SOUNDTRACK: ALI AWAN-NonCOMM (May 15, 2019).
Ali Awan is a Philly native and WXPN loves him.
Ali Awan‘s whole set was drenched in sound, and yet the crowd always seemed eager for even more. The Philly artist and his six-person band opened his NONCOMM set with the bombastic “Be a Light.” The track, which Awan just released a surreal video for, highlights the band’s ability to make a lot of noise.
Like the rest of the set it features rocking guitars and a retro feel including backing “doo doos.”
Three guitars, one played by Awan himself, didn’t feel like enough for “Pick Me Up”, a bright cut off Awan’s new EP.
“Pick Me Up” is he ridiculously catchy track that WXPN has been playing so much. The bouncy chorus is unforgettable.
The combined power of the rest of the ensemble added even more of the energy that the crowd craved. Everything Awan and co. did sounded like a lot, but purposefully so, making every ounce of noise feel valuable.
“Citadel Blues” has a bouncy repeated “beat beat beat beat” followed by a cool downward guitar riff. His songs sound familiar–old school jangly distorted guitars with an updated retro soubnd.
The 26-year-old’s unique psych rock stylings enraptured everyone in attendance. There seemed to be as much jumping and dancing on stage as there was off stage, especially during the gripping “Citadel Blues” and “Beyond The Valley”.
Awan closed out the set with “Rubble and the Memories” which was so full of energy the “bah da das” could barely be contained in the song.
No doubt Ali Awan would be a fun performer to see live.
[READ: May 1, 2019] “Pain in My Heart”
While looking through back issues of the New Yorker, I discovered that Nick Hornby had written a number of essays for them. Not as many as I imagined he would have, but at least a handful.
In this, his first piece for the New Yorker (as far as I can tell), Hornby combines his love of music with his humor at being disappointed by his heroes.
He starts by citing an old R&B lyric that he’d always liked:
I’d rather be blind, crippled, and crazy / Somewhere pushing up a daisy / Than to let you break my hear all over again.
But then an “over-analytical” friend asked why he had to be blind, crippled and dead. Surely just being dead would get the job done.
Hornby couldn’t believe his friend was poking fun at a soul singer! If O.V. Wright, who had more or less inventing pain and suffering, needed to be a corpse with three handicaps so be it,
But that made he think, could R&B be inadvertently funny? Certainly not. R&B dealt with sex, pain, loss, love–things that should remain serious well into your thirties,.
But then he thought of another of Wright’s songs:
If I were a fish that had been cast upon the land / I would stay there if you would let me hold your hand
Even Hornby had to admit that this couplet didn’t work. The only mental picture one can paint is desperately surreal not desperately romantic. Wright makes it even worse by ad libbing “If I were a fish–and this is a bad situatuon to be in–that had been cast upon the land.” Snorting derisive laughter is the only proper response.
This made the scales fall from his eyes. James Brown’s “Good Gods” started to grate. Otis Redding’s insistence on slipping the word “good” into Sam Cooke’s gentle “Wonderful World” only proved that testifying isn’t always appropriate “Don’t know what a good slide rule is for / Don’t know much about the good French I took.”
Al Green’s “Lets Get Married” is a beautiful song that hits all the buttons the title demands until the end when he starts ad-libbing and says” Let’s get married today. Might as well.”
Might as well? Is that the best that the “No 1 Lurve Man of the 70s” can do? “Might as well” isn’t going to get anyone very far.
This kind of inspection could lead one to classical music which is famously unfunny.
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