How many Lee Ranaldo records is too many?

I've heard Amarillo Ramp when it came out, and it sounded really good at the time.

His Sonic Youth songs are always pretty great.

I want Thurstin' to record something with Corsano & Flaherty, though. FREE JAZZ IS THE NEW PUNK DUDES.

I know. I blame the girlfriend.

I hate the lockgrooves...maybe it's better on CD???

well, is it?

"I had two CD's that came out in the last couple of months. One was this trio with William Hooker and Roger Miller on Atavistic, and another one that's just a duo of me and this young electronics kid from Toronto: we did a duo set up there. Stuff like that comes out when you have a live recording that sounds really good. And there's more stuff like that about to hit. I've got this other group that I play with called Text Of Light, an improvising quintet that we
play with old experimental avant-garde films. And it's Alan Licht, another guitar player from New York, and DJ Olive, or this other DJ, Christian, and either Hooker, or this other drummer Jim Bond. It's like a five piece, and the saxophone. We're having a CD that's coming out in May, and a couple of vinyl releases about to come out."

Chuck Eddy was OTM 'way back when he opined that you'll never listen to it, but it's fun to look at. (Only reason I still have mine!)

This is exactly why I no longer enjoy noise-the waves of condecension are so thick 'tis not even funny.

kekekeke.

least usefull post ever. I'll look them up when I'm home, I've always been a big fan of Lee's and have enjoyed his solo stuff and am suprised to see no mention of Scriptures of the something or other.

totally agree on "Genetic," btw.

A solo record of songs was completed this summer and slated for realease early in 2012, with band contributions from Steve Shelley, Nels Cline, John Medeski, Alan Licht and Bob Bert.

Awww, Bob Bert. Where did this come from? Cool news, regardless.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lee-Ranaldo-Official/158711314207687

so fucking pumped for that

Man, why wait? Would listen to that right now. Really excited, though not sure what to expect. It does say "solo record of songs", but don't want to get my hopes up too much.

i think in general the word on this record has been that it's going to be much more of a singer/songwriter deal than his previous solo joints. if people want to take a few months to set up a record they put a lot of work into i have no problem with that.

i'm seeing this thread title as a topic on maury

xpost: I get it, was kinda kidding cause I feel like this kind of record has been talked about (and anticipated) for a long time. Am cool with Lee making it as great as possible, if that is indeed what he is doing. Will actually buy it no matter what at this point, just to support Lee for all the joy he has brought me over the years.

Nels Cline being on it is some serious icing on the cake for me

Seriously.

Could have thought of a better word than seriously, but shit yeah, fuckin A

summery

keep lee away from that faggot beat poetry shit.
― Ian Johnson (orion), Thursday, April 29, 2004 2:33 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

:(

i bet i'd like this lee record? i always liked his sy songs. sy were my fave band in high school.

would def like to see lee play in hoboken with Rhyton, cuz rhyton are a good band.

hey, if it makes you feel any better, i don't think i've ever heard a lee ranaldo solo album.

i got a LOT of stuff to listen to...

i'm kind of in a record rut right now. not excited by stuff as much. enjoyed listening to 45s for a while tonight tho.

i'll hear the new lee record because [CONTROVERSIAL MODERATOR EDIT] but i'm not expecting it to become a favorite record of mine or anything. idk. maybe i'll be surprised. liked but did not love thurston's latest lp.

i have heard east jesus whatever-the-fuck

because i was a big sonic youth fan at the time that album was released.

think of me then, though.

teenager in the mid-90s.

dont it make you crY?

this first mp3 http://www.matadorrecords.com/mpeg/lee_ranaldo/lee_ranaldo_off_the_wall.mp3 sounds pretty middle of the road! but i like it, it's got nice guitars.

really loving the album. it *is a little more middle of the road than SY, but Ranaldo's a strong enough songwriter to pull it off.

that mp3 sounds better than most of demolished thoughts. sy have devolved into making 3rd rate malkmus-like jams.

amarillo ramp is a great overview of Lee stuff.

heavy "mote" tracers from the "off the wall" verse. nice song, not blown away, but as soon as it was over, i wanted to hear it again. catchier than most of from here to infinity.

i would hope that his first album of song songs is at the very least "catchier" than all the drones'n'poems records of the past.

ha, yeah -- seems like this is basically going to sound like a latter-day SY record with lee on lead vocals throughout. which is cool with me. looks like he's adding a bunch of tour dates, too. would definitely go see him if he comes my way.

god if nels is in the band for the tour too...

opening for m. ward ... wah wah wah
[and i even like one of m ward's records...just seems like a lame fit]

Like The Who opening for Enuff-Z-Nuff

whole album streaming here: http://www1.rollingstone.com/hearitnow/player/leeranaldo.html

this is great so far!

yeah i'm digging it. nothing that wouldn't sound too out of place on a latter day SY record, but some nice touches -- I think that's Nels Cline on "Xtina As I Knew Her"...

Awww, thanks for that link. Good way to end my work day!

no prob.
medeski bits are sounding pretty rad too!

Hah, forgot that there are a bunch of guests on this (besides Licht). Got no problem with Medeski, great player

ha, i take it back, the country rock/pedal steel breakdown on "fire island" would sound out of place on a latter day SY record.

yeah it's gotten less sonic youth in the middle part

man this is a nicely produced record, who recorded it?

i bet this will sound soooo sweet on vinyl

i think it's the same dude who did the last few SY records? John Agnello?

Tommorow Never Comes is pure awesomeness cause it steps completely out of the box.
the rest is more or less latter day SY, which for me means boring.

on the other hand, regarding the personal issues which evolved SY lately, he might need to get used to record a SY album alone:)

Man, this really does sound good, liking it much better than the live clips I have seen. The guests and added instrumentation really make it work for me, and so far the songs are all good to really good. Really, "Off The Wall" and "Angles", the two songs that were getting pushed up till now, are my least favorite, though I like them alright. Just digging the moodier stuff (not done yet though!).

First listen: this was pretty good.
Still, ambient Lee >> songs Lee >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> no Lee at all.

oh hey I am gonna listen to this now

You should, it's great - and better than (and different from) most SY of the past decade

I couldn't make it past "Hammer Blows" yesterday, giving it another try now but I dunno.

Guess I'm just not used to Lee as a straight ssw.

i did expect at least one noisy, out-there track, but i guess he wanted to keep this as straight-ahead as possible. really liked it on first listen though.

OK "Fire Island" is bringing it, this is much more of what I wanted

show you pictures of weirdos and lee ranaldo

http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/1651/johnandlee02qm4.jpg

Throwing in other SYers for good measure.

http://a1.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/118/7cae0693a8e442599bcc86fac96d8115/l.jpg

some serious weirdos in this pic
http://www2.pictures.gi.zimbio.com/Fender+Jazzmaster+50th+Anniversary+Concert+TsdPZidXA-tl.jpg

wow that's like the first picture ever where Thurston doesn't look like a dorky teenager - looks pretty old actually

Passed Thurston a few times on the Lower East Side the last couple of years and, yeah, he is starting to look only 10 or 15 years younger than he is, not 30.

Also, I like the Lee record a lot. In my mind it really picks up after the first 4 songs (not that I dislike all of those songs, I just like the latter 2/3rds of the record a lot more). Licht's playing on the live clips I had seen didn't excite me that much, and neither did the versions of those songs ("Angles" and "Off the Wall" or whatever), but on the record all of the guitars/solos sound fucking great. Some really good textured playing on there, and to my ears way more varied than any of the 00's SY records (not that I didn't really like those SY records either, just in response to the "this sounds like late-period SY to me"). Anyone getting that feel should just skip the first 4 songs and return to them later.

Who are the two blokes next to Lee in the picture Tyler posted? They look kind of familiar but I don't know where from.

that's jimmy rip and tom verlaine (rip is verlaine's regular guitarist). both weirdos.

Aha! Thought that might have been Tom, but he looked a good deal balder than the last time I saw him.

nels and thurston also making him look uncharacteristically un-giant.

apparently married life is bad for nels's health and seperated life is bad for thurston's health

oh i thought you said 'un-gaunt' like they were getting paunchy, nevermind

all i can really look at in that pic is mascis. so great.

lee is live on wfmu right now!

Hey, thanks man. Just saw this and am tuning in now ...

Ranaldo sounding great on FMU. Always was my fave SY member.

lol, talking heads cover!

Hah, awesome

Man, missed most of it I guess. Gonna have to dig through the archives to hear the rest.

listening to the album this morning -- not sure if it's a masterpiece, but it's damn good. pretty much exactly what i wanted to hear out of a "song-based" lee record. would love to see this band live.

Really harsh Pitchfork review for some reason, not sure what the point of it was. I'll bring a point up with Lee that I do with SY all the time: how many other 50-whatever-year-old musicians still trucking in rock music would deliver a better record than this? Not a REASON to put a record out, mind you, but on the scale of similar efforts to his peers, this Lee record is pretty great.

Yeah, I thought that review was overly harsh as well.

It represents a chance for Ranaldo to nab a headline without having to talk about Gordon and Moore's Facebook relationship status.
blecch. annnnyway.

what a terrible, terrible review.

I've said this before, and I'm probably just projecting on the writers here, but I sometimes get the feeling that they toss a harsh review at sacred cows like this just to sort of prove they aren't beholden to the canon or something.

Kinda got that impression with this one, especially in light of the stuff that guy typically reviews/covers, but I am on a non-cynicsm train in my life these days, and would prefer to just chalk it up to a "dude was not feeling this album at all" moment. Bummer of a lead review and all that, though. Plus, calling the solos "banal" was particularly rich. If any dudes deserve to own their sounds on a record at this point, Licht, Cline, and Ranaldo are high on that list.

I mean, calling Ranaldo out for using a trick like supplying menacing guitar underneath a pretty finger-picked acoustic is also trying a little too hard, as again: didn't SY establish a whole range of variations on this idea? Why not just criticize him for making a guitar record?

I really like Grayson Currin's writing in general and find him to be quite thoughtful in general but this review is embarrassing. I'm not even enamored of the record, but this just misses the point so much. The Lee band, minus Steve, played the whole thing at Other Music in NY last night and it was mostly great, despite it being only their fourth or fifth show together. Lee and Alan's guitar interplay live is terrific to watch. Two songs I don't like on the album didn't open up for me live, though: "Fire Island (Phases)" and "Stranded." I think it's a lyrics things but they also felt musically clunky live. V. good album overall though and will make a point to revisit it throughout the year.

"in general"

You know what, hearing the live version of "Lost" on that WFMU broadcast has totally won me over. Lee playing with a fluid, accomplished player like Licht totally changes the dynamic (not that I would trade it for prime SY mind you), there are some great exchanges going on. I am excited to see this band now, with a few more weeks of playing under their belts they could be pretty fucking great.

most of the the other reviews aren't so postive too..

http://www.metacritic.com/music/between-the-times-and-the-tides/critic-reviews

Don't really look at Metacritic, but took a peak now. Seems that 10 out of 12 reviews are "positive", giving it a score of 75 or something. Which doesn't mean anything other than that this batch of reviews generally state that it is a decent to good record (or something like that).

Out of curiosity, I looked at the Observer review, which was the other negative review. It was one paragraph long, most of which made no strong statements whatsoever (and seemed pretty positive actually), then the last sentence states that the record is sonically interesting but the lyrics not so much. All of which somehow added up to 2 out of 5 stars. Worthless review.

the gently major-label "Wish Fulfillment"

finally sitting down to listen to this now, sounds good so far. is it the same personnel for the whole album or are there liner notes online somewhere that say who plays on what?

It is not the same personnel other than that I think Steve, Alan, and Lee are on every track. The bassist Irwin Menken plays on most of the songs, but apparently Jim O'Rourke plays bass on a song. Any keyboards are Medeski, so he is easy to pick out, and Nels Cline plays pedal steel (or lap?) and then some straight guitar, which is also pretty easy to pick out. Apparently Bob Bert is on there too. Obviously I did not look at a track-by-track list of who plays on what, and I am not sure that that is available yet, but the record is out now, so maybe Matador has it listed?

i was a bit disappointed with this record on first listen. will have to try again. :( i had hoped to be bowled over by it.

I was expecting to be disappointed, I really wasn't moved by the first couple of songs that circulated (those live clips from the first show), so lowered expectations may have helped. It does make me wish he had done this in the 80s and 90s too though, as it has kinda convinced me that he may have pulled off some great shit without the SY modus operandi hanging over his songs. It makes me think that he may have a better record of this type in him as well, I hope he makes another.

What I like about this record is that it avoids the predictable guitar clashes of his work with Sonic Youth. I agree with the complaints about the lyrics, but other than that it's a very fine arranged and enjoyable record. The PF review is one of their worst. Today's review of the new O'Rourke/Ambarch/Heino cd is an example of how it should be: about the music.

but the record is out now, so maybe Matador has it listed?

Picked up a physical copy yesterday, but unfortunately there is no track-by-track breakdown which is pretty annoying, imo, for a record with a varied cast like this

And yet there's Lee in the Brian Turner interview portion from his WFMU session Tuesday having rhapsodies about how nice it was back in the old days of the album as this magical unit of music-delivery, when you could sit down and read liner notes and look over personnel info and groove on cover art etc...lol.

haha

Yeah, that's too bad, but I do think you can pick out exactly who is playing what on each song, you just have to listen to them to figure it out. Seems like an odd thing to leave out of the liners though.

yeah as a Nels Cline stan i had a similar frustration with an Eleni Mandell album he played on where the liners were not very specific as to what he played on but there were of course some tracks where it was obviously him

I like this better than the Thurston joint from last year!

^^^ me too.

Really loving this album.

yeah this is better than it has any right to be - pretty much confirms my feeling that I mainly stuck with SY for the Lee songs

I read a couple of the negative reviews while listening to the first couple of tracks, and nearly bailed. I'm glad I didn't. This is a good album!

BBC review by Spencer Grady: http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/6z5c

i Just. Don't. Get. people who can't write about this record without slighting SY's other work, etc, but i guess i'm pretty avowedly an SY fanboy by this point. this new lee album is thoroughly excellent, some of his best works, as was thurston's demolished thoughts, as was murray street, etc etc

i preferred the thurston album. at least it had tunes whereas this is noodling along. thurston did evolve whereas lee just does not change at all. does the world really need this kind of stuff in the 2010s?

what kind of stuff does the world really need? other than love, sweet love.

I liked new Thurston and Lee both, though they're very different albums. Not the BEST by either, though.

i think maybe if Lee had given the Shelley/Cline/Licht ensemble a band name to credit the album under it would've gone down better as a Wild Flag-type supergroup thing

Lee Ranaldo & The Angels of Licht

haha

just saw this: http://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/8797-lee-ranaldo/

fun article but i wish he'd been a little more personal and idiosyncratic with his selections, obviously Nevermind and Daydream Nation have personal significance for him but i dunno

yeah not terribly surprising stuff in there. liked the anecdote about playing marquee moon in the lecture hall.

Boring list, thought he'd stick a few more interesting albums for the 'guitarist' in there

And Pavement as favourite band of the 90s, jesus

the coda part of 'Fire Island' is lovely, wish it was the whole song

nice piece by Lee on the Dead, mentions a new alb:

http://thetalkhouse.com/features/view/lee-ranaldo-the-grateful-deads-long-lost-concert-documentary-sunshine-daydr#.UkCl8cWAD74.twitter

stream of new rather poppy album:
http://www.clashmusic.com/news/exclusive-stream-lee-ranaldos-last-night-on-earth

Lee finally accepted my FB friend request last month! Thanks, Lee!

really digging Last Night On Earth, only halfway in and am already pretty sure it's an improvement on Between The Tides.

Lee performing on Conan tonight!

i loled at this:

Mike Wolf ‏@thismikewolf 9h
Some might call it Alan Licht's nat'l-TV debut. MT @matadorrecords Lee Ranaldo & The Dust are on tonight's "Conan" (TBS) @leeranaldo

doing a live set on WFMU in about 10 minutes:

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/BT

Nice! His solo records are so underappreciated

playing sometime soon at the bell house with steve gunn & somebody else? might have a guest spot if you'd wanna go morbz.

Ian, pretty sure that Nathan Bowles is drumming for the Steve Gunn band on this tour, and maybe is opening the shows solo as well? Something like that.

New album on Mute tomorrow: Electric Trim.
Interesting roster: Shelley, Sharon van Etten, Alan Licht, Nels Cline, Tim Luntzel, Kid Millions. Lyrics co-written by Jonathan Lethem on six songs.

two tracks:
Circular (Right As Rain) (love this)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNK7N5L6jCk

New Thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2HWSUaqPd4

Trailer for a documentary on the making of the album (more info here: http://montclairfilm.org/events/the-thrill-of-the-creative-process-in-hello-hello-hello/)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNK7N5L6jCk

oh crap, here's Circular (Right As Rain):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2XRnzj-YmE

the album is wonderful. his best solo yet.

Listened once on Spotify. Some really surprising moments. I'm not sure what I think of the spoken bits but the melodic songs are hitting the spot, for the most part. Ranaldo, Cline, and Licht all playing on a Beatlesque pop record seems like a good idea!

"last looks"!

He soundtracked a 2025 documentary, just stumbled upon that fact today

https://m.soundcloud.com/leeranaldo-scmusic/sets/the-system-original-film-music?utm_medium=api&utm_campaign=social_sharing&utm_source=id_313799

Don't sleep on Early New York Silver.

I absolutely had, and will now investigate. His 2020 LP with Raul refree, Names Of North End Women, absolutely was slept-on, and is brilliant.

!! I love the Youngs/Refree record, need to check that out

The title track has an almost Graceland vibe, though everyone I've mentioned this to, including Lee himself, has looked back at me like I was insane.