Swift, Richard: Ground Trouble Jaw / Walt Wolfman (Vinyl LP)
Secretly Canadian
Regular price
$26.99
Sale
Usually ships in 3-6 business days
"It was a great Swiftian irony that the shining moment of realization that is Ground Trouble Jaw first saw it's release as a modest, digital-only EP in 2008. Here we right that wrong, and pair it with 2011's Walt Wolfman EP, very much a spiritual twin of Ground Trouble Jaw. Ground Trouble Jaw is the lens that pulls Swift's catalogue into a focused oeuvre. It was the first release that folded the tireless, vying personalities of Richard Swift's art - the art brut R&B of Onasis; the John Fante saloon player of The Novelist; the Brill Building songcraft of Dressed Up For the Letdown - into a singular, succinct artistic statement. Here is a man discovering at once his own capacity for timelessness. The triumphant, Sly Stone burner ""Lady Luck"" feels like a song your heart knew before you did, a ripe jazz apple that Swift plucked on a stroll through the orchard. You can feel his joy and the responsibility of his personal discovery. You can imagine a not-to-distant future in which parents and children slowdance together at weddings to the childhood sweetheart doo-wop of ""Would You."" The electric artistic breakthrough is palpable. Walt Wolfman's blown-out, basement R&B speaker-shredders are not for the faint of heart. Highlight of the set, ""MG 33"" is a raw and ghostly trance, a blast of kinetic energy and that jazz apple smoke blown right in your face. The quasi-title track ""Walt Whitman"" is a cryptic salute to Whitman, whose American lineage of primal, urgent art can be traced to include Kerouac and Ray Johnson, Bo Diddley and Beefheart - right on through to Swift himself. He was an outsider-pop wanderkind who could do more with one worn, old mic than most men could with a high-end studio, taking ""the holy moment"" and making it eternal." Would You, Lady Luck, The Bully, The Original Thought, A Song For Milton Feher, Whitman, MG 333, Laugh It Up, Zombie Boogie, Out ; About, Drakula (Hey Man!), St. Michael
"It was a great Swiftian irony that the shining moment of realization that is Ground Trouble Jaw first saw it's release as a modest, digital-only EP in 2008. Here we right that wrong, and pair it with 2011's Walt Wolfman EP, very much a spiritual twin of Ground Trouble Jaw. Ground Trouble Jaw is the lens that pulls Swift's catalogue into a focused oeuvre. It was the first release that folded the tireless, vying personalities of Richard Swift's art - the art brut R&B of Onasis; the John Fante saloon player of The Novelist; the Brill Building songcraft of Dressed Up For the Letdown - into a singular, succinct artistic statement. Here is a man discovering at once his own capacity for timelessness. The triumphant, Sly Stone burner ""Lady Luck"" feels like a song your heart knew before you did, a ripe jazz apple that Swift plucked on a stroll through the orchard. You can feel his joy and the responsibility of his personal discovery. You can imagine a not-to-distant future in which parents and children slowdance together at weddings to the childhood sweetheart doo-wop of ""Would You."" The electric artistic breakthrough is palpable. Walt Wolfman's blown-out, basement R&B speaker-shredders are not for the faint of heart. Highlight of the set, ""MG 33"" is a raw and ghostly trance, a blast of kinetic energy and that jazz apple smoke blown right in your face. The quasi-title track ""Walt Whitman"" is a cryptic salute to Whitman, whose American lineage of primal, urgent art can be traced to include Kerouac and Ray Johnson, Bo Diddley and Beefheart - right on through to Swift himself. He was an outsider-pop wanderkind who could do more with one worn, old mic than most men could with a high-end studio, taking ""the holy moment"" and making it eternal." Would You, Lady Luck, The Bully, The Original Thought, A Song For Milton Feher, Whitman, MG 333, Laugh It Up, Zombie Boogie, Out ; About, Drakula (Hey Man!), St. Michael