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| BUDDY & THE HUDDLE Music for a still undone movie maybe called ‘Suttree’ Glitterhouse GRCD 439 Skulls resonating with the same metaphorical deep-south musical landscapes as Calexico, Chesnutt & Lambchop and the Rainer / Giant Sand axis Germanic desert-dwellers of the soul Roland Kopp & Michael Stoll forsook their northern climes for the mythical Knoxville of Cormac McCarthy’s imagination. Taking it on step further than most they then went to record in the actual city. Like poetry something seems to have been lost in translation as the novel is interpreted by a 20-piece ensemble that incorporates everything from lap-steel to didgeridoo. They succeed in creating a worthy ‘possible’ soundtrack to the novel that tips its hat to Cooder, Waits, rural blues and New Orleans jazz. The torpid, dank atmosphere of the novel’s river-dwelling location is successfully recreated but when called upon to create songs the cultural shift lets them down. British boys have been singing American for years so why not German? Well perhaps if the vocal steals from Waits weren’t so obvious it might work but the songs come over as pastiche rather than convincing works. The range of references –everything from lounge-jazz to rockabilly is impressive as is the knowledge of the novel- but the very eclecticism betrays the fan-based nature of the project. Beautifully packaged it comes over as an affectionate homage to musical forms which are even more popular in Germany than here. A curious hybrid that flashes occasionally like a fish in a muddy river. Spotlight on Bibi Glitterhouse GRCD 452 Kopp and Stoll’s second disc ‘Spotlight on Bibi’ is just that –focussing on the vocal talents of one Bibi Andrea Bibel. Wrapped in mediochre sleeve are a bunch of fairly standard jazz-blues outings. The 20-strong ensemble has been pruned to 12 and the whole recorded in Germany. Where the stylistic pastiche of ‘Suttree’ was held in some kind of net by the novel’s structure here the songwriting and performances have to fend for themselves. We’re left with lounge/jazz blues with samples (Plan 9 from Outer Space) that are beautifully produced showing that the duo haven’t lost their powers of arrangement. The effort to write/sing in English is remarkable but not wholly successful – I’ve never heard a "..kingfisher yell.."- not yet anyway! It’s another example of neither fish nor fowl leading to weird cross-cultural mistakes like that. I’m all for crossing borders but not if it means making records that sound like Carmel’s out-takes. Shame. How about something closer to home for the next project – Brecht? They would make stunning arrangers of ‘Mahoganny’ if somebody could just tear them away from the southern states for a while. S.D.B. |
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