CHUCK E. WEISS
Old Souls & Wolf Tickets
Ryko/ Slow River
ELENI MANDELL
Snakebite
Zedtone/ Fusion III
· New releases from two Los Angeles hipsters.
· Weiss’s record includes a 1970 recording of "Down the Road A Piece" with blues legend Willie Dixon.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Chuck E. Weiss and Eleni Mandell are merely the latest dabblers in retro-kitsch or if they are genuinely the hippest people to emerge from Los Angeles in many long years. Weiss, the elder, has been knocking around L.A. for decades, to the point that he’s now considered a fixture on the scene and the grand poobah of cool by the likes of Tom Waits, Cub Koda and, well, Eleni Mandell. Many years his junior, Mandell can hold her own against Weiss in the coolness stakes, but even she’ll concede the title belongs to him, and kindly offer to contribute backing vocals to a couple of tracks on the old guy’s latest recording.
Old Souls & Wolf Tickets presents Weiss as a dirty perv wolf-whistling at the last 60 years of American music. A glorious collision of juke-joint jazz and edgy R and B, it’s enough to restore one’s faith in the inherent sleaziness of rock ’n’ roll, even as it makes a mockery of anyone who takes it seriously enough to make such pronouncements. For at the heart of this record, among all the honking sax solos and raspy-voiced serenades, Chuck E’s irreverent, world-weary sense of humour proves he never says anything without a wink and a smile.
The flipside to Weiss (and his good-natured burlesques) is Mandell, who is usually described as a sultry cabaret chanteuse with an acerbic view of the world, and particularly of the men in it. While much of her latest, Snakebite, only furthers this impression, it also sees her writing more metaphorical lyrics than were on her first two records, Wishbone and Thrill.
A song like "Silverlake Babies," essentially an anxiety dream about the hell of suburban living, makes it easy to understand why Mandell prefers the sailors, junkmen and wandering scavengers of her songs to the boring drones of the L.A. business community. She sings about her roguish paramours with a strange mixture of melancholy, bitterness and nostalgia, leading one to question whether these kinds of men really exist today.
Clearly, they’re quite real to Mandell. "First you fell in love/ Then you picked a fight," she bellows in the title track, her anger, resentment and venom entirely palpable. Calling all masochists: if you want to have a strip torn off you in style, Mandell is the one to do it.
CHUCK E. WEISS 4/5
ELENI MANDELL 4/5
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