Tag: Mister Adams

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Summer Record Reviews

Deering and Down — Know Rhyme Know Reason (BAA Music Group)

The long-standing duo known as Deering and Down have been teasing a new album to their fan base for quite some time. The initial announcement came over a year ago in the form of a music video directed by Matteo Servente for the dreamy song “You’re the One.” After a few months, a second video appeared on YouTube, this time for the song “River City.” Then, in December, a video for “Pick a Knee” was released.

Finally, a year later, Deering and Down’s latest album, Know Rhyme Know Reason, is out. Sort of. Lahna Deering and Neil Down played the Galloway House last weekend and made 100 limited-edition CDs for everyone in attendance. The show marked the end of the “soft-release” schedule planned for the album by BAA Music Group, which gets its official release in August.

Recorded by Doug Easley, Know Rhyme Know Reason is Deering and Down’s boldest statement yet. Dave Shouse (the Grifters, Man Control) is featured as a special guest on the song “We Took a Walk,” adding just the right amount of weird to Deering and Down’s brand of spacey indie rock.

The three songs that got the music video treatment are definitely the highlights of Know Rhyme Know Reason, but the record still has some gems on it, specifically the tracks “Spaced out Like an Astronaut” and “Honey if I Ring You.” If you missed out on the release show at the Galloway House, word is that the band will have a release show at Bar DKDC on Thursday, August 4th.

Recommended Song: “We Took a Walk”

Mister Adams — To Drift Is Human
(self-released)

Adam Holton and company might not have set out to record a summer album of the contemporary-rock persuasion, but that’s what we get from To Drift Is Human, the first full length from his band Mister Adams. To Drift Is Human features 10 songs of carefree contemporary rock that would make as much sense live on Beale Street as it would in Otherlands.

The vocals on To Drift Is Human are reminiscent of Dave Matthews, but the Memphis twang in the guitars assure the listener that this record was, in fact, created in the Bluff City. Holton’s main lyrical focus is love, but the song titles “Everyday Love,” “Lovin’ Hand,” and “Let Yourself Love Again” don’t exactly fit with the melancholy, borderline existential title for the band’s debut.

Despite it being their first album, Mister Adams has definitely found a groove that they’re comfortable with, and while To Drift Is Human won’t present the listener with anything they haven’t heard before, it’s the perfect album for front porch beer drinking or a weekend trip out of town. See what Mister Adams is all about when they play a record release show at Wiseacre on Saturday, July 16th.

Recommended Song: “Lovin’ Hand”

Faux Killas ­— Time in Between (self-released)

Faux Killas are self-described as a punk/R&B/soul band, but they have more in common with Mister Adams then they do, say, the Oblivians. Album opener “Amazing” almost seems like a fake-out track and sounds something like early U2 put through a modern indie-rock filter. Things only get weirder from there. Track two is more of a straight-up rocker than “Amazing,” and features the falsetto vocals of singer Jeremiah Jones.

Track three, “Love Life,” features more falsetto from Jones, and you can bet that he probably had a Darkness CD rolling around his car at some point in his life. Shortly after recovering from the weirdness of the title track, comes the song “Shimmer,” a full-force burner with gravelly vocals and a simple but immediately recognizable Memphis garage-rock riff. Now we’re getting somewhere. The rest of Time in Between flits between the two types of songs introduced at the start of the album. There are equal parts memorable and “what the hell” moments on this 11-track album, but the song “Maurice” seems to reveal the true spirit that Faux Killas and Jeremiah Jones can conjure, and is without a doubt the album highlight.

On Time in Between, Faux Killas show the promise of a new-ish band that’s starting to find their sound. There are still a few kinks to be worked out, but that could be the biggest asset the band has going forward.

Recommended Track: “Maurice.”

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Music Music Features

Talking Drums

CREDIT: Bryan Welker

“It’s true,” admits Ghanaian drummer Paa Kow (pronounced like Paco, with a stop in the middle) about playing with musicians from the U.S. “Somebody from home would actually understand what I’m doing more because we are speaking the same language. But music is huge enough for everybody. You get a band and make sure the sound is what is needed. You find better musicians who can feel it, and you get what you want, which is what I’m doing right now.”

Paa Kow will play at the Hi-Tone on Tuesday, August 19th. Opening act, Mister Adams, is led by Memphian Adam Holton, who is one of Paa Kow’s former sidemen and students. Holton studied at the University of Colorado Boulder, which is home to the West-African Highlife Ensemble. Holton met percussionist-producer Peyton Shuffield in that program, based on highlife, the national sound of Ghana.

“The professor who led that group would take a group [to Ghana],” Holton says. “On Peyton’s trip there, Paa Kow happened to be in town. Peyton was like, ‘We’ve got to get this guy to the U.S. People would freak out if they saw him playing drums.'”

Paa Kow came to Boulder and later returned to Ghana with Holton, Shuffield, and others in tow.

“We got to play with a lot of Paa Kow’s old buddies in Accra, the capital,” Holton says. “A lot of the elder statesmen of highlife, like George Darko. It was eye-opening to go to his home country and see how he was treated there. Just from knowing him over here, you had no idea that at any music spot in Ghana, they all know him and are looking up to him. He’s an idol to all the young musicians. They were carrying his drum bags for him. He’s treated like royalty over there.”

Highlife is a 20th-century hybrid of traditional music of the Akan people from the Gold Coast of Africa and popular music influences from colonial sources. It was music for the elites, hence the name and Paa Kow’s stature in his native Ghana. Paa Kow’s playing reflects an African approach to drumming that is as much tonal as it is rhythmic. The clave beat that underlies most of what we consider Latin music came to this hemisphere through Ghana and Cuba. Rather than the tick-tock/on-off of western drummers, Paa Kow develops polyphonic, tonal rhythms that bubble like lively conversation. Each drum seems to have 10 voices.

“I think it’s part of the tradition in Ghana and growing up in that village,” Paa Kow says. “I started making my own drums from cans. Making something and playing and make sound out of it, it helps. That’s what everyone does. You can see them making their drums, putting a calf-skin on it. But the sound that would come out of that drum, you won’t believe. It was just the tradition. That helps me make sound out of any drum. You can see a drum that is busted. You get a head on top. It all is going to come from you. You can buy the most expensive drum you could ever buy or drums that are just old. But the way you make the drums to sound, that’s what’s important. That’s what it is. And if you can make sound out of even a can, you can make sound to make a better rhythm out of it. That’s what I’ve been believing since I’ve been growing up.”

Paa Kow’s parents were well-respected musicians in Ghana during his childhood. He’s been a serious musician since he was a child.

“I think percussion is the same as a drum kit,” he says. “The reason why I say that is you’ve got to pick up the percussion and make sound out of it. Making sure that the sound that’s making out of it is ready. Playing a cowbell in a band, if it’s a clave, I have to keep it. I see the same attitude on the drums. I think that being a percussion player helps you play a drum kit or any instrument. Keyboards, bass, everything; it’s all based on the percussion. So I saw that and I was like, Wow, I want to do more. I’m playing a cowbell or only two congas. I want to play the pedals, put my foot on the high-hat stand and make a lot of sounds. I decided from that time, I would play the drum kit, at the age of seven.”

Asked if there are any recordings of his parents, he says, “I wish. Back in those days, it’s hard to get recordings of stuff. My uncle has an album. He did it with some producer. The guy brought the instruments in from Germany. He was playing shows and everything. But I didn’t think of that at that time. I need to check. I bet it’s great stuff. My mom was part of the band. She was a singer. But I didn’t do any recording with them. I was too young.”

After making a name for himself in his homeland, Paa Kow set his sights on the U.S. Meeting Shuffield turned out to be the opportunity that worked for both of them. Shuffield produced Paa Kow’s latest album, Ask.

“Peyton came to Ghana in 2006,” Paa Kow says. “He came with the students from Boulder, Colorado, and was looking for someone to study with. He asked everyone to come and meet with him. So he gave me a call and he came over. He actually saw what I have. That’s the reason why we met in Ghana. I was touring around. I was like 22 and already playing with some big bands in Ghana. That same month, I was supposed to come to the U.S. It didn’t happen.”

Shuffield arranged a guest position at the Highlife Ensemble and Paa Kow came to the U.S. in 2007. He appreciates all the musicians who have worked with him here as much as they appreciate him.

“In Ghana, we have a traditional music, and we have some called highlife,” Paa Kow says. “There is deep traditional music. Coming here changed my vision of it. I’m kind of doing my own thing, which is one sound from home — I still get all the tradition stuff. And being in the States, the musicians I play with are all educated musicians from the music school. It’s good with the fusion and the jazz and stuff. But I don’t think I’m doing a pure highlife. I have my own vision going on with my music right now. But those are influences, the jazz, blues. I call it Afro-fusion.”

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Marcella René Simien Makes Memphis Music Work

When Marcella René Simien first moved to Memphis to go to Memphis College of Art (MCA) and join the local music scene, she had a bit of a leg-up on her contemporaries making noise in basements at house parties. Trained on piano, mandolin, guitar, and drums and well-schooled by her Grammy Award-winning father, Terrance Simien, Marcella quickly left the house-show scene and began playing at clubs like Bar DKDC, the Beauty Shop, and the Mollie Fontaine Lounge. Since then, it’s almost impossible to have a week go by without Marcella Simien appearing somewhere in town. She’s at the Hi-Tone on Monday. We sat down with Marcella to find out more about what drives this immensely talented Louisiana native, how she’s made music her career, and what it was like to sing a song on a Grammy-winning album.

Flyer: You’ve been around music your whole life, and other members of your family have had success in the music industry. When did you decide to start playing music?

Marcella René Simien: I started playing music when I was really young. My dad has had a pretty successful music career for the past 30 years. He’s traveled the world playing music ever since I was young. My mom was his manager and his booking agent, so we were pretty much all in it together. I started playing piano when I was 7, then moved on to guitar and mandolin, and then I started playing drums when I was 15.

Were you able to travel with your dad while he was on the road performing?

Not as much of the international traveling that I would have liked to do. My parents thought about home-schooling at me at one point, but my mom and I decided to stay at home base, which was Louisiana at the time.

When did you move to Memphis?

In August of 2009, I received a good scholarship to Memphis College of Art and just kind of fell into the music scene that was happening.

Can you give me a rundown of some of the groups you were playing with when you first moved here?

The first performance was just me and an accordion, in March of 2010, and we would do parties at MCA houses. We also played DIY spaces like the Dairy. I teamed up with [local rapper Cities Aviv] Gavin and sang two songs on his first release, Digital Lows. After that, I played a lot with Tout Le Mon, which was more of a loose cover band that played places like the P&H. Since then, it’s just been me solo playing the piano at Mollie Fontaine or with my band Marcella and Her Lovers.

At what point did playing locally become the way you make a living? How hard was that to achieve?

It’s rough, because it was only until last year that I felt comfortable asking what I felt was fair for a performance. And some places turned me down. I had to negotiate a little bit. But I learned a lot from my parents when it comes to dealing with people in the music industry. There’s a lot that goes into performing, but thankfully there are venues here that understand all that and they want to pay their entertainment well. In a city that has so much talent and so many great bands, sometimes people don’t want to pay for it. It’s been a slow, progressive thing for me, but I’m almost able to make a living doing this and waiting tables on the side.

Karen Carrier [owner of the Beauty Shop, Bar DKDC, and Mollie Fontaine]has played a huge part in my success locally. She makes it possible for me to play weekly shows and sincerely supports what I do. I love her like family. Making a living in music is the ultimate goal for me, and Karen is an artist so she understands that and encourages me in every way.

How many times a week do you normally perform?

About three times a week on average. Sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s four.

As a singer-songwriter, how do you balance the number of covers you do as opposed to original songs?

Right now, my set is almost all covers, and that’s not something I like to admit, because I have so many originals I’d love to work into the set. Doing covers hasn’t been a terrible thing, because it allows me to make the songs my own. I like being able to do my own arrangements of some of my favorites. We cover Otis Redding, Outkast, the Animals, Dr. John, Etta James, Lil Bob and the Lollipops, and it’s one of the most flattering, and comical, things to have an audience member come up after a gig and ask if I wrote one of the covers we did that night. It’s really just cool that any audience member is into what we do. If I can reach one or two people out of an audience and know that they had a good time and got to escape their daily life for an hour at our show, then that’s enough for me.

Your father won a Grammy last year for an album that you appear on. Can you tell me more about that?

Well, to clarify, I was on one song on my dad’s latest album, Dockside Sessions, and it won a Grammy for Best Regional Roots Record. The producer, George Receli, had a song that he wrote for his granddaughter. He wanted it translated into French, and he was going to have my dad sing it. In the middle of recording it, my dad was just not in the mood to go through all the translating, so he had my grandfather translate it into Creole French. I sang the melody of how it should go to George, and he decided I should sing it. So I just have one track on the album, and I got credit as a composer and as the singer on the song.

What else do you have planned for the rest of the year?

We’re going into the studio soon to record with Scott Bomar at Electrophonic, and we are going to be cutting a single there. I’d really like to get out of town now that I’m done with college. Up until then, I was trying to balance school and start my career, but now that I’m finished with school I’d like to do some regional tours and take my music out of town.