New Music 2014 - Part 21 - The Secret Sisters - Put Your Needle Down

After a spell in which the 'New Music' series has predominantly been about UK based artists the pattern, like the weather does, seems to have wandered west to feature North American ones once again. As usual this is often dominated by ones that I have seen live, are going to see live or simply wish to see live. This one falls in to the first of those categories.

'Put Your Needle Down' is The Secret Sisters recently released second LP. 
    

They opened the Garden Stage at End of The Road Festival 2011 around noon and, true to festival form I got off to a very poor start with photography. I only took two and this is the better of them!

These days I am aware of this problem and, while I still don't really know why it happens, I am consciously able to compensate for it to some degree. One thing is evident here: that had I had wished to be up against the barrier, towards the left of this picture and a spot that would have been ideal, then there was absolutely nothing to stop me.
WTF was I thinking?
  
One answer, given that I only had the faintest idea about what to expect, is just how astonishingly good it was. The self-titled début LP had then only recently been released and I had not heard it. Unlike some such sibling-named acts Laura and Lydia Rogers really are sisters and, since these things matter more than they seem to in some forms of music, their home town is Muscle Shoals, Ala.
The title of this LP may be rhetorical; I don't know and I have no knowledge as yet of this LP released on vinyl. That is no matter but I can tell you is that it was considerably cheaper (delivery to the UK included) to buy it brand new and sealed (it arrived thus) on CD from the USA than to download it on amazon.co.uk.
That says something.  It took a few days longer; I'm quite down with that. I'll buy LPs direct from the artist if I can.
It certainly won't please everyone (and that I regard as a good thing) but for me the overarching thing about 'Put Your Needle Down' is that it is perfectly poised between being reverential of tradition and a contradictory need to seem to out-grow the same. Some of the new songs could have been written in the late 1950s or early 1960s except to say that they weren't.
There is a cover of a much more recent song in PJ Harvey's 'The Pocket Knife' and then, from the early 1980s, something more than a cover - Bob Dylan never completed 'Dirty Lie' and so, about twenty years down the line he offered Secret Sisters the demo recordings and a plea to pull it together, which they duly did.

There is a whole lot of good stuff coming out at the moment, and even the 'major labels' have stepped up to the plate, at least to some extent. It is hopeful, but tempting, to say that 'Times They Are A Changin...'. 

Thoughts on Music - albums for interesting times...

I've been taking a break from writing posts and one that has, unusually, lasted almost a fortnight. Suffice it to say that I have still been listening to and thinking about a great deal of music in the meantime. In part I have been seeking out new music, while also thinking about bands that I would like to see at this summer's festivals...
  
I intend to try and pick up the dropped stitches with a selection of music that I have had on-rotation during this time.  It comes with a warning: this is not uplifting music except that, just possibly it is comforting for its sense of hopelessness at the state of things albeit often in an abstract sense.  That things have changed has been deftly short-circuited by the recent Grammy and Brit Awards - both in the nominations and indeed the winners.
The relationship between Music and Politics took a turn for the better and it started to change in the Bush/Blair era but, I wish to contest, now the major labels are on the defensive the tide is going to be hard to change in the Cameron/Obama one.
The rise of music, largely without the political shackles that the major labels imposed, is likely to actually be one aspect of 'The Big Society' that Cameron can rely on getting in the real world. Punk was a total break.  It laid the foundation for an intelligent blue-print on which to call and promote; as happened, and with great success: that is grunge!
Tony Blair was "friends" with Oasis, in the so-called 'Cool Britannia' phase, and he also played guitar. It happened but was actually a poor publicity stunt. 
It is hard to imagine the possible invitees (except for TV talent show cast-offs) to such a soirée at 10 Downing Street, were one to happen in this new age of austerity; less likely still those, except the desperate, that might accept the invitation.
  
That is not to say that Britain does not have a wealth of talented musical artists, and ones increasingly good at taking their talent to export markets, for it does. Just now, however, is a time when they simply don't need that particular patronage.
  
This artist should be top of the list of "the uninvited". It is the eighth studio album from one who is never shy to pull punches when it comes to politics, subject or timing and therefore was only released on the Monday just gone.
  

Can one album cause a Government to fall? Well - and at least this is true - it has not happened yet.