Now that the conference is over, I'm trying to dig out of some of my backlog of work. Among that backlog are some reviews that I owe the inestimable Smed for a couple of CDs he has sent. These take time to do right, so I'll be spreading them out across the next few weeks, but here's the first installment, a review of Smed's Holiday Mix Disk 1./

The biggest question in my mind about this mix, from my first perusal of the track listing, was, �How the hell can you get from Funkadelic to the Decembrists?� I know Smed takes his mix flow seriously. It�s a short but important leap from Micahel Jackson to Frank Zappa, but how can you arrive at the Brit effete band The Decembrists after beginning with a song whose lyrics are almost entirely made up of curse words? Read it and weep.

1. Get Off Your Ass And Jam - Funkadelic. This is a great tune with a wonderfully earpiercing opening. But not, I repeat, NOT when there are children in the car. The lyrics: �Shit! Goddamn! Get off your ass and jam!� �Nuff Said.

2. Funky To The Bone - Freddi Henchi & The Soul Setters. Smed has been feeding my need for more funk. It doesn't get much funkier than this.

3. Kissing My Love - Cold Blood. I�ve heard this one before and always really liked it, but I had no idea what I was hearing. The vocals are both funky and literate. Very bluesy. The scat section toward the end of the song, where the singer trades riffs in alternation with different sections of the band, is a tour de force. That great funk bass, a sound that has always symbolized for me the New York City of my childhood, which in turn symbolized a sort of freedom that I�d never experienced in my manicured suburban town, trucks along throughout.

4. Rein Ne Va Plus - Funk Factory. Still firmly in the funk idiom, this tune slows things down a bit. It starts with an intriguingly atonal descending a cappella passage. For the longest time I thought the opening line was �Massachusetts, but I�m waiting for my love today.� Fortunately it repeats a number of times, so I was able to figure out that it is not �Massachusetts� but �That�s what you say.� The opening passage of descending parallel chords is echoed with different harmony in the middle of the tune. The vocal harmonies are pretty out there � the sound is pure Motown, but the harmonies are more complex than you�d expect.

5. Don't Stop 'Till You Get Enough - Michael Jackson. As I mentioned in a previous entry, I told AJ that this was the guy who sings �A, B, C� and he didn�t believe me. He thought it was a girl. Yeah, well, sometimes it�s hard to tell. Not a bad lesson to learn, AJ. Still, Jackson is less scary on this album cover � Off the Wall from 1979 � than he is on later tunes. You�ve got to love the disco strings. And, there�s foreshadowing of Thriller, which came out four years later, in this song � the chord changes in the instrumental break in the middle of the song are almost identical to those that form the basis of �Thriller.�

6. Debra Kadabra - Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. Smed�s been diligently educating me in all things Zappa. Zappa�s the rock artist loved by academics, mainly because of his particularly variety of complexity. Its musical virtuosity combined with extreme profanity. This is classic. Goofy lyrics, crazy rhythmic and metric shifts, instrumental sound painting (love the mariachi band) and some good hard rocking. The opening lick will have you thinking it�s somebody like George Thorogood, but you won�t be fooled for long.

7. Carolina Hard Core Ecstasy - Frank Zappa. The lyrics are hilarious. An example: �I could have swore her hair was made of rayon. She wore a Milton Bradley crayon. But she was someone I could lay on.� Also, �I have a Roger Daltrey cape on� (or is it �capon?�). This is more tuneful (pretty vocal harmonies) and talkier than some. The lyrics are front and center, punctuated by instrumental commentary. The vocal harmonies and melodic contour resemble those of �Rein Ne Va Plus� by Funk Factory above, but it goes somewhere else entirely. There ain�t no one like Zappa.

8. Honky's Ladder - The Afghan Whigs. I don�t know this song or this band, but based on the sound, I�d say we�re moving forward in time somewhat. The sound is punkier. The link to Zappa, though, comes through the guitar sound and the vocal quality, which sounds like he�s losing more cells off the back of his throat with each and every word. It made my throat sore just listening to it. I�m not as wild about this tune � lots of noise and not much substance.

9. Little Dawn - Ted Leo & The Pharmacists. I love the opening guitar lick of this one. We�re cranking up the energy again. I thought I�d never heard this before, but it actually sounds familiar. I like the sound and the energy.

10. Young For Eternity - The Subways. This one crosses my threshold for screaming guitars and people. Or maybe it�s just too many for me in a row. Sorry, I�m getting a headache. Moving on. It�s interesting, though. I�m not sure what defines the threshold for me. There�s somehow not enough musical stuff for me to grab onto in this one. But others equally noisy are fine. I�ll have to ponder that one a bit.

11. Future Foe Scenarios - Silversun Pickups. A brief respite with the opening of voice and solo guitar, but it cranks up fast. Still, this has a little more tonal variety and I like the minor melody. I wouldn�t pick this one out, but neither would I turn it off.

12. Point Of Know Return - Kansas. Ok, another paradigm shift, or is it? I think it flows in well with the dreamy rock, but what do I know. All I know is that I, for some reason, still like this song. Mainly because it evokes a quieter, simpler time for me, or something, or other. I�ve always been a closet Kansas fan. There�s some funky metric shifting going on here too. The organ/string sound reminds me of Michael Jackson too.

13. Hold Your Head Up - Argent. I�ve always liked this song too and I never knew who performed it. This is another flashback tune for me. Listen to this one for the Bachian organ solo.

14. Made Up Love Song #43- Guillemots. This one opens with a decomposing musical collage under a hearts-and-flowers pretty vocal line. I don�t know this band, but it may be my favorite track on here.

15. Bright Yellow Gun - Throwing Muses. I was a huge Throwing Muses fan in college. The funny thing about this song is that it was on one of the playlists I�ve had sitting on my computer (or did until the big hard drive crash) waiting for me to burn into disks for Smed. It�s tough to make CDs for this guy. He knows everything.

16. On The Road To Gila Bend - Los Lobos. Here�s another band that I like, but have never gone out of my way to seek out. Here�s yet another example of a band that uses irregular phrase lengths to keep the repetition from being repetitious. It�s not nearly as complex as someone like Zappa � here the instrumentals stay in a pretty strict 4+4 phrase structure, but the vocal lines mess with the division of the 8 bar total. I�m less familiar with this song than with some of their other tunes, but it�s a nice one.

17. Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Again) - The Decemberists. I�m on the fence about The Decemberists. I like their music � it�s interesting and moderately complex. The lead singer�s voice sometimes�often�irritates me. And the arcane vocabulary just bugs me, mainly because I�m not always sure that they know what the words mean. In general, I prefer the Decemberists by the album than by the song � I think their music fits better with itself than separated out. Also their albums have sweeping trajectories that are lost when they�re excerpted. That said, this is a nice tune and the guitars have a country lilt that make it possible for this tune to follow up on Los Lobos without an aural double-take.

18. My Sweet Annette - Drive-By Truckers � I�m a soft touch for anything with a fiddle. This is a pretty song, but sung by a voice that fits with some of the less pretty things above.

Nice mix, Smed!

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