{"id":793927,"date":"2019-03-18T10:01:17","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T16:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=807747"},"modified":"2019-03-18T10:01:17","modified_gmt":"2019-03-18T16:01:17","slug":"hear-blackstar-guitarist-ben-monders-doomy-take-on-goldfinger-theme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/hear-blackstar-guitarist-ben-monders-doomy-take-on-goldfinger-theme\/","title":{"rendered":"Hear \u2018Blackstar\u2019 Guitarist Ben Monder\u2019s Doomy Take on \u2018Goldfinger\u2019 Theme"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ben Monder has spent more than two decades carving out an extremely personal aesthetic niche. The guitarist has played with tons of jazz<\/a> luminaries, including Paul Motian and Maria Schneider, but recent albums under his own name \u2014 like 2005\u2019s Oceana<\/em><\/a> and 2013\u2019s Hydra<\/em><\/a> \u2014 feature sprawling, immersive, micro-detailed long-form compositions that seem to land somewhere between technical metal and ethereal art song.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fitting that a player this unusual forged an alliance with David Bowie<\/a>, a rock star who never allowed genre to fence him in. Monder joined an illustrious lineage of Bowie guitarists when he played on the late icon\u2019s final album, Blackstar<\/em><\/a>. That\u2019s his gritty yet luminous shredding you hear in the LP\u2019s final minutes, during the climax of \u201cI Can\u2019t Give Everything Away.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

In the context of his career so far, the most surprising thing about Ben Monder\u2019s new album, at least on paper, is how conventional it is. He\u2019s recorded plenty of standards in the past, but they were always palate cleansers rather than the focus. Out April 12th, Day After Day<\/em> is an entire double-disc album of covers.<\/p>\n

Half recorded solo and half with drummer Ted Poor (who also played on Hydra<\/em> and Oceana<\/em>) and bassist Matt Brewer, the album features Monder\u2019s takes on everything from the 1967 Burt Bacharach\u2013Hal David protest song \u201cThe Windows of the World\u201d to the Olivier Messaien choral work \u201cO Sacrum Convivium,\u201d the Beatles\u2019 \u201cLong Long Long,\u201d Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cJust Like a Woman\u201d and \u201cGalveston\u201d by Jimmy Webb, who Monder says is \u201cpossibly my favorite living songwriter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI had been gradually adding pop tunes dear to my heart to my trio repertoire,\u201d Monder writes in an e-mail. \u201cI found that many of them were fun to improvise on, and it was rewarding to render tunes I had a history with. When I got a grant from the Shifting Foundation to record an album, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to finally document some of this material, which I had so far never really done.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Day After Day\u2019<\/em>s most striking tracks is a version of \u201cGoldfinger\u201d \u2014 the famed Bond theme<\/a> composed by John Barry and originally sung by Shirley Bassey \u2014 on which Monder, an avowed metal fan<\/a>, cranks up the distortion and teases out the original\u2019s doomier undertones.<\/p>\n

Monder\u2019s reading features ringing power chords and molten-lava runs. As Brewer and Poor lay down a steady foundation, the guitarist\u2019s lengthy solo grows wilder and more ecstatic. Returning to the opening vamp, the band gradually ramps down the tempo, with Monder sprinkling in bits of fuzz-tone noise.<\/p>\n

Monder recalls seeing Goldfinger<\/em> and other Sixties Bond films as a child. \u201cThey were some of my earliest and most profound cinematic experiences,\u201d he writes. \u201cWe also had an LP called Themes From the James Bond Thrillers<\/em> by the Roland Shaw Orchestra that I listened to constantly as a little kid. They were instrumental versions of many of the theme songs from the Sixties movies, including \u2018Goldfinger.\u2019 But I probably would never have thought to cover it were it not for a friend suggesting it out of the blue about 10 years ago. The quasi-metal treatment is the best way I could think of to honor the power and attitude of the original.\u201d<\/p>\n

Day After Day<\/em> is available for preorder<\/a> now.<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ben Monder has spent more than two decades carving out an extremely personal aesthetic niche. The guitarist has played with tons of jazz luminaries, including Paul Motian and Maria Schneider, but recent albums under his own name \u2014 like 2005\u2019s Oceana and 2013\u2019s Hydra \u2014 feature sprawling, immersive, micro-detailed long-form compositions that seem to land […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-793927","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-15 15:50:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793927\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}