Maria Taylor, Lynn Teeter Flower (Saddle Creek) — The former half of Azure Ray, Taylor is becoming recognized as the more reserved of the pair, the more musically pure, the more emotionally naked. And while the debut (11:11) was a strong beginning, this one takes her closer to where she’s headed, but doesn’t quite get there, probably because she still can’t quite let go of her sepia-toned past. She certainly tries. Opener “A Good Start” would be a hit in any other era; the back-beat rocker that recalls Buckingham/Nicks would fit right in between other AOR staples if it didn’t sound so good. “Clean Getaway,” an acoustic weeper about escape, isolation and regret, epitomizes the Azure Ray sound sans the harmonies. When there are harmonies, it’s Maria on Maria, the edges so close together that you lose sight of the overlap that makes them necessary in the first place. Stylistically, there are similarities to Aimee Mann (and producer Jon Brion), Suzanne Vega, and McLachlan. It’s Taylor’s melodies that set it apart, along with the experiments, some successful (the rural-flavored “The Ballad of Sean Foley,” co-written by Conor Oberst and Dan McCarthy), some failed (“Irish Goodbye,” with it’s Team Rigge rap). Rating: Yes

Column 120: Happy Hollow Offramp

Cursive, NYT, Li’l Brazil, Monroes…

This week, a hodgepodge starting with some Cursive news. I got an e-mail from a reader named Adrian who asked about Clint Schnase’s status with Cursive. “I saw them on Saturday at their SXSW showcase and they were playing with a different drummer,” she wrote, “and today I look on Wikipedia and apparently he’s a former member now.”

Wikipedia, as we all know, is notoriously inaccurate when it comes to things like this, just ask Sinbad. So I checked cursivearmy.com and, of course, saddle-creek.com. Both listed Schnase as being in the band. Still, I went ahead and asked Saddle Creek Records executive Jason Kulbel. His response: “No, he has definitely left the band,” he wrote, adding that there was no drama, that Schnase merely decided that touring wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be. “The band has had a few different drummers for the shows in the past few months. No permanent replacement yet, if ever.”

Schnase is one of the most under-rated and underappreciated musicians in the Nebraska music scene. His drumming is at the core of Cursive’s explosively rhythmic music, the bedrock along with Matt Maginn’s bass on which all of the band’s bombastic sonic freak-outs are built. He won’t be easily replaced, and those of you who never had a chance to see and feel his white-knuckled stickwork live on stage are the lesser for it.

* * *

Once again, The New York Times has published a feature about the burgeoning Omaha arts and music scene. “Omaha’s Culture Club,” written by author and Omaha native Kurt Andersen for the Travel section of the Times’ Sunday Magazine, includes descriptions of The Old Market, Bemis, and of course, Saddle Creek Records. There’s even a photo of Robb Nansel looking like he just rolled out of bed the morning after passing out in his clothes.

“We’re just sort of doing things the way we want to do them,” Nansel said in the article. “I like to believe in the concept of putting out a record because it’s good, not to sell records.” Andersen also quotes Orenda Fink, Sarah Wilson, and documentary filmmaker Rob Walters about Creek, and sums it all up with: “In short, Omaha’s cultural moment is all about the application of the great Midwestern bourgeois virtues – thrift, square dealing, humility, hard work – to bohemian artistic projects. On this, everyone agrees.” Well, not everyone. Beyond hard work, there are these little things called talent and creativity that also play a factor. Still, it’s a well-written piece and good publicity for the city, even though it continues to galvanize the idea that Omaha’s music scene is defined solely by Saddle Creek and its bands. Guess that’s the way it’s always going to be.

* * *

Finally, some thoughts on last weekend’s best live shows. Friday night was Little Brazil’s CD release party — complete with balloons — at Sokol Underground. Frontman Landon Hedges proved he’s a crooner, an Omaha-style indie singer cut from the same cloth as Tim Kasher (a la The Good Life, not Cursive). Every time I see him with his just-woke-up hair and cheap wire-frame glasses I think of Corey Haim as Lucas or a bespectacled Bobby Brady, age 13. His voice matches his appearance — an unpretentious caterwaul that has no problem reaching for the high notes at the peak of a heart-wailing phrase. Little Brazil’s music isn’t exactly a bold, new direction in the world of indie rock. You got your cool guitar riffs, your lean bass lines, your thunderous drums (Oliver Morgan is always at his best every time I see him on stage — he has no second gear), all coming together to form a verse-verse-verse song (whatever happened to the chorus?) that builds to a predictable — if satisfying — “big ending.” But it’s Hedges’ Bobby-at-13 voice, in all its simple honesty, that makes the band stand out.

Saturday night was spent at O’Leaver’s experiencing The Monroes, a band that doesn’t get better or worse — they just keep doing what they’ve been doing for what seems like forever, reaching back to Pioneer Disaster and Frontier Trust a decade ago. At the core is ageless wonder Gary Dean Davis who has lost none of the high-jumping panache that he had when he was bouncing around The Cog Factory and Howard St. Tavern stages back in the ’90s. If you’ve seen them before, then you’ve seen them, and there’s a certain satisfaction to their consistency, as well as when they deviate from the norm. The deviation comes in the form of Lincoln Dickison, whose guitarwork is as unpredictable as it is bone-jarring. There’s an almost athletic quality to Lincoln’s playing that — to me — raises The Monroes slightly above Gary Dean’s former projects. Frontier Trust was always fun-loving tractor punk. The Monroes, on the other hand, rumble through their set in darker shades of John Deere green, a metallic green at that.

“‘We’re just sort of doing things the way we want to do them,’ Nansel said. Because Omaha is a cheap place to live – a 1,300-square-foot loft in the Old Market rents for $575 a month – he and his musicians are spared the financial anxiety of places like New York and L.A. ‘I like to believe in the concept of putting out a record because it’s good,’ he said, ‘not to sell records.’ Saddle Creek releases six albums a year and has repeatedly turned down offers to be acquired by a big label.”

Column 119: The Hits of 1957
Simpler times, better times.

When it comes to pop music, it was all about love in 1957. There was no “why me?” mourning and personal despair, no self-reflective self-important aggrandizements. No gnashing of teeth and clenched fists held to the sky. Certainly no calling out of personal demons — yours or theirs. No dopey political tripe or nuanced hidden (or obvious) messages that reflected sad and/or bitter images of Our Broken World.

And certainly no irony.

The music of 1957 was laser-targeted (before there were lasers) directly and solely at one subject and one subject alone, with utmost sincerity and without hang-ups and hard-ons (in fact, fully clothed, with both feet on the floor at all times, please. Thank you.).

A couple weeks ago I submerged myself in the music of 1957 in an effort to capture the mood of the era. The reason: My parents’ 50th wedding anniversary and the party held to celebrate their unbelievable achievement. The fact that my mother put up with my father for that many years is an unmatched testament to the potential of human tolerance as well as her lack of common sense (You know I’m just kidding, folks. Really.).

Because I write about music and because I know how to use iTunes, I was placed in charge of gathering the appropriate collection of songs for the soirée. The goal was to create as much of a mood as one could within the fluorescent-lit linoleum-tiled confines of the St. John the Baptist reception hall in Ft. Calhoun.

Google was my first move. Picking up the phone and calling my parents was the second. I ran down the list of hit-makers of ’57 to see who they liked, didn’t like or simply recognized.

Quickly cast aside was The Bobbettes (Huh?), Pat Boone (Uh, no) and Elvis. Back then you were either an Elvis person or you weren’t, and my parents didn’t seem like Elvis people to me. I don’t remember hearing many Elvis records growing up; instead, there was lots of Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass.

Other casualties of memory loss were Jill Corey (“Love Me to Pieces”), The Dell-Vikings (“Come Go With Me”), The Hilltoppers (“Marianne”), Danny and the Juniors (“At the Hop”) and on and on. Reading off those names was met by silence on the other end of the line.

How about Perry Como? Oh yes, they liked him, and Nat King Cole, Andy Williams, Sinatra and Johnny Mathis. By the end of our conversation, a solid list of artists revealed itself, along with a new and different image of my parents and the simple, innocent, and fun world that they grew up in. The play list looked like this:

Perry Como, “Just Born (To Be Your Baby)”
The Ames Bros., “Melodie D’Amour (Melody of Love)”
Perry Como, “Round and Round”
Nat King Cole, “Send for Me”
Johnny Mathis, “It’s Not for Me to Say”
Andy Williams, “I Like Your Kind of Love”
Sonny James, “Young Love”
The Rays, “Silhouettes”
Andy Williams, “Butterfly”
Johnny Mathis, “Chances Are”
Sam Cooke, “You Send Me”
The Crickets, “That’ll Be the Day”
Patti Page, “Old Cape Cod”
Billy Williams, “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Right Myself a Letter”
Jimmie Rodgers, “Sweeter Than Wine”
Harry Belafonte, “Jamaica Farewell”
The Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”
Louie Armstrong, “A Fine Romance”
Frank Sinatra, “All the Way”

The music generally fell into two categories: hip finger-snappers like Williams, Como, Rodgers and The Everly Brothers that you could imagine playing in the background as my dad waved my mom to jump on into the convertible we’re headed to Tiner’s for a shake; and the sweet, romantic, head-on-your-shoulder slow-dancers like Patti Page, The Rays, Sam Cooke, Sinatra and of course Johnny Mathis. Little did they know that the silly grin that Mathis was wearing was meant for a guy, not a gal, but then again, gay people didn’t exist in 1957. At least not in popular culture.

The one thing every song had in common was its dedication to true love, pure and simple, for each other, completely selfless. It was a time before the Beatles and the Stones, when rock ‘n’ roll was just emerging from the underground, its R&B roots firmly planted decades earlier in a hidden black world.

Imagine what kids 50 years from now will choose to represent the current era of popular music: The Fray, Arcade Fire, Fall Out Boy, Justin Timberlake, Notorious B.I.G., Gwen Stefani. Big, boasting, over-sexed, self-important blow-hards who wouldn’t know love if it kneed them in the bling-bling. It’s enough to make you scratch your head and wish for a second coming of Como.

Well, the 1957 CD did its job, providing the necessary background music while relatives and friends ate wedding cake and talked about the old days. The better days? Maybe, though there are still plenty of good days ahead for my folks, for my family, for all of us.

Happy anniversary, mom and dad.