David Fricke’s Year in Rock: Shows, Albums and Memories From 2014
My 2014 in rock, etc., was like most of those before it: rich in surprise, assurance, discovery and loss, some of it close: Ian McLagan of the Small Faces and Faces; Paul Revere of the Raiders; singer Doc Neeson of Australian ragers the Angels. What follows, in no ranked order, isn’t everything I heard, saw and wrote about (or wished I had). But it shows why I still love what I do – and where my standards are for 2015.
King Crimson, The Egg, Albany, NY, September 9th; The Elements (DGM); Starless (DGM)
The best new, touring band of 2014 was history with a twist: a British exploratory institution revisiting deep catalog with a tripled emphasis on rhythmic exchange and propulsion. Founding guitarist Robert Fripp presided over the premiere performance by his Mark VIII Crimson with deceptively guarded relish: perched to the far right and rear of the three drummers, cutting across their thundering math with heated-needle distortion and angular, melodic decision. The history of composed drama and improvising duty in the set list – long-dormant, progressive bedrock like “Sailor’s Tale” and “Starless” – was affirmed in The Elements, a two-CD set of rare, archival live tracks sold at the merch table, and the gargantuan Starless box, a two-dozen-disc concert account of the thrilling free-form Crimson of 1973-74: an era and ambition still surging through Fripp’s new ship.
Hedvig Mollestad Trio, Enfant Terrible (Rune Grammofon); SXSW, Austin, TX, April 13th
Set up with her power trio in the tight corner of an Austin bar, guitarist Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen – a petite, Norwegian dynamo with a wide-body axe – stalked the whole floor in spangles, heels and feminine-avenger vogue, carving the air with an avant-fusion swordplay that suggested Jeff Beck’s Blow By Blow fortified with Arctic death-metal ferocity. Enfant Terrible, her second album, has everything I got live, except the exultant body language – which is not hard to imagine.
Bo Ningen, SXSW, Austin TX, April 15th
Savages/Bo Ningen, Words to the Blind (Stolen/Pop Noire)
Bo Ningen were the last thing I expected at a British alt-rock showcase: a Japanese quartet in black priest-like robes and waist-length hair. Founded in London in 2006, the expatriate ninjas are descended, in fuzz, feedback and singer-bassist Taigen Kawabe‘s neo-operatic bark, from Sino-psychedelic overkillers such as Boris, Acid Mothers Temple and Seventies bizarros Speed, Glue and Shinki. But there is a surprising momentum in the melee: danceable rhythms somewhere between Can’s hypno-march and New Order’s “Blue Monday.” III (Stolen), Bo Ningen’s first U.S. album, is inevitably a cryptic fury: the group’s physical exaggerration in performance is half the high. Words to the Blind, recorded live with the four women of London’s Savages, is a single 37-minute turmoil of the bands’ respective, punky dada, pushed to a combined extreme.
Sun Kil Moon, Benji (Caldo Verde); Town Hall, New York City, July 24th
This show – singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek leading the long-running successor to his Nineties ghost-song band Red House Painters – was a lesson in the great weight of bare minimums: guitars plucked and strummed in improbably slow motion, through lakes of reverb; the suspense of deep breath and gathering storm in Kozelek’s baritone crawl. But this was a stasis that covered long ground: particularly, in the Town Hall set, the distance travelled on Benji – the latest of Kozelek’s more than 30 releases just since 2001 – between decisive, adolescent revelation (“I Saw the Film The Song Remains the Same”) and more recent confrontations with aging and loss. Kozelek may work in quiet, brooding strides, but he’s no quitter, as he pointed out at Town Hall in the lethal ballad “Hey You Bastards, I’m Still Here.”
Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires, Deconstructed (Sub Pop)
Like Drive-By Truckers and Bloodkin, these rebel yellers from Georgia and Alabama are the product of a South still under economic and spiritual Reconstruction and long marinated in AC/DC. “We were whooped with the Good Book/Wound up shamed, sorry and worse,” rails Bains, the Fires’ singing and writing ignition, giving back as good as he got across a crunch of thorny guitars and smackdown drumming. Deconstructed is the kind of grass-roots politics most politicians don’t like to hear: “The Weeds Downtown,” the straight-up blowback of “We Dare Defend Our Rights!” But Bains is just as severe with his own kind, the milennials too drunk on tweets and couch life to get busy on the ground. “Get off the fucking internet, and cut off the cable/The mind is static, but the body’s still able,” Bains commands in “Burnpiles, Swimming Holes.” I didn’t get to see this band live in 2014; I won’t make that mistake in ’15.