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CD Reviews

Allen Shadow: King Kong Serenade
Blue City Music

New York city native Allen Shadow traveled a long way to record King Kong Serenade. Four years in the making, Serenade was recorded pre-9/11 in Nashville-where Shadow was employed as a commercial songwriter in Nashville for most of the 90s-and is a musical portrait of Shadow's hometown that contains an auguring darkness of events to come. The album's first track, "Downtown", is the discordant doppelganger to the tune Petula Clark made famous that seems quaintly naive now; Shadow's vision of New York is darker, grittier, and is played out in minor chords: "Platform cheek to cheek/the paper hides the morning geeks/signs read in shock speak/sunglassed to the knees/the drive for sex so sleek/it rushes 42nd Street." Shadow walks the same New York streets as Lou Reed before him, another bard of the underbelly of Gotham, creating verbal mosaics out of urban decay. (Shadow published two books of poetry in the 1980s.)

Shadow is joined on Serenade by some heavy hitting music industry veterans: John Jackson (played with Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams), drummer Paul Griffith (played with John Prine), and keyboard player Randy Leago (played with Janis Ian). Back-up vocal work was handled by Etta Britt, who's vocal on "You, Coney Island" is eerily reminiscent of EmmyLou Harris' backing on Desire for Bob Dylan.

An off-beat opus, King Kong Serenade takes the rock album down the path of Nick Cave, Tom Waits, and Patti Smith, weaving stories over minimalist backing music at times propulsive, droning, and plaintive. Shadow has taken off toward the idiosyncratic edges, looking under the unfamiliar stones for a true rock story.

-Liam Drauf

Allen Shadow will be appearing at The Uptown, 33 N. Front St. in Kingston for a CD release party on Saturday, October 12. For more information, call 339-8440. www.allenshadow.com.

David Johansen and the Harry Smiths: Shaker
Chesky Records

Face it: the music business is lousy with examples of cultural poaching, from Elvis Presley to Paul Simon to Eminem. Historically, blacks hoed the musical fields and whites reaped the royalties. Muddy Waters remarked that whites can play but not sing the blues, and in the years following the civil rights movement, most would pay lip service to the observation. But such thinking may have run its course; in 1990, white professor Lawrence Hoffman wrote in Guitar Player magazine that it was "absurd to think that the lifeblood of blues could be extended by anyone who, in essence, could never be anything more than a convincing, expressive copyist." The publication was flooded with letters of protest.

Dividing the issue along color lines is facile. Pioneers like the recently-deceased musicologist Alan Lomax (a white man) saved an oral history of early Negro blues and work-songs from extinction by recording them for posterity. Yes, Robert Johnson is likely never to get his dues. Reparations to generations of black musicians, like reparations to the descendants of Negro slaves, will remain a thorny issue.

A Smithsonian Institution colleague of Lomax, Harry Smith (also white), accomplished the same rescue mission of Southern blues and folk, issuing six LPS on Folkway Records in 1952. His invaluable anthology provided the material and namesake for David Johansen and the Harry Smiths. Shaker is the second album from the group, spawned by a one-night gig at New York City's Bottom Line. Their first album garnered strong reviews from both musical purists and wealthy white men simply looking to glom onto some free-floating pain.

Frontman David Johansen remains a chameleon. His metamorphoses to date include: the lipstick-and-scarves glam rock of the New York Dolls; priapic rocker ("Marquesa De Sade" from his solo Here Comes the Night album is required listening); and party-hearty Buster Poindexter. That he slips easily into his current persona, replete with hangdog look and unkempt hair, is a testament to his acting chops. But raspy deliveries of classics by Furry Lewis, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Muddy Waters, among others, suggest channeling more than mere mimicry. Especially wistful is "Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me." (Hosannas equally to Brian Koonin and Larry Saltzman on guitar, Kermit Driscoll on bass, and Keith Carlock on drums.)

All 14 cuts on Shaker cast a spell that pulls you back into the past. But if you're keen on paying tribute to the pioneers, track down the original Harry Smith anthology. Your purchase price may not mink-line their coffins, but paying a cosmic debt has to start somewhere.

-Jay Blotcher

The Fighting McKenzies: I Know this Lady

In the four years since the Fighting McKenzies' last record, titled, appropriately, The Fighting McKenzies' Last Record, the band has undergone some changes of personnel, with corresponding shifts in sonic inflection. Now comprising Wayne Montecalvo, John Hughes, Corliss Block, Warren Perrins, Dean Jones, and Chris Cullo, the band leans more heavily on vocal harmonies and indulges in fewer of the unidentifiable thuds, squeaks, and rasps formerly provided by percussionist Mike Crawly; and the addition of Block's slyly sexy voice, replacing the shouted narratives of former guitarist John Wirtz, lends the ensemble a more balanced vocal tone-a strange attribute for a group that takes imbalance to the level of art.

Still, the McKenzies are unchanged at their quirky core. Sculptor/painter/songwriter Montecalvo, who fronts the band on accordion and gold tooth, continues to pen songs of debauched cowgirls, insane cab drivers, and childhood in a Jersey factory town, all set to catchy, Irish and Spanish-influenced tunes that jerk at the ear like an errant fishhook. Montecalvo also scratches out some melodies on fiddle, which, he says, he's not very good at-but bad fiddle playing is appropriate for these songs.

If clear, linear narrative is your bag, you don't want to know from the Fighting McKenzies. The opening verses of "Main Street," for example, paint a typically jumbled picture: "One peg leg, one steel arm / Can't reach the pedal 'cause he doesn't drive a car / Up all the way with the radio on / Only way to sleep with the racket in the yard." All the pieces are there, but, like most true things, you have to put them together by yourself.

Montecalvo says he'd like to get radio play, and hopes the band's new disc will be seen as more professional than their last. "I'd like to tour somewhere," he adds. "Pretty much anywhere that would have us." That should be everywhere, but for now, look for the McKenzies at Waitstock (the Tom Waits festival held October 26 at Uncle Bob's Dead Battery Farm in Poughkeepsie). The new disc will be available at the gig, along with their first two albums and the coveted McKenzie Songbook, containing the lyrics to the McKenzie oeuvre.

-Todd Paul