Via Rolling Stone, The Meat Puppets have a new "real blown-out folk" music album. A short blurb below is followed by a track by track listening opportunity. The album, Rat Farm, was officially released April 16 (yesterday) - it is reviewed at Consequence of Sound.

The Meat Puppets Create 'Real Blown-Out Folk Music' on 'Rat Farm' - Album Premiere

Arizona punks are set to release their 14th LP

By Jon Blistein
April 14, 2013

Arizona punk luminaries the Meat Puppets have been making music for 33 years, and on April 16th they'll release Rat Farm, their 14th LP via Megaforce, which you can now listen to in full here. Frontman Curt Kirkwood described the record as "real blown-out folk music," and it's easy to hear what he means. On tracks like "Sometimes Blue" and "Waiting," both of which amble forward with ramshackle melodies and the lithe, dry simmer of Kirkwood's vocals, while the sun-drenched "You Don't Know" is laced with the crackle of electric guitars. Throughout the album, the band shows their knack for melding styles and sounds to fit their liking, like on the opening title-track, which flips between a dub-y verse and wide open, alt-rock chorus, and the delightful "Time and Money," which sounds like a lost Allman Brothers rambler channeled through a Superfuzz pedal.

Only Known Footage of the Legendary Bluesman Lead Belly (1935 and 1945)

Open Culture offers up this wonderful treat for fans of the original blues music and one of its legendary, larger-than-life figures, Lead Belly.

Essential Recordings from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

Listen "Where Did You Sleep Last Night"
Listen "Goodnight Irene"

Watch the Only Known Footage of the Legendary Bluesman Lead Belly (1935 and 1945)

January 2nd, 2013



Huddie Ledbetter, better known by his nickname “Lead Belly,” was one of the greatest blues musicians of all time. His songs have been covered by hundreds of artists, ranging from Frank Sinatra to Led Zeppelin. Lead Belly is also famous for what his biography at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes as “the mythic outline of his life”:

Born circa 1885 in rural northwest Louisiana, Lead Belly rambled across the Deep South from the age of 16. While working in the fields, he absorbed a vast repertoire of songs and styles. He mastered primordial blues, spirituals, reels, cowboy songs, folk ballads and prison hollers. In 1917, Lead Belly served as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “lead boy”–i.e., his guide, companion and protégé–on the streets of Dallas. A man possessed with a hot temper and enormous strength, Lead Belly spent his share of time in Southern prisons. Convicted on charges of murder (1917) and attempted murder (1930), Lead Belly literally sang his way to freedom, receiving pardons from the governors of Texas and Louisiana. The second of his releases was largely obtained through the intervention of John and Alan Lomax, who first heard Lead Belly at Angola State Prison while recording indigenous Southern musicians for the library of Congress.

In 1935 the March of Time newsreel company told the story of Lead Belly’s discovery by John Lomax in the short film above. Although the scripted film will strike modern viewers as dubious in some respects (March of Time founder Henry Luce described the series as “fakery in allegiance to the truth”), the newsreel is nevertheless a fascinating document of Lead Belly, who was about 50 years old at the time, along with Lomax and Lead Belly’s wife, Martha Promise. At one point Lead Belly sings his classic song,“Goodnight, Irene.” According to Sharon R. Sherman in Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video, and Culture, the 1935 Lead Belly newsreel is the earliest celluloid document of American folklore. Lead Belly did work for Lomax after his second release from prison, as the newsreel says, following him back to the East Coast and serving as his chauffeur. In New York Lead Belly played in Harlem and also came into contact with leftist folk singers like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Lead Belly became known as the “King of the Twelve-String Guitar.”



Three Songs by Leadbelly, the only other film known to exist of the great bluesman, was made ten years after the newsreel. It was photographed by Blanding Sloan and assisted by Wah Mong Chang and edited two decades later by Pete Seeger. It begins with scenes of the graveyard in Mooringsport, Louisiana, where Lead Belly was buried after his death in 1949, accompanied by an instrumental version (with humming) of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Lead Belly actually performed six songs for the film, but only three could be salvaged. Seeger is quoted by Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell in The Life and Legend of Leadbelly as describing Sloan’s film as “pretty amateurish”:

I think that he recorded Leadbelly in a studio the day before, then he played the record back while Leadbelly moved his hands and lips in synch with the record. He’d taken a few seconds from one direction and a few seconds from another direction, which is the only reason I was able to edit it. I spent three weeks with a Moveiola, up in my barn, snipping one frame off here and one frame off there and juggliing things around. I was able to synch up three songs: “Grey Goose,” “Take This Hammer,” and “Pick a Bale of Cotton.”

Related content:

• The Legend of Bluesman Robert Johnson
• Legendary Folklorist Alan Lomax: The Land Where the Blues Began

Tom Waits: A Desperate Voice For Desperate Times

You can hear the new Tom Waits album in its entirety on NPR for the next few days - if you are a Tom Waits fan, this is a can't miss opportunity to hear the new material - his first studio album in seven years (and his 17th overall).

You can listen to the brief review of the album here:

Tom Waits: A Desperate Voice For Desperate Times

by WILL HERMES

Listen Now 

All Things Considered

[4 min 7 sec] 

October 26, 2011

Tom Waits generally sings like a psychotic carnival barker or a drunken lounge crooner. And I really mean that as a compliment.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, that voice. Pushed to extremes like the characters in his songs, his voice is an exaggeration full of truth. He's a singer of blues sentiment like Screamin' Jay Hawkins or Howlin' Wolf orRadiohead's Thom Yorke. His latest album is called Bad As Me, and the songs on it sound truer than ever — partly because Waits' songwriting and arranging are still extremely potent, and partly because his thematic desperation fits this particular moment in history like a ragged glove.

There's a line in one song about bailing out millionaires, and plenty of lyrics about money, jobs and the lack thereof. But Waits' music draws on the sweep of American history, early rock 'n' roll, old Mexican ballads and vaudeville-era pop, and you realize that these themes are depressingly eternal. Waits also sings about the power of love; about Eisenhower, Elvis and Wolfman Jack; about unlucky bodies piled up at the morgue; and, in a chilling song called "Hell Broke Luce," about a damaged soldier furiously trying to comprehend what he's lost, and the reasons why. 

At this point, Waits seems to be like Woody Allen: so respected by his peers that truly legendary artists come out for his projects. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones is featured in "Hell Broke Luce," along with Marc Ribot, an old Waits crony who might be America's greatest session guitarist at the moment. But Waits is an auteur just like Allen, and all the players ultimately serve his vision. Waits is an old pro singing slightly freakish songs — which, after a couple of listens, reveal themselves as not so freakish at all. Just human. 

Here is the text that goes with the page to hear the new album:

First Listen: Tom Waits, 'Bad As Me'

by STEPHEN THOMPSON

 





  

October 23, 2011

Everything about Tom Waits is a contradiction of one sort or another: He cuts an unknowable and even otherworldly figure, yet his songwriting can be tear-jerkingly humane. He's untethered to eras or trends, yet his sound and the characters he inhabits are distinctly American. And, for all the ways his image classifies him as a lone wolf, he's one of music's great collaborators, having spent the last three decades working closely with wife and songwriting partner Kathleen Brennan.

Waits, of course, is an expert at feeding the mystery surrounding his deeply weird but strangely accessible music; to interview the man is to be led into a catacomb of misdirection and non sequiturs. But on his 17th album Bad As Me, out Oct. 24, Waits and Brennan continue to craft songs marked by uncommon empathy. Waits' first all-new studio record in seven years, it toggles constantly between heartsick vulnerability and hell-bound defiance: He may attempt to wake the devil in the stomping title track, commiserating with a lover who's "the same kind of bad as me," but a few songs later, he's grimly mourning his status as "the last leaf on the tree" — a survivor, but a lonely one.

For Waits, vulnerability and defiance are two sides of the same coin anyway; just listen to the blisteringly ramshackle "Satisfied," in which satisfaction and death are practically interchangeable. He may exude fatalism in "Pay Me" — a punch-in-the-gut ballad in which he memorably sings, "All roads lead to the end of the world" — but his delivery is a carefully controlled mix of ruefulness and realism. For Waits, ugliness and beauty both find ways to persist against all opposition. But in the end, amid these 13 songs' furious clatter and gutter-level grime, beauty improbably wins out.

Legendary Folklorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

Another awesome offering from Open Culture - and if you love the blues, this is a wonderful little film.

Legendary Folklorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

October 20th, 2011






In 1933, 18-year-old Alan Lomax took a break from college to travel into the American South with his father, John Avery Lomax, on a quest to discover and record traditional folk songs for the Library of Congress. It was the beginning of a journey that would last the rest of his life.


With his father, and later on his own, Lomax traveled the back roads of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, from religious revival meetings to prison chain gangs, in pursuit of Southern folk music in all its forms. Along the way he discovered and recorded such singular artists as Mississippi Fred McDowell, Vera Hall and Lead Belly. Later, Lomax would widen his field of research to focus on European folk music, but in 1978 he went back to the Mississippi Delta with a camera crew to document a culture that was rapidly disappearing.


The result, The Land Where the Blues Began, is a fascinating look at traditional country blues in its native environment. Filmed in levee camps, churches, juke joints and on front porches across Mississippi, the documentary draws attention to musicians unknown outside the Delta. The Land Where the Blues Began is a must-see for blues fans, and is now part of our collection of Free Movies.

Related Content:

The Legend of Bluesman Robert Johnson Animated

The Rolling Stones Jam With Their Idol, Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters on the Blues and Gospel Train