Hiller is no 'Fool' to take on Beatle

Last summer, as nearly everyone was lining up to buy the remastered reissues of the Beatles back catalogue, local piano fixture, Reverend Chris Marsceill was conceiving a one-time performance of Beatles classics at Tavern on the Hill that he would release as a live album.

Marsceill, who may be the busiest musician in Chestnut Hill — he plays solo and in several different combos — is a Chestnut Hill area native and Springfield Township High School grad who moved back after his New Orleans home was obliterated in Hurricane Katrina. The 29-year-old has been playing piano since he was six.

But, Reverend Chris (his stage name; he is not an ordained minister) has stuck primarily with jazz. He studied jazz performance at Loyola University in New Orleans, so the Beatles were not necessarily an obvious fit for him.

“It was interesting to me as a guy with a jazz background,” Marsceill said in a recent interview. “I don’t play many Beatles songs. Some of them I’d never even heard, like 'Rain,' for example.”

To produce the live album, Chris thought of doing a show in conjunction with the release. He had a plan to perform three sets of songs with an upright bass player and a percussionist and to have local recording engineer Jason Fifield, who often plays bass with Chris, record the performance.

Once he had the show booked, Marsceill prepared for it quickly. “I worked out the arrangements on my own,” he said. “The bassist and I got together four times. The percussionist? We never got together. We had to laugh. He said , ‘I feel more comfortable going in not knowing anything.’”

The document of that Sept. 12 performance, “Fool on the Hill, “ is now available, both at Chestnut Hill’s Hideaway Music and on iTunes. The album cover is a really nice-looking classic Blue Note-style cover featuring a green-tinted black and white photo of Marsceill at the keyboard. It’s a 15-song collection of Beatles’ classics, from “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Lady Madonna” to “Come Together” and “Here Comes the Sun.”

Each song is a live performance. Marsceill recruited upright bass player Tony Garro and percussionist Gregory Morgan — credited with playing djembe, dumbeck, bongos, shakers, cowbells, washboard, cymbals and tambourine. Local songstress Katie Drake cameos on “Come Together” with a strong vocal performance.

Throughout the performance, Marsceill’s energy is high. The playing on the CD by all is really quite good, particularly for a live album. Marsceill’s arrangements are lively and inventive. His vocals are at first a bit shaky, but they really warm up by the third song, “Lady Madonna.”

“[The show] was fun,” he said. “It was different; you know the place was packed with people.”

That crowd can be heard a little. Fifield’s recording is clean with minimal background bleed into the microphones he used — particularly when they cheer as Marsceill ramps up a favorite like “Something” or “Come Together.” A little more room ambience might have been nice to hear, but the high energy of the musicians involved permeates the album. For a fun local document and some nice recordings of Beatles standards, “Fool on the Hill” is well worth a spin.

“Fool on the Hill” can be physically purchased at Hideaway Music, 8612 Germantown Ave.

From Cape Town to Cape Cod

Pop tastes are funny. One thing that a lot of music critics don't like to acknowledge is that 95 percent of the music-listening public cares very little about the art of music making.1 They want to listen to stuff that's catchy, danceable and performed by an artist or band that would look really good on the cover of a magazine. That music could be Nirvana or it Could be Beyonce. It's all catchy. It's all pop, isn't it?

Exhibit A is the much-heralded Vampire Weekend, which released it's sophomore record Contra this week. A spirited mix of early Police, Paul Simon's Graceland, King Sunny Ade and F. Scott Fitzgerald, this band of Upper West Side prep school kids and Columbia U. grads has become one of the most unlikely band of underground heroes since that other big group of NYC upper-crusters: The Strokes.

But unlike The Strokes who were traveling a pretty easy-to-read path to big record sales, Vampire Weekend is unlike anything being praised in indie circles today. In fact it's not like any music being recorded on this continent right now. Vampire Weekend -- Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij, Chris Tomson and Chris Baio -- draws a little from electro-pop and ska and a great deal from afro-pop, including snaking guitar lines that recall Ali Farka Toure. Koenig sounds an awful lot like Paul Simon here and at times like Sting in 1977. It's definitely played through an American filter, but it could easily pass as world music to the casual listener.

That this music is being played by upper-class white kids -- songs on the band's debut ranged in subject matter from avoiding a college fling at Columbia to the physical and psychological difficulties of getting off of Cape Cod -- is hard to reconcile, but it doesn't seem to bother this band's growing fan base. Despite all the obvious things to hate -- the wealth, the polo shirts, the biggest white appropriation of world music since "Roxanne," Vampire Weekend is a fun band to listen to.2 The second single on Contra, "Cousins" played a week ago on David Letterman, is a frenetic, infectious explosion of a pop song. It may be the best single I've heard in at least a year.

On first listening to Contra, I felt a little let down to not hear more of that same energy. This is not to say the rest of the album is bad, but it is not as great as that single. For most of the record, the band sticks to a much more mid-tempo bounce with tunes that rely a lot more on synthesizer sounds. A first impression is that a lot of these songs might not sound out of place on a Postal Service album.

A few other standouts for me are the driving (almost a rocker) "Giving up the Gun" and the ska romp "Holiday." A lot of the others songs are on the slow side but they are tuneful and well conceived. Overall, the album has a unity of sound and style that make for a great album. While I am still feeling a bit let down that nothing grabs me quite like "Cousins," I think it's a record that will grow on me with more time.

We could debate the appropriateness of a band of rich white kids playing African music for a long time, but it won't change the fact that Vampire Weekend is a pretty good band that now has another really enjoyable performance under its belt in Contra. I've never been comfortable to find myself on a bandwagon, but this is good music and well worth listening to.

Footnotes

1. Sound Opinions host and Chicago Sun-Times pop music critic Jim DeRogatis blasted the band for its affluent origins and similarly themed song lyrics, stating at one point that the band "had nothing to say." I found it a really curious complaint. Most lyricists, particularly since 1990, write exclusively about themselves. Maybe most people can't relate to the sudden need to escape Cape Cod, but a lot of great bands have sung about little more than sex, drugs and partying in Manhattan (The Strokes)... so I don't get the point. If you're looking for good social commentary, you're not going to find it (in great supply) in music. In fact, I think its safe to say that most bands have had nothing to say since about 1968.

2. The band members called their music "Upper West Side Soweto," which could be seen as cute or stupid depending on who you talk to. Soweto is not strictly a a type of music, as far as I can tell, but is a place where great African music is made. Soweto is historically black section of Johannesburg in South Africa that was repeatedly cracked down upon by that country's old Apartheid government. It was the site of the 1976 Soweto Uprising in which 23 people were killed when black students revolted against an edict by the government to teach in Afrikaans instead of English. My guess is that the irony of that area's history was lost on the youthful members of the band. To them it's just where Paul Simon got his band. ... Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Whither Modern Rock? Pt. II Soundgarden Rides Again

With all the reunions of big '90s bands anounced in the last year -- Blur, Pavement, Rage Against The Machine, Stone Temple Pilots, Faith no More (!) -- it was inevitable that those louder-than-rock Seattleites, Soundgarden, would join in. Sure, it probably means they were just running out of cash, but I'm still looking forward to the reunion.

I must confess, I really like Soundgarden. My two favorite albums not by Nirvana from the whole Seattle scene of the early '90s are Mudhoney's Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and SG's Badmotorfinger. The former is a fuzzy, pop masterpiece that really rewards a return listen (I hadn't listened to it in years -- had it on cassette!). Badmotorfinger is a nearly flawless collection of Sabbath-influenced hard rock. A testament to its greatness -- and that of the band in general -- is that many couldn't figure out whether the band was hard rock, grunge or heavy metal. They were as loud and dark as any metal bands, but they were melodic, smart (no songs about wizards, hobbits or Satan).

When Soundgarden broke up it never made sense. Their next two albums after Badmotorfinger-- Superunknown and Down on the Upside -- were highly regarded by critics. Superunkown earned the band two grammys (ironically, the song "Spoonman," perhaps their worst song, won "best metal performance" and the song "Black Hole Sun" won best hard rock performance). There was little news about the split that made sense. Seemed singer Chris Cornell wanted to do more ballads, while guitarist Kim Thayil favored faster and harder material. Cornell would later say that the band was "eaten up by the business."

In the last decade, drummer Matt Sheppard joined Pearl Jam (with whom he's made some great music) while Cornell fronted the really abysmal Audioslave and put out a few solo albums, including one recorded with hip hop producer Timbaland, which might be the worst recording released in the last 10 years. Heavy rock, in the meantime, suffered substantially without a band that could play it well the right way -- super loud, rhythmically complicated, dark and moody but with lyrics that matter to people who are older than 16. Queens of the Stone Age has been the only band to keep heavy rock interesting, since.

It's exciting to have such a good and innovative band back. Will they be able to duplicate their heady '90s work? Who knows. Probably not. But when they go on tour, I won't miss the chance to see them.