Ibanez & Kaoss Unite – Mesa Unveils Mark Five: 25

Written by: Jimmy McQuade

Date: October 10th, 2014

In recent guitar news, Ibanez has unveiled two intriguing additions to the RG line: a guitar and bass equipped with the Korg Mini Kaoss Pad 2S.

The RGKP6 and the SRKP4 are rather barebones interpretations of Ibanez’s iconic RG design (you know, the Stratocaster’s shape with slightly sharper edges). The bodies are mahogany, finished in an unassuming Cosmo Black; the fretboard, rosewood with white-dot inlays; and the pickup is a single passive, ceramic IBZ-KP at the bridge. But what these guitars lack in aesthetic flamboyance, they most surely make up for with the built-in Mini Kaoss Pad. Nestled in a pre-routed mount just below the bridge and pickup, the Kaoss Pad delivers “100 ‘dynamic’ effects including filters, modulation, LFO-based effects, delays, reverb, looper, vocoder and synth effects, all of which are controlled by the pad’s touchscreen ribbon controller,” according to an article on the Music Radar site.

The commercials for both the RGKP6 and SRKP4, which you can watch here and here, demonstrate many of the Kaoss Pad’s capabilities, which range from your traditional Wah-Wah sound to weird glitchy murmurs; needless to say, you could get pretty far-out with these two guitars in terms of sheer variety of sonic textures, which is never a bad thing. Though, as a bass player, I wonder how much low-end rumble is lost, if any, when the Kaoss Pad is engaged on the SRKP4?

But I don’t want to dwell too long on the Kaoss Pad, because both guitar and bass are built with an internal distortion circuit, which can be switched on with or without the Kaoss Pad and adjusted with the its own set of tone and gain knobs. Anyway, for additional specs, take a look here.

In recent amp news, Mesa Boogie has unveiled the Mark Five: Twenty-Five, not only a miniature version of the Mark Series amplifier but also a sort of amalgam of the previous Mark Series designs, especially the Mark II-C+ and Mark Five; or, as the Mesa Boogie site has it, “the embodiment of the last 45 years of guitar amp evolution.”

For an excellent summary of the impetus for the development of the Mark Five: Twenty-Five, here’s an except from a Premier Guitar article on Mesa Boogie’s new micro amp:

“During years of development, Mesa’s team looked back to the wellspring of past Mark amps for inspiration on the new Mark Five: 25. Revisiting the coveted Mark II-C+ and comparing the vintage icons to the production 6L6 powered Mark Five, which many believe is the brand’s best work to date paying tribute to the II-Cs, the team confirmed that many of the Mark Five modes absolutely had to be included in the new mini package. The key requirement being that, in the end, the new Mark must truly sound on par with or even better than the original II-C+. Given this challenge they set out to find a layout that would accommodate 6 incredible modes in a sub-compact chassis size. Mesa’s research overwhelmingly confirmed that players preferred two, and only two, preamp channels for a tiny Mark amp. With pedals now offering such a personalized, quick-change approach to getting different sounds, Mesa set to work defining the Five: 25’s two channels. Mesa claims the result is a collection that includes the very best of the Mark IIC+ and the Mark Five in a package that many will find unbelievably powerful and versatile for its size.”

A Brief History of Crunch: The Tube Screamer (Part I)

Written by: Jimmy McQuade

Date: September 27th, 2014

The Ibanez “Tube Screamer” is like the iPhone of overdrive pedals; everyone you know has one, and those who don’t, want one – even if they tell you somewhat contemptuously otherwise. The Tube Screamer (especially its first two iterations, TS808 & TS9) is arguably the most venerated of stomp-box effects.

The reverence musicians hold for the Tube Screamer is due to the sort of sympathetic relationship it establishes with a tube amp: “As you increase the amplitude of an input signal to overload a tube amp’s preamp,” writes Lindsey Tucker for the Premier Guitar site, “it distorts the signal in a way that adds sustain, edge, and harmonic liveliness, while preserving the innate tonal characteristics of the guitar and amp-and without obscuring the player’s dynamics.” The reason for the pedal’s appeal is not unlike that of the Klon Centaur, which was discussed on this here blog a couple months back; if anything, boutique effects like the Centaur were very determined attempted to imitate or even out pace what the Tube Screamer had already done

Ironically enough, Ibanez and parent company, Hoshino, made a name for itself in the late 60s and early 70s for producing Fender, Gibson and Rickenbacker knockoffs. Nisshin, the Japanese outfit that supplied pickups for some of Ibanez’s ersatz instruments, was in fact the company that manufactured the first Tube Screamer, and other effects, for Ibanez, but as result of an interesting if somewhat vague arrangement between Nisshin and Ibanez/Hoshino, “Nisshin was allowed to market its own line of effects, which were identical to those it made for Ibanez,” as Tucker writes. In 1979, the fist Tube Screamer, TS808, debuted and was quickly picked up by the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan and other guitar greats.

But the Tube Screamer wasn’t the only new kid on the block. Around the time of the TS808’s debut, the Roland company was producing the first overdrive by the now ubiquitous pedal brand, Boss. And to the dismay of the Tube Screamer’s circuitry designers, Roland/Boss had already obtained a patent for their overdrive pedal’s asymmetrical clipping system, and so Ibanez was prodded into going with a symmetrical clipping system for their overdrive design. In fact, the different clipping systems were really the only thing that set the two overdrives apart. Boss’s asymmetrical clip was designed to distort the top and bottom of the sound wave in a rather varied fashion, much like a tube amp would. This was a major selling point for Boss, because at the time, in the late 70s and early 80s, amp manufacturers were moving away from tubes toward solid-state designs, and a distortion effect that could really capture the desirable crunch of a tube amp while masking the then poor sound quality of solid-state amplification would almost surely sell like lemonade on a hot, humid day.

But the competition didn’t stymie Tube Screamer sales. The Tube Screamer was one of the first pedals to include the JRC 4558D integrated circuit chip, and as former Ibanez product manager John Lomas maintains in Tucker’s Premier Guitar article, “the sweet, vocal mid-range sound the TS808 is known for has everything to do with that JRC4558D IC chip-which explains why Lomas and many other overdrive aficionados prefer the sound of the original over other permutations of the pedal that have emerged over the years.”

It’s not hard to find internet guitar forums where commenters assert the superior sound of the original Tube Screamer design and that any position to the contrary would be indefensible, even reprehensible. And if this is an indication of anything at all, it’s that the Tube Screamer has left an indelible mark on the sound of contemporary rock music.

(More to come…)

Required Listening: Angel Olsen

Written by: Jimmy McQuade

Date: September 19th, 2014

I discovered Angel Olsen in a peculiar, almost serendipitous way. I had been struggling to nap after work one afternoon, and thought it’d be helpful to listen to something relaxing, soporific even, something to lull me into an easy sleep. I opened up my laptop on the nightstand beside my bed, and in YouTube’s “Recommended” section was a thumbnail for thisvideo. She seems like a pretty voice, I thought.

But instead of singing me a lullaby, Angel Olsen had me bewitched. I lay on my back, nearly catatonic, the lights out, staring at the ceiling fan as it whirred overhead, mesmerized by the sweet pluck and strum of Angel’s old, shabby guitar and by her truly singular voice – performing in this video the song “Some Things Cosmic,” Olsen goes seamlessly from a gentle lilt to an eerily ghostlike wail as she sings, “I’ve felt my soul/Rise up from my body/Like the way a soul can rise/When it dies in the light.” Needless to say, I couldn’t fall asleep; instead, I felt something akin to an out-of-body experience, and was nervous about my soul getting caught in the ceiling fan.

To call Angel Olsen a folk singer would be misleading. She is doubtless a singer steeped in an American folk tradition, but she’s also so much more than just a Joan Baez or Patsy Cline imitator. She is a musician through and through. Just listen to the brief but punchy garage-jam “Forgiven/Forgotten”, then the harrowing ballad of crime and betrayal “Miranda”, then the slick, bouncy sing-along “Hi-Five” for proof that Angel Olsen is a folky “singer-songwriter” type who’s also capable musically of almost anything.

To date, Olsen’s catalogue consists of two almost flawless full-length LPs, Half Way Home (2012) and Burn Your Fire for No Witness (2014), and a quiet but really quite stunning EP called Strange Cacti (2010). If you sit down for a couple hours and listen to each album in its proper chronology, you witness not only the growth and formation of a great musician but Olsen’s uncanny ability to shape-shift musically. From the Lennon/McCartney-esque songster of “The Waiting” - “I wasted time to ponder/Here I am now all Alice in wonder…” – through to the sighing matador of “The Sky Opened Up,” with its Flamenco-inflected admonition “No One Will Ever Be You For Yourself,” to the solipsistic narrator of“White Fire,” a cold, disquieting, all-too-cerebral song that would have given even Samuel Beckett the shivers: “I walk back in the night alone, got caught up in my song/Forgot where I was sleeping, none of the lights were on/I heard my mother thinking me right back into my birth/ I laughed so loud inside myself, it all began to hurt,” Angel Olsen morphs effortlessly, and at will, into sonic representations of the characters her songs so precisely describe.

Animals As Leaders: Prog-Metal with a Human Heart

Written by: Jimmy McQuade

Date: September 9th, 2014

I have always been a little leery of the label ‘progressive’. When applied to a politician or public figure, say, who sports the term like a boy-scout badge but whose politics is really no more radical than Joe the Plummer’s, I can easily enough change the channel. No secret here that “progressive” is a designation not to be taken all that seriously; it’s usually just a synonym for status quo with some spice.

Likewise, the notion of progress in music has been debased so thoroughly as to become a meaningless appellation of genre (progressive rock, progressive metal, progressive prog-rock, and so on). These sub-genres are used to refer generally to any type of music made within an established and recognizable form – like rock-&-roll or heavy metal – but have the added flare of disorienting time signatures, odd and elaborate arrangements, dizzying speed and butt-clenching dissonance, among some other strange characteristics.

Now, my problem with so-called progressive music is not with any one of its technical aspects listed above; I firmly believe one could just as well make an interesting and successful rock song in 4/4 as in 5/4. My reservation is that more often than not progressive music seems a tacit rejection of the musical achievements of the past; it’s obsession with moving forward is such that anything that came before is treated not as a tool but as refuse. The ahistorical attitude espoused by such music creates, I think, an almost impassable emotional gulf between the music and its listener. Usually, when I listen to music termed ‘progressive’, I feel as though I’m looking at a Chimera through five inches of bulletproof glass at the Bronx Zoo.

For someone with such firmly rooted preconceptions about progressiveness of all shape and color, it came as somewhat of a shock when I listened to Animals as Leaders’ latest, The “Joy of Motion,” and was genuinely moved by it. When the idea of writing a review of this album had been proposed to me, I was, in a word, trepidatious. The anxiety of trying to discuss a band known primarily for its virtuosic use of 8-string guitars (the group consists, currently, of two guitarists and a drummer, no bassist) lay not so much in any type of contempt for the music as a fear that I’d be at such a remove from the music that I’d have nothing to say.

What moved me about “The Joy of Motion” is how it’s at once a very determined step forward and a sincere celebration of everything that came before it. Listening to the record, you get the very definite sense that Animals as Leaders are not only trying to embed the entire history of music within their songs but also anticipate the course music will take in the next 5, 10, or 20 years. Because there are no lyrics on The Joy of Motion, and no story is being told in the traditional sense, the songs function almost as characters, each with his or her own richly developed personality. Every song has its moments of calm and mania, of melancholy and ecstasy, of skull-crushing violence and gentleness. By each song’s end, you can almost make out the form of the character being described by every note and drum beat. “The Joy of Motion” leaves you feeling like you just finished a novel in just under an hour, and for that hour lived intensely in the world of the characters Animals as Leaders so precisely, so elegantly limned for you.

Have Another Listen: Kevin Morby’s Harlem River

Written by: Jimmy McQuade

Date: September 2nd, 2014

On the Friday before last, Kevin Morby (best known as bassist of the psych-folk outfit Woods and singer/guitarist of winsome garage-rock band The Babies) played a set of solo material from 2013’s “Harlem River” at Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The show was an intimate one, which was not so much a consequence of the venue’s small size - surprisingly little nudging was required to secure a spot up front – but a result of the inherent intimacy of Kevin Morby’s songwriting.
Appearing on stage in a slightly oversized red button-down to match his candy-red Jaguar, Kevin Morby seems exhausted - the bags under his eyes hung so prominently on his face that it seemed at first glance as though he’d been in a brawl the night before. Morby’s appearance onstage gave new significance and just plain truth to the lyrics of “Harlem River’s” opening track, “Miles, Miles, Miles:” “If y’knew the depths I’d wandered/Or measure that hole that I’m in/If y’knew just how far I traveled/Then, maybe then, only then…”

More than any other album I’ve listened to in a while - the exception being quite definitely Angel Olsen’s “Burn Your Fire for No Witness” (2014) - “Harlem River” really lets you inside; as a listener, it compels you to nestle within the array of musical textures that Morby has so deftly arranged. From the shimmering chords of “Slow Train” and the meandering bass-line of “Miles, Miles, Miles” to the rollicking shuffle time of “Reign” and Morby’s quick, bluegrassy finger-picking on “If You Leave and If You Marry,” there’s a seemingly inexhaustible reserve of sonic nuances to be picked from the album’s soundscape.

But what I want to focus on here is Harlem River’s title track, which is the album’s keystone, keeping “Harlem River’s” whole airy architecture aloft. Clocking in at a little over nine minutes, “Harlem River” is a protracted love song to the city of New York, from which Morby recently left after a number of years for the warmer climes of Los Angeles. “I had kind of burnt out on New York at that point,” Morby said in an interview of the song’s subject and namesake, “and this area in the north of Manhattan, something about it up there is really nice. It’s really peaceful. I don’t think it’s the most desirable river in the world; it’s this dirty, gross river, but there’s something about it I really like.” “Harlem River” is sort of the culmination of the lonely wayfaring aesthetic Morby gropes at in the other songs on the album. With a pleasantly congested Midwestern lilt, Morby has found solace on the quiet, lapping shores that separate northern Manhattan and the Bronx; “Harlem River talk to me/Tell me what you think about/Harlem River I’m in love, love, love, love.” But it’s a love that is requited only after you’ve left for good: “And ride on/ that easy rider/Flow like, that Harlem River…I ride for you.”

“Harlem River” is also probably one of the most undeservedly overlooked albums in recent years. Note the nice but, finally, lackluster review on Pitchfork, in which Jeremy Gordon writes, “Harlem River is mostly concerned with different shades of subtlety, which makes the rare overt moments stick out like an anarchy patch on a wedding dress,” not a bad quality for a record to possess by any means, but then he gives the album a 7.0/10. I suppose we can argue for days about the arbitrariness of Pitchfork’s rating system. My recommendation would be to give the album a listen, or better yet see if you can catch Morby perform these songs live, and decide for yourself if Harlem River deserves what amounts to a C+. In my mind, it’d be a mistake to pass over this album too quickly.

Local Limelight: Jay Mickens

Written by: Jimmy McQuade

Date: August 24th, 2014

Take one part early John Mayer, one part Jack Johnson and about two parts Dave Matthews, mix them together until the lumps disappear, and you’ll end up with Jay Mickens, a independent singer-songwriter hailing from Prospect Park, NJ who can no doubt hold ground against even the giants of the so-called “Adult Contemporary” genre. But Jay Mickens is no one-trick pony, not by any stretch of the imagination. He can move seamlessly from the elegant chord progressions, the lush instrumentation and gentle melodies of the “Adult Contemporary” camp to the turned-up, distorted blues-rock that would keep The Black Keys on their toes; a musical feat of the highest order. Where a lesser musician would botch such genre-jumping and end up with an ungainly hodgepodge of various songs and styles, Mickens is light on his feet, deftly leaping from one sonic realm to another (and another) with a gracefulness and precision that almost makes you want to cheer aloud to yourself as though you were watching Olympic pole-vaulting.

On his latest release, “Inner Demons with External Means” (2014), which you could listen to on Spotify or buy on iTunes, Jay Mickens showcases this uncommon talent of his and then some. The opening track, “Always,” kicks off with an acoustic guitar chopping its way through your eardrums and bouncing around your head, against which a sedating electric guitar delicately dresses the rhythm section with tasteful and well-placed embellishments as Mickens sings, “You’re not the first but will be the last/You always had, girl, so much class/And I knew what to do.” The power of Mickens’ delivery does not come from any type of fervor but understatement. The distance and emotional reserve that Mickens sustains in his vocals has the almost paradoxical effect of allowing the impressions and ideas of the lyrics to stand on their own. So when the verses give way to the chorus and Mickens sings, or almost proclaims that “We all…want to be wanted/We all…feel it’s true,” he doesn’t need melodrama or vocal pyrotechnics to make the line feel true.

But then a few tracks into “Inner Demons with External Means” Jay Mickens throws a real curve-ball with the song “Movin’ on My Mind,” a nod conscious or not to Robert Johnson’s recording of “Rambling on My Mind,” probably the quintessential blues about breaking off ones shackles, literal or figurative, hitting the road and getting the hell out of Dodge. The song begins with the ever pleasant combination of finger picking and slide, the bass notes droning underneath Mickens’ blues licks that fire from the left and right. But what really tops off this song is how the intro sounds as though it was recorded in the same studio as Robert Johnson, with the same equipment. And just when you feel fully immersed in early 20th century America, the far-off, mystic quality of the recording moves into a crunchy and very robust version of the same blues. “I’ve got movin’ baby, movin’ is on my mind…” sings Mickens, not without the same reserve as “Always;” “You know when I’m leaving, girl, you won’t be far behind…” But this is merely a taste of the many virtues of Jay Mickens’ new album, if you want to know what else he has to offer, give it a listen yourself.

Ty Segall’s New Album Just Might Be His Best Yet

Written by: Jimmy McQuade

Date: August 15th, 2014

For a musician who has garnered a reputation for such a preternatural output – releasing under various monikers three full-length albums in 2012 alone – California’s garage-rock crusader, Ty Segall, has of late been conspicuously absent from record store shelves. Quite nearly losing his record-a-year stride, a precedent set and maintained ever since his first release in 2008, Segall’s latest effort Manipulator comes to us on August 26th, a little more than a year after 2013’s quiet, unpolished, angsty, yet satisfying Sleeper.

Manipulator is Ty Segall’s longest and most slaved over record, a 17 track double album that took close to 14 months to complete. One thinks of Steve Albini’s admonition to Nirvana just before the recording of In Utero whenever the term “double album” comes up: “If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up.” But if anyone could defy Albini’s claim, it’s Segall. Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene writes promisingly of Segall’s upcoming release: “Every single thing Segall has ever been good at is here, refined and sharpened and polished until it feels like a platonic expression of itself…. [Manipulator] is the stab at a defining statement that Segall has always seemed congenitally allergic to.” Greene seems just a tad pretentious and hyperbolic here (“…like a platonic expression of itself…” Eek!), but in my mind he isn’t very far off the mark.

For those unfamiliar with Segall’s music, he is known most for a delightfully manic, playful and fuzzed-out brand of garage-rock which is at turns menacing, hypnotic, winsome, contemplative; just listen the songs “Where Your Head Goes”, “Goodbye Bread,” “Girlfriend,” “The Keepers,” and you’ll see. The new album, Manipulator, or what I’ve heard of it (which amounts to about a handful of songs), stands firmly on the ground Segall has inhabited since the beginning; only difference I could glean is that the new songs seem just a little less rough around the edges, which I suppose is what happens when one spends over a year making a record – luckily, the results are far from lifeless, sterile.

The first song off Manipulator I came across was “Tall Man Skinny Lady,” a bouncy tune that just begs to be sung along to (even if you don’t quite know the lyrics yet) and opens with a wide-open guitar solo that swings like a pendulum to the drum beat established and driven through your head. “Feel,” released as the album’s single, is probably Segall’s most groovy song with a middle-section breakdown that employs both a cowbell and what sounds like a triangle as embellishment to the rhythm section. And finally, “Susie Thumb,” which is a pleasantly fuzz-fucked psych romp that could have been a long-lost record from Segall’s 2012 album Twins. I’ve got a feeling we’re in for one of Segall’s best records.