Quick Hits, Vol. 26 (Jose Gonzalez, Moon Taxi, Curtis McMurtry, Two Gallants)

Jose Gonzalez - Vestiges & Claws.  I think my friend Noah turned me on to this dude through his side project Junip when Junip was playing ACL in 2013.  This album keeps the same gentle trajectory as his past albums, beautiful soft-focus folky tunes that should all be selected for soundtracks of movies where a young middle American searches for something - love, happiness, his father, purpose.  I could listen to this thing all day long.  I want to make big fluffy buttermilk pancakes with this in the background while my dog snores comfortably in a patch of sunshine near the stove.  I want to play this while I drive across West Texas and watch the giant windmills lazily cut the clouds.  I want to lay in a hammock under ancient oak trees and have Jose himself sing me to sleep while pushing me back and forth.  Except, who am I kidding, I will instead do super boring work with this playing in the background for the next few days.  But someday, someday I'll go on an adventure with my wife to hunt down her birth grandmother in rural Louisiana and this will play as we pole a flat-bottom boat through hanging Spanish moss on the bayou.  Somehow, Gonzalez hails from Sweden, which means he should make the greatest music of all time with the First Aid Kit sisters.

The most popular song, with over 2 million spins in the week this thing has been released, is "Every Age"

That video is supremely cool - a wide angle camera is launched from the ground on balloons and rises up above a green field, seeming to show the entire earth as a small ball below.  Soon the camera is in space (or maybe just the outer reaches of the atmosphere) and still recording the earth down below, until the balloons pop and the camera starts falling back to earth.  No clue how they did they, or even if it was real and not computer generated, but neat-o anyway.

Moon Taxi - Acoustic on West 56th.  I really, really dig these dudes.  I saw them at one of the official ACL aftershows two years ago at the Parish, when Jason and I were going to go watch the Revivalists.  Moon Taxi opened for them and blew the damn doors off of that little venue - super high energy rock and roll.  I was a little surprised, as the college-aged crowd sang along with every lyric and bounced off the walls like they were watching their favorite band in the world.  Great show.  Well this is a "Live & Unplugged" album of their tunes, which sadly doesn't include "Mercury," which is my favorite of their tunes.  But it is still a really solid six song collection of their tunes.  They've got a laid back rock and roll vibe, kind of jammy, kind of southern, a little like an early My Morning Jacket to me.  Check out their Mountains Beaches Cities album sometime.

Curtis McMurtry - Respectable Enemy.  Grandson of Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, one of the best ever) and son of James McMurtry (one of the best songwriters I can think of) makes pretty dang good songwriting and music of his own.  However, his voice got my mind racing - who does this guy sound like? - until I think I figured it out.  Put the following three voices together into one in your brain, and see what you think.

#1 - His old man.

#2 - Mike Myers, doing Marilyn Monroe

#3 - Morrissey.

If you don't have the brain power to meld those three voice patterns into one, then listen to Curtis sing this first tune off of the album (although this is a relatively bad version from a live show, he's got no professionally done videos that I found).

It is good music.  Mostly spare arrangements like his dad or old Robert Earl Keen or Slaid Cleaves or other Texas singer songwriter types.  But his voice mannerisms are distracting to me - its that Mike Myers parody I keep thinking of - an intentional vamping, deepening of the voice to sound like a raspy-voiced female being sexy.  Or a dude wearing a bra and groping himself.  While I enjoy the music in general, I can't get over the fact that it sounds like he is joking with his sexy-time voice.

Two Gallants - We Are Undone.  No recollection where I found this band, but if I told you this was a set of early demos from Nirvana, I bet you would believe me.  Has a little Paul Westerberg/Replacements sound at times (check vocals in "Some Trouble" or the whole sound in "My Man Go"), and a Killers bent (Invitation to the Funeral) in there as well.  But I keep coming back to Nirvana.  Seriously, go listen to "We Are Undone" and "Murder the Season/The Age Nocturne" and tell me the band and vocals don't remind you of Bleach-era Nirvana.  I'm not saying it is an exact Cobain vocal, he was his own amazing thing, but it sounds damn close at times to me.

Anyway, beside all of the comparisons (I apparently must compare each artist to a lot of people in this post), this album jams.  Wikipedia says they are a "folk-rock duo" from San Francisco, which is not the genre I would have picked after a few listens - some of the album is kind of chilled and maybe folky, but other parts are straight rock and roll.  Here is "Murder the Season/The Age Nocturne" - Wait for it - at about 1:52 the rock stomps in looking for his girlfriend.

Cool disc.  I'm going to keep this one around and pick it apart some more to see what else I find.