Product Description
On The Countdown, Richard Lloyd creates an honest, natural expression with his stylized guitar sound and swagger. \"I can only be me,\" he says. \"I can't turn into somebody else. So every record I make is just a progression. I never felt the angst necessary to be a punk. I was too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippy. I like to say I'm an anthropologist from another planet who is observing human nature and expressing my observations through rock'n'roll.\" Renowned Nashville session players Dave Roe (bass) and Steve Ebe (drums) served as a solid rhythmic backbone in the studio, cutting the basic 11 tracks in two days, while keys by Joe Bidewell (who played with Lloyd in his band in 1980) were eventually added to the mix. The result is a real rocker's record, with Lloydallowing his trademark fusion of garage rock, thoughtful soul, and power pop hooks to marinate from opening cut \"Wind In The Rain\" to the soaring heights of the closing title track \"The Countdown,\" in which he posits blasting off into space as he's \"had enough of planet Earth,\" while his guitar and keys propel the listener with him into the stratosphere.
Review
With a bit of material from his past -- including one track that dates back to 1972 -- Richard Lloyd's new album The Countdown is a case of good things coming to those songs that wait. And the set's title track, premiering exclusively below, is among them. \"I had the rhythm, the initial riff, for a long time and didn't know what to do with it,\" Lloyd, co-founder of the iconic New York band Television and now a resident of Chattanooga, Tenn., tells Billboard. \"When I was going to do this record I began to work with it. I got the idea it would be this conflagration of space travel and we did the basic (tracks) and then I had keyboards come in and do some pads and then I did the vocals off the cuff, just ad-libbed.\" Once all that was established, Lloyd went after a guitar part that nods to the boundary-pushing experiments of his past. \"The lead guitar is nothing but feedback, which I've always wanted to do, and just put all this warpy stuff on top of a fairly simple progression,\" Lloyd explains. During \"Countdown\" Lloyd also makes the provocative declaration that he's \"had enough of plane Earth now,\" but he says it's not necessarily intended to be a political comment. \"No, I didn't mean it that way,\" Lloyd says. \"I'm saying I think it would be more exciting to be on Voyager 1 at the moment, in interstellar space. I think that's the most important event in 2,000 years of human history. The fact that we've sent something out of the solar system is incredible to me. I'd like to be on a mission like that.\" The Countdown is Lloyd's follow-up to 2016's Rosedale and was recorded in Nashville with a quartet, including keyboardist Joe Bidewell from Lloyd's '80s band, getting 11 tracks down in just two days. \"It happened very quickly -- the basics in a couple days, the overdubs in a couple more days,\" says Lloyd, who for the first time did not engineer the recording himself. \"I did the vocals for the entire record in basically one morning. I look at some of the songs now and I might have added different parts or different sounds if they'd been allowed to marinate more. But in a way it was very cool to do it quickly like that.\" Lloyd will celebrate The Countdown's Nov. 2 release with a performance that night in Nashville and is planning to line up tour dates as well. On the same day, his 2017 memoir Everything Is Combustible will be coming out in paperback with a different cover and some added material. \"It's gotten a lot of great reaction,\" Lloyd says of the tome. \"The people who are in the book who are alive are pleased with it. I don't think I was too rough on anybody. I'm not a big gossip guy. I just tried to be truthful and stay away from any really, nasty bitter things. I don't have much bitterness in me, anyway. Maybe some remorse; I always could've done things differently, but I didn't. And I don't worry about that. I believe in the power of now -- and now is good.\" --Billboard Magazine - Gary Graff
It s not innovative by any stretch of the imagination, but Richard Lloyd s latest album, The Countdown, is impressive enough to compel listeners to return to his past work, both under his own name and with the vaunted band Television. The inscrutable guitar heroism Lloyd enacted with Tom Verlaine forms the basis for this Plowboy Records release, but it s not just riffs here: the man conjures up some bonafide atmosphere with his co-musicians. On Wind in the Rain, for instance, the rhythm section of bassist Dave Roe and drummer Steve Ebe hold their ground like the eye of a sonic hurricane. Within that maelstrom, keyboardist Joe Bidewell never collides with Lloyd s, but Richie Owens audio mix (not surprisingly heavy on guitar) keeps the sounds of piano close enough to shade both instruments and lyrics. It s a tribute to the leader s self-restraint encouraged no doubt by co-producer Ben Ewing that he refuses to crank out the bedrock fretboard figure ad infinitum. On the contrary, The Countdown thrives because tracks like that opener and Smoke are arranged with an economy that heightens the potency of the material. Numbers like So Sad aren t particularly uplifting in and of themselves, but Lloyd and company imbue the overall sequence of songs with a palpable sense of liberation: the band drives Run from the opening salvo of drums, reaffirming that Something Remains, even if, as the leader also intones in his inimitably dour style toward the end of the album, everything else has gone Down The Drain. Not surprisingly, that residual happens to most often take the form of idiosyncratic, skewed guitar work. The easy rhymes and a somewhat forced chord progression on I Can Tell only stand out in marked contrast to Richard Lloyd s otherwise understated proclivity for pure pop buried elsewhere within these ten tracks ( ...I m gonna get this song on the radio, child, just so I can sing along... ). An extended improvisational workout would benefit this particular performance because it would distract from the shortfalls of the composition. But, apart from the largely instrumental title song, the general absence of such intervals is what renders The Countdown so tantalizing: even the intermittent mesh of acoustic and electric rhythm guitar textures whets the appetite for more. --Glide Magazine - Doug Collette
![\"The](\"/on/demandware.static/-/Sites-storefront-catalog-m-en/default/dwa3f36d51/images/large/c01c91841d063fcb1e2e72d0f34d2a9d.png\")
\n