The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. We’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.
Eyes Full, Zoh Amba’s debut long-player as a singer-songwriter, is built on an intriguing premise.1
Amba is a renowned avant-garde saxophonist. They’re also a small-town Tennessee native, who at the age of 17, left their hometown of Kingsport for the big city. After spending time and making music in San Francisco and New York City, Amba, now in their mid-20s, reconnected with their first instrument, guitar, and with the help of a couple of close collaborators, turned an observational lens toward the people and place that evidently remain important to Amba.2
That’s a Netflix series-ready backstory that could set the stage for a sneering prodigal child ready to tee off on their place of origin or a Barton Fink-esque depiction of the working class. Instead, the resultant album is a warm slice of alternative country with a noisy streak, and Amba comes across as someone legitimately concerned about how people fill their lives and hearts. The album brims with empathy for its subject matter while also maintaining enough remove to render a relatively clear-eyed depiction of the place Amba comes from.
Musically, Eyes Full offers few nods to Amba’s more recent history. While “Child You’ll See” ends in heaving squonks of saxophone, the album is otherwise dominated by booted foot-stomping roots rock. There are enough bold choices — redone intros (album-opener “OCD”), frayed fadeouts (“Blueberry Thorn”), squealing flares of electric guitar (many examples, but especially “Dead End Street”) — to distinguish Eyes Full from the many other recent releases in the alt-country milieu, but its base components are easy to genre tag. 3
It’s a sound that suits Amba’s voice, a reedy bray with ample grit that is bound to be the LP’s defining feature for most listeners. While anyone who’s listened to Wednesday, Waxahatchee and early Wilco will find even the most abrasive or knotty portions of Eyes Full’s music familiar, Amba’s blend of heavy drawl, quivering notes and pinched expression is one of one. It adds an extra jolt to the album’s already interesting songs about children medicated into conformity, handymen self-medicating into oblivion, piano-playing nuns and semi-successfully harbored secrets.4
In tandem with the unvarnished, and at times wonderfully loud, music that voice makes Eyes Full as compelling to listen to as it is to contemplate.
About the writer
Ben Hohenstatt
Ben Hohenstatt is an Alaska-based dog owner who moonlights as a music writer and photographer.
For more information, consult your local library or with parental permission visit his website.
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The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Year of the Month
A new Iceage album is now treated like a Capital-E Event. That wouldn't be the case without Plowing into the Field of Love.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Superstore, Season One, Episode Two, “Magazine Profile”
“Okay, that’s as loud as my voice goes, so I’m not sure what to do here!”
“Work It Off: A Guide To Injuries In The Workplace.”
“I get tired, Glenn, I’m pregnant!”
“Not today you’re not!”
“Thanks for trying.”
“Hey, I need one of you to help me give Glenn a makeover.”
“Which one of us was she talking to?”
“Whichever one of you uses moisturiser.”
“I just can’t think of any corporate jingles that have ‘God is a black woman’.”
“Hello. Welcome to meeting me.”
“Shart! For shopping cart!”
“I have a calendar in there of normal dogs.”
Mark McKinney’s slow and squeaky voice for Glenn is an interesting choice.
Jonah bringing effort and vision to his job is an interesting story choice; normally his kind of character is a slacker, but they’re going the opposite direction.
“I can’t compete with these geisha features!”
“Wanna chug these creaming sodas like a couple of bros?”
“Does it matter?”
“It should. But you’re really pretty and you smell like a pear.”
Love that we have some random shot of a nameless worker eating food off the floor. Flavouring a fairly standard sitcom.
“I was peeing! I had to cut myself off, I was very uncomfortable!”
“Is that really how people kiss now?!”
“It’s called slut-shaming.”
“No, he’s a victim! You’re the only slut in here, Sandra!”
“Are people still saying cheese?”
“I wish I could, but this camera only holds five million photos.”
“Don’t try to suck us back in with your fancy-ass lawyer words!”
“That wasn’t the contract, that was the directions to my hotel.”
Elementary, “Art in the Blood” – The penultimate episode of season two brings the revelations that Mycroft has been an asset of MI6 for years, that he’s been surprisingly good at processing data, and that he quit and returned only to protect his brother, who during his heroin years unknowingly helped a financier for terrorists. Meanwhile, MI6 asks Sherlock to help find out who killed a former agent (as quid pro quo for rescuing Joan), only he discovers there’s a mole (because since Le Carre there is always a mole). And Joan and Mycroft patch things up and hook up again, and sure enough Sherlock discovers that someone is trying to frame Mycroft! A lot of moving parts and some fun stuff here but it’s not as much fun as the mysteries of the week.
The Twilight Zone, “The Lonely” – Great cast, good premise, undercooked execution., More to come.
Frasier, “Caught in the Act” – As longtime fans know, Frasier’s first wife is Nanette Guzman, better known as kiddie recotding artist Nanny G. So when she’s in town, Frasier tries does Roz and her kid a favor to get tickets for a show. But as we saw way back when on Cheers, the sexual chemistry is still there. Too bad Nanny G’s married! Some very funny hijinx but we’re really way out there in order to get Kelsey Grammer dressed as a baby! Laurie Metcalf is good as Nanny G, but oh that Emma Thompson were available to reprise the role (but she was, ironically enough, making Nanny McPhee).
“The Lonely” I like except the ending is pretty meh.
You get a lot of very funny one-off gags of customers and workers being weird.
Enter the Dragon – 35mm screening at a cinema I’ve never been to before, really fun. It’s probably been about 15 years since I saw the movie, I forgot how much it feels like a kung-fu-ified Bond film at times, except more fun, and with better characters. Bruce Lee’s intensity really does stand out as distinct from any other martial arts protagonist I’ve encountered, John Saxon and Jim Kelly are wonderful in support and the hand-swapping, cat-threatening villain is perfect. Great Lalo Schifrin score, too. I’ve never gotten around to any of the other Bruce Lee films, partly because I know none of them are going to live up to this.
Pluribus, Ep. 7 – Where Manousos refuses to stay in contact or take help with the Pluribi to the extent that he gets INFECTED BY WHAT LOOK LIKE CACTUS NEEDLES in the jungle and still will not ask them for help until he collapses and is choppered out. (Whatever that plant is, the wound looks gnarly.) Meanwhile Carol is, like a lot of spoiled Americans, happy for any random service they’ll provide, even testing how far they’ll go to please her, until she can’t stand a month plus of absolute isolation. (Seahorn is devastating at the end.) But Manousos, much as he out-Carols Carol’s distinct brand of grumpy individualism, is Colombian, and probably knows colonial history; these bodies have been stolen, and “nothing you have to give me is yours.” The Pluribi are non-violent; they seem to genuinely mean well; they also have taken these bodies, colonizing them for their own use. (Hard not to think of how early Christian missionaries likely appeared to incredulous Meso-American indigenous people.)
What did we listen to?
1001 Albums, etc.
The Sisters of Mercy – Floodland: I’ve never been much of a goth sympathiser but this is good post-punk with some appropriately spidery guitar parts. A little samey perhaps but very enjoyable.
George Michael – Faith: a familiar pop blueprint: the upbeat songs are great, the ballads are a bit of a slog. I’m not sure “I Want Your Sex” needed to be NINE minutes long. But most of this is very enjoyable and some of it gives Prince a run for his money in the funky-songs-about-sex genre.
Husker Du – Warehouse: Songs and Stories: I really like Candy Apple Grey but I’ve never really gotten into much other HD stuff. This album has some good stuff on it but it’s less varied than CAG despite being considerably longer, so it wore me out a bit. Not helped by the production still being pretty terrible, especially the drums. CAG did take a while to win me other though, to be fair.
Butthole Surfers – Locust Abortion Technician: abrasive and odd, not sure I’d play it a lot but I enjoyed it as a 30-something-minute palate cleanser after the excesses of Husker Du. I was familiar with the “SATAN!” intro from the Orbital song that sampled it, but didn’t actually realise this is where it came from.
Astor Piazzolla & Gary Burton – The New Tango: Recorded at the Montreux Festival: twinkly vibraphone-led tango music, an unexpected left turn in the list but not an unwelcome one. Some of the dramatic, uptempo songs didn’t do a lot for me but the mellower ones are very pretty.
The Smiths – Strangeways, Here We Come: I forgot how good this one sounded, or maybe it’s just had a solid remaster since I last heard it. The Queen is Dead is comfortably their best album for me, but I like this one quite a bit. “Last Night I Dreamt…” is their best mopey slow song, maybe? And “Girlfriend in a Coma” is one of those too-short songs I immediately want to hear again.
Big Husker Du fan and all of their albums have the tricky problem of being mixed like absolute dogshit. Live seems like the best way to have actually heard them at full power. Similar thing with Butthole Surfers except at worst they’re a novelty band.
Inspired to listen to Hole’s Celebrity Skin thanks to a Pitchfork Sunday Retrospective and gonna give it a second shot today. I liked it but didn’t love it though this may be in part because I don’t particularly love super-clean late 90’s rock mixes. Apparently Love wanted to approximate the seventies pop sound, which is cool, except there’s a warmth to the productions of Bread and Laura Nyro I’m not hearing here.