Rodrigo y Gabriela : Diablo Rojo

I really like Rodrigo y Gabriela.  First of all, I really dig acoustic guitar, especially in twos and threes.  I like the fact that they are taking the acoustic guitar and are expanding its capabilities, bringing both their native Mexican and metal influences to their duo. They strum and thump with the energy of a metal band, but groove and sway with latin soul.  I like them because in interviews they seem to be honest folk who really really just love to play music and want to share that love with the world.  That is awesome.

Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero met in a thrash band in Mexico City and decided to make their fame and fortune by ... moving to Ireland.  On one of their live discs, Gabriela tells this fantastic story about their move, the unforeseen complete frigidness of Ireland in the winter, their inability to speak nearly any English when they moved, and trying to convince their landlord to show them how to get their fireplace working.  The way she tells it, down to mimicking her own accent when she first got there, is absolutely touching.

"Diablo Rojo" (which my rudimentary Spanish translates as "Red Devil") is a very upbeat latin-rhythmed rocker.  It starts with furious drumming on the guitar body, along with some severely muted strumming.  This develops into a finger-picked version of the theme, which opens into a nicely strummed version.  The rest of the song consists of variations on the theme, plus a mid-song percussive breakdown.  In all, a fun tune and a great listen.

"Diablo Rojo" is from their self-titled 2006 LP, Rodrigo y Gabriela.  It also contains their cover of Metallica's Orion, which is superb and is what first turned me on to them.  It also houses their cover of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, which is also excellent and is not cheesy at all, despite the over-saturation of the original.  Great album, just bought mine with my Christmas money.  Go get one.

Hey, I just realized it's St. Patty's Day and this album has a vague Irish connection.  Yay me for staying topical!  Almost!

[You can listen to Rodrigo y Gabriela's "Diablo Rojo" by navigating to the post "Song053" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Blitzen Trapper : Furr

Another band I don't know much about. (The truth is, I don't know a lot about these bands. I just know what I like.) Blitzen Trapper is an 'indie' band, which I think means you don't get to use Auto-Tune, except maybe ironically, and they hail from Oregon, which you can actually hear in their music, if you can believe that. What all that means is they play rock that ranges from 'folk-informed' to ... 'grunge-informed,' I guess. Think: the Byrds or Bob Dylan to a less whiny Nirvana.

This particular song is very Dylan-esque, from the surrealistic lyrics, to the musical delivery (including punctuating harmonica), even down to the vocal style. It's a folk-rock number, with a dark, mysterious feel, dabbling in the supernatural, like an early twentieth-century fairy tale set to music. In it, the singer describes his transformation into a wolf. Not like a werewolf, but like, he wanders around until he's adopted by wolves. Then he grows fur, runs with the wolves for a while, and then wanders back to humanity and settles down and gets married. Really, I don't know what it means, but it sounds good when he sings it, and that's the important part.

This was another example where it was tough to decide which song to pull from an album. The band does a great murder ballad called "Black River Killer", which is like "Folsom Prison Blues" without any of the repentance, and I waffled back and forth, trying to decide which to post. I think "Furr" is probably the better tune, but if you have some way to check out the other one, give it a listen.

Furr tends to lean more towards the folk-rock end of the spectrum, but they do have some harder numbers as well. It was released in 2008 on SubPop records.

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Jake Holmes : Dazed and Confused

This one might sound a little familiar. It's a killer tune that Jake Holmes lays down; a dark psychedelic folk jam with a middle-eastern vibe about a woman who won't do right. It's got a mean descending bass riff and there's a fantastic breakdown in the middle where he taps a voodoo rhythm out on the guitar body. The whole thing culminates in a frenzy of strumming that stops so dead, you'd think they accidentally pulled the plug on the four-track.

Well, maybe they did. I wasn't there.

But, aside from being an amazing song in its own right, the song's got a history (which you've already realized, if you're listening to it). Yes, Jake came first and Jimmy came second. It's another in the long line of tunes that, er... shall we say "inspired" Led Zeppelin.

This one's available on his self-aggrandizing album "The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes", which I haven't heard, and also on the nifty compilation "The Roots of Led Zeppelin".

[You can listen to Jake Holmes' "Dazed and Confused" by navigating to the post "Song011" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Linda Draper : Mother's Little Helper

I said at the beginning, "The music should just be really good, or at least interesting." This one falls into the latter category. Don't get me wrong. It is good. I enjoy it, and I wouldn't put anything up here that I didn't like. But posting this song is more about giving you something different than giving you something great. I don't think this song rings with the same universal appeal that the previous posts might have had, so if you don't like it, I won't think any less of you. But you should still hear it, because it's cool.

I couldn't find much about Linda Draper. She's apparently a folk/indie singer, which means she's probably a singer-songwriter who either wants to be Tori Amos or Norah Jones. I haven't heard anything else she's done, as is the case with many of the covers I've heard, but I'm sure she's wonderful if you like that sort of thing.

Here though she provides a stripped-down take on the Rolling Stones' Mother's Little Helper. Draper lilts her way through the song with nothing but a little bit of double-tracking and a tambourine. Where the original rocks, this version sort of ... floats. The weird thing is, it doesn't really sound full enough to have originally been imagined as an a cappella recording. Even most solo vocals have a sort of weight that seems to be missing here. It's almost as if they instead took a song that originally had all the parts, bass, drums, guitar and whatnot, and stripped them out, leaving only the backing percussion and the voice. Or maybe it's just a matter of some weird equalization. Either way, the result is a flat, dark, empty take on the song, which resounds with the subject matter quite nicely and makes for a vaguely unsettling experience, like driving down your neighborhood street in a light snow at three in the morning: familiar, yet eerie.

Mother's Little Helper can be found on Linda's 2009 album Bridge and Tunnel.

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