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(Tee Pee, 2009)
About four years ago, I was making money on the side by transcribing interview tapes for a book about music videos. One of them was with a very famous director, who had a funny anecdote involving Michael Jackson. Since the story didn’t make it into the book but still gets me tittering every time I think about it, I’ll (unethically?) post it here for all you billions of readers to enjoy:
“Vincent came in and I was just delighted to meet Vincent Price. … Then he said to me, ‘Can you help me?’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He says, ‘I did this vocal for Michael, he asked me to do it, and they paid me scale. I have a vocal on the biggest-selling album of all time and I get no money.’ … So anyway, years later, I’m at the Tower Records on Sunset, and it’s late at night, eleven o’clock, on a Saturday night. I was with my son, who was quite little. And there’s Vincent Price. And this is when the first scandals were starting with Mike, years later. And Vincent booms out to me, in that voice, you know, powerfully, ‘What do you think about our friend Michael?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I want to think that it’s untrue.’ And Vincent says, so everyone can hear him, ‘WELL HE CERTAINLY FUCKED ME.’”
And what of Hopewell? Well, it bums me out to report that their new album, which sees the band continue its rapid evolution into a psych-tinged theatrical-rock act, is a far less entertaining affair than the crude utterances of Vincent Price. The Birds of Appetite was the first of their records to really display this change of direction (though, in retrospect, it’s clear that the seeds of their current sound were present in Jason Russo’s work from the beginning), but that album succeeded precisely because it didn’t go for the non-stop heavy-handed dramatics that sink most of Good Good Desperation, from the apocalyptic lyrics to the experimental missteps to Russo’s high-pitched, curiously Perry Farrell-esque wailing. The whole thing’s better labeled a disappointment than a disaster, and there are a few high points, particularly the 7”-worthy title track’s glammy, druggy stomp, which is more or less the band’s earlier “Calcutta” shoved through some fucked T. Rex filter. The B-side of the single, “Opus Part II” (an edited version of the album’s “Preamble Part II”), showcases some ho-hum harmonized sighing a la the Beach Boys’ “Our Prayer” before bursting into full-band, Big Rock gestures. Eh. Certainly no need at this point to panic in the streets and swear off Hopewell – heck, this 7” is pretty darn ownable – but the group’s recent material marks an obvious low.
(Cutty Shark, 2001)
Looks like the local weather gods – vinyl fans, apparently – listened to the internet sobbings of Jason Seven Inches and I Think I Hate My 45s Me, because today the neverending rain actually held off long enough to allow me to attend a minor league baseball game. And not only did I receive a free Barack Obama bobblehead at the gate, but I, a betting man, also got to make a wager with my companion concerning one Daniel April, a left-handed reliever outta Colorado who made his professional debut in this very game. My GUARANTEE is that this guy is going to make it to the major leagues some day, even if it’s just for one pitch five or six years down the road. Yes, I GUARANTEE IT! Now, is that because I have a sharp scouting eye and could see something special over the one-and-a-third innings April threw for the short-season Hudson Valley Renegades tonight? Heck no! It’s because he’s a left-handed reliever! All of those guys get called up sooner or later, schlubs or otherwise! So here’s hoping you make a fine career of it, young Daniel April, and here’s hoping I collect a cool FIVE BUCKS in the not-too-distant future.
BUT. On a more serious note, as a wise man once observed, the word “baseball” ends with two L’s. As does the word, or shall we say band name, “Hopewell.” And that’s an eerie yet excellent point, wise man!OK, all classic segues aside, what was Hopewell getting itself up to in 2001? Well, other than releasing the gooey, hard-hitting druggernaut pop LP The Curved Glass (most of which had been recorded four years earlier!), these fellers from upstate NY were busy dribbling out 7”s and EPs chock fulla porky-prime cuts. Like “The Angel is My Watermark,” a rompin’, stompin’ single-edit of the album’s best track, one that’s heavy on the toms, the fuzz, and the melodic knife-twisting, a perfect blend of ’90s space-rock and millennial Fridmann bombast. Lunar pomp? Yes! WOW! A song this swell certainly deserves to be heard in four different incarnations, and thankfully that’s just what Hopewell offered at the time: The LP contains both the “standard” “Angel” and an instrumental reprise; the 7” has the truncated “North Atlantic Edit” (first released on a 2000 Fierce Panda multi-artist EP called “Clooney Tunes”); and the CD EP features a full-length mix that joins the two sections from the album into one ultimate version. Yeepers! Also included on the 7” and the EP, “Incantatio” is an experimental zone-out that moves from hushed lullaby to rhythm-centric tribal-clomp; it’s interesting and worth hearing, but seems to belong more to the band’s earlier, “freer” phase than to the more carefully-structured act it was by now evolving into. And while that semi-schizophrenia of vision would soon be resolved after a few years and a few lineup changes on The Birds of Appetite, these 2000/2001 releases still represent, for better or worse (mostly the former), the most interesting and varied phase of Hopewell’s career – the period while the band was “mature,” essentially, but still figuring out exactly what it wanted to do and be.
(Zeal, 2000)Hopewell’s second album, The Curved Glass, eliminates some of the noisy jamminess of the debut in favor of greater concision and a stronger pop influence, and does so without neutering the group’s decidedly crunchy sound. Nifty trick! Released as a teaser 7” by a Belgian label, the dense “Small Places” emphasizes a stabbing, rhythmic keyboard loop and Jason Russo’s whispery croon, though there’s still an undercurrent of distorted guitar that erupts between verses and ultimately brings the song to a sudden, crashing close. A bit too simple in its construction and abrupt in its ending, this isn’t one of the album’s best tracks, but that plunk-plunk-plunk loop is at least memorable, and the song effectively points the way towards the band’s more pop/rock-based future. The B-side is the “Egoless Mix” of “Sunny Days,” a lengthy ditty that originally appeared in nearly identical form on the impossible-to-find “Purple Balloon” EP. There’s a rootsy, gently zonked feel to the song that’s reminiscent of ’70s Neil Young crossed with early Mercury Rev – dig that flute – so you can betcha that hazy bliss is pretty much the name of this game (& it is!). Overall, it’s a better-than-decent single, yes, but since you can get both tracks elsewhere with a little searching, there’s no need to pick this one up unless, defying all normal standards of taste, you happen to get off on the ug sleeve art.And now, as an unrelated postscript, let me become the millionth crybaby to whine that the non-stop rain we’ve been having in New York City this June is utterly miserable. The canceled ballgames, bikerides, picnics, stoopsales, and leisurely strolls… those I can handle. I’ll even tolerate the humidity. No, for me, the final straw came yesterday afternoon, when I was caught in a sudden downpour that splattered with hateful precipitation the Moody Blues LPs I’d just bought at a flea market. Fists a-clenched and a-shaking, I screamed to the cloudy heavens above: Have you, o rain, no sense, no decency?! Water must never, NEVER come into contact with Caught Live +5! Now, please, for the love of Mike Pinder, GIVE US CLEAR WEATHER.
(Priapus, 1997)
Like many people, I imagine, I first got into Hopewell through the Mercury Rev connection – frontman Jason Russo and his brother Justin were in the Rev touring band through the late ’90s – but, while it’s easy to pigeonhole the dudes based on their family tree, it’s important to recognize FULLY that this here is no mere JV/little-sib music-making outfit. In fact, Hopewell, excellent from day one, has actually managed to improve over the years while Mercury Rev has descended further and further into squeaky-voiced, nature-obsessed, pentagram-wearing new-age nonsense. In the band’s earliest incarnation, it was dealing in loud and heavy – yet melodic – spacerock, like if the guitar-crazy Priest Driven Ambulance-era Flaming Lips took a more stoned and deliberate approach to their tape-saturation head-music. “Stranger,” a single taken from the band’s first album, gallops and clangs, the crisp drumming and tasteful keyboard calling to mind Saucerful of Secrets, albeit with much added aggression in the guitar-roar. The moaning, late-night acoustic cover of “Paranoid” flirts with novelty territory, but it’s a creepy enough stripped-down rethink and thus avoids such a knock. It’s puzzling that the band has seemingly written this initial phase out of its official history (their website, before disappearing, listed nothing prior to 2001’s The Curved Glass in the discography); there’s a lot of great music on these early, spaced-out records, and their continued scarcity is a shame.
(Beggars Banquet, 1998)
Recorded during Mercury Rev’s quasi-breakup after See You on the Other Side, Grasshopper’s solo record essentially sounds like a disjointed vomiting forth of all of the ideas the band had toyed with up through that point – noisy freakouts, dreamy fuzzcrunch, jazzy mothball-pop, relatively straightforward “Something For Joey”-esque alt constructions, and even some evidence of an interest in mid-’90s electronica (a questionable road that was also walked by Jonathan Donahue around the same time – check the outtake “Serpentine,” his cover of “Bring in the Year 2000,” and his work with the Chemical Brothers). While not quite the missing link between early Mercury Rev and the band’s Deserter’s Songs reboot, it’s a pleasant enough album that demonstrates the breadth of Grasshopper’s interests while remaining tethered to the M Rev porch thanks to Suzanne Thorpe’s familiar flute. “Silver Balloons,” the keep-it-simple single, is the LP’s only real contender for radio play, its spaced-out, rudimentary keyboard and looped drums sounding like Spectrum meets Ultra Vivid Scene – fine, disposable candy for anyone who bumps rumps to either of those groups, and certainly better than the likes of “Hudson Line.” The B-sides are the worthless, sound-manipulating, non-song buzz of “The Solar Powered Hornet Beyond the Shadows of Overlook Mountain” and a demo of “Silver Balloons,” which, by subtracting the drums and adding both an electronic pulse and further keyboard burbling, tips it almost completely into the Spectrum-derived category. Must say, I wouldn’t mind seeing Sonic Boom attempt a cover of that song one of these days; he'd likely do it up real nice.
And: I’ve always been tickled that, whether intentionally or not, the cover photo is strangely reminiscent of that of Donahue on the cover of Deserter’s Songs, which was released around the same time. What’s the deal there? Is there one??
(Tee Pee, 2009)
