond. He has a deep, solid quality to his playing and writing and the sparkle that glistens up his songs is neither artificial nor decorative but a natural attribute of his gift. To The Pine Roots is Archer’s fifth full length album and is his most intimate, stripped down and acoustic since Crazy Bird a decade ago. All his previous work is in evidence here; the pop sensibilities of his youthful debut Playing Dead, the folk of Crazy Bird, the curves of his alternative electric experimentations on Flood The Tanks and then the subtler hypnotic ambience of his last album Magnetic North. If you want to place the album in the history of rock rather than the history of Archer then Morrison’s Astral Weeks through Nick Drake and John Martyn and on down past Jeff Buckley nodding at The Shins on route to becoming a peer with Conor Oberst and Bon Iver. 

To The Pine Roots is an intimate, sparse sound that is perfect for early morning coffee or late night tipple and reflection. Archer’s guitar playing is immaculate and over time he has learned to stop being flash and also to not be too minimalist. His maturity as a musician as he won his Ivor Novello with his Northern Irish mates Snow Patrol, lectures at Music Colleges, co-writes with the Nashville scene and set up his own studio to produce major label albums is in the genes of the record. Acrobat is a light bubbly start, built on those hypnotic acoustic riffs that graced Canal Song, his contribution to Grey’s Anatomy; Songbird has an elegant grace; Hey Mia, Don’t Be Lonely tender compassion; Frozen Lake Archer’s falsetto has a fragile serenity; the eight minute Everest ends with lush Gospel vocals added by none other than his in-laws! Streamers On a Kite finger dances on Archer’s fretboard before drifting like a celebratory summer’s day into your soul.

Recorded in the Black Forest of Germany Archer has evoked the sound of its valley, rivers and the whispering of the trees. It comes across pastorally, calming and touches the places in your soul that the crammed in noises of the city can never reach. In his famous review of the aforementioned Astral Weeks Lester Bangs spoke of Morrison’s Madame George as having “beauty, sensitivity and holiness.” These three words are the perfect description of the songs here. You can sense the beauty of scenery that crafted it, there is a real sensitivity to the cast of characters and there is lots love and grace which is where the holiness comes in; the soul is touched, refreshed and the hope is ever expected.

PETER CASE - HWY 62

In March 1986 I remember walking into Caroline Music on Royal Avenue and seeing two new releases by new artists on the wall; Steve Earle and Peter Case. I took a chance. It was a good day's investment with returns still going on today! Case’s record was produced by one of my favourite songwriters of the time T-Bone Burnett. Of course I was going to love it. 

Three years later there was an even better record with the longest of titles - The Man with the Blue Post-Modern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar. This album is a long time favourite full of great songs that mixed blues, folk and classic songwriting full of poetic images, memorable lines and unforgettable characters. 

You can tell I was Peter Case fan. I even went to my first Greenbelt keen convinced by the opportunity of seeing Brice Cockburn and Peter Case.

I need to confess that in the past 15 years I didn’t give Case as much time as I used to. I didn’t even buy Wig his last record in 2010 - sorry Peter!

When I heard HWY 20 was coming out my attention was caught again. Then I somehow missed the release at the end of 2015. This past week I got my hands on it and am I glad I did. 

This record sits with all Peter Case’s best work. It has a similar sound and production of those first solo releases. Driven guitar songs, this man can play and even adds the genius of Ben Harper to the mix. Goodness. The arrangements and production is as urgent as Case has been for decades and so it should be as this man has some serious things to say.

The best way I can describe HWY 20 is that I feel the whole way through it that I am right bang bang in the middle of what Jesus spoke about when he told us that his followers would be visiting prisoners, feeding the hungry etc. Pelican Bay is about the ridiculous amount of people in American prisoners, mostly black. The deep slow blues sadness of Living Water, with one of many sneaky Biblical images, has a 6 year old refugee in front of a judge being turned away from America. These are songs for the least of these. 

It’s all so creative musically and lyrically. It’s cram packed with memorable thoughts. It packs a challenge. Had I caught on to it last year it would have been challenging Glen Hansard for my album of the year.

STOCKI'S FAVOURITE RECORDS RELEASED IN JANUARY 2016

LUCINDA WILLIAMS - THE GHOSTS OF HIGHWAY 20

We used to wait a longtime between Lucinda Williams records. Now she brings them out almost prolifically and this is the second in a row that is too long for just one CD. Ghosts is set in a particular place; Highway 20. Perhaps a few lines from Doors Of Heaven give the best clue to what is going on:

Open up the doors of heaven, let me in

I think I'm finally tired of living, let me in

I'm gonna walk in the glory and tell everyone my story

Open up the doors of heaven, let me in

Mixing blues and folk and Gospel like she always has with perhaps a little more space in the arrangements this time Williams deal with mortality, heartache and a search for faith. The closing Faith and Grace is outstanding!

 

DAVID BOWIE - BLACK STAR

Bowie’s swan song released on his birthday, two days before he dies. Black Star is another  challenging Bowie listen as it feeds off modern jazz. It’s more futuristic Bowie. After his death the record took on a whole new perspective as it suddenly seems to be an artist creating farewell art. That in the final video he backs into a wardrobe, echoing CS Lewis’s entrance to Narnia, as the end of a song called Lazarus that starts, “Look up here, I’m in heaven” gave me some thoughtful wrestlings!

 

BURNING CODES - HOPE IS OUR LIGHTNING

In my Soul Surmise review I wrote : -

Burning Codes make music that has your soul dancing on the beams the sun casts, bouncing on the sparkles that shine from love. You can tell that the band’s playlists are weighed towards The Pixies and My Bloody Valentine but they have managed to create a sound that is very much their own. Crisp guitar riffs, taut bass grooves and precise authoritative beats gives these songs a tight uplifting rock hit to the kardia! It makes them much more melodic, anthemic and accessible than any of those aforementioned heroes.

read my full review here

 

MERCYLAND: Hymns For The Rest Of Us VOLUME 2

Multi instrumentalist, songwriter and just all round nice guy, Phil Madeira felt there was a little lack in the modern worship industry in his hometown Nashville. He wanted spiritual songs with a little more bite. So, he gathered some top American acts to help create hymns for the rest of us. Volume 2 sees Emmylou Harris back on the credits and this time Trent Dabs, the McCrary Sisters, David Crowder and former Civil War’s man John Paul White bring their craft and voices to a great collection of companions for the journey.