motomami

Six guys plus some guests cutting it live in one room, no overdubs, which is the only kind of clean I trust, the quiet parts of Transmission of the Lamps sound like a room and not a file. Valley Bee and Snaggletooth are the funk ones and they're a lot of Tower of Power homework, horns locked tight and then everybody gets a solo whether the tune wanted one or not. Wichita Lineman with Kurt Elling is where I'd send somebody, Ott's arrangement under him is doing the real work. Fixins going out on plunger trombone made me grin. Low end's too polite for my ears, but I'm the guy who wants his hi-hat

LA, Kenny's own room up on Putnam Hill, four guys and basically a weekend, and it comes out sounding like a Brazilian record from the seventies that nobody in Brazil made. I got here from the Louie side and not the jazz side so I was tracking Nate Smith the whole way through, but the thing that actually gets me is Kiefer playing in these tiny little phrases and then clearing out so Carr can run something underneath him, they keep handing it back and forth like that for the whole tune. Blue Note has it mixed clean and open, which is usually where I check out, except nothing here is hiding behin

Carol City record all the way down, and that's the point, he isn't performing Miami he's just from there. Rugah Rahj gives him this mournful little piano and drums that keep backfiring under it, I came to it through the video first, which is less a video than five minutes of the parts of that city nobody shoots. I've had ZUU since 2019 and RICKY is still the one I reach for, but if somebody asks what Zel was doing that year this is the one I put on.

South Gate 2001, the record everybody files under the guitar era and skips, and I understand why, but Catastrophe is Muggs still working the way he always worked, low end sitting heavy, hats keeping that nervous little shuffle going under the riff. Wolbers from Fear Factory has a writing credit on it and you can hear exactly where, but nobody sanded the beat down to make room for him, which is the complaint people have with this whole album and it does not land here. Heard it off a burned CD somebody made me, still go back to it, still take Bitter over it.

Houston is not my corner of the map but the Lost Files stuff has been in rotation since I first heard it off a youtube rip, and it holds up on a clean copy too. Face taking on Black Steel should be corny and somehow isn't, he leaves that Isaac Hayes piano figure sitting under him and just talks over it, never once reaching for Chuck D's cadence, which is the only way anybody gets away with this. The writing about the cops and about who is owed what is plain spoken and it hits harder for being plain. I still take I Seen a Man Die over anything here, different weight class entirely, but a bundle