Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:
stream full album ° seen/heard ° buy
seen/heard ° listen ° preorder
seen/heard ° listen ° preorder
stream full album ° seen/heard ° buy
Boom Cracka Cracka Boom
(Happy birthday, America!
Scott Amendola Band featuring Carla Bozulich - Masters of War (mp3) (buy)
I didn't mean to skip over Bozulich's Fibbers stuff, but I missed a day... and this 2003 appearance she made on Scott Amendola's album Cry seemed occasion-appropriate. Bottle rockets and brewski, apple pie and cherry bombs. Blow it up, scarf it down. Hooray, militarygastroindustrial complex.
The old Dylan tune still works. Of course it does. Don't you wish it didn't?
Amendola's a jazz drummer, and though he starts the thing on the snare he avoids the standard military ratatat. Bozulich messes with the phrasing just enough to keep you hanging on every word; you can hear her breathing, early on, inhaling and holding it. There's nothing subtle about the song's emotional arc - seething becomes outrage becomes grief becomes impotence becomes resentment - but the grade is subtle, the progression smooth. A remarkable amount of tension, variety, and movement for a song that's just verse on top of verse on top of verse.
This is the only track on the record on which Bozulich appears. That's Eric Crystal with the big sax solo, Barbés resident Jenny Scheinman on violin. Bozulich's longtime collaborator (and current Wilcoan) Nels Cline is on guitar.
I had more to say about all this, but those sentences have been commuted. Yay, America!