Second Spinning Some Rock And Roll Classics, Spaced-Out Disco, and Trad African Beats

In the current climate of ruthless blog scrutiny, good records can easily disappear with little or no press and supposedly major albums are forgotten within weeks of release. With that in mind, we bring you Second Spin, where we’ll take a look at records that have either slipped between the hype cracks or re-evaluate albums after the press cycle has left them for dead. In this installment, Michaelangelo Matos gets into trouble with a classic rock and roll songwriting team, surveys the current “cosmic disco” trend, and is introduced to an eight-member Kenyan rhythm machine.

Various artists, Double Trouble: The Pomus and Shuman Story 1956-1967 (Ace) How should we look at history? As a series of peaks, or as a continuum? Pop fans would say the former, pop historians the latter, and neither group is wrong. But a CD like this makes me lean toward the latter, if only because it’s that rare thing, an overview whose valleys work as an integral part of its narrative.

Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman were one of the great songwriting teams of early rock and roll, Brill Building fixtures steeped in the blues. Pomus had polio as a child and began using crutches and wheelchairs from age six; some of this made its way into the songs, most obviously “Save the Last Dance for Me,” which the Drifters took to No. 1 in 1960. Other big Pomus and Shuman hits include Gary U.S. Bonds’s “Seven Day Weekend,” Ray Charles’s “Lonely Avenue,” Jimmy Clanton’s “Go, Jimmy, Go,” the Mystics’ “Hushabye,” Elvis Presley’s “Double Trouble,” and Andy Williams’s “Can’t Get Used to Losing You.”

All those songs are here, of course; the thing is, so are such avowed non-classics as Fabian’s “Turn Me Loose” (having just read and enjoyed Great Pretenders, Karen Schoemer’s book on ’50s pop, I have to part ways with the author’s assertion that “Fabian rocks”) and the Tibbs Brothers’ “(Wake Up) Miss Rip Van Winkle.” Yet this not only gives the comp some dynamics, it deepens the good stuff. And you get a sense of them stylistically: the piano triplets that drive Jimmy Darren’s light “Angel Face” come up to darker, smarter ends a few cuts later on “Save the Last Dance for Me,” and the songwriters’ relationship with Elvis Presley (who recorded a number of their tunes) often translates here into versions by others that hew amazingly closely to the big E’s. By this sequence, the actual Presley entrance–late, with “Double Trouble”–is anti-climactic. It hardly matters, though; the actual closer, Howard Tate’s great soul cry “Stop,” is perfect–as a finishing statement, as a recording, and as a summation of the Pomus and Shuman style on display here.

Various artists, Milky Disco (Lo) A themed compilation can be a chicken-and-egg game. Which came first–the concept or the songs? Depends on whether the record is collecting new or old material. Does it matter which? Usually it doesn’t make much difference; most people who care accept that single-genre comps are a very mixed bag as a rule. So you can generally tip yourself to a good compilation by title alone, and Milky Disco has a great title. You might wonder: all that melodrama, all that string cheese…how much milkier can disco get? Yet these folks have their ways. Taking your keyboards-as-strings cues not from latter-day Salsoul wannabes but from Tangerine Dream and/or Hugh Padgham, for example. In other words, stereo-demonstration rock’s vague aspirations are the primary material from which the eleven acts here draw their cues, then twist as necessary. Sometimes it settles for mere revivalism: Georges Vert’s “Electric Bird” is a series of crescendos that will give hives to anyone who can’t tolerate Winter Olympics themes. But while plenty of this is pretty gassy, some of it’s simply a gas: Six Cups of Rebel’s “Dubbe Ditten” takes its retro-futurist wah-wah and multiple keyboard tones into pretty cocktail abstraction; Daniel Wang offers an arcing, percolating opening theme; Quiet Village’s “Desperate Hours” dubs itself over the ’70s European drama in your mind. Even Studio, whose krautrocking West Coast is one of those albums I tried and tried and never got the appeal of, sound good here.

Kenge Kenge, Introducing Kenge Kenge (Riverboat) You’d think the early adopters who glommed onto Konono No. 1 might be equally ecstatic over this Kenyan octet, which not only piles on the percussion to work sturdy beats further into froth, but adds tunes besides, sung by multiple voices that take paths around each other similar to those traveled by their rhythms. But “discovered by the Ex” and “homemade instruments” apparently push more curious-onlooker buttons than, to quote the All Music Guide blurb, “the real roots of Kenyan benga music…Resolutely acoustic, they hew closely to the tradition rather than the modern electric style, singing in Luo.” Fair enough–modern electricity juicing old rhythm is an easier sell than steadfast traditionalists in a style most Americans have never heard. But the rhythms on this eight-song, 68-minute sampler combo are every bit as dominating and speedy as the ones on either volume of Congotronics, and while Introducing Kenge Kenge always seems a little forbidding to put on casually, it always sounds great when I do. Many of the tunes, particularly the flute figure of “Obare Yinda,” my favorite, stay just this side of pretty, appealingly weathered companions that know how to party. Ditto the singing.