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Steve Northeast, self-titled EP
For unconditional emotion from the male point of few, check out Steve Northeast's intense little self-titled EP. These four heavily emotional power-pop songs, with their focussed message and structure, charge directly into your brain, barreling through all pretense. It's straight-from and straight-to-the-heart stuff that speaks for the romantic, the idealist, the lover, the hopeless (or hopeful) devotee, the Icarus, the Abelard in us all. And it's a firm marriage of song and sound. "I want to share with you the air I breathe. I'm not pretending anymore - you are everything to me." Indeed.
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Jay Mankita, Dogs Are Watching Us
Satire is always welcome in grim times, and since times are pretty much always grim, a good-natured but sharply clever songsmith like Jay Mankita has an important place in the musical rainbow. You can hear his smile in every lyric: in places he almost bursts into laughter while singing. The songs are by turns biting, funny, and touching; some are childlike enough to work as kids' songs (not surprisingly, he does do children's concerts); but he tucks thematic complexities into his simple descriptive accounts. The two anti-Bush tracks are clever and funny, but it's in the quirkier ditties, like the weird "Little Soap" and the cockeyed, mushy "Tracy At the Bat," where Mankita stands out from the crowd of musical satirists - a crowd that's actually pretty small. Rapping Beastie-Boys-style about the philosophical quandaries of the Big Bang Theory, he doesn't have to explain that just because a scientific theory isn't fully worked out doesn't mean it isn't true. The message is implied, and well received.
I enjoyed this CD immensely, and Mankita also has another, more straight-ahead modern folk album which I'll cover in a future column. All his CDs are available at CD Baby here.
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