Get ready for New Year’s Eve with a few tracks from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s 1994 LP, Orange.
Orange is a hugely ambitious record and one whose aspirations pay off admirably. It finds the Blues Explosion moving away from the straight ahead ramalama of their earlier releases to take stock and absorb not only their immediate surroundings but also of the musical landscape that was embracing the present as much as it was the future.
Orange isn't filled with songs so much as a variety of sound collages, riffs and hollering akin to turning wildly the dial knob on your radio this way and that to grasp at the varying sounds that hijack the airwaves. Witness opener 'Bellbottoms' which still remains the band's pinnacle. The staccato stabs at the guitar usher in a string section that wouldn't sound out of place in a Blaxploitation movie before giving way to guttural screams, yelps and lascivious laughter that at once thrill and unnerve. The track stops abruptly before kicking in with a blast of music funk that doffs its cap to James Chance And The Contortions. That it stops again to allow [Jon] Spencer to become the ringmaster in this three-ring circus adds to the disorientation and its final headlong rush of aural madness recalls the idiocy of attempting to cross 14th Street in rush hour with a head full of snow. — The Quietus
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Bellbottoms [1994]
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The playing throughout the album is utterly remarkable, a display of telepathy and chemistry that's so rare to find. The band's ability to bounce off of each other and react to the most nuanced of ideas and changes comes from a deep mutual understanding and a wide expanse of ideas that are compressed, coalesced and crushed to create beauty from a seemingly trash aesthetic. Russell Simins' drumming is so precise that its tightness almost hurts. Using the minimum of percussive instruments he still manages to generate an expansive sound that marks him down as a true original. You can feel the love of his instruments as each beat comes whip-cracking through. He doesn't smash his drums; he feels them and so, in turn, do you. Similarly, guitarist Judah Bauer plays with an economy that belies the judiciously served onslaught deployed throughout. Check the clipped and slashed chords of 'Flavor' that lock in with Simins' drums that add to the percussive propulsion. This is playing that relies less on melody and more on the irresistible lure of rhythm and, as evidenced on 'Brenda', seemingly the most conventional of all the songs contained within these grooves, he keeps things rooted while maintaining an air of breathless excitement. Meanwhile, Spencer's downtuned guitar roots the material with a fearsome bottom end that pays scant regard to the conventions of bass playing. — The Quietus
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Ditch [1994]
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1994's Orange finds the Blues Explosion at the exact moment they left behind the pompadour-and-sideburns Crypt Records trash-can garage-rock universe and sidled their way into the Beastie Boys/Beck/Cibo Matto downtown genre-fucking cosmopolitan party. Beck actually shows up on Orange, literally phoning in a guest verse on "Flavor", and they toured with the Beasties soon after. It's easy to hear what those guys liked in the band's assault. The Blues Explosion were honest, organic experimenters-- fusing tons of different styles into their musical assault without compromising their ferocity or making any of it sound forced. These influences are fully internalized, rather than self-consciously stapled on. So we get Isaac Hayes disco strings on the drawn-out "Bellbottoms" intro, feral James Chance-sounding sax squawks on "Ditch", Meters/Booker T organ grease on "Very Rare", g-funk keyboard whine on "Greyhound". But we also get a scuzzed-up, pigfuck-descended rock band working at the absolute peak of its considerable powers.
On Orange, everything falls into place like it never had before and never would again. The band's gnarled, borderline-cartoonish gutbucket roots are proudly on display, and its delirious self-glorifying goes way further than it had before. (As the liner notes of this new reissue point out, Spencer didn't yell out "Blues Explosion!" too often on Blues Explosion songs pre-Orange. Here, he yells it constantly.) But most of the greatest moments on the album aren't the go-for-broke blasts of adrenaline; they're the points where the band pulls back and sticks to the pocket. It's a bit of a surprise to learn, via the newly fleshed-out liner notes, that the band was in a pretty dysfunctional and drugged-out state at the time they recorded it. Guitarist Judah Bauer floats the theory that he might've played behind the beat throughout the album because he was "junk sick." Instead, on Orange, these three guys sound able to anticipate each other's moves way ahead of time. The tracks groove hard, and every change feels totally intuitive. — Pitchfork
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Brenda [1994]
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Only a couple of songs on Orange have what could even loosely be considered choruses. Spencer is the unquestioned frontman here, but his vocals are more hypeman exhortation than actual song. A few instrumentals turn up, and all the songs could really work without Spencer's vocals, fun as it is to hear him whoop out the names of different cities or scream about how much his wife likes to fuck. Even with all the smart, well-placed studio embellishments here, this feels like an excerpted version of a long, on-fire jam session. Spencer and Bauer pile on layer after layer of stomp-riff, while Russell Simins' drumming is a natural wonder: an absurdly funky push-pull with some of the thundercrack heaviness of John Bonham. Next to the spidery, introverted indie rock of its day, Orange sounded like a revelation-- an absurd burst of swagger and libido, as rendered by three total expert musicians. Even Beck sounds a bit taken aback when Spencer starts wailing, "You got the flavor!" at him after he gets done laying his verse. The thing sold 100,000 copies, and yet it didn't really go on to influence anyone, possibly because nobody else could do it like this. — Pitchfork
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Flavor [1994]
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Rob McElhenney, Ariana DeBose, Sting (R 12/8/21)
Jimmy Fallon: Pete Davidson, Miley Cyrus, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (R 12/9/21)
Stephen Colbert: Andrew Garfield, José Andres (R 11/22/21)
Seth Meyers: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Kyle Mooney (R 12/16/21)
James Corden: Adrien Brody, Zazie Beetz, Little Simz (R 11/22/21)
Trevor Noah: Pre-empted
SPOILER WARNING
A late night gathering for non serious palaver that does not speak of that night’s show. Posting a spoiler will get you brollywhacked. You don’t want that to happen to you. It's a fate worse than a fate worse than death.
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Beck :: Loser [1993]
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LAST WEEK’S POLL: DECEMBER HOLIDAY
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