SHAKE SUMMATION

Rip It Up, Issue 126, 1 January 1988, Page 8

SHAKE SUMMATION

Graham Brazier

‘Spellbound’(CßS 7”) From the forthcoming Brazier, the long-awaited second solo album, comes a snappy number with a dark, funky groove. Brazier is one of the country’s most believable vocalists, even when he’s being hammy. Margaret . Urlich’s : clean voice cuts through, providing good contrast. The drumming is excellent, though the guitars seem to come through some sorta 70s flange. Well worthy of radio play. ‘Rags to Ruin’ is a grungy rock number with sweaty, tense vocal pushed along at breakneck speed by the drummer. National Anthem ‘Four Good Reasons!’

(Reaction cassingle) - Virtually a National Anthem best of, three tracks culled from the 1986 LP One Day Different plus last year’s ‘Wonderful Reason.’ ‘Reason’ is the pick, it chugs along on its walking bass with plenty of hooks: cutting horns, delicate guitar. The vocals are big and troubled. ‘Please Say Something’ opens with acoustic guitar and Northern soul horns, the chorus and vocals recall the Psychedelic Furs, and it takes off eventually. ‘Chapter One’ is an edgy, spacey epic a la Moody Blues but taken very fast, with strong horn and guitar riffs. ‘High Pressure’ opens with long nagging garage bass and guitar effects, then it’s OD distortion. It must have sounded good in the studio.

Nick Smith ‘Skin’(Flying Nun 12”) Smith’s musicianship has improved since his first EP, but his strangled vocals are still hard to take; thankfully the lyrics aren’t decipherable this time. There’s plenty of creativity here, I enjoyed the use of string quartet on ‘Autumn Franklin Rd’ and the John Cale melody. The lengthy ‘Brother’s Bed’ is a conceptual piece, with spacey 70s effects, French horn and talking section. Introverted, the listener feels like an intruder. ‘The First Cut’ has an odd skittish vocal, with a repetitive theme: “boys will be boys.” The backing to ‘Sin’ is almost New Age in its delicacy, but the mood is disturbed by the dark vocals and ridiculous falsetto, not to mention the little radio playlet. Much use of recurring riffs and repeated phrases a la Van Morrison, but the vocals are the let down. Maybe a guest vocalist and arranger would help make Smith’s musical ideas more accessible. Chris Bourke Bailter Space Nelshßailter Space’ (Flying Nun 12”) Christchurch’s Bailter Space, a band on many lips in 'B7 (though the bastards never came down to Dunedin) boil up a lovely-produced brew of near stunning proportions on their first record Nelsh Bailter Space. Thanks to a decidedly uninformative (though pretty) cover, all I can tell is what I know: Hamish Kilgour lays down some fat slabs of primal drummin’ with extra percussion wrapped round its vitals at the heart of the Bailter Space throb, sings and yelps some, and Alastair Parker rubs in huge, grimy smears of guitar behind

anonymous keyboards, bass and more vocals. There, that’s all, but where it clicks, like ‘New Man,’ it equates to something like that soft yummy universe they were talking about. Even a decade-old Clean composition, Tm in Love With These Times,’ skips deftly on its bassline and extra clang's of percussion and piano.

Nelsh Bailter Space gels into a broad sound that, as well as drawing on a more conventional tradition, trips easily over signposts like the Fall, but trips up nowhere. The record’s only fating, to my ears, is that somewhere the big Groove that should move my hips to some more of Bailter Space’s songs got lost in the mid-range or the weirdness; else ways tough, it’s übermensh Bailter Space. Are we in a German disco yet? Paul McKessar

Martin Kealey Imagery and Sound (Ode LP)

Martin’s on the cover with a Telecaster in his hand. He’s catching the high skies to Germany, and with this album tucked under his arm he might just break into the music scene. Evocative and powerful, moody and yet tongue in cheek. Interesting styles abound — take the song ‘Exordium,’ with its magical beat and celebration of voice in the departing chorus lines. In contrast, ‘Love Triangle’ has an uptempo jazzy feel — a rather catchy tune which should have you snapping your fingers. This is a well-produced album —congratulations should go to Steve Garden and Kealey for sustaining clever rhythms and keeping the beatfrom bopping too long. TB

Louie Perez, the drummer of Los Lobos who also writes many of their most evocative lyrics, describes the success of ‘La Bamba’ as like a “literary pie in the face” to the critics of By the Light of the Moon's more mainstream sound.

“As far as we’re concerned what we do is a very seamless body of work. All our records are extensions of one another. On the Wolf album songs like 'A Matter of Time’ and ‘Will the Wolf Survive’ were actually leaning towards the depth of lyrical content in By the Light." Moon is easily the album that their 1984 breakthrough How Will the Wolf Survive? was, but the band felt they had to move on to avoid getting in an ethnic music rut. They didn’t want to become, in Perez’s phrase “a cartoon of Mexican-Americans” doomed to only flavour 7 of-the-month success. “It'd be very easy for a band like us to play up the fact that we’re Mexican-Americans, and camp up our ethnic thing to a point where it could become something very disposable, like anything else in contemporary culture. The fact that we exist is a statement in itself. So we don’t need to play up the fact that we’re an ethnic group living in America, because we are.” Howlin’ Wolves

Unlike the Neville Brothers, whose New Orleans voices are lost in the FM rock backing on their recent Uptown, Los Lobos seem to have successfully widened their audience without forfeiting their personality. They’re determined to retain autonomy over their own sound and career. “For that reason, we haven’t become like the Ritchie Valens Revue,” says Perez. “We don’t got out there and play everything on the La Bamba soundtrack record, we haven’t become a revival band. We go out and play the songs we’ve been playing, writing and recording the last three or four years. We’re

still playing ‘Come On, Let’s Go,’ which was on our very first EP, and we’re playing ’La Bamba’ as the last song of the set — the same way we did in 1975 in a hall for a wedding or something. We’re still doing the same thing we’ve always done, we’re just waiting for people to catch up.” But when the idea of Los Lobos doing the soundtrack for La Bamba was first mooted, it felt like “destiny,” says Perez. “We were right in the middle of recording By the Light of the Moon, and we thought, well we’re gonna have to take time off from our record to do this soundtrack. There was no way we were gonna say no — we couldn’t imagine who else could possibly do it. And

I’m glad we did, it wasn’t like a contract for some obscure movie we had nothing to relate to, this movie was real close to us, and we took a great deal of pride working on it."

Just Another Band ... Los Lobos are the pride of the Chicano community of East LA, where most of the band members were born and still live. “I was born in East LA, lived there forever and still do,” says Perez. “We all went to high school here and we’re still very much part of this community.”

While Mexican music and traditional instruments have been as much a part of Los Lobos since they began as R&B elements,

that wasn’t the case when they were young. “I grew up in the 605,” says Perez, “so Ritchie Valens pre-dates me. He wasn’t really a hero of mine because I didn’t live in the period when he was a big success. I didn’t realise who Ritchie Valens was, just that ‘La Bamba’ was always in the background — it wasn’t till later on.

“That’s part of the same thing that affects all young people that come from an ethnic background in any part of the world. They try to rebel against their parents and their culture and just assimilate with the mainstream. By the time I grew out of that rejection of culture and identity, I discovered this wealth of Mexican-American music, of Mexican music, that my mother was into. And I found myself drawing a great deal of satisfaction from the sheer complexity of musicianship that was demanded of that music. “So the four core members of Los Lobos

— Cesar, myself, David, Conrad — who were rock and roll kids growing up on radio and Cream and Jimi Hendrix, found that the same fingers that played the solo to ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ were suddenly playing the little riffs on the violin of some old Mexican song. Suddenly Ritchie Valens took on a whole different perspective. He became the hero we never discovered, a 17-year-old who did incredible things, trying to find that dream and make it a reality for himself. We found a parallel between us and him, so I’m proud to live some of that legacy.”

“All searching for the promised land Tired souls with empty hands Asking to themselves, is this all there is?" — ‘ls This All There Is?’

On both How Will the Wolf Survive? and By the Light of the Moon Los Lobos presented powerful images of the plight of the underdog in modern America. Their songs, with lyrics often by drummer Perez, stand alongside such works as The Grapes of Wrath and the Band’s ‘King Harvest (Has Surely Come)’ in their portrayal of the immigrant or transient worker. Perez hopes that his words are seen in a broad context however: “I want to emphasise that there is a universal element,” he says. “The songs that seem as if they’re about an immigrant person coming to the US for the better world, could be any part of America or the world where someone finds the economic factors start to pull on the family unit. I feel people can relate to lyrics and songs in their own particular situation; I’m trying to keep them open for interpretation. ‘"ls This All There Is?’ is one of my favourites, and it’s written in a way that could be an immigrant person finding America isn’t what it’s meant to be, but it could be anyone. It could be the journey through life, finding that it’s not what is expected.”

Set Me Free In another song, ‘The Hardest Time,’ Perez once again writes from the viewpoint of a wife and mother, continuing the theme of Wolfs standout ‘A Matter of Time,’ with its powerful line “I’ll send for you baby, it’s just a matter of time.” “‘The Hardest Time’ is an interesting one for us because it’s written from a woman’s perspective. It comes from images of young women bound to motherhood, and their plight. Their world is suddenly completely changed because of their situation.”

Your wives must have influenced that song, staying at home while you’re on tour.

“Oh yeah. On the Wolf record, ‘A Matter of Time’ was written specifically about a guy coming across the border, telling his wife that I’ll be back for you once I get my situation together in America. “Then we found the song meant something to us personally, because we found ourselves getting up early and leaving our homes to go on the road away from our families. We were migrant workers moving around America, so it took on new meaning for us. That’s what I enjoy about writing songs in a universal perspective — they constantly unfold and take new meaning." Los Lobos songs are not full of despair and gloom, however — there’s an optimism and faith that things will improve. Although he’s responsible for the Christian imagery in such songs as 'The Mess We’re In’ and ‘Tears of God,’ Perez has said that Los Lobos are talking about “a faith in people and belief in yourself that will over-ride other problems,” rather than looking to a “supreme being” to provide the answers. “So many people have been misinterpreting that, even though I’m a Roman Catholic, I’m a religious person and have grown up that way. At the same time I don’t care to alienate people and tell them that there’s this shroud that can protect you under this religious umbrella. What I’m trying to emphasise is the basic faith in yourself and other people in order to overcome whatever the obstacles are.

“I feel that on this record there are songs about people that are incredibly resilient in the face of incredible odds, but at the same time there’s a lot of hope on this record. By the Light of the Moon has songs about hope and faith, and ultimately standing up and not taking it anymore — trying to take your personal situation by the neck and making it work for you, rather than for you to be a victim.”

T-Bone’s Stake Los Lobos wrote and recorded Moon very slowly in 1986, once again under the guidance of T-Bone Burnett, but now Perez says the band are capable of producing themselves:

“He’s helped us interpret our ideas in the studio and not be overwhelmed by the technology. On Moon he let us try out a lot of ideas, pretty much as an apprenticeship thing. We'd like very much to produce our own record next. T-Bone might work with us again in the distant future, but I can’t see how we can bring someone else in after working with him for so many years.” Although Perez’s taut drumming was a key

to Wolfs power, on Moon two session drummers were brought in, losing some of the band’s identity to this writer. “We brought in a couple of drummers because I enjoy the way they work, and also because I needed desperately to work on the songs. David [Hidalgo, the band’s effecting tenor voice] played percussion and I guitar, we’re all moving round on instruments. I like to do things that way, finding untraditional and unorthodox ways of approaching the recording process.” Los Lobos remain an eclectic band, the music on Moon ranging from the traditional Prendo Del Alma’ to ‘Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes' bar-band stomp and 'Set Me Free (Rosa Lee)’s Motown romp. “For a long time people found a definite division between our traditional songs and those more influenced by Cajun zydeco sounds, and by R&B, but now it's becoming more of a vocabulary for us. We’re getting closer to sounding like us and not sounding like different styles.”

Local Heroes The recording of Moon was interrupted by tours and the La Bamba project. And one extracurricular activity that has received publicity is their work on Paul Simon’s Graceland. Los Lobos started legal proceedings against Simon, claiming a song of theirs went uncredited on his album. How did that work out?

“At the moment, we’re in the process of trying to bridge the communication gap, which got even wider because the media got involved and blew things out of proportion.”

They were eager to jump on him for hypocrisy: here was an example of an ethnic group being exploited. “Exactly. I think what he did was a very positive thing, despite the backlash because maybe he breached the blacklisting of artists that went across the fine line there. But what he’s done if anything is make people more aware of the music there. Suddenly the whole ethnic thing across the board is very healthy.” How are you looked upon in Mexico? Have you toured there? “We haven’t yet. It’s funny that just now our records are available in Mexico, so in the future we’ll go down there. But here in the local community, we’re sort of local heroes, and hopefully we can inspire people to just follow their own dreams, whatever they may be. Hopefully we’ve brought success closer to home to the local community.”

Chris Bourke