A Strong Start, a Nice Return

Today’s menu of local album releases ranges from Peter Fahey’s long-delayed debut to the Chantays’ impressive surf-rock comeback with their first album in 30 years. Also, the Leaving Trains’ latest release serves as a fittingly raw yet catchy hail-and-farewell for the late Fullerton record producer, Chaz Ramirez. Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent). Three stars denote a solid recommendation.

*** The Chantays “Next Set”

While Dick Dale has won deserved acclaim for his thunderous ‘93-94 return to recording and touring action, the Chantays’ first new album since 1964 makes it clear that he doesn’t have the market cornered when it comes to auspicious comebacks by vintage O.C. surf-rockers.

“Next Set” also makes it clear that there is more than one way to ride the surf-instrumental wave.

Dale’s method on his comeback albums, “Tribal Thunder” and “Unknown Territory,” calls for a wild, barely harnessed unleashing of elemental force. The Chantays--whose ’94 lineup includes founding guitarists Brian Carman and Bob Spickard and the band’s original drummer, Bob Welch--show that it is possible to arrive at powerful and dramatic ends with means that are guided by a classicist’s sense of restraint.

The pleasures of “Next Set” come not from any sudden explosions, but from the sureness and inevitability with which the Chantays’ architectural song-blueprints unfold.

Guitar themes are stated, developed and built upon with interweaving or harmonized passages, with some lines clean, and others drenched in the traditional surf-spume of reverb. Drums and bass get ample space along with the team of three guitars. (The all-guitarslineup is a change from the early ‘60s, when the Chantays also featured electric piano; for fun, listen to the Chantays’ original “Pipeline” back-to-back with the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” then see how much you’re willing to wager that the Doors’ pianist, Ray Manzarek, was a surf-rock fan.) It’s all put together in lean, shifting arrangements that generate motion, drama and grandeur without ever seeming overblown.

The Chantays’ new compositions, “Killer Dana,” “Bailout at Frog Rock” and “South Swell,” are all highlights, small epics that stand up well with the surf-classics that round out the album and make it a fine introduction to surf rock in general.

Carman and Spickard have rearranged their own 1963 hit, “Pipeline,” perhaps the most sublime artifact ever concocted by two 16-year-olds goofing off with guitars in a suburban bedroom, as well as two Spanish-flavored oldies from the Chantays’ first album, “El Conquistador” and “Blunderbus.” (Dale duplicated the main theme from “Blunderbus” on “Shredded Heat,” which is credited to Dale himself on the “Tribal Thunder” album.)

Also included are valuable remakes of excellent surf-rock standards by the Bel-airs, the Astronauts and the Pyramids. The only misstep on this well-chosen, well-wrought album is the zillionth remake of the overexposed “Riders in the Sky.”

(Available from the Chantays, 34184B Coast Highway, Box 236, Dana Point, CA 92629.)

* The Chantays play Friday at the Heritage Brewing Co., 24921 Dana Point Harbor Drive, Dana Point. 9 p.m. (714) 240-2060. *** Peter Fahey “Astral Skyline”

Oxygen Records Fahey is a singer-songwriter from the old school, down to the strummed guitar and the harmonica in a brace around his neck. “Astral Skyline,” his debut release, is a mellow, low-keyed EP (the title might be cosmic in intent, but one would prefer to take it as a tongue-in-cheek play on the titles of Van Morrison’s moody “Astral Weeks” and Bob Dylan’s mellow “Nashville Skyline.”)

The tone throughout its six songs is wistful as wistful can be--we’re talking Jackson Browne-like buckets of gentle ruefulness. Like the Buck Owens of “Together Again,” the country-influenced Fahey sounds steeped in sadness even when he sings, in “Fallin’,” about finding a true, sustaining love.

While “Astral Skyline” will be just the thing for those who’d like a warm, sweetly melancholic soak, it doesn’t get soppy or overly sentimental. Fahey is careful not to overplay his emotions, keeping his pleasant, homespun voice (which can sound at times like a less crusty John Prine or a less ragged Jules Shear) keyed to a pitch of dignified restraint that rises only momentarily to full-on pleading.

He has enough faith in his simple, direct and tuneful songwriting not to strain for effect. It’s a faith well-placed.

Fahey’s co-producer, Joe Simon, does a fine job of paralleling the singer’s own approach by giving the music warm, rippling textures without letting things get saccharine or overstuffed.

A veteran musician on the local scene who has always impressed with his roots-steeped keyboards playing, Simon makes like a poor man’s Benmont Tench as he applies a delicate Hammond organ whir.

But the instrumental star here is Greg Leisz, the gifted former Fullertonian who adds just-so teardrop pedal steel lines to a couple of countrified ballads, and brings David Lindley’s work on Jackson Browne’s early albums to mind with his soaring lap steel solo on “Someday.”

If the new adult-alternative station, KSCA (101.9-FM), wants to establish some grass-roots credentials by jumping on the bandwagon of a deserving, unknown, unsigned local, Fahey would be a worthy candidate.

(Available from Oxygen Records, P.O. Box 3425, Long Beach, CA 90803)

*** The Leaving Trains “The Big Jinx”

SST This album by the long-running L.A. band the Leaving Trains is one of the last records overseen by Chaz Ramirez at his Fullerton studio, the Casbah. As a producer and engineer, Ramirez was a key ally of Social Distortion and worked with scores of other O.C. rockers both well-known and obscure.

At his death from an accidental fall late in 1992, he was engineering this Leaving Trains release, and leader Falling James Moreland had officially inducted him into the band as its bassist.

While the whimsical Falling James might be capable of starting an album with three minutes and 16 seconds of an actual train’s rumbling approach and departure just for the heck of it (or to outdo Brian Wilson’s “Pet Sounds” coda by about 2 1/2 minutes), in this context it sounds like a farewell to Chaz and a commentary on the transitory nature of things. The train tapes return (mercifully briefly) at the middle and end of the album.

With Chaz playing some guitar and a bit of drums as well as bass, the Leaving Trains’ basic sound is hefty, loud and garagey. The exceptions come in Moreland’s more arty, self-consciously deep moments.

He burrows into a heavy, gothic-psychedelic mood with the Jim Morrison-like “A Woman’s Clouds” (a portrait of a drug-abusing, sensation-craving protagonist, it invites speculation that Moreland might have been thinking about his now-famous ex-wife, Courtney Love).

The song’s thematic and stylistic bookend on the album is “Chloroformality,” a gloomy piece with oceanic sweep that sounds like Nick Cave-goes-to-Seattle. Both songs contain the baleful line, “In the absence of feeling, even pain is a pleasure.”

While those tracks are keepers, the Leaving Trains are really in their element when they turn themselves into a rough, wryly antagonistic garage-punk band. With Moreland braying like Ian Hunter or Joe Strummer or copping a Lou Reed deadpan attitude, the band bangs its way through hard-charging rockers like the N.Y. Dolls-inspired “Ice Cream Truck” and the slamming but melodic punk songs “Nothing Left” and “Go A-(Expletive) Head.”

The darkly romantic “Blacklist” has some Clash/Social Distortion echoes as Moreland celebrates the outlaw-outsider spirit he has always cultivated. The country-punk ditty, “Can’t Afford to Die” is a lighthearted statement of noncomformist purpose, in which, among other things, the famously cross-dressing Falling James defends his transvestite proclivities.

Less reliant on novelty and overt acting-out than some past Leaving Trains releases, “The Big Jinx” is still a messy and unpredictable mixture from a band that wants to make serious, anguished art without relinquishing the right to be impulsive and bratty. Both sides have their appeal.