By now I hope everyone reading this, the opening salvo of my blog—or, as Chronogram’s Sharon Nichols so brilliantly spells it, blaahg—has had adequate time to tool around the new website and discover its riches and wonders. As readers may or may not already know, I’m the magazine’s assistant editor and also direct its music coverage. But an equally monumental part of my gig also involves managing the content of the new site and working with our invaluable web developers, Kingston’s Evolving Media Network, to get it all together and running as smoothly as possible. A task that at times admittedly feels Sisyphean, but it’s good work to do and it feels really good to do it.
Even more so when I look at the results, which speak for themselves. While there are, as with all new websites, some bugs to conquer, I’m really, really proud of the new Chronogram.com—in fact I’m blown away by it. And I hope you are, too. Not only is the overall look of the thing so much better, but innovations like the new category arrangement system, the new events calendar and business directory (maps! diving directions! distance mileage!), and the widely varied flotilla of regularly posting, scintillating bloggers are unlike much else online, let alone in the Hudson Valley. And the streaming videos and embedded music clips? Unreal. I still can’t believe things like that are possible. Just amazing.
But really I’m a music guy and this is to be a music blog. I see it as an opportunity to talk about whatever music-related topic happens to be stuck in my craw or my crosshairs, or something that landed on my desk that I might be into but for sundry reasons doesn’t have a place in Chronogram proper: Perhaps this means a gig or two that I caught over the weekend, or a CD by a non-local artist that I think deserves attention (or one by a cool local artist that we didn’t have room for), maybe a volume off my buckling shelf of music books or a few recent acquisitions from my never-ending, solvency-threatening vinyl- and shellac-digging expeditions.
So, then: Speaking of cool CDs by non-local artists, one recent surprise is Marcus Singletary Rocks (Aviation Records) by LA singer and multi-instrumentalist Marcus Singletary. From the look of it and the spiel on the accompanying press sheet, I was expecting yet another soulless and antiseptic bar-band blues record. Boy was I wrong.
On this, his fourth full-length, Singletary stays far from Miller Beer land, instead slaloming furiously between the scuzzed-out, awesomely lo-fi Cream worship of Grand Funk’s first LP and raw, punkish blues that would be more at home on Fat Possum than Alligator (those are the names of labels, folks). This guy really seems to know that, these days anyway, the blues need to be fucked up to still be vital. Check out the tracks below and tell me if I’m wrong. Anyway, ‘til next time…
Peter Aaron is Chronogram’s assistant editor and music editor. Once the vocalist of New York band the Chrome Cranks, he now justifies his record-collecting obsession by masquerading as a “musicologist.” The Chrome Cranks’ Diabolical Boogie: Singles, Demos & Rarities 1992-1998 is out now on Atavistic Worldwide. www.atavistic.comMore on Peter: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/contrib.php?id=263
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