Knockdown South
JIMBO MATHUS
Knockdown South Records
Your name is James Mathus and a couple years ago you moved back to your native Mississippi. Opened a studio called Delta Recording in Clarksdale. Started your own label. Played second guitar with Buddy Guy. Your old band the Squirrel Nut Zippers is long gone.
James Mathus? Nah. Time to go with Jimbo. Good move.
Another good move: Making your maiden voyage at Delta Recording a winner. Knockdown South (the name of his band, label, and new CD) is a beguiling amalgam of Southern music – rough-and-tumble Mississippi hill-country blues, ragged boogie, hardscrabble Memphis R&B, undiluted swamp-rock and boozy honky tonk. Deeply honest and proudly unrefined, the album evokes Exile-era Rolling Stones.
The whole thing has a live-in-the-studio, set-the-levels-and-play feel. The drums sound like drums, with the requisite clatter of the snare and sustained crash of the cymbals. The horn parts on a couple tunes sound under-rehearsed, like the Stax section the morning after a bender. Likewise, Mathus is not a slick guitarist, preferring instead to play tight, knotty leads and sleazed-out rhythm parts. He sings in a dissolute bellow, reveling in its Southern-ness, not sweating an off-key note here and there.
Amid all this devil-may-care authenticity stands a group of strong tunes, not gussied up into would-be hits, but deeply soulful and unremittingly real. They are pushed along by a rhythm section that never fails to get a nice grind going.
You are Jimbo Mathus and you know you made a great album – and made it your way. (www.knockdownsouthrecords.com) 
-Eric Snider
Morning Kills The Dark
Biirdie
Popup Records
As a Gainesville resident, singer-songwriter Jared Flamm gave indie-rock some earnest twang in Noah's Red Tattoo, and made a national splash co-writing and performing with alt-country rookie Laura Minor. Now he lives in Los Angeles, and is making the transition that most ambitious, roots-conscious songwriters of his school (and current environs) seem to, sooner or later – the one that leads from smart, simple, resonant rock 'n' roll to accomplished, idiosyncratic pop. Less expansive than The Pernice Brothers, less experimental than Wilco, less cutesy than Ben Lee and less self-consciously populist than onelinedrawing, but a kindred spirit of each, Biirdie does pocket-sized melancholy just right. (www.popuprecords.com)
-Scott Harrell
Black Forest
The A-FRAMES
Sub Pop
Let us suppose, for a second, that you are a student in a collegiate music composition course taught by an out-there, techno-skeptical professor old enough to remember both the Summer of Love and Bauhaus (the architectural school, not the band). Let us further suppose that one day in class, your professor says to you: "Hey, I just saw that animated movie Robots, and I think it missed the point entirely, man. I mean, it was cute and all, but robots with emotions and personalities have gotta feel a lot more alienated, don't you think? Anyway, it got me thinking, and here's what I want. I want you to write a musical about a robot that works in a factory building other robots, but who thinks and fantasizes while he's working. All music, no dialogue except through lyrics. And try to make all the music sound like it's being made by the machines in the factory, but you can't use real machines – you've gotta use traditional instruments. But don't be traditional, I mean, make it edgy and primal, but try to think like a machine at the same time." What would you do? Hell, just go buy a copy of Seattle trio The A-Frames' third record (and first for Sub Pop), Black Forest, and burn it onto a blank CD-R, because that's exactly what it sounds like. 1/2
-Scott Harrell
Dizzy: The Music of John Birks Gillespie
DIZZY GILLESPIE
Verve
History has lionized Charlie Parker as the godhead of bebop, and often relegated trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie to the role of sidekick or the man who did his level best to popularize the genre. It's not my intention in a few short lines to argue against that perception, but to merely point out that when it came to stylistic bread th, Diz had it all over Bird (although he did live 40 years longer). This collection, a companion to a new biography, captures an enticing array of material from 1950 to 1963 (anything much later gets less and less important): the classic small-group bop of "Bloomdido" and "Leap Frog" (with Parker); an essential Latin-esque take on "Caravan"; three big band workouts – the dense, complex "Africana," the creamy, sumptuous "I Remember Clifford" and the overly bombastic "Cool Breeze"; as well as several other small-group selections. The set showcases some of Gillespie's best playing, but probably the single most galvanizing performance on the disc is Sonny Rollins' scalding tenor foray on 1957's "I Know What You Know." 1/2
-Eric Snider
This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2005.