Review: Mark Bacino - Top of The World

As often happens whenever two or more pop obsessed people converse for more than 15 minutes, the conversation meandered onto the subject of Sir Paul McCartney. “I’d love to get Paul into the studio,” said singer/songwriter Mark Bacino. “I believe he has another great album in him, but he needs someone who can say ‘no, this isn’t to your standards. Go write something better.'”

“Of course,” he added with a laugh, “I’d probably get fired.”

Happily, Bacino is completely in-charge of his own artistic vision, a vision fully on display on his latest album Top of The World (available on LP and CD from Parasol Records.) Granted, it was a vision that took a good while to come into view as his previous album, Queen’s English, was released 13 years ago. “The songs were recorded at various times over the last eleven or so years,” explained Bacino. This long gestation period required a little finessing when it came time to put the album together. “I needed an old school guy to help the songs sound like they go together, which is why Greg Calbi [who mastered the album at Sterling Sound in New Jersey] was so great.”

Indeed, the album does hang together remarkably well. When I pointed out the album seemed to have an overarching theme to me, a man of a certain age taking stock of where he was and how he got there, Bacino responded, “If it does it was completely unintentional, but looking at it now, I can see how you might get there.”

The album starter, the bouncy “Kaylee Hughes” sets the tone of the record, being at once playful and a little cynical in its look at a woman who is a little too good to be true. “Flop of the World” continues with a wry observational look of the pop artist living in a world that very obviously doesn’t know what to do with pop artists.

“Not That Guy” a tune Bacino had released as a single 8 years ago (and which I reviewed at the time here) slides very nicely into the mix at this point, testament to the good work of Calbi and the overall excellent production values of this record.

“Shaky Hand” offers an autobiographical look at Bacino himself. “Yeah, it is just about something that happened to me. I have no idea what made me write about it. It isn’t your typical lyrical content. I will say the third verse is one of the favorite things I’ve ever written.” It is a poignant and beautiful track, a definite highlight of the album.

I pointed out to Bacino that I thought the album was succinct, coming in just a smidge over 23 minutes long. “That’s a good word for it,” he said. “In another interview someone asked me why I didn’t make longer records, but I have always thought the point of a pop song was to say what you wanted to say in 3 minutes. I like making something interesting under those limitations.”

Top of The World is more than just interesting, it is a seriously good listen which I predict will be just as satisfying on the 100^th listen as it is on the first.

Grade: A-

Best of 2024

 I'm gonna get a head start on next year's Best Of list. 

Toward a Philosophy of Recorded Music

There is nothing new under the sun. Well, for the most part there is nothing new under the sun, which is the same as saying there are a few things new under the sun. The reason we so often state there isn't is because we need the reminder that whatever passion or trend is all-consuming within the world we live in, chances are we've seen its like before. We should just chill.

Within the context of the history of the species, however, recorded music is new. We finally have a history of recorded music worthy of the name, an accumulation of material with the depth and breadth to make serious study a possibility and complete mastery an impossibility. Maybe in 1900 it could have been a goal to be an Erasmus of recorded music and have heard every recording then in existence. Today it would be impossible to hear everything recorded and commercially released in even a single year, even if you devoted a lifetime to listening to just music from, say, 2012. 

Recorded music has gone from being a technological breakthrough, to being a novelty and a fad, to being an art form and a form of big business, to being sown into the very fabric of contemporary life.  We know there was long stretches of time when recorded music didn't exist, but I doubt very much we know what it felt like to live without it. 

Really, that is what music is about for us, the feels. If you subscribe to the idea that Palto's Republic is really an examination of the ordering of the human soul more than it is a treatise on good government (which has always made a good deal of sense to me), the strictures Socrates makes on music are pretty sensible. When Socrates says the state should regulate the modes of music because if they change the entire structure of society, including the laws, will change with them, we can think of that as the reason of a person making sure they are not carried away by the music. Think of how we depict teenage rebellion so often as having a musical dimension. The adoption of a new style or mode of music signals the adolescents rejection of the old norms and the end of the old order. In such a reading Socrates understands the power of it all, he is simply counseling us to be smart about it. 

Are we? Probably not according to the terms laid out by Socrates and Plato. Plenty of us "get lost" in music. We turn to it when we need solace; we use it to set the mood, whether we are looking to boogie or looking to get laid; it becomes a companion to help us fill up an empty apartment; we think about it, we read about it, we collect it. Allan Bloom may have infamously complained that modern music was little more than "[a] prepackaged masturbational fantasy," but those who live with it know it is a lot more all-encompassing than that, and not in the Dionysian orgiastic manner Bloom was fond of envisioning. Music affects us and we knowingly let it, for good and ill. 

Of course, when Plato wrote about music he meant "music and poetry," as the separation we instinctively place between music and poetry didn't exist. However, of greater impact is the difference between music as the ancient world knew it and recorded music as we know it. Art has always had the potential to have political or socio-economic implications, but the world of recorded music raises those potentialities to undreamt of heights. Yet, it isn't simply the scale of mass industrial production that gives recorded music its extra power, it is also its continuity. Recorded music can have mass appeal, it can have niche appeal, and what is mass marketed today might be niche indeed in 30 years' time. And that niche musical genre just a few people loved forty years ago may be the next big thing to generation yet unborn. It endures in a way even printed music notation cannot as it is without question authentic. Is a piece Bach wrote for harpsichord authentic after it has been transcribed for a modern piano? It is a question people can argue about, but there is no question when you play Louis Armstrong's "Mahogany Hall Stomp" that you have the real deal. 

It is this continuity that allows recorded music to transcend generations in a way music simply hadn't been able to in the past. We often do tend to remain firmly within our generational bubble.  It is comfortable and can touch on our nostalgia and pathos for the people and places that make up our personal history. But we also can become time travelers, if we want to, or world travelers if we want to. It is so ordinary we don't even recognize it as a boon of civilization, but that is exactly what it is. There may be those who claim to long for the simplicity of life in the 1600's, but not me.  I want to crank some Matthew Sweet already. 

Screaming Into The Void

Don't ask me why, but I think I will soon begin writing more material for this blog. Part of it is I just miss the rhythms of writing.... writing something, anything. I got a time consuming day job, which is very different from back in the days when I was posting regularly, but that really is a big reason why I feel the need to write more. I don't want to write about politics because politics these days are... well, let's just say I find them lacking in good sense, decorum, sanity, etc. With music I always was in a sparsely populated country, and right now I can revel in the comparative obscurity. 

 So, hello to anyone stumbling across this. How the hell did you even find it? For all of our sake I hope I find some interesting things to talk about.

Genre Hell: Americana

Here is a definition of the music style known as Americana pulled from a Wikipedia article:

Americana, as defined by the Americana Music Association (AMA), is "contemporary music that incorporates elements of various mostly acoustic American roots music styles, including country, roots-rock, folk, gospel and bluegrass resulting in a distinctive roots-oriented sound that lives in a world apart from the pure forms of the genres upon which it may draw. While acoustic instruments are often present and vital, Americana also often uses a full electric band."

Well, okay, I guess... but it is all so wishy-washy. I mean who exactly is defining what constitutes "pure forms" of any of these "root" genres? The truth is there has been so much cross-pollination since, well, forever, that it would be nigh impossible to actually say where Americana starts or stops. It turns out it's a little like obscenity; you know it when you hear it.

Of course, that also means what we hear will help each individual define it in their own way. For example, a person who knows country well will be able to catch variations and differences that will elude someone for whom any twang at all equals country. The result is there will be an almost endless array of perspectives possible from which an individual draws their idea of what Americana music is. So what follows here is not an attempt to say what Americana as a genre is, but what I think of when I define it for myself and my ears.

It is some of the best stuff out there so let's delve.

Webb Wilder:

The Last of the Full Grown Men has been an electrifying recording artist since 1986's It Came From Nashville was released. From day one Webb covered a lot of ground. To wit:









I could go on forever... so I will stop.... for now.

Walter Clevenger & The Dairy Kings:







The Bottle Rockets:

The best bar band since the Beatles left the Reeperbahn.









The Beat Farmers:





The Skeletons:







The Morells:







Bill Lloyd:







Various stuff:











That will keep you off the streets for awhile.

Horton's 2018 Music Project - Day #39

Horton's 2018 Music Project - Day #38