Stagger Lee Saturdays - Frank Morey

Frank Morey (official AMG FB MyS profile) is a Massachusetts blues-folk type of guy, with a perfect gravelly voice. Like Waits and Wolf before him, he uses his voice to express not just beauty but pain and anger and wrecked ennui and all sorts of other things, and even occasionally that beauty but through a cracked window.

This version of Stag has a slow, tuning-up kind of start, but soon begins swinging hard and loose. Then it turns into a medley, with quotes from "Delia" (the two songs share a few lines in the folk canon), and in between there and the end there's also a rambling a capella break and a big finish, and a little coda at the end.

There are no screaming guitars, or drum solos, but this is rock and roll at its finest: take traditional American music from a couple of different sources, get a few talented people in a room and have them run through it, with the freedom to do what they want and follow their own musical ideas.

It's too bad I "discovered" Frank Morey right this second -- as of this writing I don't have the money or the time to invest in five new albums from a completely new-to-me artist, but I really really really want to. (His MySpace and Facebook pages also include a mindblowing cover of Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song" I might be sharing sometime soon, but you shouldn't wait. Click and listen.)

Frank Morey - Stack O'Lee
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Buy via Frank Morey

Stagger Lee Saturdays - Broke Toe Rezo

Broke Toe Rezo (archived official AMG) is another guy who's only released one album, so again there's not much about him online. From what I can tell, he claims he broke his toe hopping a train, and he also helps rebuild trains. He's just a train kind of guy.

This might be the most sadistic version of Stag we've ever heard, maybe even moreso than Nick Cave's badass version. Stag doesn't personally tell Billy Delion's wife to look at the hole in Billy's head, but he puts his body on a train. He puts his body on a train!

I'm not sure if this is, in fact, Broke Toe's natural singing voice (it sounds like he drops out of it at one point), and I'm not sure if I like it, but this man plays a crazy guitar. This is amazing slide blues work, some of the best we've heard in any version of Stag.

Broke Toe Rezo - Stagger Lee
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Buy from Amazon

Kevin Mahler - Pirate's Christmas

Remember last year when I talked about Suburban Sprawl's free annual Christmas compilation? Well, 2009's is up, but here's a look back at two tracks from the first two years.

Kevin Mahler (MySpace) doesn't ONLY write Christmas songs about pirates, but I wish he would. I'd buy that album. (He's also contributed songs to later editions of the compilation, and those are all good too.)

His MySpace genre classification is "Country/Rockabilly/Emo" which sounds ridiculous, but those categories aren't too far from these two songs. The first song is "Pirate At Christmastime," wherein the song's narrator pines for home and Yule logs and family. The second, "Pirate's Christmas," tells a more traditional pirate story, about a battle between an underdog and the bloody Bluebeard. These songs aren't for sale, so the buy link goes to Mahler's latest release instead.

Kevin Mahler - Pirate At Christmastime
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Kevin Mahler - Pirate's Christmas
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Buy Kevin Mahler's latest CD

Okkervil River -- A Brief Introduction

This poster here is not for the show I saw last night, but it's pretty, and it represents a few things about the band -- their darkness and their mystery and their roughness.

I was all psyched to come here today and write an impassioned love note to Okkervil River for the show they put on, but I don't have to. It's already been done by others.

So let me say a few personal things instead. I'm a sucker for bands that have a trumpet in them. If you're a rock band, and you include a trumpet, I'll listen to any album you put out at least twice. Okkervil River has a trumpet, and it plays the trumpet figures that haunt my mind whenever I hear a sad song, any sad song at all, on the radio.

Will Sheff's vocals consistently affect me emotionally, no matter the lyrical content of the song. (Scroll down or click to listen to what he does, even with a silly song like "Simon Smith and The Amazing Dancing Bear.")

So here are my three favorite songs that the band played last night. "Plus Ones" is a good summation of everything Okkervil River can do, lyrically and musically. "John Allyn Smith Sails" turns into a surprise cover, which seems inevitable as soon as you hear the first strains. And "Westfall" is incredible -- a driving rock song that feels like the band's audition for the next volume of Murder Ballads. (The song was inspired by a real-life murder, kind of, and the way that Will Sheff's coworkers kept trying to see the evil in the banal murderer.)

(Okkervil River opened for The New Pornographers. Direct your browser this way tomorrow for a post on that half of the show.)

Okkervil River - Plus Ones
Okkervil River - John Allyn Smith Sails
Okkervil River - Westfall

Buy CDs from the record label -- The Stage Names, source of "Plus Ones" and "John Allyn Smith."
Don't Fall In Love With Everyone You See, source of "Westfall."