Mark Dery on Samm Bennett
Samm Bennett, best known as a mainstay of the 1980s New York avant garde music scene, has a new album out, Roomful Of Ghosts. Cultural critic Mark Dery digs it big time. I haven't heard the album but Mark's review is fantastic in its own right. From Shovelware:
Call it slumdog gagaku. Or gutbucket p'ansori. Or a black cat moan wrapped around a lonesome train whistle, cured in Tokyo fog and nailed to some grotesque African fetish, deep in the swamp dark. If that's too clever by half, let me just say that I love the unvarnished honesty of this stuff; the pensive moodiness of "I Burned This Song"; the heart-stoppingly beautiful stillness-in-the-middle-of-a-fast-moving-boxcar vibe of "Until You Kiss Me"; the loping, hypnotic gait of "A Thousand Rhymes.""Alabama Song"
And the lyrics! They're uncut brilliance, reminiscent of the electroconvulsive blues of Captain Beefheart or Rauschenberg's droll "combines," Pop art mash-ups like "Monogram" (you know, the stuffed Angora goat with the tire around its middle).
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I haven't heard the album, or read the review. But Pesco likes the way Bennett writes, so the album has to be aw3som3!!11!!1
Is there a way of checking old google? I'd like to know how often "slumdog" showed up in news stories from a year ago compared to today. That comes across as mean, but it's not meant to be. I've just seen "slumdog this" and "slumdog that" a lot lately.
Great stuff! Seems like there's a blog for the album, too:
http://roomfulofghosts.blogspot.com/
No slumdog dis intended. Too clever, maybe?
BTW, I include links to Bennett's awesome-tastic videos and full-length song files.
You can pick up Roomful of Ghosts at your favorite independent record store, CD Baby -- where the artists get paid better!
http://cdbaby.com/cd/sammbennett