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Edith Frost with The Zincs
Wednesday · Southgate House
Edith Frost’s last album, the crystalline Pop gem Wonder Wonder, was released in the summer of 2001 to overwhelmingly positive critical response. By the time Frost wound up traversing the country on her subsequent tour in the fall, the 9/11 attacks had robbed the nation of any semblance of innocence or normalcy, resulting in an emotionally draining road circuit for the Country/Pop/Jazz chanteuse. When Frost finally finished her lengthy road support for Wonder Wonder, she was physically and spiritually exhausted, and it was years before she even began to consider ideas for her fourth album, the follow up to one of the most highly regarded albums of her career. Frost has been no stranger to critical acclaim; her debut full-length, 1997’s Calling Over Time, was an expansive Folk album that was highly praised and her sophomore album, 1998’s Telescopic, was a trippy and shifting soundscape that was very different in tone and texture but equally well received. With the shimmery Pop/Country atmosphere of Wonder Wonder, Frost attracted more great notices and further synthesized her broad, musical experiences; after her relocation from Texas to Brooklyn in the late ’80s, the daytime computer programmer split her nights between three distinct bands (The Holler Sisters, a hardcore Country covers group; The Marfa Lights, a Western Swing band; and Edith and Her Roadhouse Romeos, a Rockabilly unit). By the early ’90s, she was writing her own songs and, inspired by Will Oldham’s many creative facets, she sent her demo to Oldham’s label, Drag City, who promptly signed her. After her divorce, Frost moved to Chicago, which opened up a whole new musical vista for her. After a nearly five-year absence, Frost’s latest album, It’s a Game, is equally broad-ranging, from the oddly syncopated Folk of “What’s the Use” and stripped-down Country waltz of “The Mirage” to the noirish Pop of “My Lover Won’t Call” and the ambient lilt of “Larger Than Life.” She might be harder to pin down than a Midwestern weather system, but Edith Frost will satisfy whatever musical need you bring to the table. (Brian Baker)
Crush Kill Destroy
Thursday · The Comet
In most reviews of Chicago’s Crush Kill Destroy, one obvious trait is always addressed — the foursome’s name is a bit misleading.
Those anticipating a Hardcore roar will be — perhaps pleasantly — surprised to find CKD to be an intricate, shape-shifting Post Rock juggernaut. That’s not to say that the band’s music is devoid of tension and intensity. In fact, CKD’s music thrives on it. The songs on their recent release, Metric Midnight (their third overall LP and first for No Karma Recordings), aren’t so much “songs” as they are slanted, spooling sculptures of sound, fluidly piloted by emotion, dissonance and tricky, impulsive structuring. The tracks are epic (averaging about six minutes a cut) but never grandiose, sounding like they were composed spontaneously by musicians who are so mentally locked in with each other, you might want to swab their DNA to see if they are blood related. Creating a hypnotic ebb and flow, the drizzling guitars and oscillating rhythms rotate in a bewitchingly circular motion, creating a trickling cascade that is as much Jazz as it is Rock (the wicked horn squawk-and-swell of closing track “Walkers, Sleepers, Eaters” is as close to Ornette Coleman as it is Shellac, Slint or June of ’44, artists with whom CKD are frequently compared). Singer/guitarist Brian Hacker drops in blunted, nearly-spoken vocal snippets throughout (think Mark E Smith with a couple of shots of espresso in him), but singing is hardly the focal point of CKD’s textural assault; this is clearly a communal effort, as each player’s contributions are vital to the end product. CKD isn’t all about drawn-out expansiveness; many tracks feature impetuous bursts of energy amidst the hypnotics and the band really bears some teeth on the Fugazi-like “Off Point.” Though never rising to the aggro implications of its moniker, CKD’s meditative, multifarious approach is cerebrally powerful and magnetically creative. (Mike Breen)
David Gray with Aqualung
Tuesday · Taft Theatre
David Gray’s career in the ’90s had enough ups and downs and hairpin turns to inspire a ride at Kings Island. The Welsh Folk/Pop singer/songwriter did three albums for three different labels, none selling enough to warrant contract extensions. By 1998, he was discouraged enough to consider a more conventional work situation, but ultimately realized that his problem was with the business and not with the music. Drawing on donations from sympathetic industry insiders who loved his work, Gray recorded his fourth album in the bedroom of his London apartment; White Ladder set sales records in Ireland and England, and with his signing to Dave Matthews’ fledgling ATO Records, the album went multi-platinum in the U.S. What should have been Gray’s triumphant 2002 follow-up was indelibly colored by his father’s death and his daughter’s birth, and while the somber and introspective A New Day at Midnight sold only slightly less than White Ladder, reviewers were not particularly kind to the album.
Feeling he had depleted his autobiographical influences, Gray turned his songwriting perspective outward while creating the songs for what became the lush and lovely Life in Slow Motion, his sixth and most sonically accomplished album. Gray also shifted his perspective by employing an outside producer and utilizing a real studio for the first time, settling on Marius DeVries, mastermind of lushly constructed Pop works by David Bowie, U2, Rufus Wainwright and Björk. Another huge influence on Life in Slow Motion was his compositional work on the independent film A Way of Life in 2003. Having never scored film before, Gray was forced out of his songwriting comfort zone.
“It sort of placed me in the third person, seeing the world through the eyes of people in the script,” says Gray. “Something of that, in the nature of writing the soundtrack and also seeing an imagined world through someone else’s eyes, sort of hung over into the whole record and I found myself working like that a lot.”
After a five-album catalog of nakedly confessional songwriting, Gray found comfort in placing a little distance between himself and his subject matter on Life in Slow Motion.
“My records are always quite heart-on-sleeve,” Gray understates. “A New Day at Midnight had contained a lot of raw emotions, unedited, straight-from-the-heart kind of stuff. This time round, I was a bit more healed than I was then. I guess it felt good to be using my imagination rather than staring straight into my emotions. Your emotions find their way in there anyway, it’s just a more circuitous route.” (BB)
This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2006.