The Williamsport Guardian: B.B King and Cold War Kids

MANDATORY MENTION: As mentioned earlier, I write bi-monthly music reviews for a local independent newspaper, The Williamsport Guardian, typically reviewing several albums each column, as well as commenting on local musical performances and events. Because I've been receiving a lot of requests for these reviews, and as far as I can tell they are not as yet published online, I've decided to begin posting them here. The newspaper itself is always well-written, attractive, and full of interesting insights-- AND free-- so be sure to grab a copy if you notice it some where.

B.B King: One Kind Favor

The new album from legendary bluesman B.B King, One Kind Favor, is a melancholy meditation on the inevitable arrival of death, a poignant statement of gratitude and uncertainty from the 83-year-old master of the blues. The “one kind favor” of the title is stated in the first track, supported by the slithering percussion and frank lyrics of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s own musing on mortality, in which King repeatedly pleads a reluctant lover to “see that my grave is kept clean”. King’s own guitar is conspicuously absent from the arrangement until a characteristically terse solo toward the end of the tune, only occasionally augmenting his lyrics with licks that seem weary and reluctant, even sickly, in their delivery. His power is again on display almost immediately, though, in “I Get So Weary”, a surprisingly upbeat song that seems to be more about the sorrows of old age than the absence of a spiteful lover.

The arrangements, overseen by producer T. Bone Burnet, are all characteristic of King’s style: large, open palettes featuring the energetic drive of a horn section and the open-ended murmurings of organ and piano. The piano in this case is played masterfully by New Orleans musician Dr. John, a clear devotee of King’s who is both reverent and complimentary in his accompaniment style. King delivers his characteristically reserved, emotive solos frequently throughout the disk, playing as eloquently on upbeat numbers as on slow, morose ones, and with an obvious sense of melancholy not as apparent in the youthful energy of his earlier work.

As is the prerogative of blues singers, King refers to the ambiguous “baby” throughout the album, often in a mournful or accusatory way, but always with a pleading sense of powerlessness. In the slow shuffle of the minor key “Get These Blues Of Me”, King begs an unnamed loved one not to be angry “because I’ve gone away”, and intones “I’m just so tired of worrying, I don’t know what to do”. And when he apologizes in his deep, brooding voice as his guitar roars beneath him, and confesses his fear at what is to come, one can’t help but feel that he is speaking to himself. And when he takes the voice of a deceased lover on the album’s final tune “Haunted House”, singing “I may be dead and gone/But I’ll always be by your side”, one can’t help but feel that he is speaking to us, assuring us of his continued gratitude and reminding us of the indelible footprint he has left modern music. One Kind Favor, though as upbeat and entertaining as any of B.B King’s recordings, is a meaningful artifact of one man’s fear in the face of death, and his wonder at the fragility of life.


Cold War Kids: Loyalty to Loyalty

Cold War Kids play a style of rock music characterized by blues-inflected vocals and a distinctly rural perspective on songwriting, creating loose, multi-sectional songs that seem to careen from one idea to the next in a guttural way full of energy, charisma, and surprising sensitivity. Lyrically, they paint bleak portraits of desperate characters, again taking a deliberately non-urban approach to hardship and poverty, a tactic that is refreshing in its honesty and unique in its insightfulness. Sonically, they seem less concerned with writing traditionally organized rock and roll songs than with shaping textures through their sparse instrumentation and use of ambient sounds, creating songs that are more similar to sonic snapshots than coherent, identifiable pieces of music. Coming from a group with less sincerity, these songs would seem amateurish rather than profound, but in this way Cold War Kids make music that is similar to “found art”, creating their “found” songs from sounds and stories that exist around them, and ultimately molding their environment into a work of art.

On their newest album, Loyalty to Loyalty, Cold War Kids continue this tradition, molding the sounds of blues, folk music, and gospel into a back-woods, truck-stop kind of rock that is beautifully eerie and constantly unsettling. In the atmospheric “Every Man I Fall For”, singer Nathan Willett murmurs quietly over a dark, sultry web of heavily-reverbed guitar and insistent drums, telling the story of a woman left broken by her attraction to danger (“Every man I fall for drinks his coffee black/’Love’ and ‘Hate’ are tattooed on his knuckles and my name is on his back”). Throughout the album, Cold War Kids reveal an intense fascination with the darkness of society and the animalism of humanity, but also a redeeming sense of compassion for the characters they portray. This juxtaposition of light and dark, despair and sensitivity, make Loyalty to Loyalty an intense, profound document of an effortlessly innovative band making rock music that is as vital as it is poetic.