Greatest Hits - Nazareth

 

Provenance: Early on in my album collecting life I had a notion that 'best of ' and 'greatest hits' compilations were the way to go with a new artist - sample the cream first, dig through the muck for truffles later. This was an HMV job, probably about a tenner, and an early addition to the collection, within the first thirty albums or so that I owned.

The catalyst for buying this was hearing 'This Flight Tonight', a superb cover of a Joni Mitchell song. What set it apart from much of what I listened to was that Nazareth eschewed groove for a jittery, tense atmosphere. Combined with the cryptic lyrics and Dan McCafferty's razor-wire singing - I hadn't heard anyone like him until this point - I felt I was onto a winner.

Oddly, I've never followed up - this remains my sole Nazareth album. Some bands' output lends itself to compilations, but as I never took the plunge with their catalogue, to me this album is Nazareth. I did see a version of the band at Sweden Rock that featured originals McCafferty and Pete Agnew, and they were - fine. A little slow, and McCafferty faltered at times, but they rendered their greatest hits more or less faithfully. Except...

Review: ...where the pigging hell is 'Hair of the Dog' on this album? Where's 'Telegram'? It seems that this particular greatest hits, first released in 1975, has gone through more transfigurations than Dr fucking Who. According to the version I'm staring at right now, apparently from 1990, I've got four more tracks than the original yet somehow I don't have 'Hair of the Dog'; and whilst subsequent expansions included 'Telegram' its absence is keenly felt here. When I saw Nazareth at Sweden Rock, 'Telegram' was quite easily their best performance, a drama roiling in the sturm und drang of life on the road. I'm getting steamed just thinking that some feckless longhair in the mid-1970s was enjoying tracks made unavailable to me when I bought this in the dawning days of the 21st century.

Anyway, before I get too salty, I should probably return to the task at hand, which is reviewing what is on the album. Two things strike me immediately - one is that Nazareth indulged in more than a few ballads that stray over the line between sweet and saccharine. Weepies like 'Love Hurts', 'I Don't Want to Go On Without You', 'Star' and 'Dream On' are performed competently (I actually like 'Star' a lot) but it jars with the band's image of rowdy Scottish toughs. 

The second is that Nazareth are really good interpreters of other people's material. Which isn't a quiet slight against their own songwriting and compositional abilities - it stands alone as a compliment. Where Nazareth succeed is making their versions distinct from the originals, as opposed to slavish note-for-note copies that are all too prevalent. So we have the aforementioned 'Love Hurts' (Everly Brothers), 'This Flight Tonight', 'Morning Dew' (Bonnie Dobson), 'Gone Dead Train' (Randy Newman) and a loopy take on Tomorrow's 'My White Bicycle'. So thoroughly Nazarethfied is this version of 'Gone Dead Train' that I let out an audible "huh?" when I heard the original pop up at a student screening of Performance. Half a millisecond's worth of thought would've led me to the conclusion that it was unlikely Cammell and Roeg asked Randy Newman to bash out a Nazareth number for their arthouse crime flick.

Most everything else on Greatest Hits is the brawling heavy blues rock with which Nazareth made their name - on gigolo anthem 'Bad Bad Boy', which takes its cues from the hoary blues 'Old Grey Mare', McCafferty vies with Bon Scott and Rod Stewart for the title of rock 'n' roll's chief rogue, whilst 'Shanghai'd In Shanghai' and the menacing 'Turn On Your Receiver' hide a great deal of craft beneath their bruising sonics. All of this adds up to a thoroughly enjoyable hour-and-change in the company of Dunfermline's finest.

All of this gives me a slight pang of regret - that unlike the feckless longhair and his mid-1970s copy of Greatest Hits, I will never get to see Nazareth in their pomp. On this evidence McCafferty sounds like he gargles tarmac as part of his morning routine, and to see him going full bore, yelping "I'm a bad bad boy, and I'm gunna steal you love" like some demented yard dog would've been a treat. What I saw at Sweden Rock was serviceable; but just think about it, back in the day, Nazareth slamming it into overdrive, all double-denim, hair billowing from every nook and crevasse, nicotine-stained teeth, the whole nine yards, powering their way through another unstoppable chugger. Hey. at least I've still got Rival Sons, right guys?

It's settled then. Some people would use a time machine to bear witness to the Crucifixion, or to the Great Fire of Rome. Others would go and slay some historical ghoul like Hitler in the hopes of a better world blossoming in the aftermath. Me? Hastings Pier, 9 May 1975 - sounds like it was a blast!

Heavn - Jamila Woods

Provenance: My partner went to a Jamila Woods show and bought a copy of Heavn. They said that "I might like it", and it's ended up in our shared, monolithic CD collection (only Blue Oyster Cult and Michael Jackson are kept reverentially separate), so here goes.

Review: I'm really not qualified to talk about Heavn at all.

Now, regular readers of this benighted blog will no doubt be wondering why I've only awoken to my almost crippling limitations this far down the line. And it's fair, I don't consider myself a Robert Christgau (nice website mate) or anything of that calibre. I poke and pry, and sometimes alight on the odd insight or two; I tend to be more at home with metal than other genres; heaven forfend that I try and step up to the plate with a jazz review. I would suggest, humbly, that one of my strengths is that I know what I know, and correspondingly I have a fair idea of what I don't know.

So, I know that I don't know enough to appraise Jamila Woods' full-length solo debut Heavn in anything other than the most superficial aesthetic terms. Why? Because unlike the person I am sharing a life with, I have no idea what it's like to be raised as a black woman in America, and this notion of the beating heart of the song cycle. Okay, you might counter, what could I possibly share with the guys in Motley Crue or ZZ Top, or with Tom Waits? My answer - lots of cultural touchstones, a collective musical inheritance (which ironically appropriates tons from black-origin forms) and a society that is happy to propagate the notion that the least amongst us white folk is still better than someone else. And in the USA, that's black people, Latinx, indigenous peoples, queer folk - and good fucking luck if you intersect across any of these designations.

Here goes, then - this is pretty damn great. The production is whipsmart, all wobbly electro-dreamscapes and snappy beats. Woods is a rather lovely singer - sweet and mellifluous, which honeys some incredibly stark messages. Eric Garner's choking at the hands of the police is referenced in 'Vry Blck', a track that sounds like a playground chant, and I'm sure that the dazzling, swirling 'Heavn' slips in a reference to the slave trade with the same sly, allusory quality employed by Randy Newman on 'Sail Away'.

I like the way that Heavn swings between moods; at times it exhibits a playful, wilful strain of juvenilia that's also present on cuts by Tank and the Bangas; at others, there's a dense, layered jazz-tinged soul-pop sound that resembles KING's first album, which I properly loved. Collaborations are judicious, which makes a change; Chance the Rapper, to take one instance, shifts the pace nicely in 'LSD' with a dense, push-pull verse that abuts Woods' sleeker versifying very effectively.

Perhaps even more than the black female experience, however, is how strikingly personal Heavn is. Little nuggets of a life zoomed in at microscopic level shine through every now and again, to the extent that a line like "I be in my nightgown, chicken wings ready" feels both utterly humdrum and utterly voyeuristic. This intimacy is heightened by the spoken-word interludes studded throughout Heavn, which are made to sound as if Woods is talking down a phone line. It genuinely feels like engaging in a conversation, listening to Woods' joy at unexpectedly being able to bond with other black women through shared schoolyard games, or sharing the story of how she got her name, or musing about living a life true to oneself. It's all apiece conceptually with everything else on Heavn, and it's wonderful.

I'm very sorry if I've blundered through the album, missing any number of references that Woods has painstakingly woven into the tapestry of Heavn. For what it's worth, I'm smitten with this cerebral, passionate, reflective, sumptuously crafted offering. It feels apt that Heavn finishes up on a reprise of the most affirming track, 'Holy' - "woke up this morning with my mind set on loving me / I'm not lonely, I'm alone / And I'm holy by my own" - a message of self-love that everybody could do with, from time to time.

Closing Time - Tom Waits

Provenance: For my 29th birthday my partner bought me ten Tom Waits albums because I'm a cool guy with a great taste in music. Incidentally, my partner is reasonably hip too - certainly a better writer than I could ever hope to be.

Review: I'm actually starting at the start for once - this is Tom Waits' first album. Believe me, this'll be one of the few times where I don't play compact disc Jenga with my structurally unsound stacks of plastic.

Ten albums by an artist I had rarely, if ever, mentioned was quite a gamble. Hitherto, my partner's engagement with my music collection consisted of parodying the singing styles of Neil Young, Bon Scott and Brian Johnson. Getting married to me, it could be argued, was also a rash and poorly-evidenced decision so perhaps it's congenital.

What I did know of Tom Waits was that he was responsible some fairly experimental music (and one or two notable press conferences) so I was fully prepared for a journey to these weird hinterlands occupied by Captain Beefheart and Scott Walker. What I didn't expect was a slice of shaggy-dog Americana that evoked shades of Jimmy Webb, Nils Lofgren, the Eagles, Randy Newman and the aforementioned Neil Young. Formally, there's little to hint that this artist will one day produce Mule Variations or Swordfishtrombones; and at times, the music ploughs a very comfortable furrow down the middle of the road. I am, however, only telling half the story.

As it so happens, the lead-off track 'Ol' 55' would go on to be covered by the Eagles. It sounds like a goddamn Eagles song, aside from Waits' heavy-lidded drawl. The hiccup-bellow of later releases fails to make an appearance, even in embryonic form. What buoys this album is the twin brilliance of songwriting and sequencing. In just twelve short tracks Waits creates an entire universe of melancholy and longing. Even when Waits puts the wistfulness aside for a (brief) moment his music never quite escapes being anything more than bittersweet. In a psalter of hymns for the losers optimism is something that can only be fleetingly glimpsed.

In that sense Waits occupies the same territory as Newman, most obviously on 'Lonely'. However, where Newman often creates moments of wry levity to make his sometimes desperately sad songs a little more digestible, the best that Waits manages is the tired half-smile of a man down to his last nickel. This is not to his detriment; a chuckle on this album would be as incongruous and unwelcome as a fish head sticking out of a birthday cake.

The best thing on here by a country mile is 'Virginia Avenue', the album's jazziest number, a slow-rolling piano sharing space with lugubrious string bass and muted trumpet. You're out of the coffee house and into the dive bar, your nostrils filled with stale cigar smoke, your stomach burning with gut-rot whiskey. Personally, the primo stuff that Closing Time has to offer occurs when Waits packs his acoustic guitar away and gets behind the piano - 'Midnight Lullaby', 'Grapefruit Moon' and the title track standing out in particular.

As I type these words the final chords of Closing Time are melting away. From my window I see a cuticle of moon hanging above a silent town and a sea dark as pitch. It is one of those moments where senses combine to create an atmosphere that is positively filmic, like it's spilled off the reel of a classic noir. A touch of fog and a glass of bourbon (as opposed to Diet Pepsi) and it'd be somewhere close to perfect.