Townes Van Zandt – s/t
More record showing during house showing! And on this particular day I was in a country mood! At least that’s how I’d characterize it—Townes Van Zandt is one of the foundational outlaw country singer/songwriters, author of one of the foundational outlaw country songs, “Pancho and Lefty,” which was covered by Willie Nelson (who I also wrote about today!). And yet, curiously, when Rolling Stone published a list of the 100 Best Country Albums of All Time (which was mostly very good!) there wasn’t a Townes Van Zandt record in sight. That’s just not right.
I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. Townes was never very mainstream, and generally evaded the stereotypical tropes of country music throughout his career. I’ve heard him compared to Leonard Cohen as much or even more often than many of the big names in country, and that’s pretty fair. His self-titled album, i.e. this one, shares a lot in common with Cohen’s sound, particularly on the Songs of Leonard Cohen album. (Townes never made his version of I’m Your Man, but I bet that’d be something.) Much of the album comprises beautiful but stark arrangements of mostly guitar and voice with some light accompaniment. He recorded several of these songs a couple years earlier for his debut album, but he didn’t like the reverb-heavy full-band arrangements and decided to re-record them without the extra studio trickery. “Waiting Around to Die” is infinitely more devastating, for instance, without the ghost-riders backing vocals during the chorus.
Everything here is a highlight: “For the Sake of the Song” is about as beautiful a song I’ve ever heard, and “Lungs” has that stark but badass country grit that I’m kind of a sucker for. I’d been meaning to pick this up for a while and once I did, I went on something of a Townes binge—you’ll see that in another hundred posts or so, and I’ll have a lot to say about that. (Including maybe some deeper thoughts about my strange pull toward artists who lived much harder and more self-destructive lives than I ever have. I’m not ready to examine that at the moment.) And just last year I wrote about this in greater detail for the Treble 100 series. So I probably don’t need to repeat myself. I just know that this is the kind of album that gets its claws deeper into me the more I listen to it.
Rating: 10.0
Sound Quality: Great
Yellow Swans – Being There
As I mentioned in my last post with Aaron Dilloway, noise was creeping into my consciousness in ways that I hadn’t previously explored to such a pronounced degree around 2020-2021, and my cravings required satiating. To date, I’m not sure I’ve heard a noise group that’s really fascinated me and moved me in the way that Yellow Swans have. They’re a bit like Foetus in that they have a large catalog that’s full of releases credited to different aliases, but instead of Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel, it’s something like Drowner Yellow Swans, Deterioration Yellow Swans and so on. (They all begin with D for some reason.) I’ve only heard a handful of their releases and they have a TON, so I’ve got more exploring to do, but by far my favorites are Going Places and Being There. (No relation to the Herb Alpert or Wilco albums.)
I’ll write about Going Places soon, which is the “official” studio album of the two. Being There was originally a bonus CD included with the first release, featuring extended recordings taken from the same sessions. In fact, a couple of them are essentially longer pieces that were edited down into two tracks on the former. But the full 2xLP set is rife with powerful moments and stunning sounds, somewhere between the harshness of Wolf Eyes and the static-laden ambience of Fennesz. These are distorted and abrasive pieces of music, absolutely, but they’re strangely accessible, often quite pretty, and there’s melody seeping through the din. As a looser, more freewheeling set of improvisational tracks, it’s not quite as cohesive as its counterpart, but goddamn does this record have some incredible stuff on it. This was a good reminder to go back and listen to some more Yellow Swans, not all of which is easy to find on vinyl (noise is kind of a CD-R and cassette genre anyway), but which is pretty much all ready to stream and download via their Bandcamp page.
Rating: 9.1
Sound Quality: Great
Willie Nelson – Red Headed Stranger
Another album from the country canon! Or rather one that actually meets most folks’ criteria of country canon, even if Townes doesn’t. (Absurd, I tell ya.) But regardless, Willie Nelson is a celebrated and beloved artist, and one of the most prolific to ever do it, with 151 albums. In fact, Texas Monthly ranked all of them, and Red Headed Stranger was number two. (I won’t spoil it for anyone but the top three all have pretty strong justification for being up there.)
I also bought this during a selling-our-house outing, and I guess I was in a country mood? It was my first Willie Nelson album, in fact, and I suppose I have 150 to go (or, more realistically, considerably less than that—but one doesn’t seem nearly enough). This album doesn’t really have many “hits” so to speak, other than “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” but it’s kind of more about the whole than individual songs, as it’s a song cycle with repeating themes and an overarching narrative about love, betrayal, murder and redemption. Whether every detail about the story is important is debatable, but it’s a beautifully written and performed album that features Willie in top form, and something worth mentioning is that he had already had a long career by the time this was released in 1975—he was 42 years old and had released 16 albums. And yet, when you look at the bigger picture, it would appear he was only getting started.
Rating: 9.5
Sound Quality: Great
