7-07-05, 9:08 am
Hiretsukan End States G7 Welcoming Committee, 2005
Hiretsukan is a loud New York hardcore punk band whose lyrics on their latest CD, End States, range from the deeply personal and emotional, sometimes surreally so, to highly charged political and historical matters. The words of 'Manual Fiction' challenge hypocrisy, the superficial and deception: 'Can you speak your mind, does it come out like a story or forced through a sieve? Your scars hold more than history.'
'Click and Repeat' invokes images of Bush’s Guantanamo Bay terror prisons: 'Through heightened state terror and wired surveillance we keep our eyes open.' Linking the abuse of rights and the torture of imprisoned detainees, the song turns the 'bankrupt moral values' of Bush’s 'party line' against him.
'Hauling Sharp' turns the album’s direction to anti-authoritarian student uprisings in South Korea in 1980 that resulted in massacres of hundreds of students. Why this subject matter?: 'We’ll sing these sings because they’re all we know.' The CD concludes with the abstract 'Tight Not Touching,' cursing the direction of modern life in Bush’s America in 'a cold war holding pattern.'
Hiretsukan’s other themes are images directly out of Freudian nightmares, authoritarian surveillance, and Bush terrorism rhetoric: 'sleeper cells,' 'self-timed and tranquilized' populace, scared people who 'speak through slots,' and images of humans subdued and passive. Still, the notion of resistance and the potential for refashioning the present world into another aren’t suppressed in the songs on this CD.
Michelle Proffit’s wailing vocals add to the urgency and anger embedded in the anti-authoritarian attitude and militancy of End States.
According to the band’s press, Hiretsukan formed near Washington, D.C. in 1998 and paid their dues with mind-bending tours, splits, and failed recording projects before consolidating in New York City. By 2002 the band won critical notice with their 7 song EP, 'Invasive//Exotic' for G7 Welcoming Committee Records that May.
End States, Hiretsukan’s first full length CD, is due out later this month. Look for it at G7 Welcoming Committee.
Otis Taylor Below the Fold Telarc 2005
If you love blues, jazz, folk, or roots music in any combination and haven’t discovered Otis Taylor, you have missed out on an excellent body of work. His most recent CD, Below the Fold, is an extraordinary artistic achievement that combines, genres, styles, instrumentals, politics and peeks at the personal.
Taylor and his talented band will treat your ears to cello, banjo, mandolin, guitar, electric guitar, bass and harmonica. Additional skills on jazz trumpet, organ, fiddles and drum add to the orchestra of sounds that make up this CD.
Taylor is the son of a railroad worker from Chicago with strong political commitments. Taylor says of his father, 'He was a socialist and a real bebopper.' In fact, both of his parents were fond of music and raised Taylor around jazz and blues musicians where he learned to love these genres of working class music.
Living in Denver during his adolescence, Taylor learned folk music and how to play the banjo. He formed several musical projects and toured the world into the 1960s. By the 1990s, Taylor’s career took off as his albums Blue Eyed Monster and When Negroes Walked the Earth earned him wide critical acclaim.
His next release White African explored the history and experiences of African Americans confronting the violence of white supremacy. On the heels of that accomplishment, Taylor turned in the award-winning and critically celebrated album Truth is not Fiction, a musical experiment that turned to electric and psychedelic styles he called 'trance-blues.'
Below the Fold marks a return to traditional styles with Taylor's special mix of surprises. Songs like 'Feel Like Lightning,' 'Your Children Sleep good Tonight,' and 'Government Lied' stand out as brilliant historical narratives told in Taylor’s unique storytelling manner and enriched with beautiful music.
