The Amadans

The Amadans are Jon Wahl on vocals, guitar, saxes, etc., Steve Reed on bass, backing vocals, Bob Lee on drums and backing vocals. Musically? Well, let's see. Hmmmm.... How about "art-rock-country-jazzoid music? Jon Wahl was the front guy for L.A.'s Claw Hammer. Bob Lee was the drummer for Claw Hammer. Steve Reed, well, Steve's been everywhere at every time and is one of L.A.'s gnarliest electric bassists. Now they've all got this thing going: A potpourri of nonsensical ballads, waltzes, grooves or just oddness and noise performed from many points of view. A general musical and lyrical attitude from the hearts of country outlaws like Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson to mindwarpers like The Residents and crooners like Roxy Music. Live they're simply a trio. They used to bloat up to an octet but the trio allows for gnarlier dynamics -- high to low, soft to harsh, weirdo to garden variety.
In 2000 they recorded a demo (produced by Sally Browder of Little Dog Records) which pretty much landed them an instant deal with Birdman Records. The first official release, Sour Suite was released in 2002. Two years later Rudek Records (half funded by JW and assisted by Claw Hammer's Rob Walther) released the second CD Iron Nails Run In. In the mean time, they've been keeping busy live locally and even toured with the likes of Mudhoney, including a nice jaunt to the UK for All Tomorrow's Parties in May, 2006.
See The Amadans live here
Listen to more songs from IRON NAILS RUN IN here
Purchase IRON NAILS RUN IN here
Purchase SOUR SUITE here
Here's a review of our CD "SOUR SUITE" in DUSTED MAGAZINE:
WAHL's STREET JOURNALS:You've got to admire Jon Wahl's perseverance. The L.A.-based musician has been at it for years now, but he's never managed to shed the "critically acclaimed" tag and enjoy anything approaching the broader success he deserves.Since leaving the Pontiac Brothers in the mid-'80s, he's lent his multi-instrumental talents (sax, guitar, drums, harmonica, keyboards) to numerous acts, from the Bassholes, the Red Aunts, and Midget Handjob to Bad Religion, Slowrider, and Wayne Kramer. But, of course, his main gig was as frontman for Claw Hammer, a phenomenal live act whose mad punk hybrid of hard rock and blues didn't always fully translate to the studio. After two albums for Interscope, the band went on what now seems to be a permanent hiatus and Wahl set about recording his solo debut.Claw Hammer aficionados will remember Wahl as the frazzled, wailing presence at the center of fast 'n' loud songs that, while highly disciplined, frequently seemed only seconds away from chaos. Aside from the noisy guitar-fueled "Maybe," however, Sour Suite is less rock-oriented than much of his work with Claw Hammer. Written mostly while walking the streets of L.A., these songs find Wahl in a quieter, slightly more restrained mood. That's not to say that he forgoes the eccentric sensibility of his previous recordings; rather, his distinctive surreal vision is preserved and fleshed out in rootsy, off-kilter numbers that showcase, more than ever, his talent as a writer and performer.Wahl's vocals with Claw Hammer usually left little room for compromise: either you loved his often manic, pained delivery or you simply found it painful. Here, he shows more range. On the Appalachian-tinged ballad "May the Road Sing with You," complete with viola and piano, and the short and sweet "Florita," he sounds rather like Bryan Ferry's dissolute southern cousin. (Actually, Wahl's got some version of the Bryan Ferry look going on in the liner photos: he's smoking pensively and sporting a suit jacket, albeit standing in a bathtub, under a running shower.) With its Eno-esque synth, "My Song" conjures up the full-on early Roxy Music sound, although you'd never catch Ferry crooning lines like "My song is the salmonella journeying through the bowels of music and the guts of time."Wahl reworks a couple of old standards here with considerable success. "Blue Moon" (re-titled "Blooooo Mooooon") is given a Tom Waits-ish makeover with dark clockwork rhythms and a slightly bizarre edge thanks to Wahl's vibrato, as well as his oddball supplementary lyrics. "Tennessee Waltz" is performed without a shred of irony, complete with a late-night jazzy sax solo.Although on Sour Suite Wahl might sound down, he's certainly not out – a point that's made emphatically by standout tracks like "Southern California Dreaming" and "She Was Plastic," which bring country-blues inflections to Wahl's familiarly skewed, ambivalent portrayals of his urban surroundings.Wahl's Claw Hammer oeuvre often raised comparisons with that other Jon (Spencer), inasmuch as their records display a similarly warped, parodic punk homage to the blues. While Sour Suite continues to bear out such comparisons, it also suggests that there's more to Wahl's repertoire than there is to Spencer's, which has become something of a one-line joke. There may be as much irony in Wahl's crooner pose as in Spencer's, but there's also a sense that he's genuinely able to lose himself in a broad range of musics rather than always having to be the knowing, self-referential frontman. (by Wilson Neate)
and here's one from SWIZZLE-STICK.COM
JON WAHL & the AMADANS: SOUR SUITE (Birdman 034)
Jon Wahl knows something about pop history and the nature of the "pop" song. His late great, vastly underappreciated, art punk band, Clawhammer once upped Devo, who was the greatest of all art-spastic-punk bands, by doing an entire cover version of "Are We Men?" Of course nobody listened because in the 90s "fun" was an unkind word. On Wahl's solo debut "Sour Suite" (get it, sour sweet?) Jon somehow manages to take on the entire history of the American song structure and turn it on its arty fucking head. And, believe it or not, he succeeds without nary four buckets of paint on his canvas. Coming off like a southern California Bryan Ferry, Wahl manages to croon his way, shake and bake his way, and finally balls his way into this mini-masterpiece. The only problem with fellows like Jon is that he sits so far below the radar that not one "sophisticated" soul is ever gonna here this record to even get it. Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music are the easiest and most logical diving boards for this because Ferry appreciated the American song form enough to play with it much in the same way Harry Nillson did. But the one thing Ferry had over Harry was, number one, he was English and, number two, he learned a lot from Brian Eno. Wahl has the (mis)fortune of living in southern California in relative obscurity to do his thing without any of the pressures of the music biz telling him you can't ride "Blue Moon" into the deep cracked darkness that he does with retooling it into "Blooooo Mooooon" or doing the sickest most brilliant take (off) of "Tennessee Waltz" since Randy Newman remade Stephan Fosters' "My Old Kentucky Home" into, well, Randy Newman's "Old Kentucky Home" way back in 1972. And like Jon Wahl, nobody gave a shit about Randy Newman then either.The other guy I keep harking back to on this daring cheek full of swollen tongue opus is Scott Walker but without the grandiose overbearing theatrics of Walker. Jon seems like the kind guy who would charm the hell out of your girlfriend, fuck her while you're sitting in the next room and you wouldn't be mad cause you could see why. His lyrics are fun, twisted and with his confident slow moving romantic voice they don't seem trite or goofy just perfect and, believe it or not, respectable.It's records like this and Manu Chao's "Clandestino" & newer "…proxima estacion…Esperanza" that solidify that not only is the whole industry completely fucked but most of the major media outlets are also. Granted the newest Manu Chao has gotten very favorable press but not one reviewer had mentioned that on three different songs on the new one he had managed to sample/rip off his own "Bongo Bong" which was a huge European hit two years ago as was "Clandestino". My point being in this day of over amplification of stardom, when an emotive hack like Thom Yorke can release not one but two soulless electro bummers of records and be hailed as a genius, when Carson Daly is a star just because he can introduce Fred Durst (at least Dick Clark knew his place) and when unimaginative dreck that boarders on what Pat Boone did to black performers in the fifties like Limp Biscuit and the entire genre of rap-metal can get positive press in mainstream magazines that should know better (hello Jon Parles and Ann Powers) these great challenging records get lost. It took Rolling Stone almost thirty-three years to write about Skip Spence's "Oar" and not one mainstream magazine wrote about "Clandestino" when it came out. It's a shame that just because Mick Jagger has performed his two best songs in the last twenty years on two different solo records ("Evening Gown" and "God Gave Me Everything") it doesn't mean those albums are really good. It's pitiful that Bob Dylan had to eat bat shit to get folks to remember how great he has been and great he can be but would anyone really say that "Love and Theft" are even in the top eleven of all Dylan albums? I'd put it somewhere in between "Down in the Groove" and "Band of the Hand."It's a sad state of affairs when those who should know better are either too lazy or too chicken shit to know what makes a good record. Fortunately Jon Wahl has enough sense, talent and balls to make one without giving a flying fuck. He's making my list. (by Bela Koe-Krompecher)
here's a review of our CD "IRON NAILS RUN IN" from the UK (2004):
"Jon Wahl has been plowing his own lonely, multi-instrumental, furrow for well over a decade now. It’s been a rocky road that’s seen him go from doyen of the major labels during the post Nirvana, grunge feeding-frenzy when Interscope snapped up his super-frenetic, cubist rock troubadours Clawhammer, to this, his latest incarnation as vocalist/guitarist/ keyboard and horn man with the Amadans, Gaelic, incidentally, for idiot.
Wahl himself may be cursing his own principled idiocy in financing an e.p that attacked the dumbness and spoonfed homogeneity of current US Rock, as embodied in the Bush-backing corporate radio behemoth “Clear Channel” and rock waxworks “The Rolling Stones”, then distributing it to Stone’s fans outside one of last years “low key” gigs. Hate mail and financial ruin seem to have been the rewards reaped thus far.
“Nails..”, further self- funded and produced reprises the two tracks on “Tribute to the Rolling Stones” and adds a lot more besides, coming across on first listen as a hybrid of Borbetomagus and Eugene Chadbourne with cover versions of The Residents and Franz List thrown in, and on subsequent listens as a rather brilliant and sneaky series of rock and country-waltz standards spiked with all kinds of rhythmic and jazz fuelled subversions. “Nails” scratchy, low-fi production flattens out and saps the dynamics on some of the tracks, and it often feels that Wahl is quite consciously avoiding either the rock blast of Clawhammer or the lusher, more expansive Alt-alt country grandeur of the Amadans magnificent first effort, the overlooked “Sour Suite”
“Nails” is more dense than his last work and more diverse. A series of mini-dramas within a larger whole it alludesn to “Moby Dick”, beginning with a cry of “Call me Ishmael,” and ending with a drunken Wahl clinging to a coffin. Along the way we’re treated to the Zoot-suit and rattlesnake-feedback shuffle of the Congo-groovy “The day it rained pigeon shit”, attacks on Korporate rock and Wahl’s nostalgia for it’s co-opted promise,“I don’t believe in the Pop world” “Would somebody please pull the plug” “Threnody for St Cecelia”, and a full-tilt romp through “Leibestraum” that collapses into demented howling.
Wahl’s attack on corporate rock is no easy run through rebel-cliches, and “Nails” is as uncompromising aesthetically as Wahl’s stand has been politically. The truth of this album, a truth missing from the tritely confessional “boy looses girl” re-treads of his Alt-Country peers is that so much of his daily life is inevitably bound up in the misery and frustration of being an intelligent, talented rock musician within Corporate America. The picture Wahl paints is richer, truer, dares to engage with the political dimension of life and is consequently fuller. Bitterness, despair, bruised romanticism and righteous ire are counterbalanced by skewed musical tangents, irreverent pastiche, determined aggression. An exhausted and an exhausting sound, but because Wahl still understands the liberating value of play, finally not a defeated one. Wahl’s dedication to “all Future revolutionaries” suggests that, for him at least, it may simply be yet another new beginning." (Carl Neville)