People Mover

2011-06-20T23:48:00.018-04:00

It's so good to be here, asleep on the lawn.
Some notes towards a Neil Young summer, or what will probably be a Neil Young / Descendents / Sun Ra / Motorhead / Bill Callahan / everything else summer. But really, I just want to mention On The Beach, because I've been listening to it all the time, and even when I'm not listening to it, I'm thinking about it, and I suspect I'm even thinking about it when I'm not thinking about it. Maybe it's that it reminds me of someone and that I can hear her Fargo/Rochester accent singing "I'm a vampire, baby" and "I went to the radio interview/ended up alone with the microphone", and that it's a killer sometimes. Or that the line "sooner or later it all gets real" flashes in my mind every single day, or that "Revolution Blues" is an ultimate driving with the windows down in the warm air and feeling there's no way you won't survive song (the word BADASS, all caps, comes to mind), or that the solo around the 3:15 mark of "Vampire Blues" is like an anti-solo or a middle finger to boring virtuosos (or just a miraculous fuck-up?), almost jokey but absolutely not a joke. Maybe it's the flowery wallpaper inside the album sleeve, or that some Neil Young records feel like EVENTS and Beach is one of those in-between LPs or something, not that it's a non-event, it's just off-the-cuff in a way, not labored over. Did he have a studio at his house overlooking the coast? Was everything done in one take? Did he ever kill anyone in Laurel Canyon? I want to dig for every little bit of Beach session minutiae, and then pick up Trans, Zuma, Everybody's Rockin', American Stars N' Bars, etc, just jump down the Neil rabbit hole and see where it takes me. Fuck, have you heard Le Noise? Beach is all sunsets and being at a distance and being exhausted but it's nice out so let's keep going kind of attitude, and that's what I need so that I'm not just spacing out and counting down to Fall. It's easy to get buried in the past, for real, but fuck that.

Neil Young - "Revolution Blues"
Neil Young - "Vampire Blues"
Neil Young - "On The Beach"
Neil Young - "Ambulance Blues"

Also: not trying to get into a Taste War, or what's that phrase, "class antagonism"? But I went to one of the Jazz Fest shows, The Budos Band down in a huge tent near Main and Gibbs. 20 bucks, and Leah and I only caught half of their second set of the night, and I only had enough money for a couple overpriced whatever beers. It was strange. Budos was good, if a little crisper and modern-er than their records. On vinyl they're a band straight out of the sweaty, well-dressed sixties, soul/funk rhythms, great horns and bass, scratchy guitars, lo-fi enough to sound old. They're an ideal summer band (I wrote about that first record a few years ago, see!). The full clear sound at the venue and the actual physical presence of the band itself erased my dream vision (in my mind they all looked like young Ornette Coleman with sunglasses and short-sleeve collared shirts and tailored slacks; this is not what they in fact look like), and then there was the audience. Again, not picking a fight, but it was a mix of jam band kids and normies and then all these middle-agers. People's parents, or maybe people who could afford a season-pass or whatever it's called. I shouldn't even care, the band was solid, people were dancing their asses off, but I felt out of place almost. It was so comfortable. I wanted it to be in a club where you couldn't breathe but couldn't stop moving. Why?? I love breathing. When I heard Budos for the first time, it was music that felt, maybe not revolutionary, but like it was needed. Necessary music, dance music that was also a time machine and had tons of real instruments. I was also big into Hypnotic Brass Ensemble at the time. I don't know, I get lost in my own music fantasies and when the reality doesn't match up, I get grumpy. There was a woman doing a light workout routine to the live Budos set and she seemed happy (I have video of it, I should post it). So what am I complaining about really? Am I complaining? I've listened to Forbes/Young/Walter's American Free a few times and this is what I want. I want to be pummeled and flattened I guess. I missed their show a few months back (maybe it was a year ago?) and I'm kicking myself way hard. Something raging and transformative in the tight quarters of a frightening punk show is almost always the way to go, and I realize it's not for everyone, and there can be the soothing and the vintage and I'll totally get into that and love it, but I also need to be taken outside myself and feel like I will never be balding and will always be horribly restless on the inside.

Forbes/Young/Walter - "Red"
Forbes/Young/Walter - "Yellow"

Have you checked out Jesse Michaels' thrash metal blog? Please do so now. I finished Bill Callahan's Letters To Emma Bowlcut the other day, and you should do that, too. I keep thinking of the part where the main guy says "I hope someone drops a burlap sack of cash on your doorstep. And that you will undo a button on your poncho". Girls should be melting. I've been singing his "America!" for days, I can't stop. Also, if you haven't picked up Ellen Willis' Out Of The Vinyl Deeps, you really should (cool trailer for the book here). Great, great, great stuff and important in the history of feminist rock writing. Also, she liked all the shit I like (Dylan, VU, Van Morrison, Dolls), except she said the first three Sabbath albums were terrible. And she was into CCR and Janis and I can't really hang with them. I can only listen to them from a radio that I'm not paying attention to. Dick Snare recording is nearing completion, too, even though Kaci's in Switzerland right now living the high life, if the high life includes working a job you don't necessarily like (ironing sweatpants?), but getting to nanny some cool kids and skip town for Paris to see live Dinosaur Jr and skateboard expos. A postcard she sent me included the phrase "cool peens". So there's that. Otherwise, if you need me I'll be drinking coffee and trying to write lyrics while the plumbing gets fixed. PEACE.

2011-04-10T14:14:00.012-04:00

Yooo, here's the Dick Snare recordings I mentioned way back when, titled Sega Tapes, an homage to the citizens of Quad City. Two joints, one called "Punta Gorda" and one called "Smith-Corona", done pretty quickly--a few takes of each song, a couple quick doubled guitar takes, and maybe three vocal takes total for both songs. Everything sounds HUGE and together, mostly thanks to Kolbe Resnick. Also, new podcast by me, Kaci, and Kolbs is here. Longest one yet, but it flows pretty well and you'll get to know some of the songs we liked/remembered from our childhoods. It's entertaining (I think!). I'm currently in the process of moving to Rochester, so my mind is on how many cardboard boxes and plastic tubs I need to carry my shitload of shit, and the only music I've been hearing is stuff I put on in the background while I pack and unpack. Cold Cave's Cremations, Grinning Death's Head's LP, Death's ...For The Whole World To See, Milk n' Cookies, Shoppers, etc. Today I slowly woke up after having a dream that I met the man who's life inspired The Wonder Years. He lived in the neighborhood I was moving to, and I went over to interview him for a magazine I was working for. We went into his living room and he still had a Christmas tree up, but the dream could've taken place in January, I'm not sure. We sat down and he started talking about the girl who was the actual Winnie Cooper, who he'd eventually married and who'd died a few years ago from cancer. We both got really choked up, and I kept thinking how unfair it was that he had to lose her and that he lived in a shabby apartment by himself in a dreary part of town. He seemed like he never got any royalties from the show. I assumed he must have written a book and then some producer adapted it for TV, but as I kept talking to him I got the impression someone had just overheard his life story and a lightbulb went off over their head, and then they changed all the names and cast Fred Savage and filmed the pilot and they were off. Kind of fucked. Dude just kept on living, though. I wish I could remember his name. I'm never gonna watch that show the same way again! Anyway, I woke up, watched two episodes of Doug, then watched Tamra Davis' doc about Basquiat, The Radiant Child, which you should watch. Heroin death is fucking dumb, but I could look at SAMO graffiti all day. BOOM FOR REAL. Can't wait to get the Gray cd. Also, here's a couple songs I've been thinking about: Chalk Circle's "Scrambled" and "Subversive Pleasure" (from the incredible Reflection, available from PPM), Albert Ayler's "Masonic Inborn, Part 1", Harald Grosskopf's "So weit, so gut" (from Synthesist, reissued over at RVNG), The Tornadoes' "The Breeze and I", Jonathan Fire*Eater's "I've Changed Hotels". I haven't listened to a lot of things but I'll get around to them. Thinking about going to Jucifer tonight, thinking about getting a lot of Sonny Sharrock records. Thinking thinking thinking....

2011-02-08T21:44:00.012-05:00

Yooooooo, what's up? Guess what--THIS BLOG STILL EXISTS! People Mover is alive and well and not exactly motivated. But here are some nuggets: my band is in the process of recording, and, if they're not too sucky, I'll put the songs up here. The band is called Dick Snare. I play guitar, my friend Kaci plays drums, and our friend Kolbe is recording us. If you want to hear a rough practice demo of one of the songs, click here. You can also follow us on tumblr here. Our first show is February 18th (really fucking soon!) at the Dress Barn in Rochester City, NY. Kaci and I have determined that we'll be rocking shit as hard as possible. Come see us! Also, if you go to our tumblr, you can check out a couple podcasts we've done. New one should be happening soon. You should also stop what you're doing and check out my friends Kelley and Kyle's "Two Dummies" podcast here. Garage/goofball mania. And then you should stop what you're doing again and check out my boy Tyler's monthly mixes over at Androids-Anonymous. Best mixes you will ever hear EVER. Not kidding. Also, he just posted a recipe for his delicious vegan cornbread, and he's not even vegan! What else? I'm assuming you saw the Ice Age video and thought "man, I gotta get that record". I did the same thing! This Verma stuff is cool and it's FREE. The new Earth jammer is record of the year. Listen to "Old Black". I'll probably write something about Jane Birkin's Di Doo Dah soon (favorite record of 2010, hands down), which includes "Help Cammioneur!", which is better than "Le canari est sur le balcon". The Nerves/etc. tribute comp is pretty killer. Davila 666 doing "Hangin' On The Telephone", Audacity doing "Why Am I Lonely", P & the Ps doing "Any Day Now". Oh and I finally heard "King of Fuh", too! Beyond that, I don't know. I'm waiting on a copy of On The Beach (ahem). I can't think of anything else I'm freaking about. I mostly hang with my girl and watch Larry Sanders and listen to Legends 102.7 and daydream about reading all day long. Oh, here's a picture of me in front of the animatronic T-Rex at the RMSC. I'm at that point in winter where I just don't care how long my hair is and the cold is basically killing me. I work like 10 hours a day, face brutalized by sub-zero winds, openly swearing at sidewalks that aren't shoveled. But Lungfish's "Lay Yourself Aside" is cool, and I can't wait to eat homemade burritos with the girl who coined the term "butt babies". I'm gonna be in my early 30s as of 11:30 tomorrow night. More updates soon, probably!

2010-09-28T19:03:00.016-04:00

NEWS: I played live music in front of people for the first time in like 5 years the other day. My band Carpet Crawlers played the excellent Poetry Vs. Fiction event in Geneva at the fantastical Cracker Factory, aka the coolest space in the area, or maybe the world. The photo to the left (click on it) is what Carpet Crawlers looked like when we weren't playing, or between our two songs, one of which scared the hell out of people. Tyler (drums) played like Animal from the Muppets, and the acoustics of the giant room made him sound like 100 drummers at once. The guy serving wine at the other end of the building actually spilled shit when Tyler played. I played the analog synth and didn't blow people's ears out as much. On the first song I tried to make these weird fire works/bird noises. Second song was a little quieter, more like spaceships computing that was also kind of Earth-ish? It was like later Coltrane crossed with Goblin, or Zombi, but with maybe one vague concept to guide us that wasn't even a concept. College professors liked us, and some people walked out. It ruled so much. The poetry and fiction readers were excellent, and I especially liked Mike Faloon's work. I picked up his book, The Hanging Gardens of Split Rock, and I'm convinced it's great even though I haven't yet read it. He saw Servotron at least twice, what more do you need to know? But seriously I'm going to read it and you should pick it up.

Speaking of books, I need to stop buying books. I buy like four a week now. Today I got two in the mail (Charles Willeford's I Was Looking For a Street, Bruce Russell's Left-Handed Blows) and ordered another one (Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories). I also just got Joan Didion's The White Album, and I have two Raymond Chandler books that I bought over the summer that I haven't even flipped through yet. I also got Bill Callahan's book, Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone, and a copy of Bukowski's Women that I bought after I got breakfast with my friend Brady during one of his two visits this summer. This is on top of the 3-5 comics I buy PER WEEK, and the stack of books I borrowed from my dad two years ago (Hemingway, Pynchon, Mailer, etc.), and Looking For The Magic (which I started over a year ago), and Americana, which I'm almost through but should have been through back in July, when I spent a week either sitting around the house in extreme sloth-mode or going to my sister's pool and drinking Coronas. What the hell am I doing? When do I think I'm gonna read all this shit? On lunch breaks? In the 20 minutes between when I get into bed and when I fall asleep? I've finished a couple things: Julia Wertz's Drinking At The Movies and the 6th volume of Scalped. If you've read Wertz's Fart Party books (the first volume is due to be reissued shortly) or seen her work on the www internet, you know what to expect. Funny stuff, and some kind of serious stuff, but then more funny stuff. It's good. Scalped is second only to Stray Bullets in my mind. I want someone to make an HBO series out of it, but I can't decide who (like who I want to exec produce it, adapt it, direct the episodes). Oh and Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit: Book Two and the second Fuck This Life book should be added to your cart RIGHT THIS SECOND.

My music-buying has been just as bad. I went to the Antique Mall in Farmington to see if I could find a good belated b-day gift for my friend Justin. I wanted to find something cool for his garage/ping-pong area/darts room. He has a nice portrait of Kenny Rogers in there, so I was looking for something along those lines. Maybe just another portrait of Kenny Rogers. Instead I saw more used Nazi memorabilia than I expected (flags, arm bands, moderately scorched SS helmets) and got creeped out thinking about the local market for that shit, and then I bought collectible drinking glasses (Charlie Brown, Empire Strikes Back) and some older reasonably-priced LPs--Neil Young's first record, Johnny Cash's Bitter Tears, Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything?, and Rolling Stones's Flowers. Young and Stones records were musts because I've had "I've Been Waiting For You" and "Back Street Girl" in my head a lot. Cash and Rundgren could've waited, but I wanted them. Most of my favorite songs now are long as shit. Bardo Pond's "Lomand", Bo Hansson's "Migration Suite", Law Of The Rope's "Thy Own Throat", New Life's "New Life". I like short songs, too. Aias' "La Truita", Cheap Trick's "He's A Whore". The Arts' "I Am Ye Charged Black Candle Cursings", The Sapphires' "Who Do You Love". Birkin and Gainesbourg's "Orang Outan" can be hard to shake. So stupid. There are a million things I'm overlooking right now. I'll think of them later.

Anyway, I'll update this thing more. I've had complaints. New issue of geneva13 should be out maybe next month? I already wrote my piece, about Fall music/reading material. Go get the Love Pork tape and go see Beast Man in Rochester on...Thursday? Gotta double check that.

2010-07-23T12:45:00.024-04:00

TOTAL RECAP: I'm moved into my new apartment, which is located exactly where I described it in my last post. I didn't mention that it's also next to a performance square area, where boring live bands play as loud as they can every thursday night (cover bands, bands that have singers who really want to SING, etc.), and where teens hang out after dark and start fights, call each other "MOTHERFUCKER" and "PUSSY" and wear wife-beaters and giant shorts. The Old Farmer's Inn Bar is down the street, too. Do you like human garbage? Leathery faces? I look at that place and imagine what the inside might be like. It's gotta be like the back of the Bang Bang Bar, it just has to be.

But anyway, some things from the past month and a half, when I didn't have internet or cable for a while. I read a lot: comics, Brian Evenson's Baby Leg, Bryan Charles' book about Wowee Zowee, parts of Luc Sante's The Factory of Facts. I'm working my way through Don DeLillo's Americana. Holy shit, can he write. I picked up his Libra and Mao II, probably gonna start them next. I also started Bruce Eaton's book about Radio City, plus Christopher Hitchens' new book (speedy recovery!). I went to Charleston, South Carolina to meet up with my friend Melinda, and we took a car down to Florida. We saw vultures, helicopter bugs, a fully naked older gentleman by the side of the road near the beach. We swam with some fish in the waters off Key West, saw a woman with a confederate flag bikini top, saw chickens and roosters roaming free. I drank at the bar where Hemingway drank. There were two of them, actually, and one of them had old bras hanging from the ceiling. I sat on a stool with Arlo Guthrie's name on it. When we walked around Charleston, I decided I should live there.

Music-wise, I've been buying records left and right and listening to the same 3 or 4 things over and over. The Cap'n Jazz vinyl re-issue is cool for the songs, obviously, and also for Tim Kinsella's liner notes, which are...bleak? I can't tell. But they're worth a read. There's a Chain and The Gang 7" out now that's much better than the full-length, and the full-length isn't even bad. Looks like it's sold out at K (I just barely got a copy, it was a miracle), so check around. Got the Kinks Pye Set, which is on constant rotation. Favorite song right now is "Don't Ever Change". Or "Tired Of Waiting For You", or "Something Better Beginning". I'm stuck on Kinda Kinks, basically. Yesterday I put on my Hank Williams best-of set and put a public access fishing show on mute and it was pretty relaxing. I like "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You)" and "Jambalaya". Last month, I was driving down Park Ave, listening to the first Meat Puppets album, and I started almost crying. Long story, slipped back into a fog for a minute, but it's a funny picture. Some guy driving down the street on a beautiful day, blaring "Dolphin Field" or "Melons Rising", sniffling. I finally started listening to Smog, too.

Shit, I was planning on writing a lot more, and now I can't remember anything. And this is my last day of vacation so I want to be extra lazy, so fuck this. Go look at my tumblr if you haven't (just put up my 500th post, a picture of a ceramic Santa praying to a ceramic baby Jesus). More songs and funny videos (THIS!) and photos. Oh and some drawings I unearthed. I think I may have done them, but I can't remember. One is of my William "Fridge" Perry action figure. Be sure to watch Louis CK's show, too. The opening credits alone crack me up. I'm working on a podcast for geneva13, which should be done maybe in the next week (please do not hold your breath). Playlist is settled, I'll let you know. RIP Andy Hummel and Harvey Pekar.

2010-05-31T10:23:00.011-04:00

I'll be pretty much basically internetless for a couple weeks, but I swear you won't even notice. In the meantime, check out some things, starting with "The Other Girls". I know I mention Vivian Girls all the time, and if you're not interested, fine. Be that way. But I like that Cassie Ramone sometimes has a Stevie Nicks voice without trying (it's more pronounced on "Moped Girls"), and I'm 100% down with a chorus that goes "I just wanna spend my time inside my mind". Also, it starts with a crazy fake-out, like Costello's "Man Out Of Time" and Beauty Pill's "Rideshare". Also, it's 6 minutes and kind of builds to something. Also, it's just good. Elsewhere: I've been listening to the White Fence record all the time, Helium videos are enjoyable, Personal & the Pizzas are the best band going. Oh and my friend Kelley, who does a great blog called Psychedelic Elvis, will be in town this week spinning oldies, which should be ragical. So yeah, lots of things. See you soon from my new place above the jewelers and the salvation army, next to the upstairs bank offices! See you in the car, best wishes, Milhouse.

2010-04-25T13:19:00.019-04:00

I don't know a sin I haven't found.
Hey! Sorry I blanked on the whole month of March and almost all of April. Hope people are still reading this even though I kind of jumped ship to Tumblr for no reason (other than laziness probably?). I also hope people (you specifically) went out and tore shit up on Record Store Day 2010. I wasn't even excited about it until the day before, when I read the list of decent RSD releases and then had this sudden realization that I still love music and buying records. I mostly buy comics now, it's weird. But I bought a ton of vinyl, more than I thought I would, and felt great about it. The stores I like got a bunch of money and the shelves I like got more things to hold. And I actually managed to find a bunch of this year's RSD-only vinyl releases! Last year I couldn't find any. I had to scour eBay later and pick up some of them for slightly inflated prices. One that I still haven't picked up (at least in physical form) from last year is The Breeders' Fate To Fatal 12". You can download it pretty easy, but last I checked it was around $40 on eBay, limited to 500 copies, hand-screened, I think. But has everyone heard it? It's easier to handle than Mountain Battles, which is great, but takes some patience. Fate To Fatal feels a little fresher, totally unforced. It's not a long journey. It's only four songs. The title track comes direct from the '90s. "The Last Time" isn't a Stones cover, but does feature Mark Lanegan. A guy's voice on a Breeders song! So disorienting. "Chances Are" might break your heart at the right time. "Pinnacle Hollow" sounds like a Neil Young cover, but I'm pretty sure it isn't. It's a big vista and some hard, vague truths, the details never articulated but their presence hovering all around. I can go on and on about The Breeders, but I won't (I already have, sort of). I just didn't know if people had heard this record, and I wonder if people put new Breeders stuff into the "I'll check that out later" pile. You should check this one out now, or at least sooner.

The Breeders - "Fate To Fatal"
The Breeders - "The Last Time"
The Breeders - "Chances Are"
The Breeders - "Pinnacle Hollow"

Meanwhile: I'm going through a big Mississippi Records phase, or really a Mississippi Tape Comp phase. Download most/all of their tapes from the Root Blog. Type the word "mississippi" into the search field and go nuts. My favorites are What Are These Things With Big Black Wings? and Men With Broken Hearts. Oh and War Declaration is great, too. They're all good. Also going through an Everly Brothers phase. "Kentucky" and "Down In The Willow Garden" are good examples. Also obsessed with Stray Bullets. Do you have some of the later issues and do you want to let me borrow them? I take good care of borrowed books. I'd treat Stray Bullets back issues like the Shroud of Turin or the original Constitution. It's the best series I've ever read, at least so far. Also: new Max Morton zine, Mentholated Suburbia, is available now. I'm only telling you this because I already got my copy.

ps--Happy Birthday Leah!! Last night at her party we watched this video, plus the AVNs, which were drastically short, I thought. I got her an issue of a vintage adult mag called Black Silk Stockings, which I bought at the Antique Mall on 332 and had to ask an old lady to fetch for me from behind a glass case. Also got her the "Get Out of My Dreams" 45. Leah, if you're reading this: you still have two more gifts on the way. Barf Town 2: More Barfing!

2010-02-28T14:23:00.030-05:00

To this day I swear it was nice.
When I mentioned Silk Flowers' As Above So Below record a couple months back, I sort of downplayed just how much I was listening to it. There was a point right after I got it (middle of December) when I would put it on after work and play it for what felt like hours--side A, flip, side B, flip, side A, flip, etc. That's calmed down a bit, but hasn't really stopped, and now I have it on my iPod and sometimes listen to it while walking around delivering mail. It's so good! And strange. In the song I posted before ("Falling Palms"), there are notes that get played and then immediately begin to fly out of control, like they can't be reigned in, and even though the song doesn't feature any vocals or words, there's some kind of narrative going on. And the creep-o synths at the beginning, and the guitars that come in! It's fucking great. But who do you recommend this to? People who post pictures of themselves holding Bauhaus records? People who like Cold Cave? I actually don't know anything about Bauhaus. With Cold Cave, you can run close to something like Pille Palle Alle Pralle (that's not a knock, either), while Silk Flowers could be working in an office down the hall from Eliane Radigue, where she's playing drones using an old refrigerator or some kind of air conditioning unit. I'm not saying you can't dance to it or meet girls to it, it's just different. Aviram Cohen sounds like he's making fun of '50s horror villains, and there are distant mechanical/extra-musical sounds, the sound of a car idling and computer thought bubbles and TV static. Sometimes you're in the castle level of a Sega game, sometimes the chord changes are awesome. Are you into those types of things? Maybe you're into zoning out and dancing a little bit, or staying home and picturing night life, or maybe you like drawings. Maybe you like finding things in a place you wouldn't have thought to look. I just think this record kills.

Silk Flowers - "I Walk With You"
Silk Flowers - "Crescent Glow"

I turned 30 a couple weeks ago, and it wasn't so bad. I'd assumed it would feel like a kind of death, or like it would have a sting to it, but it didn't. When you're in your 20s, it's your job to be reckless and sleep on people's floors, have questionable facial hair, fuck things up repeatedly, do a lot of heavy thinking even though you really, really don't know shit. Turning 30 was a big step away from that. It felt like a retirement from that. I was in Barnes and Noble the other day and I heard what I think may have been Vampire Weekend on the in-store radio. I got some books, paid for them, and walked out. Whoever that music is for is officially none of my business, you know what I mean? I'm 30. They're not talking to me (lyrically, maybe; musically, not even close). Breaking music down by age-group isn't a great thing and it doesn't always work, but sometimes it does. It might not apply to Vic Chesnutt. He was 45 when he died this past Christmas, and plenty of people loved his music, and when I saw him back in whenever it was, June or July, it wasn't just a crowd of people 30 and up watching him. I went with Leah, who's 25, and when I mentioned the show later to my friend Erik, who I think is like 21-22, he was pissed that he hadn't gone. I've just been listening to At The Cut a lot, and I've been daydreaming about travelling south and having a house of my own, and reading a lot and getting a dog. There's something about his songs that makes the pace of being older seem nice and appropriate, and never boring. Listen to the guitars (strings?) on "Philip Guston"! The Silver Mt. Zion people and Guy Picciotto did an incredible job here as well. It's a really beautiful record. Oh and the lyrics to "We Hovered With Short Wings" go like this (capitalized just like it is in lyric booklet):

we hovered with Short wings
over the Hillock hillcrest
Our breath like radiation
glowing, showing Bones
with Much bellowing And roaring
a Change of Directioning
We wrench around
dumbfounded At our wretchedness
hungry As a hunter
our Breath is Keen opinion
the Old guard plays patty-cake
with The edgy Conferees

Vic Chesnutt - "We Hovered With Short Wings"
Vic Chesnutt - "Phillip Guston"
Vic Chesnutt - "Flirted With You All My Life"

Some other things (tumblr things): Deep Wound, Pussycat, Mark McCoy, and this Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions song that sounded like a Truth & Soul comp song from a distance the other night. Seriously great. Two books I read this morning were Noir and Mesmo Delivery (not trying to brag, but the copy I read is an original Ad House version!), plus a big chunk of Kill All Your Darlings. Constant bookworming! Also watched Inglourious Basterds again and continue to be in love with Emmanuelle Mimieux. Also, did you know Middle America broke up? WHAT THE FUCK. My other new band project, long in the planning stages, will now feature a girl named Debbie playing bass and hopefully, if we're lucky, an ounce of what MA had going on. I wish I could post a song from their demo/tape but I forgot to have Tyler burn it for me. Next time.

2010-02-19T17:33:00.015-05:00

General update: Hey! So, I've been in a total fucking fog for the past two months. I've been staring straight ahead at nothing, shoving food into my mouth without even tasting it, talking to people and not really thinking about what I'm saying. I think Christmas was good, and then New Year's was alright, and then everything kind of went haywire, so I kind of went autopilot. I started reading, pretty much all the time, and when I listened to music, it was partly just so that I wouldn't have to hear myself think. There was a lot of Figure 8 ("I Better Be Quiet Now", "LA", "Everything Means Nothing To Me"), and I tried to picture Prince covering those songs. Then there was Big Star ("The Ballad of El Goodo", "Thirteen", "September Gurls") because I guess I needed '70s pop in a huge way, and then a lot of Roxy Music ("Beauty Queen", "2 HB") and the first Eno record ("The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch") to balance it out. Tons of Elvis Costello, too ("Accidents Will Happen", "I Stand Accused", "Man Out Of Time"). Lately I've been jazzed about the LA Nuggets box ("Jump Jive & Harmonize", "If You Want This Love", "The Times To Come") and ESPECIALLY the Max G. Morton mixtapes over at Workin' Nights (the other mixes are probably great, too, I just haven't listened to them yet; I've heard good things about Tortilla Blanket). Oh and Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Galaxie 500, Oliver Onions, Neon Blud, Felt Letters, and some other shit. I think I spent a lot of time looking at pictures, either at They Don't Call Them Lovers... or at A Journey Round My Skull. Negative Pleasure is pretty cool, too, but I can't stand people who are maniac tumblrs. A couple posts a day, tops! For the love of christ! Oh and, not sure if these were secrets, but I love comics and I love Erykah Badu (I still need that Taco Loco record!). I'm trying to focus on things that are great/awesome/sawesome, and less on things that are horrible or things that I miss terribly from the moment I wake up, through my whole workday, through my dinners/beer blasts, through Buckingham Commons hang-outs, through comic talk and movie watching, through grocery shops and long commutes, 30th birthdays, Puppy Bowls, games of Phase 10 and Skip-Bo, all the way until I finally, finally fall asleep. Two of those good/great things are: I'm going to be DJing a wedding for some rad people in May, and I have a new band project in the works. There are always things that are totally not shit-tastic at all. So obvious! What else? Fuck, I don't know. More posts soon, and it won't just be me rambling about whatever. Album talk! For real!

2009-11-30T21:51:00.009-05:00

Ok, so I just got yet another message on my answering machine where a pre-recorded robot-y woman's voice says she has a message for "Scott Tuttle". Then she says if I'm not Scott Tuttle, please call this number so I can remove my number from their records, and then another robot woman's voice comes on and reads a phone number like it's the single most boring phone number she's ever had to say out loud, or like she's only doing this job for the money and it's been a really long day. Then the first robot woman says that if I am Scott Tuttle, I need to call a different boring phone number and reference a super boring account number, and that by even listening to this part of the message, I am acknowledging that I am in fact Scott Tuttle. Did they think I would scramble to shut my machine off when they shifted the focus to the real Scott Tuttle? Who leaves messages like this? What is this shit about?? Should I just pretend to be Scott Tuttle and find out? What the fuck kind of name is "Scott Tuttle"? Can he even be real? Can robots really get bored? I have so many questions.

Here are some songs I posted on my tumblr within the last month or so: The Parasails, Bumrocks (bored warp mix), Vincent Gallo, The Crossfires, Ornette Coleman, Moondog, some Thai stuff, Abner Jay, Blonde Redhead. I update that shit pretty consistently, so if you're coming here looking for stuff, maybe you should go there? At least for the time being? New posts will be up here soon-ish, though! Also, new geneva13 will be out even soon-isher! It'll include my picks for Christmas songs that are kind of great and kind of not on Sunny 102 and Warm 101.3 and the rest of the holiday/John Tesh/Delilah stations (assuming I finish it in time). Wowee! It's cold, and time to eat. Be back later.

2009-10-12T09:07:00.029-04:00

Notes on August and September: Actually, I don't think I have any notes on August and September. It's tough to remember everything. Right now my brain is kind of feeling like this, probably because it's 9:00 am on Columbus Day and someone has been pounding nails into a board with a hammer directly below my apartment for at least an hour. Plus a million things happened this weekend, some of them crazy things. It's a Krazy World. Before I got woke up, I dreamed I was at the record store with a stack of shit I wanted to buy--a box of cassettes and some LPs, a huge haul--but then they decided to close for the night and turned off all the lights at once and started to lock up while I was still in there. Then I dreamed I was in school, and the teacher was handing back a spelling test. She handed my test back, I got a C-. She started talking about what we could do to improve our grades, and part of it was that we had to tape the tests to our shirts and wear them until we had taken a make-up test. I thought she was kidding, so I was like, "Wait, we have to do what? Are you serious?" She didn't say anything, so I asked again really politely, like raised my hand and everything, and then said, "I'm sorry, I didn't catch what you said. What do we need to do if we want to take the make-up test?" She turned around, grabbed my test out of my hand, crumpled it up and threw it at me. I think she called me an asshole, too. I don't remember exactly what happened after that. We had to watch a video or a film strip or something, and I may have gotten a little belligerent, because it seemed like there were no rules anymore, or I just stopped caring. I remember trying to figure out when/if I could get close enough to the teacher to spit in her face, and then I started thinking about putting sugar in her gas tank, and tried to picture myself doing it, in the parking lot in broad daylight. I would be spilling sugar everywhere, and she'd be leaving the school, walking towards her car, digging through her purse to find her keys. I could see myself sweating, trying to finish, wondering if I needed to put in a whole sack of sugar or if even a little bit was more than enough, and then hearing her dress shoes clacking on the pavement, getting louder as she got closer to the car, the car I was trying to ruin. Then, there was the constant, barely muffled thud of a hammer.

But yeah, as far as August/September goes, I don't know that I was really stressing about music at all. I had some time off and hung out with my friends from Michigan, bought a bunch of wine, was sick for weeks on end (pretty much all of September), camped out at my parents' house while they were in Europe and Northern Africa, got the worst fever of my life and went totally delirious, thought I was on a TV show and kept dreaming about things stacked on top of each other, like a garbage dump. I almost threw up but I didn't. Speaking of garbage, though -- the new issue of geneva13 is out and it's all about Geneva's trash situation. I haven't read through all of it yet, mainly because I don't want to get bummed out about landfills and local problems being symptomatic of Earth's general fucked up enviropocalypse. It's one of those things that makes you feel personally responsible and completely powerless at the same time. Ugh. But I wrote a column about my favorite garbage songs and it's fucking AWESOME! Or at least, the songs are decent. I made a mix of the garbage songs + bonus songs to be played at the zine's release party, but unfortunately it didn't get played. Not a huge loss, but people could have heard "Trash", "Garbage Can", "I Sold My Heart To The Junkman", "Teenage Wastebasket", "Peanut Duck", "Everything And More", "Born With A Curse", "Don't Bother Me", and "Werewolf", and it could have gone over pretty well I think. Maybe next time.

I'm trying to think of records that came out recently that were good. The new Grass Widow 12" on Captured Tracks is rad. The new Vivian Girls is killer, too. Don't read or listen to what anyone says about it, just check it out for yourself. And..holy shit! Tyler just sent me a Beavis and Butthead ringtone. This is the greatest shit. Uhhhh, what else? Rusty Kelley from Total Abuse is doing some tumblr things. Pretty crazy about Thee Oh Sees right now. Always insane about Fugazi, right now "Closed Captioned (demo)". Speaking of, read this -- roughly the same shit I thought about as I watched Instrument last week. You should buy this T.A.S.K. record or at least listen to "Holy Coffee", too. Fuck, all I can think about is B&B and how cold it is, and how I need to go to Newark and finish mowing my parents' lawn, visit my grandmother, pick up her laundry. I'm going to end this here. No wait, I'm going to end this with "Ice Cream Paint Job"

2009-08-26T17:21:00.003-04:00

Tyyyyy-lerrrrrrrrrrts!

1. Came across a book called The Risen Tide of Shit and Failure. '90s hardcore art allegedly, and the cover looks MITB-ish. I ordered it, so if you want to check it out before you buy, that can be arranged (once I get it). Also ordered that Dave Pajo acoustic Misfits record. Might be some good Fall shit, might be terrible. Nick Drake singing "I ain't no goddamn sonofabitch"? Why not.

2. IDIB's got a couple good things finally: Glass Candy "Geto Boys" 12" and a new Nite Jewel thingie. One-time pressing for the "Geto" shit, if you're still interested (I know my interest in disko shit dropped like a motherfucker). The new NJ stuff I've been hearing has been cool, though.

3. I bought just about everything you told me about. Still waiting on Citizen's Arrest, should be here by the end of the week. Harvey Milk jam is solid, but hasn't sunk in yet. Haven't listened to MK Ultra yet, but it's sitting next to me as I'm typing this. It's right here, Ray, it's looking at me. What do you think of Nazi Dust? I like it after a couple listens. It's more metal than I expected, which is nice. That "South Will Rise Again" comp is kind of stupid, but it reminds me of out-of-town Chuds shows ca. 1999 for some reason, and the Cult Ritual song is worth it. I didn't order that Condominium 7", but I want to hear it. More hXc recommendations, please and thank you! Please pardon my dear Aunt Sally. Oh and I'm still waiting on my Pissed Jeans record, but the guy who took the cover photo (Shawn Brackbill?) is apparently following me on tumblr.

4. I listened to Possessed to Skate yesterday. Suddenly love Spazz and Asshole Parade. Could just be a phase, but what if it isn't?? S. Shootings should happen soon.

5. Did you get 42nd Street Vol. 4?? We should be watching it. Or maybe we should wait until the end of September and do it like balls to the wall Vol. 1-5 . Just an idea.

6. Can I borrow all your Elvis Costello jawns?

2009-07-22T15:07:00.006-04:00

Hey, I started a tumblr and you can see it/follow it here. It'll be just like People Mover (music-related things), but with very little writing, which means I won't dread having to update it, which means I'll probably update it all the time. And you can learn things from it, like for instance: did you know the Nation of Ulysses clip I mentioned last September that used to be 1:58 seconds long (or something like that) is now 3:59 seconds long? I thought I was hallucinating when it happened. So there's that. What else? I saw Harvey Milk last night. Fucking incredible. Couldn't help noticing Kyle Spence is phenomenal. Better than the first time I saw them in a lot of ways. Set list included "Merlin Is Magic" and "Motown". I really couldn't have been happier. They opened for Torche, which wound up feeling sort of like Sabbath opening for Van Halen, which actually happened in the late '70s, I think, and which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Never sure exactly how I feel about Torche, though. Also, I bought Salo the other day. 50% off select Criterion titles at Barnes & Noble, as of this past Sunday afternoon anyway. I bought a book about Cat Power, too, and now feel like that was a mistake. I flipped through it at the store and found a couple quotes from Henry Owings and thought "this'll be great!". Later, I read the introduction to the book, which starts with Chan Marshall does not want you to read this book. If Chan Marshall doesn't want me to do something, then I shouldn't be doing it. 30-some pages in, and I know why. Don't think I'll finish it.

2009-07-18T11:19:00.007-04:00

That mailbox looks like a droid.
I gotta watch Strange Brew because I've been thinking about it every couple of days for the past 10 years probably, and it's on TV right now. But I also want to say this Grass Widow record is fucking killin' it. It feels fresh as hell. Maybe because it's got twisty guitars like Monorchid but with the The Breeders on vocals? Maybe because the songs are a little crazy, sometimes arranged like scrappy prog songs that have to be done in three minutes, but they're not bowing to math? Maybe because the lyrics are legit good? Maybe because they're from San Francisco but they sound sort of British? Maybe because I like all-girl bands in a way that I can't like all-guy bands (Harvey Milk, et al excluded)? Maybe because this GW song I mentioned before (from their split with Rank/Xerox) is like an early hal al Shedad practice tape with the Vince Guaraldi children's choir? Maybe because the cover of their 12" is a picture of their practice space, with a big blanket hanging on the wall with their name spelled out in patches? I mentioned something in my last geneva13 column about "self-consciously post-punk wild women" being not exactly what I'm looking for (even as I love this Mika Miko song/video). Grass Widow are sort of that, but with heavy modesty and great instincts. You can also hear every note. No fuzz, no feedback, nothing blown out. Some people have to go no-fi because they can't write "Green Screen", I guess.

Grass Widow - "To Where"
Grass Widow - "Green Screen"
Grass Widow - "Out Of Body Experience"

Regarding the late Dash Snow: look at this. Doesn't it make you feel like you're doing literally nothing? I'm not at all an expert on him, I was aware of him, sort of. I bought a zine he did that I decided to never look at again because it wound up being weirdly prophetic and I have no interest in revisiting one of the darker periods of my life. But the guy basically had super powers, and said "fuck you" in a lot of fun and ridiculous ways. The more of that, the better. So, R.I.P. Meanwhile: I'm a big fan of Dominique Young Unique and James Moody. Those songs at least. Oh and Cliff Nobles and Co! Long live 94.1 FM.

2009-07-09T17:48:00.011-04:00

YO! Briefly noted: new geneva13 is out and buyable/grabable. It includes yet another music column by me, four pages of things I think are totally pretty good, including: Dum Dum Girls, Brilliant Colors, Onna, Milk n' Cookies, John Lurie, The Stains, The Nerves, Pat Graham, Hot T-Shirts, and Albert Ayler, and some other stuff. Things I did not get around to or sort of forgot to mention were Ancestors and Real Estate. Maybe next time. Also, you should check out this Summer Mix, courtesy of the guy from City Center. Girl groups, etc, so it's definitly worth it. Oh and did I ever mention Ian Svenonius on Dissonance? Totally awesome, and longer than this, but good in a lot of the same ways. Be sure to go to the 1 hr. 36 min. 18 sec. mark to hear "When Love Calls Your Name". Listen to the Congos track after it, too. And turn both them shits way up. Listen to Josephine Baker, too. Buy this Parasails tape if you can. AND: my friend Kaci was an instructor at the Willie Mae Rock Camp For Girls this past week in NYC, and you can see some photos and thoughts about it here. I guess she got an eye infection, but she also got to work with Allison Wolfe. You gotta take the bad with the unbelievably great sometimes.

First podcast coming soon. New posts coming sooner.

ps: Beauty Pill's back and it feels so good. Talk about timing.

2009-06-29T18:17:00.026-04:00

Sky-scraping afro in the bloom of youth.
Everything that could be said about Michael Jackson's death has to have been said already. Of the very few eulogies I read, my favorites were Rob Havrilla's and Maria T's (be sure to check out that Detention song, as well), because they spoke the truth while saying two completely different things. People loved MJ's music and people thought he was a fucking weirdo, and most people thought both at the same time. I don't know if that's complicated or very uncomplicated. His music was so good and he made people so happy, and his personal life was so unorthodox and made people so uneasy, and the feelings at both end were so extreme and couldn't cancel each other out, and I think it gradually just wore everyone down, maybe MJ included. That's speculation, though, and there's nothing grosser than speculating about someone immediately after their death.

My MJ shit is this: The first album I ever bought with my own money was Bad, on cassette. I was in 2nd grade and I watched TV all the time and taped songs of the radio. I would lay down on my bed and listen to "Dirty Diana" on my walkman, really not understanding what it was about. There was a girl named Diana who wasn't nice? I had no idea what any songs were about at that age. I just liked stuff. The year before it was Los Lobos' cover of "La Bamba". A year later I would ask for a copy of Appetite For Destruction for my birthday. As time went on, I was neither a Jackson loyalist nor did I have any serious problem with him. I didn't end up like Corey Feldman, as this awkward guy who likes MJ way too much and makes Rock and Roll High School Forever. And I didn't end up like this dipshit, who made a 7-part documentary that hinges on something a 12-year-old would make up as a joke and questions that start with "I axe you". I watched the making of the "Thriller" video and thought it was kind of interesting, but also kind of long, and honestly I liked the "Billie Jean" video better. I laughed when, in 4th grade, some kid said "I pledge allegiance to the flag that Michael Jackson is a fag".

Years later, my uncle gave me all his old records, squeezed into two old Ernest and Julio Gallo boxes, and I was psyched to find copies of Off The Wall and Thriller. I put "Rock With You" on a mixtape for my friend Melinda because she liked it so much, and I realized I liked it, too. I saw part of some terrible biopic about him, and this scene where he's in a hospital bed and Lisa Marie Presley is there and she tells him something like, "This isn't going to work..." and then she walks out of the room. From that point on I just felt bad for him. Things were never going to work out the way they should. He was doomed and I knew it.

When I found out he died, I thought of two songs. One was a demo version of "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" from the special edition version of Off The Wall. It's Michael, Randy, and Janet, sounding like they're goofing around in a furnished, wood-paneled basement. Someone's clanging on bottles and there's a false start and they all crack up. It's fun and ideal, even as a kind of rough draft with a crazy collapse at the end, and without those great string parts. The other song was Beauty Pill's "You, Yes You", from their You Are Right To Be Afraid EP. If you listen to it, it's pretty obvious why. It was written several years before his death, but didn't seem incorrect. As part of a full-on, irony-free love song, it made sense. Who wouldn't understand this? Beauty Pill's strengths were (are?) in their warmth, their dry sense of humor, their willingness to tell it like it is, and their modesty. They were a talented band who were either misunderstood or never got their due (I don't remember reading a single review of You Are Right...), and they wrote a song that will always feel strange now that MJ is gone for real.

The night after MJ's death I saw Jonathan Richman at the Bug Jar. He strode up to the stage and immediately started playing a song called "When We Refuse To Suffer". It was funny and he was doing these dances and spinning his guitar, but it was also kind of heavy. I had watched E! the night before and Arsenio Hall called in and said things about working with MJ that weren't suprising and then signed off by saying something that didn't make sense. On CNN, I watched Gideon Yago talk about MJ being seemingly "on something" when he interviewed him a few years back. MJ's kids don't have a dad anymore and people are just saying whatever, and I guess Neverland will be open to the public at some point, with a Michael Jackson corpse dipped in some kind of preservative plastic and placed in a glass case for people to look at. What if he had just made some cool songs, and when he was feeling weirded out by everything, he just stopped, took some time off, didn't take pills, took care of himself, and relaxed mostly? What if he just kept making demos with his brother and sister? I wouldn't have listened to Beauty Pill over the weekend, I wouldn't have had to listen to guys at work struggle to make a joke out of a mega-star death. It could've been different.

Beauty Pill - "You, Yes You"
Beauty Pill - "You Are Right To Be Afraid"
Beauty Pill - "Copyists"

Whoa, videos to make you feel better: The Choir Quit and Hausu. Can't stop thinking about Grass Widow either! Seriously can't! New geneva13 is out NOW, too, but isn't yet available in the store. I'll keep you posted. What else? I gotta eat dinner now, I'm starving. Sorry if this was long and unnecessary!

2009-06-10T23:14:00.000-04:00

I love to hear your sweet voice, but not all the time.
Whoa, some belated things from like a month ago. I should've just blabbed about these right after I killed time driving around Canandaigua lake, while kids straight out of '96 style-wise were looking at the apartment I'm in the middle of leaving. But then I got home and they were gone and I was like, "I'm gonna have a beer." Anyway, first off: Middle America. What's up with them? Is it just me and Tyler listening to them? Or is it me, Tyler, the guy from Home Invasion, Fashionable Idiots, and Pennsylvania dudes? Or is it like a lot more people than that? I have no idea what people listen to. I'm fucking old. I also don't know that many people. If I was at a house show and people started talking about Middle America, I'd be like "Middle America! NICE!" and then I'd probably just stand there. There's not much more to say about Husker rage and spooky cover art that doesn't tell you anything. Doesn't it look like it's from a weird PBS art special? Or a museum you went to as a kid that shows up in your dreams every once in a while? Listen to the singer's voice and the guitars overheating and picture the one band in town that's slaying all the others.

Middle America - "Anxiety"
Middle America - "Scraped/Paranoia"

And then Los Mockers! I heard this at my friends Kelley and Kyle's house sometime last year, right before we went to Tap & Mallet and drank what we called "black metal beer" but was actually a beer called Wizard's Winter (I think?). Actually, Kyle wrote about this record on his blog and hit a lot of nails on a lot of heads. He somehow works in Daniel Desario. Actually, if you look at the comment section under his post, you'll see the same story I just told you. Whoops. This record is so good, though. Look at them on that cover, they look like Menudo! But they sound like the Stones! And they were from Uruguay from just the right era and the singer's accent is great. Wait, watch them here. Jesus Christ! I listen to Little Steven's Underground Garage all the time and I've never once heard Los Mockers (or Milk n' Cookies, or the Make Up, or Pussy Galore, or...). What the fuck? Enough with The Oholics already. Original Recordings is like 17 straight hits and it's widely available, so they have no excuse. Here are three songs that are as good as anything anywhere:

Los Mockers - "Every Night"
Los Mockers - "All The Time"
Los Mockers - "Sad"

I looked at the Wooooo page today and started reading all that Franklin group/Bohemian Grove shit. Yikes. I didn't know anything about either of those things but I had this idea for a movie a while ago that would've basically been that whole story, only it would've been set in England and it wouldn't have made any sense. Wwwweeeeiiirrdd. Aren't politicians gross? Isn't Joe Scarborough gross? I don't know if I mentioned The Hairy Posse's take on "New Song" before, but here it is. Oh and Esther Phillips doing "Home Is Where The Hatred Is". The mix I got with my first ever Teenage Teardrops order is in heavy rotation. So is that Vaselines thing that just came out. I'll talk more about that later maybe. No new posts for at least the next week (I'm moving and having cable/internet stopped and restarted again). My only means of communication will be my phone and old fashioned letters. It's a good feeling.

2009-05-28T19:04:00.001-04:00

Hey, real quick: Check out this Aaron Neville shit, back before he was dueting with Linda Ronstadt (sp?) and soundtracking commercials about cotton undies. It's so good. Everytime I hear it I start daydreaming about making a movie that starts with a shot of the lighthouse out at Sodus Point that has a graffiti drawing of a giant dick on the side facing the water. I saw it when my friend Melinda was in town last month. We drove around listening to almost nothing but Elvis Radio on Sirius. I heard "Mystery Train" just as I was getting into work yesterday and I was like, "YESSSSS" when it came on. I never thought I'd be that way about The King, but now I'm totally that way. So there's that. Also, I'm drinking vodka and lemonade out of a Charlie Brown cup, listening to Don't Look Back from the other room, packing slowly. My new neighbor has lupus and offered to find me a free love seat. New place is either alright or completely ridiculous depending on the day. Regular post tomorrow or Saturday, probably. Oh and new geneva13 issue coming soon (I think?)!

PS--I can't get this out of my head (Jarmusch mania lately).

2009-04-30T09:13:00.000-04:00

I don't care if I'm alone here.
During Kurt Vile's set at Cornell a few weeks ago, I sat cross-legged, with my knees up and with my arms locked around them, my hands clasped together. I thought positioning myself like that would keep me awake, or if it didn't stop me from dozing off, the pressure on my arms from my legs starting to slack would wake me up, and I could at least catch myself before I fell over. I actually thought it out, and was like, "yes, this will work", and it did. It wasn't that Kurt Vile was boring. I mean he was a little boring, or I guess he wasn't exciting. But mainly I was just sleepy. He didn't go on until 1 am, and my usual bedtime is like 11:30. If I have to do laundry, which I can only do later on at night after Tyler's gone to work (because there are businesses below us and using the washing machine during the day interferes with their work, and because the washer and dryer are in Tyler's bedroom), I'll stay up a little later. But I have to put on a punk record (lately it's been Brilliant Colors or that live Vivian Girls LP; for a while it was Deep Wound or Total Abuse), something loud and fun, and...I don't want to say dance around my room, but kind of rock out? Bedroom mosh? It helps if I've had a couple beers. But I have to do that to keep myself awake. That's my laundry routine; quasi-raging, colors, whites. There was a little bit of punk before Kurt Vile went on, but not enough, so I had to figure out the right way to sit.

U.S. Girls played first, and they/she were/was decent. She had a tape recorder, a microphone, a ton of pedals, and an amp set up on a chair. She sang a bunch of words buried under hazy echoes and loud drones. It was a warped mess and it sounded good to me, and I recognized a couple songs so it was even a little familiar. It was also a little underwhelming. Weird bedroom droney stuff is great when you're by yourself in your actual bedroom, but playing it in front of people? As the opener? At the graduate/professional dining hall? I don't know. And she was dressed so normal--short hair, a couple layers of hoodies with pins, jeans, sneakers. That stuff doesn't matter, but I kept thinking, what if a girl came out in a dress and heels with her hair done up like she was in the Ronnettes and then blew your eardrums out? You'd never forget her.

Matthew Mondanile did his Ducktails thing after that. Originally I thought his other band, Predator Vision, was going to play. But he set up by himself and introduced himself as "Matt" and said he came up from New Jersey, and then he started playing some wah-wah guitar and I put it together. It was good. I've been all about him lately, and mostly he didn't disappoint. He did this kind of tribal-y jam in the middle of his set that sounded like Black Dice and went on way too long. And he sang a little bit, and his lyrics were like, "Are you the man/with the plan?" or something, and I was like, "uhhhh...". But he ended with guitar loops and gentle psych solos and it was all good. He also had this dirty brown jacket and glasses that reminded me of Egon from The Real Ghostbusters, and he smelled like weed everytime I walked by him.

I think Gary War played next. I don't know anything about Gary War, but I assumed it was just one guy. Maybe he is on record? He played guitar, and had a girl playing keyboard and a guy drumming. The girl had a notepad next to her the whole time they played, and I guess had all the keys on her board labeled with what note they were. At one point the pad fell on the floor and she stopped playing, picked it up, and then started playing again. I would probably do the same thing. The drummer played the same beat on every song, but people were loving it. I was mainly watching from the upper tier, while people I didn't know suddenly decided to dance to what was kind of Blank Dogs and kind of wasn't.

I guess the organizers saw people dancing and thought it was the right time to bring out the two-man DJ techno crew that was setting up when we first got to the show. I think they were called Teenage Fantasy. They were alright. They weren't offensive. I don't want to say it was "hipster dance shit", but it was hipster dance shit. A guy with kind of an afro in a Bad Brains shirt and a clean-cut guy. Loud beats, synths, mash-ups. When I saw their gear, I said, "Maybe it's just because I went to punk and hardcore shows for years and it's all I know, but I just want to see guitars and drums. I want to see dumb-ass kids playing shitty rock songs." I think what I was trying to say was, "I secretly hope Nazti Skinz have reunited and are playing every show I go to." We waited for the rave to stop, and it just kept going. People ate it up. There was a girl sitting at the top of the stairs leading to the upper area, staring straight ahead and slightly nodding to the beat. She looked like how Farah sounds--small, dark hair, bangs, quiet, scared but not. Every once in a while she would get up, grab people's discarded cups, throw them out, and then go back to her seat. If someone asked her what she did last night, she could say "I zoned out and picked up garbage."

Just before Teenage Fantasy ended their set, I bought a copy of The Hunchback from Kurt Vile right as he was rolling a cigarette. I felt bad interrupting him, but he didn't seem to mind. He smoked and then came back in and set up. He had tons of pedals like everyone else, but used two acoustic guitars--one 6-string and one 12-string. I don't know what all his pedals were doing but everything he played just sounded echo-y. He did a few songs from his new record on Mexican Summer and a few from Constant Hitmaker, including a clunky version of "Classic Rock In Spring". It's one of my favorite songs off that record and it should have bothered me that he was playing it weird, but it didn't. He switched a couple times from the 6 to 12-string and it seemed to take an eternity for him to plug and unplug, get the levels right, and start up again. But again, I wasn't that bothered. He brought up a guy named J. Turbo, who plays on The Hunchback (along with a couple other guys who make up Vile's backing band, The Violators) and did a bunch of wild but not loud solos over Vile's strumming and reverb-y singing. They finished with "Freeway In Mind" and Turbo played harmonica through this cool-looking mic going through a pedal. It was the best thing I heard all night.

I looked around and most of the people still watching were the same people who'd watched every band. The short-haired guys who all looked alike but at different heights; the Latin girls who stood by the same wall spot the whole night and danced when the PA played that "Born 2 B Fly" song between bands; the old dudes standing on the steps; the curly haired kid with the red pants who we saw when we finally found the venue. Who knows what they all thought they were getting into? They seemed like they could have stayed there all night, then got up and had breakfast together. I'm used to a kind of anxiety when I go to shows. The weight of expectation, the awkwardness of being around unfamiliar people. The need to feel comfortable and the desire to be broadened somehow. I'm used to that tension and I almost always debate going to a show right up until the last minute.

I went with Kaci and Ryan, who I don't know real well, but they were awesome. When we got to the show too early, we just went and got pizza, at this place that had a huge photo of George W. Bush, George Pataki, and Rudy Giuliani eating pizza by the entrance. We had to drive back downtown to get there, down these huge, steep hills, and then we had to get around these buses, and then find a spot in a parking garage. We walked in the shitty rain, got our food, talked about people we know in Rochester and high school mascots. At the show, everything seemed calm. You could get free fountain soda if you wanted. There were sort-of weirdos and bored college kids who wanted something to do and it was totally fine. The loud fuzz, beach jams, clangy synth punk, space beats, and slow folk were non-issues, explorations of a kind of patience.

Kurt Vile and the Violators - "Losing It"
Kurt Vile and the Violators - "Good Lookin' Out"

Meanwhile: I only bought one record on Record Store Day, but I made it count. At the House of Guitars (of all places! such a dump!) I found a sealed, original press of the Milk n' Cookies LP for $14. I think I was in shock for a few minutes. In his write-up for the 2xLP Radio Heartbeat re-issue (really a complete Milk n' Cookies discography), Max G. Morton says something about how you can pretty much throw away your Ramones records. I don't know if I'd go that far, but I will say "Not Enough Girls In The World" and "Tipically Teenage" never really leave my head. I feel like they're the official Matt-Tyler-Leah band, too. One of them anyway. So I just stood there like, "holy shit, is this really what I think it is?", and then I took a picture of it and sent it to Tyler, kind of to verify it. All I wanted out of life that day was to see Rational Animals play at Record Archive, and I did that and they were so good. They covered "Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie" which was kind of obvious, and then they covered "122 Hours of Fear" and I might've decided they were the best band in Rochester. And then this Milk n' Cookies shit happens! Later that night, at the apartment, we watched the AVN Awards and it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. My friend Becca was there and I'm not sure she was crazy about watching porn awards. Or I couldn't tell exactly how it went over. She seemed weirded out when she left. I sort of regretted exposing her to a show where an actress accepted an award by saying "I swallowed a lot of cum that day". But there was also a guy who won the Best Male award and he stood up there and said something like, "I feel like fuckin' crying right now!!" when he clearly wasn't going to cry. I don't know, I thought it was hilarious. Earlier in the day I saw a vinyl copy of Belle and Sebastian's Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant at Lakeshore, and what I mainly regretted was that I'd talked myself out of buying it.

Belle and Sebastian is someone else's thing, not really mine. My friend Susanna is probably an expert on them. I think maybe Ryan McGinley is a superfan, too. I want that Belle and Sebastian/Bad Brains shirt, but I wouldn't say I know much about them. The first time I heard Fold Your Hands was at Ultrasonic Sound, a record store that was around from 1999-2001 or so, on Monroe Ave in Rochester. It was run by a guy named Jon (I think?) who's in the picture of Void on page 123 of Banned In DC, and in hindsight it seems like the perfect store, for any number of reasons. I bought my first copies of Spiderland, Unfuckwithable, and the Cap'n Jazz anthology there. If you were like, "hey, I need the Swing Kids discography", you could just go there and he'd have it, and when you got there, he'd be playing something like Loaded or maybe the Brendan Canty/Lois Maffeo record on the in-house stereo, and then you'd talk to him for a little bit and look up at the collection of early hardcore 7 inches lining the wall. At some point it switched owners, moved to South Ave, and was re-christened Analog Shock. It was alright for a while--the kid who took over put on some cool shows in the store's back room. But then the store hours got weird and he wasn't getting in any new stuff, and I went up a couple times in the middle of winter and there was no heat, and then it was just gone.

When I heard Stuart Murdoch's voice, I thought maybe it was John Cale. It must've been "Women's Realm" because there was his voice, very English and airy, and then a cute girl's voice. I asked what it was and maybe even bought it right there. I was so excited about it, it was weird. I remember bringing it over to my friend Jason's house, where all of us used to hang out, and my friend Brady and I were geeking out over it, especially the girl voice parts (Isobel Campbell, I guess). Jason thought this was way more my thing than the bands I was doing at the time, which were mostly hardcore scream-fests where sometimes I'd throw my bass on the ground or fall over. I agreed with him to an extent. Partly what I liked about Fold Your Hands was that it seemed like a cool older kid record. It made me think of cool older girls especially. The kind of girls who were a thousand times smarter than me, who I'd only hang out with accidentally, through some other group of friends, at diners. They'd show up with a chunk of raw sugar cane, or they'd go on and on about taking bartender classes and some guy they dated who "looked just like David Bowie in the dark". I was a straight edge kid, and when they'd go outside for a smoke, I'd want to go with them.

But what I mostly liked about Fold Your Hands was a lot simpler. The music was pretty and catchy, and the lyrics weren't hardcore lyrics. There were boys and girls writing letters back and forth in the middle of a war, and observational stuff about trains and living in a town that's beautiful apart from the people. I've been listening to it a lot over the last month, just on my way to work. There's a part of County Road 4 that runs through Seneca Castle, where the road curves around and there's a sudden drop in the speed limit from 55 to 30. I listened to "Waiting For The Moon To Rise" for the first time in years, going super slow on that stretch, early in the morning, when it was warmer than usual and the sun was flickering through the trees. It was great. I kind of needed it. I deliver mail to people with dirty diapers on their front porch, people who have long, detailed notes taped to their front door about how you need to take off your shoes before you come into the house. My two best buds are moving to the city into this apartment palace and I'm still going to be living in this Nazi date rape shithole. I need to not freak out, and I'm at a point where I'm probably not going to. I think Fold Your Hands is helping. I definitely get "The Broken Vow" in my head a lot for whatever reason, but I need to occasionally hear the weird fuck-you of "If my family tree goes back to the Romans, then I will change my name to Jones/If my family tree goes back to Napoleon, then I will change my name to Smith". That might actually be my thing.

Belle & Sebastian - "Waiting For the Moon to Rise"
Belle & Sebastian - "Women's Realm"
Belle & Sebastian - "Family Tree"

Fuckin' A! Some other songs are "Disappearer", "Sway", "Pole Position". My new favorite Buzzcocks song is "Lipstick", but obviously they're all my favorite. What else? Pukekos posted up both Brilliant Colors 7 inches and both Real Estate EPs. The Brilliant Colors records sound kind of scratchy and slower than I'm used to, but I think my record player plays everything slightly too fast. The Real Estate stuff is a little corny but who cares. There's a new Cult Ritual song, too. Holy shit. PS--the date on this post is April 30th, but I started writing it April 17th and posted it May 14th. What the fuck is wrong with me??

2009-03-24T18:11:00.002-04:00

Hey! Sorry, this is another micro-post. Just wanted to say I'm deleting a bunch of files--pretty much all the mp3s from the latter half of 2007 through the first couple months of 2008. Spring cleaning, I guess. You have a week to listen to those songs, possibly download them, possibly love them, possibly turn your brain into mine, slightly. Then they're gone forever and you're stuck with the brain you already have, which is fine. So that's it. Oh and Freak Scene is back and functional and it's off to a great re-start. I think there've been three new posts so far. Also, Maggie Lee, who became one of my favorite photographers after I saw THIS, has been doing a thing on Vice called Zine Creamers, which should tell you everything you need to know about how awesome this girl is. Really cool shit, including (I think) Cassie Ramone's old zines, like I needed more reasons to love her. So good. But yeah. I guess that's really it. I feel like I should recommend some songs. I got nothing. Honestly, I've just been listening to Stan Getz a lot. What a nerd! The record he did with Luiz Bonfa, Jazz Samba Encore!, is great. I thought it was just a Sunday morning record, but it's more like an everyday all-the-time record. That'll change when I get my copy of Hallow (which is STILL AVAILABLE?! WHAT?!), but until then. Oh wait, this popped in my head the other day. OK, now I'm done.

2009-03-17T18:08:00.000-04:00

Yoooooo! Here's a mid-March round-up. New issue of geneva13 is out and includes a column by me about Classic Arts Showcase, Harry Pussy, and Vothana, among other very important things. For those who already read it (or even those who haven't, or would prefer not to), some related listening: Chunklet, "Mic Check", Maria Callas, Eugene Onegin, Palatka, singer from the Black Crowes, Tyler (pictured), LVTN. Meanwhile: I hadn't been to Soul Sides in forever, but they put a ton of good shit up over the past few weeks. Check out Moses Dillard (and "Move On Up" while you're there) and...well, I was gonna say Pi-R-Square and the original version of "All Falls Down" with Lauryn Hill, but they're not up anymore. You'll just have to take my word for it. Chain and the Gang LP is out and at my house but I haven't listened to it yet. I'm seeing them (but really HIM) in April, on the anniversary of the birth of the Leah. Other things worth noting are "Crawl Babies" and "Should I Tell You". All I wanted to do on my drive home from work was listen to Maiden, specifically the part that kicks in at 1:46. Girma Hadgu's "Ené Alantchi Alnorem" is also good, maybe even better, especially on a nice day like this where I shouldn't even have to work, then drive home from it, then be on a computer. I do have the shades open. More posts soon.

ps -- check out kevin13's journal of urinals he's used in Ireland so far (wait, maybe it's Scotland).

2009-02-17T19:10:00.001-05:00

Good Evening didn't come with a lyric sheet.
But it's so goddamn good! I wasn't prepared for how great this Nite Jewel LP was going to be, and I liked her (their?) 12" on IDIB and everything. The synths are farty and blorpy. It's kind of a dorkier, more relatable version of Glass Candy, which I'm all for. And it's super catchy and not in-your-face, and there's some '80s moping, and there's one song that's a total Arthur Russell thing. And some of the textural background-y stuff has made me say "that's fucking awesome" out loud even after 5 or 6 straight listens. The video for "Artificial Intelligence" isn't what I would've done, but whatever. If you and your friends are out late and then you come home, but you're not tired, and you sit around and make jokes about naming your kids "Shithead" and "Fuckface", this record will sound fucking PERFECT, and that's really what matters. Oh and the Gloriette logo is the best logo I've seen in a while. Also: Are you a girl? Do you want to start a band like this with me? Let's do this. Bonus points for girls who also want to do a band like Middle America, although if that happens, I'll probably ask you to marry me, just a heads up. Another also: These mp3s were made by someone else, from vinyl, and it sounds like they didn't have a good pre-amp/signal booster thing. So they're kind of quiet, but maybe that adds something.

Nite Jewel - "What Did He Say"
Nite Jewel - "Lover"
Nite Jewel - "Weak For Me"

This Fucking Sucks fucking rules!! I've been lobbying for the official release of the full TFS record for years, and now I know why. Oh and I was totally going to say something about Food Of The Gods, but now I don't have to. They nailed it! I guess right now I'm on the fence about Reading Rainbow; cool songs that I can't get out of my head, but a little bit of a cheese factor (lots of animal talk). Slightly less on the fence about Invasion, although I need to hear the rest of the record. Oh shit, did I mention Ducktails already? Go ahead and give me grief about the name, fucking 7" kills! Tapes are probly good, too, but my tape decks are out-of-order. Leah, did you bring back my boombox? Or wait...did you have it? I'm gonna look right now.

2009-01-08T13:52:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to say something real quick about Ron Asheton. His death just passed by me, like I didn't even notice it really. I read the headline and had no reaction, and then I was listening to Howard on the way home yesterday and they were talking about him and The Stooges. They played "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and Howard said it was annoying. Artie liked it and then started talking about that Iggy Pop song "Candy". I was actually yelling at the radio, "Play something off Fun House! Or play fucking 'Search and Destroy'! Or 'Penetration'!" I know he doesn't play guitar on Raw Power, but he's still there. When I was in Berlin a few years back, I listened to Fun House just about every night before I went to sleep. I would lay there with my headphones on in this room with a really high ceiling and tall bookcases, in this great apartment that you had to go up a weird secret stairwell to get to, and listen to it all the way through. For whatever reason, it sounded fucking perfect, better than any other time I've listened to it. We went to a street fair and I almost bought a Russian pressing of it, but I wound up buying a Jerry's Kids LP instead, which is decent but I haven't listened to it that much. Years earlier, I'd given my cd copy of the MC5's Kick Out The Jams to this weirdo guy who hung out at Perkins, and Andrew and I watched him basically destroy it in front of us from across the table. I'd decided I was tired of it not being as good as I wanted it to be, so I handed it over. I almost did the same thing with my copy of Fun House, but I thought, no this one's still kind of awesome. I was 16 and every once in a while I would accidentally do the exact right thing. Now I daydream about getting a copy of the complete Fun House sessions and listening to nothing but that for weeks. I probably don't need to do that. But yeah, I felt like being unfazed by Ron Asheton's death was so retarded. I take so many bands and people for granted. There are so many songs that I forget about, and there have been so many times where I've been whatever about something I know I love just because I wasn't completely jazzed about it right at the moment. The Stooges fucking KILL always, every time (even when I don't feel like listening to them) and Ron Asheton was fucking cool, and I need to not forget that.

The Stooges - "Down On The Street"
The Stooges - "Loose"
The Stooges - "Lost In The Future (take 1)"
Iggy and The Stooges - "Penetration"

PS -- picture via Gnarlitude (sorry about the heavy swastika presence lately! nazi punks fuck off, seriously!)

2008-12-23T17:20:00.000-05:00

Ruh puh pum puuuuummm
Crom-Tech - "Silent Plarm"
Crom-Tech - "Here Comes Mobo-Clais"
Crom-Tech - "Lit-L Floater Boy"
Crom-Tech - "O-Climtwist Tree"
Crom-Tech - "Have a Holly Jolly X-Mas"
Crom-Tech - "Deck The Stix"
Crom-Tech - "Crestnobs On Open Flimor"
Crom-Tech - "Chanukob-O-Chonkab"
Crom-Tech - "Clomtad Is Here"
Crom-Tech - "We Wish You XMas"
Crom-Tech - "Jorpeel Bells"
Crom-Tech - "Winter Wonderland"

Melt your brain to the floor! I mean Happy Holidays! Bonuses: "Santa's Coming Over", Riverbottom Nightmare Band. More bonuses: Last year's models, still good!

2008-12-10T18:53:00.002-05:00

It's been a slow education.
The dream I had last night was great. I was in Japan for a conference, and we were walking back to our hotel that was built along a lake with a great view. We went around the back of the hotel and saw a series of these things that looked like giant hurdles (if you're familiar with the steeplechase, they were like the big hurdle that's right before the puddle of water) in rows leading down a hill from the back of the hotel to the lake (running parallel with the hotel). We looked out on the water and saw a guy driving a boat that was actually a piece of earth that had broken off from the mainland. He had just stuck a steering wheel in the piece of land, and was ferrying about 10-15 tigers, who were all sitting the same way and looking at us standing on the hill looking at them. The guy driving the boat decided to dock, without realizing that as soon as he got near the land the tigers could run after us, probably eat us. I thought about how fast I could run if that happened, and what exactly the tigers would do. How quickly would they start chasing us? If one of them swatted at me with their paw, how bad would it hurt? The driver got close enough to land that a couple of tigers were able to jump out. We started running towards the hotel. The two other guys from my office were way ahead of me, and one of them did a flip off one of the hurdles and landed on his hotel room balcony, about three floors up. I knew I wasn't going to be able to do that and wouldn't be able to outrun the tigers. I remembered I had the power to levitate, so I closed my eyes, concentrated, and started to float away.

Later, I walked down to a clothing store where my friend Kate was working. They only carried t-shirts, and left them in piles on the floor instead of putting them on shelves or hangers. She was playing a recording of her daughter saying the letter "X" over and over. She told me she had a live video of one of my old bands playing a show in Florida. I couldn't remember what show she was talking about, so she got the tape and played it on one of the TVs. I was playing bass with no shirt on and we sounded a lot like Palatka. A couple kids who were big fans of the band were in the store and started talking to me. One of them asked, "Which one was the wimpiest guy?" I figured he was talking about Brady, but I said, "Well...we were all wimps." I left the store to finish delivering some mail, but I had to drive through a mall that also had subway cars running through it. I had to be extremely careful not to get in the way of any of the trains, and I had to listen for these alarms that meant a train was coming through. I heard one of the alarms going off and tried to park the mail truck in a corner. I had to do an awkward parallel park and kept moving like 1 ft. backwards and 1 ft. forwards, totally fucking it up and saying, "Sorry, I'm new here." The alarms kept sounding and I finally got the truck parked, and then woke up to the sound of my phone ringing.

This was a much better dream than the one I had the night before, where my grandmother called me up and asked how I was doing, and then, her voice kind of breaking, said, "Well...I think I'm ready to kill myself." She hung up and then I tried calling my parents, but their line was busy. Finally I went over to their house and they just asked me exactly what she'd said, like word for word. I woke up around then. It's not that I think she would really do that or say that she was going to do that, or fucking call me up and tell me she was going to do it right before she did it, but I do know she wants to die. The last time I went to see her at DeMay, she asked me to read from a large-print daily devotional prayer book. I read the one for that day, something about using prayer or faith as a shield or a sword in the battle for...I don't remember exactly. It was about God. Then it had a prayer at the end and I read that, too. I didn't feel uncomfortable reading it. When I finished, I looked up and she had her head down and was covering her face. She looked up and I could see her eyes were teared up. Then I was like, "So...yeah". She looked at me and said, "You know what I pray for, don't you? For the Lord to take me." She said this with a smile on her face, like she was acknowledging that it was a funny thing, or that it was one of those things that doesn't seem funny until you mention it to someone. I think most people who have a good sense of humor and also get retardedly depressed would understand. I laughed when she said it. She'd said it before to me and my mom, and I think I said something like, "Well, you can't tell God what to do." This time I just said, "It'll happen when it happens." I changed the subject and asked about a picture of her parents that she had on one of her shelves. Then I gave her a piece of gum. I left and walked past the common area, where these three women in wheelchairs were sitting in a row watching A Carol Christmas on a huge-screen TV. I could see William Shatner's giant head talking to Tori Spelling's weird face and these women staring at it from about 4 feet away. When I first got to my grandmother's room, a nurse was helping her into the bathroom, so I waited on her couch and read one of the daily devotionals, written by a woman about her daughter, who'd wanted to be a ballerina when she was little, but got cancer and wound up dying roughly 18 years later. This is like the only thing my grandmother reads.

I drove to my sister's and then back to my apartment, listening to Bright Flight. Dave Berman's lyrics are the best--ridiculous sometimes but absolutely true. I have to get his book. Sometimes his voice--untrained and flat, but pleasant and reassuring--sends what would ordinarily just be good lyrics into another place. I got Bright Flight a few years ago, when I was working in Phelps. I never gave it a good listen, and when I was driving home, I looked at the tracklist and really wanted "Horseleg Swastikas" to be an awesome song, just because of the title. I'm not advocating being a Nazi, I just feel like most great song titles are paired with lackluster songs, and vice versa. Plus, swastikas were around way before the Nazis. My friend Andrew did a paper on the history of the swastika when we were seniors in high school. We drove from Newark the the U of R library so he could look up info. He was kind of freaking out about it. I half-assedly looked up info for my paper, which was about Punk, and in all likelihood the worst thing I've ever written. I'm not even sure I read Andrew's paper, or if he wound up finishing it. When I was driving I thought, we should be able to mention the word swastika or use it in a song and not have it be some loaded thing. We should be able to use it as part of something else entirely, that maybe turns the word swastika, or the idea of a horseleg swastika, or whatever you had previously thought of when you heard the word swastika, into something warm and sad and funny, something less race-hatey. With everything we have to suffer through--ABC Family movies, deadlines, being born without certain talents, wanting to die but not wanting to do it yourself--we should be able to say or not say whatever the fuck we want.

Silver Jews - "Horseleg Swastikas"
Silver Jews - "Room Games and Diamond Rain"
Silver Jews - "Tennesee"

I have to admit I'm mostly listening to The Sads' Silent Show LP. I'll maybe write more about it later. What else was I going to mention? Bands covering The Clean are Times New Viking and Pavement. Pavement's cover of "The Killing Moon" is a lot better, although what the fuck are "Major Leagues" b-sides doing on the Brighten The Corners re-ish? Do I need to read the liner notes more carefully? Did someone else need to do something more carefully? I haven't listened to the whole Street Carnage Radio with Paul Stanley, but I'm going to! I'm also going to download all this Huggy Bear stuff eventually, but in the meantime I'm looking at the hottest Debbie Harry photos ever. Christmas post is coming.

2008-11-17T20:57:00.000-05:00

Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson
Failures Gary Wilson

Also, more of the same old thing: BH, BT, BD. I'm ok with it, though. Oh and lots of Cult Ritual. I have a 24-hour heart monitor strapped to me as we speak, and some mystery ailment that's not terrible, but maybe it is? I have no idea. But I know I got great parents. And I can't shower until tomorrow afternoon. New thing for geneva13 got handed in, and includes a true story about listening to Genesis that goes, "I'm listening to Genesis", and that's the end of the story. More later.

2008-10-30T17:59:00.001-04:00

I know I said Failures and Gary Wilson, but I feel like I gotta do some Halloween shit/month-end wrap-up shit. I can't really top last year's Halloweenr, but how about Xela's "The Illuminated" or Aethenor? I'm almost positive I mentioned the Xela tape before and then I just linked to a page that had a comment section where someone linked to a download. Pretty chintzy, so here's the whole thing, side A and side B. I don't think I ever mentioned Aethenor. I think I was actually going to save it for a scary music post. I guess I should say these are both good if you want "extended noise inside a cabin where you're going to die at the hands of a weird guy". Picking out songs that are supposed to be scary is kind of dorky, though. Maybe something like "Ghost Walk" or "Walking On My Grave" would be better? All I've been into lately is Earth (old and new-ish) or Shop Assistants or Black Tambourine. Not really horrifying, but good for cold drives and snow showers before it turns 60 degrees again. Finding out that I was laying on the couch while reunited Harriet The Spy was playing "Retarding Dimensionally" in Ohio was kind of horrifying, though. Somebody please do one of those "play that whole album" shows with them doing Unfuckwithable, PLEASE. It'll only take 20 minutes and I'll get to sing along to "I tried real hard to give myself a cold by getting my hair all wet/it never worked/it never even parted my hair down the middle" and "I'll be waiting in the parking lot with a fistful of food". I have so much to do--zines, mailing things, blowing up on youtube, hanging out with Ixor--and I already had a reasonable amount of time to do it. Oh well. Have a good Ghoul's Night Out! Your Fiend, Matt.

PS--"Animal Imagination"

2008-10-17T19:13:00.000-04:00

You may look cute, but you puke all over it.
So yeah, Kurt Vile. Probably the biggest reason I got way into him is that he's like a guy you went to school with who was mostly quiet but always said funny shit and could draw really well, who never seemed bothered by anything and always knew exactly what was going on. Maybe I got that more from the interview he did with the guy from Clockcleaner or the interview some guy did with him that was all text messages, but I think it comes through in the music, too. He's that guy doing Leonard Cohen and The Church and Springsteen and Eno, recording weird loops and songs that are spacey and funny (but not jokey) in his room, and then hanging out later. It was what I needed to hear, especially during a summer that was kind of horrendous. Parts of it were good--the train ride down to see Harvey Milk, hanging out with Amy at her apartment before the show, the week that Andrew and Sara were here, seeing Sex Vid and Monotonix in one day. But mostly it was just a big hollow feeling and watching things go retarded. At a certain point I said "Fuck, I gotta do something", and started working on the zine that I've since been real lazy about, but is still happening and is still going to be pretty alright. And when I wasn't doing that, I went out driving during the record gas price bullshit and listened to Constant Hitmaker in between Shuggie Otis records and Dylan bootlegs, tried to find that lunar eclipse or whatever it was, looked at the trees and big open fields and got fucking lost. What else can you do when shit sucks and nobody's around, but it's really nice outside? Listen to a guy who can play like Elliott Smith and says "I got a trumpet, I know where to dump it".

Kurt Vile - "Space Forklift"
Kurt Vile - "Don't Get Cute"
Kurt Vile - "Classic Rock In Spring/Freeway In Mind"

I finally got real crazy about the Ai Aso/Wata She's So Heavy split, just in the last week. I got it months and months ago during my big Michio Kurihara phase, when I was listening to his Sunset Notes record and the Boris/Michio Rainbow record all the time, but I was lagging on it for whatever reason. Crazy shit, especially since Ai Aso sings on the best shit on Sunset Notes (I've listened to "The Wind's Twelve Quarters" so many times and I'm still not sick of it), and the line-up on Wata's song is basically Boris with Michio, maybe even from the Rainbow sessions, but I'm not totally sure. Not to mention the 7" comes with a huge booklet of photos of Ai Aso and Wata looking really pretty. Who's not going to buy this, even though it's kind of expensive? And the songs, holy shit. Ai covers King Crimson and does it spare with big drums and organ and guitar, and it's perfect. Wata covers Masashi Kitamura, who I don't know anything about, but it doesn't necessarily matter if you do. The song is a fucking killer. It's one of those beautiful slow building power-ballad-y jams that Boris always takes to the stratosphere. I don't even like it when they do the super rock stuff. I literally fall asleep when they do that. But when they get all quiet and then WAIL over a sad part, I wake up.

Ai Aso - "Islands"
Wata - "Angel"

Oh speaking of Shuggie, he's on the cover of the new Wax Poetics. And on the other cover is MF Doom. NICE. I went down to the Carolinas and listened to Interpol for the first time in forever. It was actually really good. The rest of the time I just wanted to listen to the Germs and the Buzzcocks, and then "Terrapin". I heard David Scott Stone hasn't been using his modular synth lately, which is maybe a good thing. The first song on side B of his Teardrops 7" is cool, but the rest of it is some snoozy noise. I hate saying that. I just want to hear his hardcore band! What else? Oh yeah, I already have a couple leads, but if you have a copy of the Ninja Turtles' Coming Out Of Their Shells Tour video (not the Making Of... video), and want to get rid of it, contact me immediately, please. Next post will be about Failures and Gary Wilson, no question about it. Maybe I'll mention Times New Viking. Err, I'll just do that now.

PS--Divshare issues have been worked out! You can listen to the songs without downloading anything. I'll fix the last couple posts so you can do that with those songs, too.

2008-09-30T17:13:00.000-04:00

Holy christ, is September over already? Shit. Alright, well: I wrote a thing about a youtube clip of Nation of Ulysses (above) for Geneva13. Maybe you already knew that? I also go on to say that NOU were really good and other bands are good, too. If you want a copy, send $2 to here. Definitely read the TJ/Nahide Bascakir interview and the Betsy Francechi interview and Lesley Adams' piece about drying her clothes. Definitely read the whole thing, actually. For those who already read my piece and wanted to hear the bonus jams for Fall, here goes: Ted Curson, Soccer Team, and a different Kurt Vile song than the one I mentioned (I don't have an mp3 of "Everyone Is Talkin" lying around). Sorry they're not playing on the embedded player and going straight into download mode. I don't know what the deal is. I think it's some weird quicktime issue, even though they aren't supposed to be quicktime files? If you know another server with a player option, PLEASE TELL ME. I want to go on and on about Kurt Vile and Asa Osborne and Astrud Gilberto, but I don't have the time/brain for it right now. I will really soon, though, so check back like this week even. I could sort of go on and on about Nisennenmondai, Wound, anything coming out of Heartworm. So pissed I didn't order Scarecrow the second I saw it on sale. What was I doing? I've been listening to Beat Happening a lot, too. Jamboree mostly, and Black Candy. How the fuck did this happen? Probably started with a lot of Unrest. Some definite "what would Chunklet think?" going on while I drive around. Fuck it. It's not like I'm not going to order my copy of My Love Is Higher... first thing. I think I need a replacement cover for my Courtesy... vinyl, too. I feel bad for Henry re: Courtesy blunders that were beyond his control, but not too bad re: everything else he does/gets to do. Oh and I can't stop listening to Ahmad Jamal, or the two records I have anyway. When I said "jazz records" in my last post, that's what I meant. There's something about the covers (1, 2) alone. Vivian Girls had that video and a WFMU set. Still pretty in love with them a lot (note the shirt). Ten years ago they could have been playing with Operation: Cliff Clavin and I Farm and The Knockouts, maybe De La Hoya, too (Counter-Clockwise, Pissants, old Nobody Cares, etc?). 18-19 year old me with bleached hair and a blue zip hoodie with a Standfast patch on the back would have been in Chud heaven. Is that how anyone else thinks of them? I'll end on a totally unrelated note and say that The Man Who Wasn't There is a perfect movie. That and Ultra Flesh. If you know the last line of "I Hate Summer", you know how I feel.

2008-08-28T18:01:00.000-04:00

Something for August, last minute! I just wanted to mention Ariel Pink because I've been way into him lately. I've liked him for a while, but I never really tried to push him on anyone. He does weird prog-pop on a four-track and sometimes sings like Frankie Valli. He puts out a bunch of records every year and all his cds are like 70 minutes long. He can write a catchy chorus about Bin Laden, but it'll be in the middle of a 20-minute suite. I could see people thinking "What the hell is this? I need to listen to Robert Palmer." Or "I haven't heard Minor Threat in a while, let's listen to that", or "I'm going to put on Licensed To Ill because I know all the words". I've gone back and forth on him, too. There was "Helen" and that video where he's like "I'M SATANIC", but then I thought he was biting R. Stevie Moore and Gary Wilson way too hard. The whole Blank Dogs scene came out and sounded like an oversimplified, cheap Ariel knock-off, but then I was like, this is kind of more palatable, and they're actually coming from a totally different place. It took hearing his live set on WFMU for me to finally understand the nuances. With a backing band, he sounds incredible. Check the difference between the WFMU "L'estat" and the original. Or if you're into garage jams, check the cover of "Calm Me Down". I can also understand being creeped out by Ariel Pink, but he brings back vibes that are never going to come back. Like this guy's face (minus the vag eyes), they exist only in the past. I don't know if that makes sense. I just like stuff like "Suicide Notice". Put aside the Paw Tracks hatred for a second, that's all I'm saying! If you can't, at least watch this review of Best Game. Beyond that, just listen to some jazz records. That's all I got. Sorry I've been phoning it in all summer. I've been standing in two time zones, wondering what time to be home. Werts zine will still be totally in your face, but not until later September or maybe October-ish. My periodical is way late. I might be a published author somewhere else, though. I'll let you know.

2008-07-12T17:36:00.000-04:00

From the Dept. of Summer Bummers Dept.: Soiled Mattress and The Springs are playing their last show tonight in NYC. Actually they're maybe even playing right now. If you're in NY the City, go to The Yard next to the Gowanus Canal. I have no idea what any of that means. You can also go here to find out more info. This totally blows, though. I've loved these guys since I saw their "Tidal Wave" video (above) way back when. There was even a point maybe a year or so ago when nothing made me happier than listening to the Springtime! record over and over and over again. I think I said that like 7 or 8 months ago, but it's still true. Go buy it here, or go buy the cd with Springtime! and Honk Honk Bonk! here. Eventually go buy the Honk Honk Bonk! 12" back at Teardrops. Also, go look at the Fader video they did. I tried to watch it but my computer is not hi-tech enough. They also have some good news about future Mattress-related projects. Other good news: this 2-part Ian Svenonius essay on Marion Barry. I'd also like to point out that back in '95 or '96 when Mary J. was singing "You're alllll I neeeeed to get byyyyy" she was talking about listening to Deep Wound after spending 40 minutes just trying to leave Geneva. Fuck bicyclists, fuck athletes, fuck NORMS in general. I think I just moshed in my room. Werts Quarterly Review out by the end of the month!

2008-06-27T18:19:00.000-04:00

Just so I have something to show for June 2008, here's some things: another Cohen cover by Harvey Milk (from the Daymare press of Life...), this Delphine song that can't be ignored, these Vivian Girls songs from the record you almost could have gotten but now you'll have to wait until Fall, and some bootleg Blood On The Tracks tracks below a lot of blabbering. Also, the Werts zine is moving along at the slowest possible speeds, but it WILL be out and in your hands and into your life soonish. In the meantime, go see Straight, No Chaser and L'antietam if you're in the same city they're in. Do everything you can not to make this a Summer of Bummers.

PS: I don't know if anyone read the Ben Ratliff piece about Thrones in the New York Times last month, but I swear I didn't see it until like 3 days after I wrote my thing. Am I too weirded out by this? I don't know.

PPS: THRONES RADIO!!

2008-05-27T17:25:00.000-04:00

"If I am a perfection-
ist, I do a pretty shitty
job of it."
At the Thrones show last week, Tyler and I did the same thing. Joe Preston--the one man in the one-man band that is Thrones (as well as collaborator with the Melvins, Earth, Sunn 0))), High On Fire, and Harvey Milk)--played a slow, creepy song with drawn-out high notes on his bass, while his sequencer and pedals did other things, and we both stood there with our eyes closed and took it in. It's a fucking really dorky thing to say you did, but it was hard not to do it. He ended his set with "Obolus", and it sounded like he was breathing whole choirs of gold sparks into the microphone and I felt like I was at the end of a movie or possibly at the end of my life. Thrones songs can do that to you. They can fuck you up privately even in a public place where things are relatively normal. They can make it seem like something happened but you didn't know what it was. For some reason it wasn't really like this the last time I saw him, two years prior almost to the day and at the same club. All I remember of that show was us getting really lost on the way there, and my friend Mel telling me about some poem she'd written for a class that involved the term "comatose cocks", and Thrones being pretty loud and goofy. The only thing goofy about this time was maybe Joe Preston's hair and Jason Schulmerich's comment about Werner Herzog remaking Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage (which I honestly thought was a clever joke until I found out it was TRUE). Jason also told us about listening to Thrones on acid years ago, being gone for days and out in the woods and something about being on the bus. He didn't get into too many details. I told him my "Thrones-related mania" story, which wasn't as exciting, of being alone at my old apartment and staying up late listening to Day Late, Dollar Short and looking out into the hallway from my bedroom and suddenly being terrified. I didn't want to look into any of the other rooms. I didn't know what was out there. Jason tapped me on the chest and said, "You were scared of what was IN HERE."

Thrones - "Obolus"
Thrones - "Algol"
Thrones - "Simon Legree"

This page is gonna be on hiatus (it wasn't already??) for most of the next month while I try to get an actual, on-paper zine together. It'll be just like this page only it'll be multiple pages and mostly interviews and probably not have any reviews of records. And it'll have a cool cover, hopefully! In the meantime, devote yourself to listening to Morricone, Jackson Conti, F/i, and this Xela tape. Throw in some Dutronc, too, even if you're like "alright, enough with French shit already" to yourself. And most importantly, be excited for Life...The Best Game In Town. Also, watch the trailer for Zardoz, but NOT the movie itself. You can skip Indiana Jones and the This Is Awful, as well.

2008-05-14T17:18:00.000-04:00

C'est la confiance et le courage.
Holy crap, am I behind on this thing or what? I think I forgot how to write these posts. But I also timed it perfectly, since I just got a Moog the other day and I was going to write about Steve Moore's Demo 2003. Originally issued in an edition of 50 CD-Rs, The Hlava label recently stepped up and reissued it as an LP in a slightly less impossible edition of 500 (it's also available as a download from his myspace space). If you're into Zombi--Moore's main gig--then you're definitely a nerd and you're definitely ready for this. Or if you're into any kind of Goblin-y soundtrack work, you'll again be a nerd and be happy and possibly scared. Or if you thought Andrew MacLaren's son gs on the Newark! Here Too! comp. were the best songs, you'll have something new to secretly be really jazzed about. Nothing terribly complicated and obviously owing a huge debt to the backlog of Tomitas and Jarres and Carloses, etc., but fuck it. He does it like he fucking means it. Put this on and SPACE OUT! Or don't put this on if you don't really want to space out.

Steve Moore - "The Jefferson Institute"
Steve Moore - "Waves"
Steve Moore - "The White Knight"

There's also the Bastro/Codeine 7". I feel like I read something that said this was more of a collaborative record than a traditional split, but I'm still not sure. The A-side--a cover of Pierre Barouh and Francis Lai's "A L'ombre Des Nous"--is credited to the songwriters, while the B-side--a jarring piece of moody, discordant late-80s instrumental art-punk in five or so actual pieces called "Produkt"--is credited to both Bastro and Codeine. And if you look up info on either song you'll get multiple answers for who did what. But what's probably more important is that both songs will make you wish you were living in 1991. Or that 1991 was living in 2008. That was my initial reaction anyway. "A L'ombre Des Nous" especially is a total devastator. I put it on and kind of had my jaw dropped. Who does something like this anymore? Who finds the slow Slint jams in old soundtrack ballads? I never fucked with Codeine since I've never been able to make it through a whole Low record in one sitting, but they kill it on this 7" and I'm wondering what else they've killed. And "Produkt" is throwaway Bastro jams that are still pretty cool and summarize the entire '90s DIY hardcore aesthetic (which they more-or-less helped prototype). But again, my main feeling about this record was that it was the most refreshing punk record I'd heard in a while. And it's not even that the punk/hardcore/etc. scene now is that bad. I think I can actually say that now. Melodic hardcore looks like it's died out completely (at least around here, hopefully everywhere). Kids seem to be getting weirder and funnier and making bands that are weird and funny. Knowing when to start and when to stop is crucial, whether you're making music that's terrible or complaining about music that's terrible. Shit gets old and edges can get rounded off to the point where you're literally opening for Third Eye Blind. But there's always something else going on, and there's still the possibility that you'll hear a band covering a really good French song brilliantly and, at times, without a French accent.

Bastro/Codeine - "A L'ombre Des Nous"
Bastro/Codeine - "Produkt"

Check out the Plantlife song "Fool For U" here, or at least check out the first couple minutes (it's kind of long). The Santogold song isn't bad either. Errr no, actually--check out this Santogold song first. Imagine if that was on the radio instead of shitty Gwen Stefani songs. The world would be a little better. I found an old episode of MST3K that I've been trying to remember for 10 years. You can watch it starting here. What else?? Hmmm...oh this Doom beat is another reason I wanted a Moog. If you can tell me what the sample is from, I will be your biggest fan. Oh and thank you Kevin for giving me a really nice shout-out on Kpunk! I have never been called sharp and thoughtful in my life, I don't think.

2008-04-27T16:54:00.001-04:00

I know where you're coming from.
After we saw The Brown Bunny at the Dryden, Andrew and Tyler and I drove to Wegmans. We were in my 2002 Geo Prizm that might've had a Charles Bronson sticker on it at that point, which is probably the only thing I missed about that car after I got rid of it. It was in September or October. It was the nice kind of chilly that happens around then. You're not ready for it, and your teeth chatter and you fidget when you're outside but you really like it. Summer gets boring after a while. We were listening to a dub of my dad's copy of the White Album that has a skip partway through "Piggies", and I drove through a pothole right during the skip so it sounded like the pothole caused it. We got to Wegmans and I bought an Upstate Farms Cookies n' Cream Milk and it was fucking GREAT, and I tried to remember what happened in the movie, but I could barely remember anything. I remembered Chloe Sevigny smoking crack and some motorcycle race. I remembered Tyler and I cracking up during that scene where Vincent Gallo is talking to Chloe's mom and her grandma(?) is off to the side making a weird face, although when I saw it again it wasn't that funny. I remembered a huge blowjob even though Chloe was dead(?). And those were all kind of hazy. They're hazy even now. The only part that was clear then and now was that shot of rain coming down on his windshield as he's driving and the Gordon Lightfoot song playing over it. I don't pick up young girls at gas stations or drive bikes or get giant blowjobs much, but I do drive around and feel sad. That was like my whole life at that point. After I saw Repulsion, it was roughly the same deal. There was Catherine Deneuve looking young and unbelievably good. There was her rolling over in her bed and some random guy being there who maybe wasn't really there. There was the scene where she's talking to her friend at work about going to the movies where it seems like she's getting her shit together and is going to be fine. There was the dead guy in the bathtub. There were weird laytex hands coming through the wall. Mostly, though, there was her walking through the streets of London to upbeat early '60s jazz jams that sounded like they were supposed to be in another movie. I think about time travel to the '60-'70s and regular travel to Europe all the time, and every once in a while I think about what my personal theme song (for lack of a better term) would be. Hers was "Carol's Walk", I think (see if you can figure it out by reading this). I'd like mine to be any number of other Chico Hamilton songs or Cal Tjader stuff I've heard lately--West Coast-ish and breezy. Or "Ilgaz", for real. In truth it's probably closer to "Policenauts" at any given time, which I guess isn't bad. But not now.

Chico Hamilton - "Carol's Walk"
Chico Hamilton - "Languid Morbosity"
Chico Hamilton - "Sophisticated Thrilling"

I guess there are other songs besides "Night Of Joy" and "Dean's Dream" and whatever this Black Majesty song is called, but like what are they? Also: Tyler, this is that other Farah song from After Dark; Leah, I couldn't find a space for this on Homegirls: The Album (plus it's really long and I wasn't sure you'd be into it); Kelley, I posted this up before but wasn't sure if you'd heard it. That should cover my full readership, as far as I know. Do you read this and want a song directed at you? Let me know somehow. Oh and DUH--go here now!

2008-04-10T16:40:00.001-04:00

I thought it best if I cry.
It's got to be cool to be one of those guys who can rattle off a bunch of nonsense and have it come out perfectly formed and incredible, or to be one of those guys who can say one or two things that hang with you forever and almost call you out on some hidden shit you'd hidden even from yourself. The best I could do when I was in a band was stuff like "I've got a boner curse" and "We are not South America" and other stuff that was even more embarrassing, and in conversation I'll occasionally say stuff like "eat those farts like Pac-Man". It's not really the same thing. I'm not one of those guys. Mayo Thompson is definitely one of those guys, although I'm basing that on one week of listening to a reissue of his 1969 album Corky's Debt To His Father, and actually the most interesting thing about the record is that all the songs--as structured as they obviously are--feel like they could fall apart at any second but never do. I'm not really sure how they (Thompson and a bunch of people I'm guessing are from The Red Krayola) managed to keep it together--either by sheer will or mutual agreement not to stop playing until someone gave some kind of signal, or by playing really good bass lines and organ lines and horn parts (that are seriously the best things you'll hear all day), or because Thompson's voice sounds like D. Boon as Syd Barrett, or because he uses that voice to sing lines like "I'd like to get you alone just to know what you'd do". Or it could be otherworldly forces at work, turning what should be something creepy and irritating into something funny and awesome and relatable.

Mayo Thompson - "Dear Betty Baby"
Mayo Thompson - "Horses"
Mayo Thompson - "To You"

Speaking of otherworldly forces, check out Arthur Lipsett's Soundtracks, recently issued as an LP in limited numbers by Global A. While working for the National Film Board of Canada, Lipsett created sound and film collages that blew a lot of young filmmaker minds (apparently there's a reference in Star Wars to one of Lipsett's films) in the '60s. Soundtracks literally presents the complete audio tracks from four of his short films, and even without the visuals it's pretty fascinating and eerie--like Twilight Zone episodes constructed entirely out of random documentary footage. There's something terrifying about listening to disembodied speeches and machine sounds from the past, like it's coming from beyond the grave, but I can't stop listening. Plus, watch the first like 40 seconds of "21-87". It's the scariest shit. Not all of his work (or the little bit that I've seen) is that unsettling. Some of it's just beautiful shots of basic things you'd probably never see otherwise, and disparate elements put together to create a narrative. Whatever's happening on screen or on tape, though, there's a constant feeling that the world is really interesting and huge and there are ghostly things floating in the ether, above all else.

Arthur Lipsett Soundtracks

What else could you want? "I Feel", rare spy music, Failures, Heather Perkins? Everything Blank Dogs has ever done mixed in with good recommendations? I made a muxtape on my day off last week. Maybe you'll like that! You can listen to it here. It's got some songs I've mentioned here and some songs that are beyond discussion. It'll be up for a couple more days, and then I'll probably do a new one (I put a link up top, if you want to check). I'm going to try to do one every week, assuming I don't get sick of it, which is pretty likely.

2008-04-01T16:52:00.000-04:00

You should not square it off.
FUCKIN' CLUUTCHYYY!!
Sorry. There's a new Clutchy Hopkins record out on Ubiquity called Walking Backwards and it's wonderful--probably the official album of Summer evenings 2008, but just as essential to getting through some March-April doldrums, if you have those. It's not even about him living in a cave or maybe/maybe not existing, either. He could be Rainn Wilson and it would still be about songs broadcast out of some uncharted quadrant of the funk/jazz/soul/hip-hop feedback loop, that have their own interior logic and speak on the realities and surrealities of living without any actual speaking. And even when there are vocals, they're from that Ecko school of the blues (though maybe Darondo has better/worse cred than that?). It's like they were reading mine and Tyler's minds! Nothing as extreme as "I Got Kicked Off The Oprah Show" or Barbara Carr, but still. He made that shit work! You got an ass kickin' comin'!

Clutchy Hopkins - "Horny Tickle"
Clutchy Hopkins - "Percy's On The One"
Clutchy Hopkins feat. Darondo - "Love of a Woman"

The other day at work I had a 20 minute break between stuff I had to do (between getting back from delivering Expresses and having to go pick up mail from Hobart & William Smith), so I decided to go hang out in my car. While a bunch of my co-workers were chatting and maybe making plans to get some beers at Trotta's after work, I sat in my car listening to part of Gastr Del Sol's The Harp Factory On Lake Street, absently picked at scabs on my hand, counted some of the change in one of my cupholders, tried to fall asleep, and then read something about Taylor Swift in the latest issue of Blender. What the hell is wrong with me? Three weeks earlier, I left Jim Seidel's retirement party feeling like shit, wishing I had been better friends with him, wishing there was at least one person at work who I had any real connection with (maybe someone who hates it as much as I do?), and wondering why I keep a comfortable distance from everything when I know I'll only end up feeling uncomfortable and retarded and awkward later. And then a few days go by and I'm there in my car, zoning right back into "This Job Is Fucking Stupid/Being Alone Is Awesome" mode. I'd rather do NOTHING by myself than potentially do anything with you guys. I'd rather listen to some random There Will Be Blood/Silent Way hybrid and David Grubbs sing-talking (I think it's David Grubbs) than shoot the shit. Is that terrible? I mean I like Gastr Del Sol. I like that they did pretentious things but were natural and charming about it, and I can appreciate that they're part of a larger tradition of dorks doing cool shit. But it seems like the flip side of that appreciation is that, professionally, I'm going to continue being probably the worst version of myself for the rest of my life. It's the price you pay for trying really hard not to pay a price.

Gastr Del Sol - "The Harp Factory On Lake Street"

YESSSSSSSSSSS! Also, get your Bohack record here and your Venom and Cannibal Coke stage banter here. My favorite part of Discreet Charm can be found here starting at around the 4:51 mark. Sorry there are no subtitles. You can make up your own dialogue! If all else fails, go with Hugh or Lenny or Prince Vince. Or..."o"...skip directly to "Hollywood Freaks" and Dock Ellis' story.

2008-03-17T17:02:00.001-04:00

All alone (I) saw a spark.
I was really reluctant to talk about Belong's Colorloss Record. I saw Pitchfork liked it a lot, which should have made it immediately suspect, and then I read a review of the Pitchfork review that made me feel totally grossed out about music writing and the internet. It was like watching Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer or something. It was like that feeling. But I can't deny that I like Colorloss Record. If daylight savings time and very, very early mornings fucked you up to the point where you were partly hallucinating all last week, you might like it in the same way that I do. That's a really specific endorsement. There's also the spectre of ambient German stuff from the '70s, British psych (all the songs are old psych covers), black metal drones, and avant classical work that I'm only kind of familiar with hanging over the whole record. And it's understandably been tagged as a shoegaze thing, although it's the most extreme shoegaze shit I've heard. Like you're half listening to air and half listening to a band roaring from down a hallway, which maybe makes it sound like it would be too challenging or really not enjoyable, but it actually feels right. Some things are just better when they sound terrible! Or maybe a better thing to say would be "production and engineering decisions are very important". Like there are those guitar parts that pop up towards the end of Blur's "Coffee and TV", where it sounds like there's something really wrong with Graham Coxon's guitar and it's probably going to explode. How did he get that sound? What the fuck is Belong even playing? Sometimes it's completely about the sound of something and nothing else.

Belong - "Late Night"
Belong - "My Clown"

"Frankie Teardrop" is the official Tyler-Matt national anthem. I'm not sure what that says exactly. Also, "Miami Morning Coming Down II" is different from "Miami Morning Coming Down I". I'm not crazy about Shane Smith, but anything about North Korea is fascinating and scary, and I'm fucking amazed they were able to a.) go there b.) shoot anything and c.) not get trapped forever in a North Korean prison FOREVER or brutally executed. Check out these snacks.

2008-03-10T19:22:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I'd love a minute of time.
Hey, just want to talk about The Amps' Pacer real quick. Like literally I'm writing this as fast as I can because I don't want to get bogged down writing some long thing. I started thinking about Pacer after I saw The Breeders the other night. They played a couple songs from it almost right off the bat, which was a little unexpected (even though "Full On Idle" wound up on Title TK, but they didn't even play that) and nice. They also played a lot of stuff from Pod, which I still don't know very well, and a bunch of new stuff from Mountain Battles (including the song they just posted up on their site), and "No Aloha" and "Safari" and "Happiness Is a Warm Gun". It was a great show all around--they were fun, it wasn't too loud, nobody was obnoxious, I didn't get bored at all, there were only two bands on the bill, etc. Every show should be like that, minus the snow and cold, and maybe with some free coatchecks? But yeah, Pacer. This was the first Breeders-related record I ever got, and it was as much a summer '96 soundtrack for me as the KIDS soundtrack and Orange. Actually, this was probably the kind of band I really wanted to do before I wanted to do a band like The Chuds. Or if I could've done a combination of The Amps and "Dang". That would have been my shit! That could still be my shit. Pacer maybe isn't as nuanced as The Breeders' stuff, which is good and bad. Good in the sense that it's straight-up from start to finish and I can listen to the whole thing in one sitting and really enjoy it. But the weirder stuff on Breeders' records, or the stuff that doesn't work great or doesn't register at first but gets better the more you listen, is so good. Imperfections can be the whole deal. What's that Dean Martin line? "The problem with things that are perfect is that they're not very good"? Maybe it's not Dean Martin. It's on one of those Soft Focus episodes. Anyway, I can't remember the exact Amps line-up. I know it was Kim Deal and friends. You can find out somewhere (maybe in old copies of Spin you still haven't thrown out?), but it doesn't say in the liner notes. And it was released in '95, maybe while Kelly Deal was trying to clean up? How weird is it that she was on heroin? Maybe it's because she looks like a younger version of a woman I work with or because she was so funny and friendly and healthy-looking at the show, but I can't picture it at all. Also, were The Breeders the first to incorporate post-girl group girl group sounds into alternative rock? And are The Breeders one of the great punk bands of all time? These are things to think about.

The Amps - "I Am Decided"
The Amps - "Mom's Drunk"
The Amps - "Dedicated"

If you're in Rochester tomorrow (3/11), go see the last Ghost Harm show at the Bug Jar. Now there's one good band in town. Oh and Raunchy Sex is playing. I mean, there will be Raunchy Sex at the show? Check out this tape. Check out "Why Should I Love You". Check out Alf Metal.

2008-03-03T17:57:00.000-05:00

My darling, I don't know.
Real quick, some things for a really nice day that's totally over at this point! First is Bully Records' recent Obession compilation, which has so many things going for it it's not even funny. There's the woman with headphones about to kiss a droid head on the cover, for starters. There's the general wealth and variety of obscure global '60s/'70s fun--mellow Brazilian sunshine and wild party jams that sound like actual parties, Turkish drug rock, Indian Saz-rockers, Uruguayan freakouts, distorted Peruvian soul men, Argentinian space pop, etc. There's more specific stuff, like the pre-Greg Ginn guitar at the beginning of Erkin Koray's "Hor Gorme Garibi", the sped-up Motown and guitar flutters of Ovni 87's "Sueno Un Camino", and the weird structure and instrumentation and adorable flatness of Suely E Os Kantikus' "Esperanto". There's the fact that you don't have to be an archaeologist with a money bin to hear these songs. And maybe most importantly, there's the larger function a compilation like this serves, reminding us that, while we have to suffer through Three Doors Down videos at the movies and local Cricket commercials, there are still a few people out there who aren't (or at least weren't) striving to be embarrassing dipshits. If you see this album anywhere at any time, get it.

Ovni 87 - "Sueno Un Camino"
Atomic Forest - "Obsession '77"
Erkin Koray - "Hor Gorme Garibi"
Suely E Os Kantikus - "Esperanto"

And also, there's Sven Libaek and His Orchestra and their Solar Flares. I know, more library shit for dorks, but hear me out. This is Sven's space-themed rarity from 1974, which means homemade synths, soft everything, and great song titles like "In Nebular Orbit", "Destination Omega 3", and "No Flowers On Venus". If you're obsessed with old episodes of Cosmos, you will doubly think this is awesome, maybe even as awesome as Carl Sagan's voice, wardrobe, fake spaceship, and ability to connect Dutch pioneers and ancient Greek heretics to future space endeavors. And like Obsession, this is another situation where you don't have to spend several figures that you don't have, thanks to Vadim. If you want to, though, check out Votary (who are in the process of putting out vinyl re-issues of a bunch of Australian jazz jewels, including the full Inner Space) and their secondhand list.

Sven Libaek - "Destination Omega 3"
Sven Libaek - "No Flowers On Venus"
Sven Libaek - "...And Beyond"

Other great comp. songs are Unwound and Honor Role. I don't know how, but I forgot to mention lost Rites of Spring demos, again brought to you by Chunklet, who are putting on a SXSW show that's also the best show of the modern age. Also, fuck it--I like the new Dead Meadow and I like Mogollar. Peace out, Jimmy.

2008-02-24T15:55:00.001-05:00

We'll get over it,
we'll go
around it.
It took me a while, but I finally dipped into the second disc of The Clean's 2003 Anthology collection. The first disc's '80-'82 material -- garage-y punk filtered through New Zealand hillsides, inexplicable hippie/Rugrats artwork, goofball/potentially serious shit going down at the same time -- became a weekly, then daily thing for me without me even realizing it. Meanwhile, the second disc sat there, filling me with later-era LP dread (see: Black Flag, Minutemen, Bad Brains, etc.). But as it turns out, the songs culled from 1989's Vehicle, 1994's Modern Rock, and 1996's Unknown Country that fill up disc 2 are perhaps catchier, stranger, and more endearing than even their classic early work. The tracks from Vehicle illustrate the correct use of late '80s/early '90s college rock (a genre I have an endless soft spot for, if not always the stomach) and have been playing on a loop in my head for weeks, while the songs from Modern Rock and Unknown Country get mellow and odd, sometimes turning into Spacemen 3 jams minus the drugs, if that's possible. The end result is a lot of instant nostalgia tripping to that '90s era I was born just a little too late or too shy to be a part of, and I guess that's really the main draw for me as far as The Clean goes. They wrote great pop songs without being super obvious about it, that remind me of things I didn't get to do. They were informal and had sort of a small-town vibe, and did simple things that worked while doing weirder things that worked just as well.

The Clean - "Drawing to a Hole" (from Vehicle)
The Clean - "The Blue" (from Vehicle)
The Clean - "Secret Place" (from Modern Rock)
The Clean - "Franz Kafka at the Zoo" (from Unknown Country)

Part of the reason I haven't posted much in the past few weeks is that I've been been working these really long days that put me in general space-out mode, delivering mail like a zombie, driving dead-eyed through dark grey countryside, and not moving for whole weekends at a clip. It's not a life I would recommend to anyone, but it puts you in the ideal mindset for Guitar Soli, the Numero Group's latest addition to their Wayfaring Strangers lost-folk series. If you're not into solo acoustic instrumental finger-picking in the Fahey/Kottke/American Primitive vein, I would say maybe stay the fuck away from this. But I would also say that even within the songs that are too bluesy or showy or formal, there are solid genuine moments, and that the best of Guitar Soli's obscure, self-funded, mostly-'70s material works with mood and creepy notes and uses blues-slides only enough to remind me why I like stuff like Beggar's Banquet. There is also the added bonus and mystique of lost '70s dad dudes who became religiously obsessive about acoustic possibilities and forms, some developing and building their own instruments, and some recording lone genius demos and then saying "I was just too lazy to retune the guitar". And as usual, The Numeros' impeccable research and beautiful packaging are on display, with particularly awesome original artwork from Mike Davis.

Richard Crandell - "Diagonal"
William Eaton - "Untitled"
Dan Lambert - "Charley Town"

First of all: belated song for Linda Werts is "The Golden Age". Second of all: Drill, Saw, Vise's "Local 12" kills and I feel retarded for having forgotten about them. Thirdly, here's that Bonnie "Prince" Billy cover I mentioned a couple posts ago. A couple TV things that deserve entire posts unto themselves: the Faces doing "Maybe I'm Amazed" and Johnny Knoxville & Co. dancing around to "Alright" at the end of their MTV takeover (sorry there's no clip of this...or is there??). They're also good for counter-acting the unstoppable despair of The Wire's final season. Goddamn.

2008-02-10T14:16:00.000-05:00

Secret thinkers sometimes listening aloud.
It's a shame that Weird War never really caught on. What was the problem exactly? Were the line-up and name changes too confusing? Was the mission behind this particular Ian Svenonius-led group not clear enough (if so, go here)? Was their aesthetic too much of a pastiche? Were people alright with perpetual teenage greasers seceding from the U.S. and '60s garage gospel, but not alright with economically disadvantaged Funkadelic/foreign psych pop theorists trying to dismantle the culture? Were people tired of trying to figure out if something was for real or a joke, or if it could be everything at once? Were people not into Alex Minoff's guitar tone? And what about 2004's If You Can't Beat 'Em, Bite 'Em? It wasn't the second coming of I Suck On That Emotion (nothing could be), but it was something. It had "AK-47", perhaps their greatest moment/greatest song ever written. It had these great inspirational songs, like the title track (which has a rap at the end by JJ Rox that reminds of that part in "She Ain't Got The Boom Like I Do") and the soothing, Eddie Hazel-ish "One By One". It had cover art inspired by Lou Reed's Live: Take No Prisoners, and came with a fold-out board game. Not to mention, have you seen the video for "Grand Fraud", or their performance of "AK-47" on the first Burn To Shine DVD, or even just a picture of it? OR their performance of "Session Man" from Las Historias Mas Sexy Del Mundo? Not saying Soft Focus and The Psychic Soviet aren't great, or that Extra Golden isn't cool, or even that everything Weird War did was spectacular. But even when they were off, they were still kind of on.

Weird War - "AK-47"
Weird War - "If You Can't Beat 'Em, Bite 'Em"
Weird War - "One By One"

Some 30 years earlier, there was David Bowie's Young Americans. Ostensibly his Soul/R&B record, it was coked-out and personalized and skewed enough to be closer to a white pop Funkadelic thing (sidebar: if there's a connection between Young Americans and Weird War, it's a song like "Fascination"). It also features two of his more enduring hits (the title track and "Fame"), Carlos Alomar playing guitar, a Beatles cover, and sometimes brilliantly shoddy vocal work. When I think of Young Americans, though, I immediately think of the song "Win". I got really obsessed with it when I first heard it, right around the time I was making a 2nd mix cd for my friend Teresa. I haven't seen her in a while. I saw her at my friend John's wedding, where we realized we both dance like '80s teens, and then I saw her again exactly a year ago, at my surprise 27th birthday party, where she and her husband, Jeff (aka Licky), gave me a plastic robot claw and a large poster of hairless cats. A few years prior I made her a cd just before she left for school in New York, which included, among other things, Bowie's "Sons of the Silent Age" (from 1977's "Heroes"). Months later I sent her the crappier sequel mix that also included "Win", and it struck me later that in both cases the Bowie songs felt like centerpieces. I wanted her to hear "Mannequin" and "Hoe Cakes" and everything, but the Bowie shit was a little more important. Lyrically both songs say things that would make more sense coming from someone else, a real intimate hysteria and weirdness that was world's apart from where we were. But they're also full of dialogue with a more general sense of personal history. Bowie isn't singing to someone he barely knows, he's singing to someone who's going to understand what he's trying to say, even if it's something like "I feel you driving and you're only the wheel". Even if it's a couple really good songs that have nothing to do with anything, but are kind of like, "Our history isn't exciting, but it's a still a history, and that's something."

David Bowie - "Win"
David Bowie - "Fascination"
David Bowie - "Young Americans"

Total hits from another great Tyler Wertsday mix include Al Kooper, Funkadelic (did I just fucking mention them again??), and Scorps, and that's just within the first five songs. Mi Ami's "Ark of the Covenant" is music to my ears, LITERALLY. Their African Rhythms 12" is finally out and I'm pumped and psyched, but I was big into Black Eyes, like a lot. Also--The fucking Whip demo! Also, Thin Lizzy is awesome and Soulja Boy constantly outdoes himself. These are facts.

2008-01-28T20:01:00.001-05:00

Cosseted by white hazy mornings.
Goddamn! One of the great things I got for Christmas (and I got nothing but solid gold hits from people) was a burned copy of The Music Library, the collection of '60s/'70s sound library/mood music/source music tracks compiled by Johnny Trunk and friends as a bonus egg to his/their definitive overview of the Library Record scene. Some total nerd shit, for sure, but also, as Melanie Wood put it when she gave it to me, an album that "has Matt Werts written all over it". Yup, this is the music that soundtracks my ideal world, in case you weren't sure. In more general terms, this is something the Doom/Madlib/Morricone fan in your life will potentially go bonkers over. Tons of vintage cornball jazz and funk and pop that's more incredible and transporting than what most people take way serious, not to mention the perfect score for flipping through those Taschen ad books. Especially check out Guy Pedersen's "Kermesse Non Heroique", which is like the "Payload Theme Song" of rare library jams, sort of. Thank you again, Mel (and Jesse?)!

Guy Pedersen - "Kermesse Non Heroique"
Luis Conti - "Zapata"
Basil Kirchin and Roy Neave - "First Step (b)"

Another wonderful New Year's time record that needs some shouting out is Michio Kurihara's solo record from last year, Sunset Notes. If I had technically heard this in 2007, it would have made my year-end wrap-up. I should've just included it anyway. Kurihara is probably best known for his endless work in the Japanese psych community (Ghost, White Heaven, etc.) and with former Galaxie 500-ers Damon & Naomi, who released Sunset Notes on their 20/20/20 label. I had only been aware of him through his collaborative album with Japanese doom-gazers Boris, last year's (or maybe it was 2006's) increasingly awesome Rainbow. On Rainbow, he goes all over the place and gets super wild (seriously check the last couple minutes of "Starship Narrator"), but Sunset Notes is much more restrained and rarely gets psyched out. It's more college rock and surf worship and soothing lite ballads sung by Ai Aso--kind of a virtuoso's bedroom project, which means you get low-key experiments, but they're presided over by a legit genius guy and his friends, who are also pretty legit. I think my new goal for any band I play in from now on should be to sound like "Twilight Mystery of a Russian Cowboy". Imagine hearing that played by some band at a house show! Holy shit.

Michio Kurihara - "Twilight Mystery of a Russian Cowboy"
Michio Kurihara - "The Wind's Twelve Quarters"
Boris with Michio Kurihara - "Starship Narrator"

Damn, what else? Uhhh, ESG's "Erase You" and The Savages' "The World Ain't Round, It's Square". If I could put up Chico Hamilton's "People" and Bonny Billy's Phil Ochs cover, I totally would. If you're not reading Indestructible Wolves of the Apocalypse Junkyard, you're crazy, but if you are reading it, you're probably also crazy. Be sure to check out his soundtrack picks. Check out Lovefingers' picks while you're at it. And definitely, definitely check out David Lynch on phone movie-watching. Take that, Larry Brown.

2008-01-10T22:48:00.000-05:00

It's so obvious.
So yeah, 2007: The Year That Was.
I bought a bunch of Harry Pussy records and French stuff. I watched The Wire a lot. I wore the same pair of pants virtually every day. I think that pretty much covers it. As far as albums, mini-albums, tapes, mini-tapes, etc. go, there was a ton of stuff that totally ripped. No Age took Brian Eno and loud bedroom punk and united absolutely everyone in the world ("Boy Void", "Dead Plane"). Big Business delivered another pleaser, this time with the assistance of master helpy David Scott Stone ("Hands Up", "Another Beautiful Day In The Pacific Northwest"). Para One released a fuzzy, warm, melancholy space-synth score to what looks to be a heavy-shit film involving water gymnastics ("Naissance des Pieuvres", "Sunless"). Fucked Up continued their gimmick of being really interesting and good in a scene that's predominantly neither ("Year of the Pig"). The Budos Band came back with more dusty afro-soul, only the dust was sand and the soul was possessed ("Origin of Man", "Mas O Menos"). Dawn McCarthy & Bonny Billy made it possible to have The Letting Go on two consecutive year-end lists ("Strange Form of Life", "Lay and Love"). Italians Do It Better was the other awesome label of the year, dropping d.i.y. italo-disco hits from Glass Candy, Farah, and others that made me want to dance kind of slow and relaxed ("Law of Life", "Etheric Device"). Bone Awl and Blank Dogs released an onslaught of severely angry black metal and warped new wave, respectively, and I had trouble keeping up with it ("Smiling Star-Wide", "Leaving The Light On"). PJ Harvey went for broke and made a pretty affecting record centered around the piano when she wasn't necessarily that proficient on it ("Silence", "White Chalk"). Gonzales did the same thing, only he was pretty proficient and he did it a couple years ago, though it wasn't officially released in the States until this year ("Gogol", "Gentle Threat"). Oh and Deerhoof were awesome, again ("The Galaxist", "Look Away"). As usual, there were great things I didn't get around to and mediocre things I took a chance on and terrible things that people seemed to love for whatever reason. The stuff I really spent time with, though, was pretty fucking decent.

In my last post (before the Christmas one) I mentioned that I was "truly bowled over by one record in particular". That record was Vothana's Hoang Gia 10". While the indie world continued to champion a lot of patronizing shlock and Radiohead awkwardly tried to stay inside and outside the music business by making their new album available in every conceivable format at every conceivable price, Vothana (aka Vietnamese black metal savant/U.S. resident Lord Nebulah) produced another genius epic vortex of extreme misanthropic extremeness and blown-out melodic triumphs, then destroyed the remaining copies of the already-limited MLP with a set of hammers when he feared it had fallen into the wrong hands, eventually swearing off any and all distribution to the States. In 2007 this felt awesome, as though someone was finally being brutally honest about how shitty, corrupt, thoughtless, and culturally barren the world (and particularly America) had become, and doing it through 15-minute blasts of nuclear-winter white noise histrionics, unintelligible demon growls, comically over-the-top anti-religious fury, layers of corpse paint, and a sense of exclusivity. (As a side note, some of these ideas pop up in the latest issue of ANP Quarterly. In Cali Dewitt's interview with artist and Youth Attack label head Mark McCoy, McCoy touches on the non-monetary value of limited records, that "to keep something obscure is all we have left to maintain its importance--once it is dispelled it becomes safe again". In Aaron Rose's interview with filmmaker Harmony Korine, he talks briefly about Norwegian Black Metal, its use in his 1997 film Gummo, and how "it was just like the least commercial music that a person could create!") Of course, what Nebulah is actually saying on Hoang Gia is probably a lot of paranoid ramblings about "Jew traitors" and "Zog". But the music is so genuinely compelling and thrashy and, in many ways, ambiguous, that it leaves itself open to all kinds of dramatic interpretation. Getting past the often retarded black metal aesthetics and absurd hate spiels (and, fuck, even finding a copy) is obviously the tough part, but if you're up for the challenge, you can maybe pick up on what made Hoang Gia the most astounding, mind-warping record I heard all year (and, in all likelihood, what made his other release this year, Trên Con Duòng Danh Vong, the most astounding, mind-warping record I will never hear).

Apologies of course for all my holiday and post-holiday laziness. I will make it up to you by directing you to this. I'm dying to talk about other things, so check back soon.

2007-12-21T16:19:00.001-05:00

Christmas Ape and Christmas Ape Goes to Summer Camp.
I'll get back to my half-assed list of favorite things of the thing later. It's time for some Christmas Jams! Most of these selections can be found on the mega rare Snowman-shaped Wonderful Christmastime/Rush Job 2-CD mix tape box set I made for a White Elephant exchange last year. If I remember correctly, Ms. Emily Twentyfive owns the only copy on spaceship Earth. Congratulations, Emily. They can also be found separately in many other places. Enjoy them together again for the first time below.

Alan Vega - "No More Christmas Blues"

Full credit to WFMU for alerting me to this. Not unlike Paul Beatle and wife and friends, only it was released on a Ze comp. and you probably won't hear it on WYYY. Also perfect for starting a Suicide kick if the pretty great knock-off from Candy-O isn't enough.

Caetano Veloso - "In The Hot Sun of a Christmas Day"

As previously side-noted a little while ago by me, this is the first whole Veloso song I ever heard, from Peanut Butter Wolf's (or someone else from Stones Throw's) Christmas mix from last year. From that category of Christmas songs that use Christmas primarily as a backdrop for a story about a guy narrowly evading a bloody manhunt. Includes the lines "Machine gun/in the hot sun of a Christmas day".

Claudine Longet - "Snow"

More of a winter song than a Christmas song, and a grim, lonely winter song at that ("Our dreams lay buried in the snow"), from the acclaimed French actress and songstress who left Andy Williams for pro skier Spider Sabich, who she later shot sometime in the '70s.

Rowlph and John Denver - "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"

From the Muppets/Denver collabo, A Christmas Together, which is up right there with A Charlie Brown Christmas, Crom-Tech X-Mas, and Dorothy Hammill's PAX nightmare from a couple years back. If I ever cover a Christmas song, I think it should be this one. I can do a decent Rowlph impression, and I know all the asides, too. It'll wind up sounding like Tom Waits and a guy making fun of John Denver, but I'm just going to do it anyway.

Mirror Image - "Deck The Halls"

From their 1979 album, Yuletide Disco, which looks like this. Not nearly as unbearable as Universal Robot Band's "Disco Christmas", but still covered in Variety Hour sheen and best in small doses. Lots of great synth sounds, though, and a cheap robot reggae version of "Deck The Halls" totally out of nowhere.

Bob and Doug McKenzie - "The Twelve Days of Christmas"

Arguably the only funny Christmas song that will be really, really funny forever. No disrespect to the barking dogs doing "Jingle Bells".

Non-Christmas jam of all-time is Ghostface and MF Doom's "Angeles" from the forthcoming album Swift and Changeable (DO NOT COPY) set for release in late 2006.

2007-12-09T16:31:00.001-05:00

Baggin' ounces in the back of the Maz.
Alright, I should probably do some 2007 best-of spiels before the year is out and I forget what it was I liked so much. I'll start with a couple must-haves by two bands that conquered my brain in the early part of '07. El Michels Affair continued their Wu obsession by collaborating with actual Clan member Raekwon on the PJ's...from afar EP, together interpreting Pete Rock's "PJ's" as only true dusty Shaolin Brooklynites can--L. Michels and crew laying down their cinema soul moods with a little more cut n' paste flair, while Raekwon gets almost stream-of-conciousness about day-to-day nefarious things (I think). If you have a heart for New York hip-hop, it will get all aflutter. Clean and instrumental version of "PJ's" are also included, as well as the deep stunner, "This One Is For My Baby", and some bonus beats. Did anyone else see that Fat Beats ad in the Wax Poetics photo issue that mentioned an El Michels "Wu-Tang covers album, title TBA"? Did anyone else gasp (or say "Noooo shiiiittt") out loud??

El Michels Affair and Raekwon - "PJ's (clean)"
El Michels Affair - "This One Is For My Baby"

I also geeked out majorly over Soiled Mattress and the Springs' Springtime! 12" right around the same time (January/February) I was geeking out over the first of El Michels' Shaolin 7"s. Honestly, that period was like the highlight of my year. Just coming home from work, freezing, putting on Soiled Mattress and El Michels one after the other for an hour or so, and dreaming about what Spring and Summer might have in store possibility-wise. NYC's Soiled Mattress especially came out of nowhere with the perfect idea--wonderfully executed bar mitzvah-ish jazz for everyone--and introduced me to the excellent Teenage Teardrops label, who's blog then introduced me to the Smell-centered LA scene that I feel like I've been living through vicariously ever since. If I wasn't a little unsure as to whether or not Springtime! came out this year or at the tail end of 2006 (and if I wasn't truly bowled over by one other record in particular), I would say this was the best record of 2007. But there's no doubt it was the most refreshing piece of non-rock pure joy I heard all year (and let's not forget that back cover photo of the boat with the words "DOCK WAR" spray-painted across it).

Soiled Mattress and the Springs - "Phillip's Head"
Soiled Mattress and the Springs - "AM"

Christmas Bonus(es): I think we can all agree Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmas Time" is the Christmas national anthem. At the very least you should check out the video, if possible. White dorks on dope! Back-up anthem is The Free Design's "Close Your Mouth (It's Christmas)", which is maybe definitely a more impressive song.
Serious Non-Christmas Bonus: The Creatures' Expansion over at the Red Room. For disco robot weirdos only.

2007-11-29T21:09:00.001-05:00

Poised
to be a
mediary.
It's pretty rare that I discover an album completely on my own. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a straight line from someone else's record collection (mainly TFS's) to mine, or that I don't spend my few hours of free time everyday wandering the internet in search of other nerd dudes' recommendations and free samples. Even when it's not one of those two situations, I can usually retrace the steps (down to absurd details, like what shirt I was wearing and the feeling in the air) that got me to owning any album in my room, but every once in a while that trail goes totally cold, as is the case with The Covocation Of...'s 2001 album, Pyramid Technology. I think it may have been a Jason Schulmerich (then of Fantastic Records, later of Hell On Earth, and now of the Yawn Factory) recommendation based on my known appreciation for Unwound, Botch, Aesop Rock, Sam McPheeters, et al. I seem to remember him saying, "You'll like this." either right before or right after I bought it, but I can't be sure. I also seem to remember playing it, along with Lightning Bolt's Ride The Skies, for Tyler in my parents' computer room, and then him putting it on a tape with a Scorpions record (maybe Lonesome Crow?). That would make sense, but again, I can't be sure. Regardless, Pyramid Technology is fucking killer and more instantly satisfying than some of guitarist/vocalist Tonie Joy's earlier, arguably more essential projects (Moss Icon, Universal Order of Armageddon, The Great Unraveling, etc.). Kind of a dirty prog mega-rock thing, kind of a psych wah-wah version of the hal al Shedad, with Joy singing about dark forces the way Benjamin Britton Lukens sang about sad angels, albeit less British-ly (no pun intended?). Additionally, bassist Guy Blakeslee and drummer George France both slay harshly, and Chris Coady's production is the best shit ever. They don't make records like this anymore (as far as I know), and this was only six years ago.

The Convocation Of... - "Crimson King's Deceit"
The Convocation Of... - "Ramblin'"
The Convocation Of... - "Unlimited Outer Thought Broadcast"

Not surprisingly, Mira Billotte's version of "As I Went Out One Morning" is the best thing on the I'm Not There soundtrackt. Speaking of that...uhh sort of, check out Eddie Hazel doing "I Want You (She's So Heavy)". Tasty licks! Also, every episode of Dr. Katz is now available on DVD. Get on it!

2007-11-20T17:02:00.000-05:00

I'll rent
the truck.
Punks! It probably goes without saying that Nazti Skinz' long-gone Sic Semper Tyrannis EP is not going to appeal to everyone. If you can make absurd off-color jokes with your friends (please notice there's a T in their name!), were a fan or member of The Chuds (Newark), or are generally not an uptight pantywaste, you'll be fine. Otherwise, you may have questions or concerns. Mentioning that Nazti Skinz featured members of Wrangler Brutes, The Monorchid, Le Shok, etc. and that their sole EP was released by Youth Attack may also help put it in the proper context. Plus, just try not to boogie to "No Accident"! It's impossible. Can't not boogie. It's that teenage trash feeling, the perfect blurred line between pure, ridiculous anger and fun (not to mention a certain mysterioso reputation and general scarcity) that keeps Sic Semper Tyrannis going for semi-crazy $50+ prices on eBay. It's that undeniable need for horribly/awesomely-recorded gems, perfect for skating and destroying or wishing you could skate and destroy, that must be pursued worry-free.

Nazti Skinz - "No Accident"
Nazti Skinz - "Tirade"
Nazti Skinz - "Criminal Crime"

Songs that may go over easier include Nelson Angelo and Joyce's "Sete Cahorros", Francoise Hardy's "Le Temps De L'amour", and/or Olivia Newton John's "Magic". Also, a couple good VBS joints--No Age on Practice Space and Enrique Metinides on Art Talk. Avoid the Enrique Metinides stuff if you can't handle dead bodies and sad things.

2007-11-14T15:08:00.000-05:00

Kurt Werts is 65 years old.
It's my dad's birthday today! He's 65, approaching old fogey status. That's him in the black vest and flowers (and my mom staring at the camera) at what I've been told was a Sgt. Pepper party. This was when they were living in...South Dakota? I can never remember which Dakota they lived in. I think it was South. Or maybe they were still at Grove City. Regardless, my dad's pretty great. If you see him, wish him a Happy B-Day. Also, feel free to check out the best "Dad" song I could think of below.

2007-11-07T16:27:00.000-05:00

I can feel
the real dis-ease.
I've been pretty burned out on music lately, but here goes anyway: a couple post-Halloween records that also work year-round. First is Quix*o*tic's second and final album, 2002's Mortal Mirror. Featuring Christina Billotte (Casual Dots, Slant 6, Autoclave), Mira Billotte (White Magic), and an almost unrecognizably shred-free Mick Barr (Crom-Tech, Orthrelm), Mortal Mirror, for me, kind of blows all those past and present works out of the water (although I do adore Crom-Tech, and I'm starting to adore White Magic, and there is that one Autoclave song). It's also essentially a guide for what girls should do if they're going to start a band--spooky, slightly mathy garage/ girl group jams, with stunning Aaron Neville and Black Sabbath covers thrown in. That's only if you want people totally falling in love with you and thinking you're the coolest, though.

Quix*o*tic - "Anonymous Face"
Quix*o*tic - "Open Up The Walls"
Quix*o*tic - "Lord of This World"

And then there's Velvet Cacoon's Genevieve. Full credit goes to Tyler Farren for randomly throwing this on the living room stereo (thanks, Leah!) one afternoon, and for generally being my #1 black metal supplier (sorry, Leah). I'm still an amateur enthusiast, but I'll say this: Genevieve is in the gauzy, speed drone realm of the black metal universe, full of multi-layered embittered darkness and occasional growls of despair in mini-epic form--not quite the high Wagner-ian drama of something like Vothana, but moving nonetheless. I want to say if you could get down with Orchid, you could probably get down with this, too. But who knows? I had this idea for a haunted house/hayride thing that revolved around Genevieve being played really loud inside an abandoned church, which seems kind of cheesy now. It's good, though, it's pretty scary.

Velvet Cacoon - "1"
Velvet Cacoon - "P.S. Nautical"
Velvet Cacoon - "Genevieve"

Random other songs are "Scrapbooking", "Odorono", and "Ten Thousand Animal Calls" (remember this song??). Check out clips from the best album of 2008, I mean besides whatever Straight, No Chaser puts out. Oh and Spiked Candy got updated big time last week--major French girl pop and Halloween song talk, plus A LOT of downloadable things.

2007-10-31T19:26:00.000-04:00

TRICK OR TREAT, YOU SONOFA-
BITCH!!
Hey! It's Halloween, so here's some scary stuff. The Shining soundtrack initially saw the light of day back in 1980, but was quickly recalled due to licensing issues and has remained fairly scarce ever since, save the occasional bootleg or eBay listing (where I found my copy). You can find most, if not all, of the songs scattered on other releases, and Wendy Carlos features all of her and Rachel Elkind's work for the film (including a ton of un-used pieces) in her Rediscovering Lost Scores, Vol. 1 collection. But there's something nice about having it all in one place. And when I say "nice", I mean "frightening and unsettling as shit". The songs by Carlos and Elkind, Krzystof Penderecki, Bela Bartok, and Gyorgy Ligeti featured on the original soundtrack LP are just as terrifying outside the movie as they are steady-camming down the winding halls of the Overlook Hotel. Total unspeakable creepiness and traumatizing, bad haunted vibes right in your own home--doesn't that sound great? Hooray.

Krzystof Penderecki - "De Natura Sonoris No. 2"
Bela Bartok - "Music For Strings, Percussion, and Celesta"
Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind - "The Shining (Main Title)"

Bonus scare jams are Thrones' "Valley of the Thrones" and Ten Grand's "Scary Movie 4". Also, White Magic's "Very Late" is both the spookiest and best song of the week. Claymation allegedly banned from TV for being too creepy and satanic can be found here. Have a scaaaaarry Hannukah!

2007-10-29T18:02:00.000-04:00

From the page in the book that I found.
Another real quick double-post, this time focusing exclusively on some chilled-out early '70s jams. First up is Layers, Les McCann's 1973 minimal space jazz spectacular, originally put out by Atlantic and recently vinyled-up again by the impeccable folks at 4 Men With Beards, with liner notes by Bundy K. Brown (!). I may even go so far as to say Layers is the jazz synth, funk bent, ambient groove record of my dreams. "Sometimes I Cry" sets the tone perfectly with some pre-Steve Curry, soft funk relaxation, while McCann's penchant for the harder stuff (and some Ray Charles worship) creeps up on a few of the later songs, especially on "The Dunbar High School Marching Band". But it's the open-air keyboard feeling of the more silent songs that really does it for me--those warped electronic notes echoing in an empty room that may as well be the entire universe, inner and outta spaces combined in a weird but totally familiar way. Also, Layers has apparently been mined a bit by the hip-hop community (for good reason), although the only sample I recognized right away was the one from "The Harlem Buck Dance Strut" used in part of Beck, Mike D, and Mario Caldato Jr's remix of the Blues Explosion's "Flavor".

Les McCann - "Sometimes I Cry"
Les McCann - "The Dunbar High School Marching Band"
Les McCann - "Before I Rest"

Also, I've really been wearin' the shit out of my copy of Francoise Hardy's gorgeous 1970 LP, Alone. Since I'm still a novice Hardy-file, I'll defer to the guy filling in for Justin Gage and his recent synopsis of why she's pretty great (I swear I'm not copying him; I've been planning this post for weeks!), though I will add that I'd been a stickler for her French-only stuff right up until I heard Alone, one of her (I think) first few English-language albums. As usual, her work on Alone is soothing and effortless, and her accented English adds a little something, beyond just me being able to understand what she's saying. It also feels a little less like her early, French-traditional Vogue pop, and more like an orchestral folk-pop collection, a la maybe Nick Drake or someone of that ilk, though without a lot of overly self-conscious bummage. It makes me want to shift my focus entirely to her pretty substantial late '60s/early '70s output, or, barring that, travel back in time, and I can virtually guarantee you will want to do the same exact thing.

Francoise Hardy - "Magic Horse"
Francoise Hardy - "Strange Shadows"
Francoise Hardy - "I Just Want To Be Alone"

Other songs are the Mary Timony Band's "Sharpshooter" and The Clean's "Platypus". Thurston Moore has a really nice office. Ken Burns needs to do a 12-part miniseries on him talking about things. Also, there's another stellar Ariel Pink video, and Black Dice's video for "Kokomo" melted my brain with its use of Fruity Cheerios commercial footage, among other things. It's like someone stuck their Gore book in the VCR.

2007-10-24T16:50:00.000-04:00

Sad dreams blow through dark trees.
I've been on a major David Lynch kick lately, which has involved a few different things--a couple weeks re-watching Twin Peaks, braving all three hours of Inland Empire yesterday afternoon, scattered portions of Chris Rodley's Lynch on Lynch interview collection, and of course, Monsterpiece Theater's presentation of Twin Beaks. What started all this for me was Julee Cruise's 1990 album, Floating Into The Night, produced and written by David Lynch and his frequent soundtrack collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. Floating Into The Night is almost a companion piece to Twin Peaks (a la The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, Tapes of Agent Cooper, etc.), evoking the dreamy '50s love vibe and often overwhelming emotional focus on simple things (owls, fire, darkness, the wind blowing through the trees) that were so integral to the show. Cruise even performs a couple of the songs from Floating in both the pilot and in the episode where we find out for sure who killed Laura, in the scene at the Roadhouse(?) where the Giant eventually shows up and says "It is happening again". Creepy shit. Actually the only thing missing from the album is the super terror of BOB, which is maybe a good thing, although he is thanked in the liner notes (gulp).

Julee Cruise - "Floating"
Julee Cruise - "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart"

If you listen to any other songs today, they should be Family Fodder's "Savoir Faire" and Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood (RIP) doing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'". You could, should, and would hear "Savoir Faire" as part of Derek Erdman's guest set on WFMU, as well. It's on that page somewhere. Also mandatory is Anthology Recordings' new "astral folk goddesses" podcast, curated by Plastic Crimewave of Galactic Zoo Dossier fame. Even if you know for a fact you would hate an "astral folk goddesses" podcast, you will like it.

2007-10-15T16:40:00.001-04:00

Fiery lovers will make you blunder.
Real quick: A couple re-issues from foreign lands. First is Soul Jazz's new Brazil 70 compilation, full of incredible post-Tropicalia folk strummings and crazy fantastic rock jams from the oppressive Brazilian '70s, featuring the usual suspects--Caetano Veloso, Tom Ze, Gilberto Gil, Rita Lee, etc. It's ok if you're not familiar with any of those names. I'd only heard a couple Veloso songs and only really liked one of them, and it was a Christmas song. Not to mention the lesser-known players in this collection are the real keepers. Also, I can't vouch for anything they're saying since I don't speak Portuguese, but I'm sure it's great. It's brilliant non white-boy shit from the best decade in music ever--you can't beat that!

Gilberto Gil with Gal Costa - "Sai do Sereno"
Jaime Alem and Nair De Candia - "Passara"
Alceu Valenca - "Punhal de Prata"

Of course sometimes you want to listen to white-boy shit, and that's fine. I was listening to The Promise Ring the other day and I'm ok with that. You could also do worse than Young Marble Giants' lone official album, 1980's Colossal Youth, originally issued by Rough Trade and recently issued again as a 3-CD set (including 7"s, demos, and a Peel Session) by Domino--although it's maybe not so much white-boy as it is white-girl, and not so much white as it is English (as in England). Young Marble Giants' work comes straight out of the sparse, intimate, sing-songy wing of the post-punk library--as Simon Reynolds describes it in the liner notes, "music by introverts, for introverts" and "the urge to cut loose checked by a native reserve and inhibition" and other comments that are totally correct. I would also add that it's music for evenings and early mornings ONLY, and that "Eating Noddemix" could pass for a Lily Allen demo.

Young Marble Giants - "Music For Evenings" (from Colossal Youth)
Young Marble Giants - "Eating Noddemix" (from Colossal Youth)
Young Marble Giants - "Cakewalking" (from the Final Day 7")

I like the Black Lips' "It Feels Alright" a lot, maybe or definitely because it contains the phrase "magic city titties". I like Black Sabbath's "Shock Wave" because it's like Sabbath covering Boston. It's the best of both worlds! Fitness freaks, check out Fantastic Family Fitness Fun, Session 1. Cool down with Dr. Dog covering REM. Look around and you can find Kaki King doing a cover with one of the Tegan and Saras.

2007-10-08T20:03:00.000-04:00

I looked up and then looked down.
I keep going back and forth on the new Les Savy Fav album, Let's Stay Friends. On the one hand, it's a pretty good record--the songs are catchy, it's a major improvement over their last full-length (2001's Go Forth) in almost every way imaginable, and it even bests some of the more recent material from their Inches collection. You really get the feeling they're at the height of their powers (I could even say, as most other people are saying, that they're the Fugazi of the thing they do). On the other hand, it's not exactly what I wanted. I think what I was hoping for was something akin to their Accidental Deaths 7" (aka the Pop Frenzy Tour EP), released in somewhat limited numbers in 2006. Opting out of their usual crazed, verbose party punk and delving into a comparatively mellow, straightforward, almost meditative consideration of random death scenes resulted in two of the most compelling songs in their canon. On "Hit By Car" they take a mid-tempo look at a pedestrian getting struck by a passing car and feeling "like sea sprayed in the air from the blow-hole of some whale somewhere" before gliding out for two minutes without a word from vocalist Tim Harrington. On "Hit By Train" they sound like another band entirely, the only dead giveaways being Harrington's vocals and Seth Jabour's by-now unmistakable and incredible guitar work (he somehow manages to make his guitar sound like an oncoming subway train hurtling down the tracks). It's really striking, and I gotta believe a full album of stuff like the Deaths record would have been tits. But like I said, Let's Stay Friends does have its special moments. "Pots & Pans" is a good "something is very, very wrong here"-style opening salvo, like a more uplifting "Goodnight For Real", and it boils things down nicely with lines like "Has your skin grown thick from bands that make you sick?/Has your skin grown thick from a thousand stinging pricks?" (couple that with the fact that Pitchfork LOVES them, and interpret it however you want). And as briefly mentioned in one of my last posts, "Raging In the Plague Age" is the best of the best. I guess the thing to keep in mind is that, like the bulk of their catalog and like a lot of the big name shit in the indie world right now, Friends is written for an audience (maybe a particular audience, maybe just an audience period). It's Les Savy Fav trying to present something that'll affect everyone in the room in some way--melodically, intellectually, spiritually, spasmodically, etc.--and succeeding without too much pandering. Who they wrote for on Accidental Deaths (and why) is less clear and, for me, much more intriguing.

Les Savy Fav - "Hit By Car" (from Accidental Deaths)
Les Savy Fav - "Hit By Train" (from Accidental Deaths)
Les Savy Fav - "Pots & Pans" (from Let's Stay Friends)

Ennio Morricone song of the week is "Cavallina A Cavallo", which also features Ilona Staller. Two songs I never thought I'd hear at work are "Weightless Again" and "The Saturday Option". Ian MacKaye is indeed alive and well, and you should re-watch him on Soft Focus to see why that's such a good thing. Oh and I can't remember if I mentioned it before or not, but check out the Weather Report song ("American Tango") at Soul Sides. I was almost in tears just talking about this scene from Extras earlier. Don't forget to click the picture up above for an up-close adventure.

2007-09-30T12:50:00.000-04:00

I don't go for anything drawn with perspec-
tive.
One of the things I really like about the David Candy album Play Power is that it's the 180 degree opposite of what my life in 2007 consists of. It's an audio movie, with David (portrayed by Ian Svenonius) comforting you, detailing his favorite art, recipe, city, and cultural paranoias over beautifully recreated swingin' '60s psych pop and Spanish guitar (provided by Jeremy Butler, John Austin, and friends), and covering some choice '60s soundtracks hits, closing with a rendition of Krzysztof Komeda's "Lullaby From Rosemary's Baby". Again, that's Ian Svenonius singing the lullaby from Rosemary's Baby. Also, I say portrayed because Svenonius described the David Candy album thusly in the Summer 2003 issue of Skyscraper: "David Candy is absolute fantasy. It was a movie that I was asked to be in. Essentially, David Candy is part of a set of character records. It's a fantasy constellation that was scripted. I can't take credit for that." More than anything, Play Power is an ideal album for those already caught up in the NOU/Make Up/Weird War rapture, who want to live in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg rather than hear the guy at work talk about 300 (again), and can be found autographed in your local record store's used bin from time to time.

David Candy - "Incomprehensibly Yours"
David Candy - "redfuschiatamborine&gravel"
David Candy - "Lullaby From Rosemary's Baby"

The best car song of the week was "The Beautiful Ones" and all of Purple Rain. Also, I can't stop my crushes on Farah's "Law of Life" and the new Keyshia Cole song, but I don't know that I really want to. Oh and the Moondog book is available, despite some confusion about the release date. I'm looking at my copy and listening to the accompanying CD as we speak.

2007-09-19T18:33:00.001-04:00

They are the monsters we never became.
Whoops! As usual this is several days/weeks overdue, but it's worth it. First up is Fucked Up's Year Of The Pig 12"--part of their Chinese Zodiac series, which is enough to tell you they're working with an entirely different creative agenda than 99.9% of their punk brethren. In fact, they've spent the better part of their 6+ year career making decidedly gruff rock n roll 'core with an increasingly non-core aesthetic sense, resulting in 5-minutes-or-longer hardcore jams (that, miraculously, don't overstay their welcome), stunning, clean sleeve design work, and intense esoteric conceptual theorizing. I'd only followed them here-and-there for the last couple years, and thought they were decent--a lot to like, not enough to really love--but this 12" is a whole different story. The title track (an epic in 18 minutes and 38 seconds to be exact) is easily the single of the year, and possibly the defining punk moment of the '00s. Their own unorthodox, expansive hardcore language gets stretched even further to somehow fit The Cardigans, Neu!, and an impeccably crafted insight into the existentially crushing human/pig struggle. Every publication and critic on Earth is probably talking about how great this record is (I haven't even mentioned the flip side's shorter rocker "The Black Hats") and how Fucked Up is the only band that matters, and now I'm pretty sure they're all telling the truth.

Fucked Up - "Year Of The Pig"

And speaking of Neu!--I finally heard that Harmonia album (1974's Musik Von Harmonia) I read about in the Freak Scene column, and I think I like parts of it more than Neu! (and honestly, De-Luxe may be even better). Main Neu! dude Michael Rother's collaboration with Cluster dudes Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius is characteristically pretty kraut-y, with a major pro-synth, anti-guitar bent. The motorik beat is only used sparingly ("Dino"), ditched largely in favor of weird keyboard jungle rhythms, pre-rave spasms, or wandering electronic compositions befitting, perhaps, a meditative '70s/'80s Italian thriller--not bad for three Germaniacs plotting out "endless sheets of bliss" or whatever it is Thom Yorke says on the cover of the first Neu! cd. A nice addition to your good, bad, or indifferent krautrock collection.

Harmonia - "Watussi"
Harmonia - "Dino"
Harmonia - "Hausmusik"

I finally got my David Scott Stone credit card CD-R and it sounds like this. He has a new record coming out on PPM soon and seems to be a hero to many, myself included. The best Les Savy Fav song in a while is still "Raging In The Plague Age", but the new record is alright. I feel a little corny liking "The Man Who Sold The World" as much as I do, but that organ and whatever that shaker instrument is and those moany vocals at the end make it hard to be ashamed. Also, check out Pissed Jeans on the radio and the video, and some great dog photos (1, 2).

2007-09-09T16:05:00.000-04:00

I kept on living in my own dream.
Nick Cave kind of nails it in the liner notes to last year's re-issue of Karen Dalton's final album, 1971's In My Own Time. He forgoes the historical review/significance-in-the-lost-folk-pantheon route taken by Lenny Kaye and the shitty poetry route taken by Devendra Banhart, and instead talks about listening to "Something On Your Mind" over and over, how much he likes her voice, and the album itself being inextricably linked to a very specific time and place in his life--more or less exactly what I would have said, our experiences with the record being almost identical. Granted, his "time and place" was an extended stay in Sao Paulo, Brazil some years back after a Bad Seeds tour, while mine was driving my grandmother through the back roads between my parents' house in Newark and her new apartment in Clifton Springs last fall, trying to shake off what felt at the time like a monumental, crushing personal defeat. But still, the record had a similar impact, and I imagine the Cave and Werts experience is not unlike that of anyone who spends some time with Dalton's follow-up to her also-great, surreptitiously-recorded debut (1969's It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best). You lock into "Something On Your Mind" because it's so classic and starts off with that awesome, kind of distorted bass count-off, and you listen to it like 100 times before you even get to the other songs. And you maybe think the other songs are alright, and that a couple of the cover choices are questionable ("When A Man Loves A Woman" being linked with Michael Bolton and lame Andy Garcia/Meg Ryan movies in your mind). But at some point you realize that her voice is a fucking saxophone sound, that all the songs you may have thought were filler-ish are actually pretty good, and that she was such a skilled interpreter of other peoples' songs that nobody will ever care that she never recorded a single original composition. I mean, I'm pretty sure that's the universal In My Own Time experience.

Karen Dalton - "Something On Your Mind"
Karen Dalton - "In A Station"
Karen Dalton - "Are You Leaving For The Country"

I should have mentioned this earlier but--yes, there's a new Soiled Mattress song up on their myspace place, and yes, their upcoming EP is called Honk Honk Bonk!. Also, compilations can be pretty good. Thai Pop Spectacular has Onuma Singsiri's "Mae Kha Som Tum (Papaya Salad Merchant)" and other songs with equally great names. After Dark opens with maybe the best Glass Candy song I've ever heard, called "Rolling Down The Hills (Spring Demo)". And if you haven't checked out Oliver Wang's Soul Symphony mix at his Soul Sides page, then you need to get on that (and if you can clue me in as to the full tracklist, please get on that, as well!). If you only have room on your drive for one side, I'd go with Side B, but Side A is no slouch.

2007-08-30T17:47:00.000-04:00

Mysteries of the unknown.
I did a lot of unwanted manual labor today and now there's an unearthly glow in my room, so this is probably a good time to talk about what I'm going to talk about. First up is Joe Meek and The Bluemen's I Hear A New World, which I finally got around to hearing after months of casually re-reading Meek's profile in The Rock Snob's Dictionary, the perfect snide manual of things I'm compelled to investigate (next up: Porter Wagoner!). Of course, some people will say Meek "sprayed stardust upon pop aspirants of no discernible talent" (not literally, I don't think, but check it out) and some will say he was "a pioneering English record producer and songwriter acknowledged as one of the world's first and most imaginative independent producers". The truth is both, and with his 1960 solo debut, he fashioned something of a haunting, reverbed-out space surf concept album, and by that I mean something of an ambient Servotron record overseen by David Lynch. Not necessarily for everybody, and at times not even for me, particularly during the chipmunk-ish sections of "Entry Of The Globbots" and "March Of The Dribcots" (although, oddly, the title track doesn't bother me). But the instrumental sections are pretty warped and beautiful, and work well outside of any vague outer-space narrative.

Joe Meek and The Bluemen - "I Hear A New World"
Joe Meek and The Bluemen - "Valley Of No Return"
Joe Meek and The Bluemen - "The Bublight"

Also, I finally figured out why James Chance and The Contortions' "Dish It Out" kept popping into my head at work. I re-read the lyrics and found lines like "Sick of being on the losing end" and "I wanna be the one to tell you when to start and when you've had enough", which I guess means that my brain was subconsciously cuing up a song to reinforce what my brain already knew--in this case that I'm overworked at a crapfest of a job that I nonetheless sort of need. This isn't to say that "Dish It Out" is James Chance's "Clocked In", because it really isn't, but it is raging and unhinged in a way that even Flag dudes would find intense. The other Contortions tracks from the Brian Eno-curated No New York comp. (none of which are are available on the majorly excellent Irresistible Impulse box set) offer up variations on the same crazed atonal funk desperation, with even more incredible lyrics (see "Flip Your Face"), and get more weirdly essential with every listen.

James Chance and The Contortions - "Dish It Out"
James Chance and The Contortions - "Flip Your Face"
James Chance and The Contortions - "I Can't Stand Myself"

I didn't know how much I liked Harry Pussy until I heard "Mandolin", off their Tour or Fuck You or Fuck Blue Men LP. Thank you Chunklet for posting the whole B-side and other things. I forgot how much I liked ESG until I heard "UFO" again. I should have just done a whole post on them. Glen E. Friedman's book about Fugazi is out and you should get it, but don't forget Pat Graham has an awesome book out, too, called Silent Pictures. Check out samples and more samples, and order from Akashic--you might accidentally wind up with an autographed copy! Summer vacation/embarrassing laziness is over, more regular posting is just barely beginning.

2007-08-15T18:48:00.000-04:00

Big fucking shit. Right now, man.
Apologies at the outset for not getting this up sooner. "Sitting in a living room gathering dust" wasn't just the title of my last post--it's my fucking life!! Apologies also at the outset for talking about way too much stuff in this post. For starters, the new Budos Band record (The Budos Band II) is out and, like a scorpion, it will probably kill you awesomely. It's not too far off from Budos Band I, but this time you're in Dry Dry Desert as opposed to Lavalava Island (you know what I mean). Unexpected dangers and vaguely Egyptian intrigue await! "Ride Or Die" and "Budos Rising" give off an especially ominous nighttime heat, while "His Girl" acts as a tropical oasis about halfway through. If you feel you could get down with some funkier Ethiopiques stuff by way of Staten Island, you will be in Afro-horn heaven (hell?) here.

The Budos Band - "Budos Rising"
The Budos Band - "Ride Or Die"
The Budos Band - "His Girl"

And not to keep being the cheesy instrumental guy, but Sven Libaek's soundtrack work is also pretty killer (this time by shark attack!). You probably heard some of his work in The Life Aquatic, and as Wes Anderson observes pretty accurately in the liner notes to the Aquatic soundtrack, "Libaek's music is magical and dated in the most appealing ways." Inner Space: The Lost Film Music Of Sven Libaek, issued by obscure soundtrack and library music obsessive Johny Trunk and his Trunk Records (who you can also thank for the Flexi-Sex collection ), compiles songs from four of Norwegian-born/Australia-based (Australgian?) Libaek's major film and TV soundtrack works of the late '60s and early '70s, including The Set, Nature Walkabout, To Ride A White Horse, and the 1974 underwater series from pioneering filmmakers Valerie and Ron Taylor, Inner Space. I've been really into the Nature Walkabout and Inner Space materal, but it's all great, particularly if you're into jet-setting under the sea or surfing through extreme wildlife. This would also be perfect on a tape with The Gentle Rain on the flip side, although you'd need a 110-120 minute tape.

Sven Libaek - "Sounds Of The Deep"
Sven Libaek - "Dark World"
Sven Libaek - "Desert"

The new Bone Awl tape is great (the even newer one is probably great, too), and the first song is pretty good. It's no "These Days Are Marked" but it is "Cassetto", kind of. I also can't stop giving a crap about alternate takes of Beatles songs I never gave a crap about before, like "I'm Looking Through You" and "Penny Lane". The first take of "Tomorrow Never Knows" is worth a listen, as well. I don't know if "Friday Night At the Drive In Bingo" is wonderful or horrible, but it's definitely one or the other or both. You should watch this phonetic Dutch video, and then follow it up with Jordy, and then follow that up with Derek Erdman's great photo journal of his trip to Graceland, if you want to be in awe continuously. Summer is basically over, but fall is looking good.

2007-07-30T17:11:00.000-04:00

Sitting in a living room gathering dust.
So yeah, this is my co-worker Jake's album. I know it says Steve Curry, but everyone calls him Jake, and that's how I was introduced to him. I don't know a whole lot about Jake, his recording process, or any kind of Latin back stories--all I know is this was recorded in 2000 and that his son (Steven Curry II, who also works at the post office and put out a record kind of recently with his nu-metal rock band, Cry To The Blind) just had it professionally burned and put together by some company he found on the internet. I also know that Jake carries one of my least favorite routes (City 10), looks about 75 but is actually in his late 50s, and is one of the nicest, funniest, kindliest people in the world, and one of my favorite people in the office. The album itself is all instrumental, and has a nice Gary Wilson-y, lite jazz vibe with enough Caribbean beach grooves to garner him a Saturday night spot on BET J. Fair warning, though--if you can't deal with some pure joy, you might not be able to hang with this.

Steve Curry - "E Flat Salsa" (from Latin Journeys)
Steve Curry - "Columbia" (from Latin Journeys)
Steve Curry - "Tapajos" (from Latin Journeys)

Also, if "The Anvil Will Fall" doesn't tear you apart completely, you are a cold, dead stone of a human. The latest Harvey Milk re-issues (My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment Of What My Love Could Be and The Pleaser) are out and you need them in your life pronto. You also could do worse than "Tezeta", "Statue Of Liberty", and "Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)". I think I just have a weird thing for that last one. Oh check this out, too.

2007-07-19T16:49:00.000-04:00

"The line about magazines still applies."
I really thought that Raincoats song I liked a few weeks ago was a fluke, but, along with a cold, I apparently came down with a British post-punk jones that's had me craving PiL and Wire, freaking out over Bowie's Low and "Heroes" (pre-post-punk blueprints!) again, and making specific plans to dig further into The Pop Group and This Heat because I only know them tangentially. But the record that's been hittin' me the hardest has been Swell Maps' 1980 grand finale, Jane From Occupied Europe. Swell Maps' work towards the end of the '70s was something of an inspiration for the post-punk art-ness that burgeoned and mutated well into the '80s, consolidating The Buzzcocks and Can into one ramshackle home-schooled savant punk drone attack, and effectively prefiguring the noisier, goofier end of indie rock (Sonic Youth, early Pavement, etc). And the nice thing is that it doesn't fall prey to all the sometimes overbearing post-punk affectations--there are no self-serious conceptual put-ons, the scrappy amateur approach isn't a liability, and it rarely feels political, and even then in only the vaguest sense (just oblique references to World War II and, in the case of "Border Country", the Welsh Border Wars of the 1400s). I honestly can't tell what they're going on about most of the time, either because the vocals are mixed weird or because the words I can pick out seem abstract or really simple at the same time, but they always make it sound right. Jane is sort of to their 1979 debut, A Trip To Marineville, what Chairs Missing is to Pink Flag--an immediate follow-up that's a bit less brazen, but arguably more compelling as a full piece. Secretly Canadian reissued both albums a couple years back with bonus tracks (though not as many as the Mute reissues from the late '80s) and some great liner notes, so check up on it because these few songs are just the beginning.

Swell Maps - "Let's Buy A Bridge"
Swell Maps - "Border Country"
Swell Maps - "Cake Shop Girl"
Swell Maps - "...Vs. The Mangrove Delta Plan"

I missed the Hitchcock movie last week at the Dryden, so "Shadow Of a Doubt" will have to do. Also the new Yesterday's New Quintet album sounds alright so far, and "Cold Nights and Rainy Days" sums up this week pretty well, AND it even reminds me of my co-worker Jake's album that he just gave to me and everyone else in the office the other day. I really honestly like it a lot and am kind of blown away by it. I'll probably talk about it in my next post. It's called Latin Journeys. Oh and Eric Fensler did a pretty good Ariel Pink video, while I'm thinking of it.

2007-07-09T17:20:00.000-04:00

All you gotta do for that guy is wink your eye.
I'm happy to report I haven't yet keeled over from heatstroke and exhaustion (lord knows I've been trying), and to celebrate that not-keeling-over I'd like blab about a couple records from the "albums I own that are kind of rare" category. First up is Television's Live At The Old Waldorf, recorded at the end of June 1978 in San Francisco and issued (in an edition of 5000) for the first time on the Rhino Handmade label back in 2003, around the same time that Rhino Regular re-issued Television's first two masterpieces (1977's Marquee Moon and 1978's Adventure). Their set includes a good mix of Moon and Adventure hits, as well as an awesome take on "Little Johnny Jewel" and a decent encore presentation of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction". But what really makes this a mind-scrambler must-have is how hard they ROCK SHIT. The street-delicate classic rock of their studio work gets turned all the way up (they up the fucking low-down!), making for some crunchy guitar/big beat poetry punk elegance of the highest order. If it's possible, check the transition from "The Dream's Dream" to "Venus".

Television - "The Dream's Dream" (from Live At The Old Waldorf)
Television - "Venus" (from Live At The Old Waldorf)
Television - "Little Johnny Jewel" (from Live At The Old Waldorf)

The other record I want to highlight briefly is a record I don't technically own and don't want to credit anyone with introducing me to, on the off chance it may get her into trouble. But suffice it to say, my burned copy of The South Indian Film Music of Vijaya Anand is an invaluable addition to my collection. Whatever you imagine when you look at the image above is exactly what you get, plus so much more. Fake drum beats, foreign languages, a style that borrows well from Western pop music but is definitely not Western pop music--like a loose translation of American rock n roll crossed with a Euro-disco crossed with Dhalsim's theme music (Yoga Fire!). I will freely admit to enjoying this quite a bit, although it's essentially what you'll hear if you go to an Indian restaurant, and may even literally be what I heard at an Indian restaurant in Georgetown a little over a year ago. Also, if you have a bunch of drunk friends at your house late at night sometime in August, and you throw this record on, strange things will happen--I have seen it!

Vijaya Anand - "Aatavu Chanda (Dancing is Beautiful)"
Vijaya Anand - "Prema Rudaayade (Loving Hearts)"
Vijaya Anand - "Neeve Nanna (Only You Were Mine)"

Man, what else? I like Bryan Ferry's take on "Simple Twist of Fate", and I also like The Long Blondes' "Autonomy Boy". I actually like that What's Your Rupture? stuff more than I thought I would. The Black Lips' "A Lion With Wings" hasn't left my head much either, and Mika Miko has a good video, as well. Oh and did you see another twenty-something kid named Matt wrote about Brighten The Corners? Sure it's insightful, but where is the irrelevent prom info?? Actually, who cares about that--check out Mark McCoy's drawings. Holy shit (do some scrolling).

2007-06-22T19:47:00.000-04:00

I knew I had to rise above it all, or drown in my own shit.
I guess when I said Friday, I meant the following Monday. Also, all these songs--the best songs of the remaining moments of June 2007--can be found on accompanying divShare pages which, in addition to hosting them theoretically until the end of time, will allow you to listen to the songs on one of their embedded players before you decide whether or not to download. Try 'em before you don't buy 'em, but hopefully do buy them eventually because they're worth your money!

Kati Kovacs - "Szólj rám, ha hangosan énekele" (from Kati Kovacs)
Also known as Kovacs Kati, and from an album that may also be called Rock and Roller. This song is fucking great--Hungarian psych funk pop that sounds kind of like Abba if Abba threw in guitar solos that absolutely destroy (or, I guess, if the male half of Abba was Locomotiv GT)--and came to my attention via the sadly dormant Spiked Candy site (the song is also downloadable there, with a little more info about her). You could probably just ignore the other songs on this list and go with this one, and I would totally understand.

The Screamers - "She's The Girl", "The Beat Goes On" (from Demos 1977-78)
I forget what blog posted this record up, but they're god's own personal warriors, whoever they are. This is arty synth-punk from every LA punker's favorite barely recorded band, sounding like James Chance and Suicide doing covers of each others' songs. Kind of what all those art-damaged ex-hardcore kids tried to do in the late '90s/early '00s, only not annoying.

Timothy McNealy - "Easy Easy Easy" (from Fallin' Off The Reel, Vol. 1)
Truth and Soul's collection of vinyl-only singles from a couple years back is such a staple in my car, it's made its way into the "permanent rotation" glovebox along with The Replacements' Let It Be and Sabbath's Paranoid. I refuse to drive without the classics, vehicle registration, and insurance card! This track originally comes off the B-side of McNealy's "K.C. Stomp" 45, which was either recorded in the early '70s or sometime recently. It's hard to tell the new-school old-schoolers from the old-school old-schoolers on this thing, but either way it's a perfect mellow soul joint for those with a strict "good-vibes only" policy.

Ennio Morricone - "Trafelato" (from Crime and Dissonance)
Crime and Dissonance collects a bunch of Morricone's psych-y, free jazz-y, funky soundtrack work and it KILLS, as do the film stills in the liner notes. This song starts out frightening before turning into two minutes of potential Wu-Tang beats, and can be found in the 1971 film Giornata Nera Per L'Ariete.

Them - "Mystic Eyes", "Don't Look Back", "Baby Please Don't Go" (from The Story of Them featuring Van Morrison)
I got obsessed with Them (Van Morrison's pre-Van Morrison band) once I figured out they were the ones responsible for the version of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", as featured in Basquiat and probably most recognizable to fans of Beck's "Jack-Ass". These three jams originally appeared on Them's first record--either Angry Young Them or Here Comes The Night (or just Them), depending on which side of the pond you were on, and are right in line with the best of the mid-'60s UK blues revivalists/obsessives. Actually, maybe "Baby Please Don't Go" wasn't on the first record. It may have just been a single.

Black Moth Super Rainbow - "Forever Heavy" (from Dandelion Gum)
This is kind of a guilty pleasure pick. "Forver Heavy" is some kind of psych-stoner jam done entirely on perfect-sounding synths, which is awesome, but the vocoder vocals are a big turn-off. I can handle it on a Daft Punk song, but not here. Thankfully they're not on the whole track. Also, beware--the full album is this one idea run into the ground like 15 times. BUM-OUT.

Funkadelic - "Maggot Brain" (from Maggot Brain)
I can't usually stomach guitar histrionics in that bluesy rock kind of way, but I can make a very easy exception for Eddie Hazel. On Maggot Brain's opener, he mellows out and destroys your brain for 10 minutes as a way of expanding on George Clinton's initial state of the world/mind/ass address.

The Kinks - "Lavender Hill" (from The Great Lost Kinks Album)
I've never investigated The Kinks because it seems like you can be either vaguely aware of their hits or a completely obsessive nerd about them--there's no middle ground. I don't know if I want to be a nerd about them or hang out with nerds about them, but this song is really great.

The Raincoats - "Balloonacy" (from The Kitchen Tapes)
Ramones - "Loudmouth" (from Ramones)
I thought I was basically done with arty post-punk weirdo bands, but I guess not. This live Raincoats record is better than I was expecting--subtle and funky, like a slightly less-together Talking Heads. The Ramones song is one of my favorites of theirs, and sometimes I dream about Ten Tents covering it and making the last part that's kind of a hardcore breakdown go on way too long.

The Velvet Underground - "Satellite Of Love (demo)" (from Peel Slowly and See)
This isn't quite as incredible as the version on Transformer, but it sounds pretty good if you listen to it right after listening to Loaded, which is probably why they sequenced it that way on the last disc of the VU box set. The basic elements are all there (plus an intro that was later scrapped, and slightly different lyrics), waiting patiently for a couple years to go by and for David Bowie to get involved.

The Breeders - "Oh!", "Doe" (from Pod)
It would have been awesome if riot grrrl sounded like The Breeders, instead of trash-punk that, in most cases, wasn't necessarily as listenable as it was politically and socially right-on. Also, does anyone else see an almost direct connection from The Breeders and early Liz Phair to the Smart Went Crazy/Beauty Pill/Soccer Team thing in DC?

Dennis Wilson - "Thoughts of You" (from Pacific Ocean Blue)
Pacific Ocean Blue--the long-out-of-print solo record by former Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson--probably deserves its own post, but it's been talked about so much and I have basically nothing to add to the discussion, other than that it's pretty interesting and mostly really good. This song, which starts out on some proto-Wilco low-key throaty ballad shit, gets incredible just after the opening notes of the M*A*S*H theme song kick in. "Thoughts Of You" is also a good indication of the heavy melancholy/bummage found throughout most of the album. Even the cover shot is pretty heavy.

Holy lord did I post a lot of stuff. I also want to shout out William Berger's Cassette Culture Revisited posts on Beware of the Blog. Lots of cool, obscure noise tapes from the '80s, when band names were great (JFK, Wall Drug, etc.) and underground culture seemed pretty weird and genius. Check out the video for "Teenage Riot" for some of that same feeling. Also, songs from the last couple posts (Shuggie Otis/Budos Band/Jehu) will be posted up anew on divShare pages over the next couple days.

2007-06-20T16:45:00.001-04:00

I ain't burnt, just golden brown.
How lazy can a punk get?? The answer is lazier and lazier, by the milisecond. I'm going to try to make up for it by posting TWICE this week, sort of to punish myself but mainly because there are several things I've been liking all at once. First up is some double daring, starting with this Budos Band record, full of even more perfect '60s/'70s instrumental soul/funk jams released within the last couple of years (via Daptone and their time machine), on the El Michels tip but with a little more of an Afro-beat thing going on (and I've heard the beginning of each side of the Bread and Circuits LP, so I know what I'm talking about). It also features, dare I say, better volcano cover art than Unfuckwithable. And check out the cover of their next record! This should have been on the horizontal summer soundtrack list I made in my last post, along with obscure '60s girl groups.

The Budos Band - "Up From The South" (from The Budos Band)
The Budos Band - "Budos Theme" (from The Budos Band)
The Budos Band - "Ghost Walk" (from The Budos Band)

I've been rockin' Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime a lot, too, and I think I'm going to add it to the punk rock curriculum I secretly hope to foist on my sisters' kids. Maybe it's me angling to be the cool older brother I never got to be (and not the weird, goofy uncle I surely am), or me looking for at least one anti-most-family-functions, pro-listening-to-Charles-Bronson accomplice. But regardless, kids of the future are going to have to learn about '90s hardcore sooner or later, and I'm reasonably sure I'm the most qualified Werts for the job. Yank Crime may even be the best record to start with--it hits pretty hard with dirty, vaguely southern math punk bombs constantly exploding or threatening to explode, and balances out with discordant slow jams that eventually erupt into shouts of "DO YOU COMPUTE?!" and "ALOHA! SUIT UP!". Meanwhile, it's still pretty accessible--compared to their San Diegan brethren from that era--without turning into an "alternative rock Jawbox nightmare", as someone from Harriet the Spy once put it (put this and some Chavez on a tape and you'd be pretty much set for the day!). Maybe I'm crazy, but I think that's sort of an important thing to pass on--that even in an often impossibly crappy subculture, great things are still occasionally possible.

Drive Like Jehu - "Here Come The Rome Plows" (from Yank Crime)
Drive Like Jehu - "Golden Brown" (from Yank Crime)
Drive Like Jehu - "Luau" (from Yank Crime)

#1 Hit Song of the day is The Bitter Sweets' "What a Lonely Way to Start the Summertime", which I cannot get out my head. Full credit goes to T. R. Farren for introducing me to this. Ask him about Brute Force! #2 hit song is "Markos", courtesy of Goblin. Some of the Suspiria soundtrack is great and some of it is music used in a film. Oh shit, check out old Meat Puppets sessions! Do it!! Random songs post with picture of somebody in front of a tape machine coming this Friday, probably.

2007-06-07T20:26:00.001-04:00

Here's a pencil pad, I'm gonna spread some information.
Lest you think there's only one great thing (go to just shy of the exact middle of the clip) associated with the word "shuggie", fucking check Inspiration Information the fuck out. Shuggie Otis--the psych-blues Doogie Howser of the '70s--delivers his last studio album, replete with Stevie Wonder soft funk, keyboard preset soul jams, Debarge vocals, and a 1970s future-vision hypothesis that's so intimate and perfect it will make you hate the actual, crummy future that much more. The Luaka Bop cd reissue from a couple years back even includes a few tracks from Freedom Flight (best album cover since Never Say Die!, or ever) to sweeten the already sweet deal. A happier, snappier endless Shuggie(/black metal/No Age/yeh yeh/Goblins) summer 2007 awaits, and I'm ready to dive/cannonball in.

Shuggie Otis - "Inspiration Information" (from Inspiration Information)
Shuggie Otis - "Island Letter" (from Inspiration Information)
Shuggie Otis - "XL-30" (from Inspiration Information)
Shuggie Otis - "Pling!" (from Inspiration Information)

Videos!!!!!! Danzig as performed by Legion of Rock Stars. Vincent Collins' hallucinogenic cartoons. Bat For Lashes' horror movie bikes. A tan Lukas Haas at Andre 3000's pretend wedding. Song!!!!!!! An epic (15 minutes!), moving Vothana track from Hoang Gia that he probably doesn't want you to hear, or me to post. Seriously, if you can't get down with horribly anti-semitic (I think?), Vietnamese black metal, you're more than likely a fucking PANTYWAIST.

2007-05-24T16:09:00.001-04:00

Coach tought me to sing, he couldn't teach me to love.
The initial plan for my junior prom was this: My friend Andrew and I--the only two dateless wonders within our crews and sub-crews of friends, as I recall, and maybe less than chuffed about it--would dress up and tag along with a few of those romantic winners for the usual pre-prom dinner and limo riding, and then drop the loving couples at the prom itself, hijack (not literally) the limo, and watch crappy soft porn videos while everyone else made treasured memories inside the Newark High School gymnasium. Out of context that sounds kind of creepy and pervy, but classic Skinemax films were pretty de rigeur for junior year hang-out sessions at our friend Joanna's house, and I can attest that they were watched strictly for laughs, devoid of any and all steaminess and/or mid-90s eroticism. Of course they were also generally watched in big groups, which might be why the idea of just us two dudes watching soft porn quickly lost its appeal--it would have run contrary to the spirit in which those films needed to be watched and wound up some weird conceptual joke that neither of us really felt like making (not to mention the two films selected for us were an episode of Red Shoe Diaries starring Ally Sheedy and a movie that's probably still too hardcore for me now, called Auto Erotica). So we dropped the facade and hit up the prom proper. I danced awkwardly with a girl I wasn't into, goofed around, checked out everyone all gussied up, and had a pretty good time. The night wore on, and a bunch of us bailed on the gym, went to the now-defunct Perkins, and wound up staying at our friend Laura's house, where I fell asleep watching strange movies on the USA Network.

The following day my parents let me drive them up to Borders in Henrietta (I had a driving test coming up), and I forced them to listen to Devo's Greatest Hits all the way there. My dad got a kick out of "Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA", but I think they were happy once they were able to get out of the car. I didn't have my P&C job yet, so I don't know how I had any money, but I managed to pick up Pavement's Brighten the Corners--kind of the End Hits and Steady Diet of their oeuvre, all in one--and it became my ultimate record of the summer (much to the chagrin of both my mom, who got freaked out when I played the creepy part in "Transport Is Arranged" while driving through a cemetary on the way back from dinner at our local Country Club, and Jason Wetmore who, on a separate occassion, said "I don't like this!" from the back of my overcrowded van once "Date With Ikea" started), at least until I purchased Minor Threat's Complete Discography from that same Borders a couple months later and got set off on an entirely different trajectory. Still, Corners resonated with me so much that even while I was devolving into a cheesy Fat Wreck Chords mess and trading in all of my Sonic Youth cds, I was still listening to it (and whatever other Pavement records I could get my hands on) exhaustively, exalting it to the top of all mental lists, littering mix tapes with "Stereo" and "Shady Lane" and possibly "Old To Begin", and accidentally memorizing every word of the only record I know all the words to.

Pavement - "Shady Lane/J vs. S"
Pavement - "Transport Is Arranged"
Pavement - "Old To Begin"
Devo - "Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA"

So much more to talk about! Unreleased Nation of Ulysses demos, depressing answering machine tape (submitted by Jason Yawn Factory) at Chunklet. No Age video at here. Songs of the day, like "Into The Hollow" (or anything from Era Vulgaris) and "Stuck On An Island". Songs of the Memorial Day (aka Take Back the Center Street Day) weekend, like some Favela Funk--1, 2. RIP Charles Nelson Reilly, long live Match Game.

2007-05-17T21:00:00.000-04:00

You get me in a crowd of high class people and then you act real rude to me.
Songs of the week for...I don't know, like the last 10 days. And begin:

The Isley Brothers - "Voyage to Atlantis" (from Go For Your Guns)
Bill Withers - "Use Me" (from Still Bill)
The first time I heard this Isley Brothers song was the other day on my way home from work, and I wound up hearing it again as soon as I got in my car the following morning. This was probably just a coincidence (and/or a wake-up call for Sirius channel 53 to add more songs to their library), but what if it wasn't?? Anyway, it's a good song with sweet guitar work. Plus I don't know what's more awesome--the idea that the song might actually be about going on a voyage to Atlantis sung from the point-of-view of a former inhabitant, or the idea of "going on a voyage to Atlantis" as a euphemism for fucking. Meanwhile, Bill Withers shrugs off a dysfunctional relationship because he's the nicest guy on earth. I was a little creeped out that the guy from Gym Class Heroes had "Use Me" AND an Isley Brothers song on some list he did for Nylon Guy, but we do both have a Geneva connection (just as creepy - ed.).

UGK featuring Outkast - "International Players' Anthem" (from UGK Underground Kings)
I finally heard this song in its entirety yesterday after weeks of catching the last 5 seconds of it, and shit is good. Not great, but good. Andre 3000's verse at the beginning is decent, Big Boi's verse at the end is fucking fantastic, and the beat (I think courtesy of Three Six Mafia) is beautiful.

Monks - "Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice", "Love Came Tumblin' Down" (from Black Monk Time)
Black Monk Time gets better every year, and makes me both proud of myself for being inexplicably obsessed with finding a copy when I was in high school and mad at myself for not picking up everything else in the short-lived Infinite Zero catalog. For those not up on the Monks story, check here. These are just random picks that have been stuck in my head lately, especially the guitar solo in "Boys Are Boys...". Also, something about "Love Came Tumblin' Down" (the repetitive-ness? the chunky-ness?) makes me think of Shellac.

Galaxie 500 - "Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste" (from Peel Sessions)
Songs like this are the reason I don't flinch or recoil or barf when people use the term "indie rock". In fact, this--a loud, amazing rock version of a Jonathan Richman song--is almost note for note what comes to mind when that term gets thrown around, even though I get the feeling this isn't what people are talking about anymore.

Jacques Dutronc - "L'Espace d'Une Fille", "On Nous Cache Tout, On Nous Dit Rien" (from Les Playboys)
My obsession with Dutronc continues! Like the Monks picks, these are sort of random selections (this time from the first disc of a 3-disc mid-to-late-60s era Dutronc set) that I can't get out of my head. The only bummer about "On Nous Cache Tout..." is that it's mixed differently here than it is on the original Les Play Boys EP, and the awesome drum fills at the end of every line in each verse section--the ones that totally make the whole song!--got brought way down. Sacre bleu (sp?)!

The Beatles - "You Never Give Me Your Money" (from Abbey Road)
Harvey Milk - "War" (from Special Wishes)
I had a dream the other night that I picked up the cd single for "War", which included two unreleased live tracks and came with a bonus action figure of a tree that had a face and two branches/arms--sort of what trees always look like whenever they come to life. "You Never Give Me Your Money" will be on repeat in my mind probably for the rest of my life. I don't know why I paired these up.

Elliott Smith - "Whatever (Folk Tune in C)", "New Disaster", "Either/Or", "Pretty Mary K (other version)" (from New Moon)
I had a hard time figuring out which songs to spotlight, but I finally narrowed it down to a quarter of New Moon's second disc. Every song on both discs is a no-brainer classic, though, and from my favorite era of his ('94-'97), when everything was, for the most part, super raw. But yeah, these songs are all from the 2nd disc, and, with the exception of "Whatever...", are all Either/Or outtakes that leave most people's shining moments in the fucking dust.

Gary Wilson - "Soul Travel", "Rhythm In Your Eyes", "New York Surf" (from Forgotten Lovers)
Every Gary Wilson song starts out sounding like the best song I've ever heard and then usually veers into bizarre territory or just kind of hangs out and winds up sounding like the most pretty good song I've ever heard. But some of them are the best songs I've ever heard, and here's three of them. Forgotten Lovers may even be better than Mary Had Brown Hair, but not better than the cover of Mary Had Brown Hair.

Song that's also on the list but not listed is No Age's "Great Faces". Video is Amps For Christ on Practice Space. Also, I'm taking up a weekly post routine for at least the summer, if not the remainder of eternity, and I might throw in a podcast somewhere down the line, which will probably be called "Rappin' Ronnie Reagan Tape".

2007-05-10T20:51:00.000-04:00

I probably forgot more than you'll ever need.
Objectively I don't know how In Cold Blood stacks up against the 100,000 million Johnny Thunders albums, bootlegs, collections, or bootleg album collections since it's the only Thunders record I've listened to in its entirety (I've also listened to, I think, five minutes of Hurt Me). But I do know that my dub of Nick MacLaren's dub (which only included the first five, in-studio recordings), squeezed onto the end of a 120-minute tape immediately following Black Flag, went missing sometime after being listened to on a chartered bus to Washington, DC in the fall of 1997, sending a small part of me into a severe panic. If there was a way for me to have filed a missing persons report for a tape, I would have. But eventually I realized there was this thing called the internet and I managed to track down a copy of it--released on cd by Dojo Limited in '95, but originally released on LP by New Rose in '83, I think--thus ressurecting another of my high school-era favorites from the high school-era graveyard (props to finding my Wookiee tape a couple weeks ago, as well!), sort of. So yeah, the hazy haze of nostalgia is probably making some non-essential, crappy New York punk/drunk rock outtakes sound much more revolutionary than they really are, but I'm going to stand by these songs (the first five songs, anyway; the live set tacked on the end will have to fend for itself). They're catchy and sleazy and, in the case of "Diary of a Lover", terrible, but they're SINCERELY catchy, sleazy, and terrible, and that goes a long way. Plus the version of "Green Onions" is dirty as hell and kind of sacrilegious, and all the studio tracks were produced dutifully by sometime Stones producer Jimmy Miller.

Johnny Thunders - "In Cold Blood" (from In Cold Blood)
Johnny Thunders - "Green Onions" (from In Cold Blood)
Johnny Thunders - "Diary of a Lover" (from In Cold Blood)

Brighten the Corners song of the day is "Blue Hawaiian", runner-up is "Type Slowly". In On The Kill Taker demos song of the day is "23 Beats Off", but keep it hush-hush. Video of the day is...yikes, Black Oak Arkansas' "Hot & Nasty" (or absolutely anything listed in this WFMU post). Remember when VH1 Classic used to play videos?

2007-05-03T16:12:00.000-04:00

D as in Denison, E as in Enison.
While I'm waiting for my Denison Kimball Trio 7" to arrive on my doorstep, I figured I'd talk a little about Duane Denison and his work with The Jesus Lizard. I'm not really a historian on Denison, though (I'm not familiar with the works of Firewater or Tomahawk), and I'm only a novice Lizard dude. But I can still say that his guitar work is fucking great--adding so much terrifying color, just-slightly-off-from-each-other layered guitar lines that give you that squirmy/mind split open feeling (like Joey Santiago does with his one note bend-ups, but in greater numbers), and a sense of restraint and tastefulness in all the right places ON TOP of his and the rest of the band's great pummelling math blues attacks. As much as the band wouldn't be what it is/was without David Yow's raving derelict vocals and should rightfully be remembered for just that, it's Denison's experimental, almost jazz approach to the dirty rock game that really does it for me--the moments when his guitar alone seems to blow open the entire song ("If You Had Lips", "Boilermaker"), or when his guitar without a doubt, definitely does blow open the entire song ("Monkey Trick").

The Jesus Lizard - "If You Had Lips" (from Head)
The Jesus Lizard - "Pastoral" (from Head)
The Jesus Lizard - "Boilermaker" (from Liar)
The Jesus Lizard - "Monkey Trick" (from Goat)

Mad decent songs are The Free Design's "Bubbles" and Pavement's "Zurich is Stained". The former was in my head all weekend, the latter all day today. Videos are Them and the Huskers on TV (not at the same time).

2007-04-30T16:42:00.000-04:00

It's affecting you and me, subliminally.
Hey, check it out--the songs of the week ca. April 23-30, 2007, with a little bit of talk about them!:

Boys Life - "Sleeping Off Summer" (from Departures and Landfalls)
That echo-y thing that pops up just after the start of every line in the verse parts of this song is one of my favorite sounds ever, but what the hell is it?! A whistle maybe? A keyboard? I have no idea. Also, the second half of this album (which this song starts off) really, really destroys.

Spacemen 3 - "Take Me To The Other Side", "That's Just Fine" (from The Perfect Prescription)
Deerhunter - ""Like New" (from Fluorescent Grey)
Two bands cut from similar, drug-soaked cloths. Spacemen 3 are more 60s rock and Deerhunter are more shoe-gaze, but both space the fuck out with nice results. They also both work best for me in small doses (read: Cryptograms is too fucking long).

Lil' Kim - "Queen Bitch" (from Hard Core)
Say what you will about Lil' Kim being a progressively more gross-looking hyper-slut perjurer(sp?), but I've never disliked any of her songs. I just heard this one randomly while driving by Cayuga Lake yesterday and it sounded really good. It even has a quick, awesome line from Biggie tucked in there. I also thought it would be funny if it somehow played off the Bowie song of the same name, but it doesn't at all. That's the only real bummer here.

The Rapture - "Love Is All" (from Echoes)
Not sure why I decided to break this record out, but it was a decent listen several years removed from the unrelenting hype surrounding its release. This song really stuck out to me since it's not a dance song at all. It's more of a ramshackle, mellow rocker, with some nice reverb-y, almost Rolling Stones guitar in it. The way they work in the warped vocals/sounds at the end is pretty nice, too.

Deerhoof - "Giga Dance" (from Milk Man)
I never paid much attention to this song (or this album, really), but goddamn. Deerhoof takes three sections that don't go together at all and puts them together first to accentuate their differences, then manages to find common elements among them. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think that's what's happening here. And then there's the lyrics. This song is really insane the more I think about it.

Make Up - "Blue Is Beautiful", "Have U Heard the Tapes?", "Substance Abuse" (from I Want Some)
I should post every song on this singles comp., but I'll stick to just these three for now. I don't usually fuck with the latter half of this cd and I have no clue why. I guess I thought it was too rough, wasn't as groovy and clean as the first half ("I Am If...", "Born On The Floor", "Walking On The Dune", etc.) and that was apparently a bad thing?? Something stupid like that. But I'm a changed man now. I M a believer.

Video of the day is this Replacements interview. Regular album talk will probably resume tomorrow. Oh and Beck isn't peforming in Canandaigua this summer as previously reported, but this guy is.

2007-04-25T17:13:00.000-04:00

Full of thoughts already written.
So yeah, The Gentle Rain. More soul/funk/jazz instrumental stuff from yesteryear, which is really all I want to hear right now (in between Bone Awl records, '60s freakbeat shit, and Abbey Road), with a nice bit of '70s light FM going on, ie. jazz flute, synths, horns, shag carpet, good times, Good Times, etc. The original hits by not the original artists, including reinterpretations of Stevie Wonder, Carole King, and the Beatles a few times over (including yet another take on "Fool On The Hill"--what's the deal with that song?) brought to you by Nick Ingman and friends, and eventually the good folks at Sunbeam and Anthology. Writing this off as dentist office Muzak would be a mistake, but having a little shindig and gettin' a little loose to this would definitely not be.

Moody - "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life" (from The Gentle Rain)
Moody - "Across The Universe" (from The Gentle Rain)
Moody - "Gonna Make You An Offer You Can't Refuse" (from The Gentle Rain)

Song of the day is "Rabbit Hop" in honor of Leah Daniels and her being 23, I think. Runner-up is "Happy Bunny Goes Fluff-Fluff Along" (WARNING: not really a fun song). Non-Leah song of the day is "Melbourne".

2007-04-23T12:51:00.000-04:00

The Late Skip Moonlight.
I should really be talking about The Gentle Rain, but I want to round out the very slapdash Beck/Mix Tape double-theme week I started over a week ago, so here are a few random Beck tracks from compilations (which are basically mix tapes, albeit the most unsatisfying mix tapes imaginable, generally speaking). First is Beck's take on Skip Spence's "Halo of Gold", from More Oar: A Tribute To The Skip Spence Album, sounding like a decent/bizarre Odelay b-side. Don't know much about Spence or the Oar record (I'm blanking on what they said in the Rock Snob's Dictionary), so I can't compare and contrast, but I will say my interest is piqued, KIND OF. Next up is a take on Daniel Johnston's "True Love Will Find You In The End", from the Late Great Daniel Johnston tribute comp. Its a pretty standard pairing of Johnston's lo-fi production and Beck's Sea Change voice, and not quite as killer as the original (or any of the original versions, I should say), but it's not bad by any means. And then finally a couple old blues numbers from the soundtrack to Steve Hanft's film Kill the Moonlight--"Leave Me On the Moon" and "Last Night I Traded My Soul's Innermost For Some Pickled Fish". I think I'm going to see Beck with my parents sometime this summer, in Ganandaigua.

Beck - "Halo Of Gold" (from More Oar)
Beck - "True Love Will Find You in the End" (from The Late Great Daniel Johnston)
Beck - "Leave Me On The Moon" (from the Kill The Moonlight OST)
Beck - "Last Night I Traded..." (from the Kill the Moonlight OST)

Beach Boys songs of the day for Saturday morning were "Little Pad" and "Can't Wait Too Long". Beauty Pill song of the day for yesterday (Monday) was "Nancy Medley, Girl Genius, Age 15". Incidentally, check out the blog at Beauty Pill's myspace spot for some free music school. Oh and you can listen to the Clutchy Hopkins-related radio show courtesy of An Aquarium Drunkard--check out the download alone or sign up for their regular podcast. Like it says in the recap, there was barely any talking and TONS of random, good soul/funk stuff for two magically fantastical hours. Run, don't walk...uh, over to that site.

2007-04-19T20:11:00.000-04:00

Flying through the air with grace!
Yeah, so let's talk Beck singles ca. 1994. The Steve Threw Up single was the Holy Grail '96 for me, maybe until I found the Jimmy Castor Bunch E-Man Groovin' record but probably even after that, and just like the real Holy Grail, it had to be returned to my friend Andrew since the copy I had been listening to ad nauseum (ba dump bump!) technically belonged to him. But what a song--three and a half minutes of what exactly Steve threw up (falafel, tequila, bagels, catfish, granola, pickles, etc.) while on acid at the top of a ferris wheel. Beck's knack for absurdity and perfect folk songs reaches its zenith at both ends with some help from the gals of That Dog., before devolving into his patented lite Wolf Eyes noise mania (a trick that even found its way onto Sea Change). Luckily I had the presence of mind to be in Washington, DC some eight or nine years later and to bring $8 (kind of steep) with me so I could own my own grail, FINALLY. Also of note, the B side has a slightly longer version of "Mutherfuker" than the one featured on Mellow Gold. I'll try to post that up someday.

Beck - "Steve Threw Up" (from the Steve Thew Up 7")
Beck - "Mutherfuker" (from Mellow Gold)

Not to be outdone, the Loser single bosts four unreleased songs that trump most of what actually made the cut on Mellow Gold. That record has its moments and everything, but I've always been more insane about these fucking B-side gems. Well, not so much "Corvette Bummer", but check out the alternate take of "Soul-Suckin' Jerk". Fucking genius. And again, Beck's savant-like folk mastery is all over "Alcohol". And then there's "Fume", which is whatever for a couple minutes and has some funny lines ("smokin' broken pencils and beatin' up kids"), but then drops major heavy loads all over the place for the last two minutes. It also reminds me of my friend Andrew and his tales of doing nitrous while visiting his brother in Houston. I think I even saw a diary he tried to keep while getting insanely fucked up down there and it was pretty great.

Beck - "Corvette Bummer" (from the Loser single)
Beck - "Alcohol" (from the Loser single)
Beck - "Soul Suckin' Jerk (Reject)" (from the Loser single)
Beck - "Fume" (from the Loser single)

Song of the day is Husker Du's "Makes No Sense At All" because its so good. It also, like "Steve Threw Up", comes courtesy of disc 2 of the Matt Werts Goes to Pittsburgh mix compiled by Tyler Robert Farren. Both come with bonus Carnage clips. Video of the day is some much-needed Dutronc.

2007-04-16T21:28:00.000-04:00

A void we filled with death and noise.
The good news is that the forgotten mystery tape from Stoney Way, Spring 2005 opens with a classic clip from a Forever Leather infomercial, and has some surprise picks/decent transitions on side B--ie. Morphine's "Whisper" into Fugazi's "Pink Frosty" into Gordon Lightfoot's "Beautiful", and then later Beck's "Earthquake Weather" (the best song off the worst Beck record?) into Black Dice's "Schwip Schwap" into Nels Cline's "The Ringing Hand". The bad news is the forgotten mystery tape from Racquet Club, Spring 2000(?) is mostly humiliating with very few exceptions--ie. "Broken Face", Beck's "Cyanide Breath Mint" (the best song on the best Beck record?), Boys Life's "All of the Negatives". Best to just avoid personal mixes altogether (are you really trying to impress yourself??). Plus, who has the time?

News of the day is this Clutchy Hopkins shit! Songs of the day are the Misfits' "Green Hell" and Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl (single version)", but they have to be played one right after the other as you're pulling into work. PS--this is clearly the video of the day (probably NSFW).

2007-04-09T20:06:00.000-04:00

Nobody can hear the missing.
Welcome to another week of barely posting anything! I assure you (both of you) my lack of writing things is warranted and that I'll get back to the usual three-scattered-posts-a-week routine shortly. In the meantime, here's a two-fer post. First up is Gonzales' Solo Piano, recently issued in the USA after being a mostly non-USA only record, from what I understand. There isn't much I can say about it that isn't spelled out in the name of the record, but the guy from Aquarium Drunkard called it a kind of "musical palate cleanser", and he's dead on. I would also say it's extremely simple and good, makes a perfect soundtrack for driving slowly through the decaying streets of Geneva, and fulfills my current need to hear anything even vaguely foreign.

Gonzales - "Manifesto" (from Solo Piano)
Gonzales - "Armellodie" (from Solo Piano)
Gonzales - "CM Blues" (from Solo Piano)

Second up is Townes Van Zandt's Townes Van Zandt. I was listening to this a lot last week, but I caught part of Be Here to Love Me last night and it got me thinking about what I had been thinking about. I don't know if its maybe uncouth or retarded to relate Townes to someone like John Denver, but that's who he first reminded me of. Like a John Denver who doesn't immediately make me think of muppets (although I have nothing but absolute adoring love for A Christmas Together), I should say. Like a John Denver who is also Gram Parsons who is also [insert old bluesman]. But anyway, Townes Van Zandt is my record of choice so far, until I go headlong into the rest of the Texas Troubadour set. Lots of classics, maybe nothing but classics. Plus "(Quicksilver Daydreams Of) Maria" reminds me of that thing Ray Charles said about how if you want to write a great song, you've got to praise a woman. I don't know if that's completely true (I don't know if it explains Black Flag), but the last thing I want to do is argue with Ray Charles.

Townes Van Zandt - "(Quicksilver Daydreams Of) Maria" (from Townes Van Zandt)
Townes Van Zandt - "Waiting Around to Die" (from Townes Van Zandt)
Townes Van Zandt - "Columbine" (from Townes Van Zandt)

Songs of the day are Earth's "Miami Morning Coming Down" , from the new Hibernaculum joint, and the Aliens' "R:18" from their upcoming anthology. Video of the millenium is Lumidee and Tony Sunshine's take on "She's Like The Wind". Holy lord.

2007-04-03T18:30:00.000-04:00

My cyber impulse was uneven.
I thought writing about Miho Hatori's record from last year, Ecdysis, would be easy, but I've been re-reading all of her lyrics from the record while listening to Flowers-Corsano Duo and Bone Awl, and now my brain is completely scrambled. Suffice it to say, Ecdysis is way more impressive than you think it is, sometimes because its melodies and arrangements are so mellow and subtle that they don't always register, and sometimes because the most brilliant or most crushing lyrics are sung in a language you don't understand ("A Song For Kids" slips this by you: "I found a key to the dream island, I'll be back/I'll give you a code between us, it's secret/Only we know, even mom and dad don't know/I will find the place like this, when I become an adult"). It's a record that reads both willfully child-like and unexpectedly heavy ("I live near the river/In the forest of the deer/I release my arrows/To the sense of your fear") , and often sounds like it's being played from both the future and the past, like a bossanova jazz record re-interpreted by a wistful, time-travelling dream warrioress. Think something like "Sugar Water" with quieter beats or Bjork when she's not singing the shit out of everything or Joanna Newsom's subject matter done right, and you'll be part-way there. Tons of ideas done with care is always a good thing.

Miho Hatori - "A Song For Kids" (from Ecdysis)
Miho Hatori - "The Spirit of Juliet" (from Ecdysis)
Miho Hatori - "Walking City" (from Ecdysis)

Guitar solo of the day comes courtesy of the song of the day ("Rainbow"), which comes courtesy of Boris and Michio Kurihara's record of the same name. Video of the day is this making of "Peg" clip, but I also like this Camera Obscura video.

2007-04-01T14:52:00.000-04:00

Baby baby, are you down?
Before I go to a show that promises to be 10% great stuff and 90% stuff that needs to fucking go away, let's talk about some music that has fucking gone away. With its lounge-y, vaguely hip-hop inspired rock thing going on, Butter 08's lone release is very much a mid-90s NYC time capsule record. Weirdly, it's taken me about 10 years to really get into it and not just go along with it based on personnel (Blues Explosion's Russell Simins and Cibo Mato's Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, along with future Thumbsucker director Mike Mills, and a guy from Skeleton Key (the band)) or enjoy it strictly as late night, I-can't-sleep music. Most of it seemed like a very well-produced joke at the time of its release, but now it feels like a bunch of extremely well-versed cool kids fucking around and making an admittedly schizo, but still for-real album. And as it turns out, being a bunch of fun weirdos is pretty eternal, even if the music feels extremely dated. I'm pretty sure Grand Royal Direct doesn't even carry this anymore, so you may have to check eBay or Gemm, and also the cd came out in both a mock-LP sleeve and a jewel case (not at the same time obviously). Somehow I wound up with both.

Butter 08 - "Dick Serious"
Butter 08 - "How Do I Relax"
Butter 08 - "What Are You Wearing"
Butter 08 - "Sex Symbol"

Song of the day is definitely "Deacon Blues" or anything off Aja, video of the day is this Bobby Conn video that I forgot about.

2007-03-26T19:26:00.000-04:00

"I would like to call certain people murderers."

I don't really have an album to talk about today. You should definitely own Meat Puppets II ("Aurora Borealis", "Teenager(S)") and Bjork's first record is incredible, but mainly you need, NEED to watch Dream Deceivers: The Story of James Vance & Judas Priest, the documentary on the Judas Priest suicide/subliminal messages trial back in 1986. It's not widely available, so this is probably the only chance you'll have to see it. Fans of Preacher's Arse-face, take extreme note. Shit is CRAZY. Major appreciation to WFMU's Beware of the Blog for being so fucking great.

2007-03-22T19:41:00.000-04:00

I feel so glotious when I fly in my bonahr.
I'm gonna finish up "Essentials" week by talking about Men's Recovery Project as best as I can, and I guess specifically about The Very Best of Men's Recovery Project. The easiest way to sum them up would be to say that--with their synthesizers, stage theatrics, and songs that seemed to be about humans sung from the point of view of another species--they were to the hardcore scene of the mid-90s what Devo must have been to the rock (or punk or new wave) worlds of the late 70s/early 80s, and even recalled the kind of bizzaro material found on Devo's Hardcore collections. But I would argue that they they were possibly more surreal (and less structured) than even Devo was at their most uninhibited, and maybe even funnier. There's also something cheaper about MRP that's really endearing, and that feeling that they were genuinely in another fucking universe (just listen to "Bleeding Gash"!) all the time, and that nobody will ever be able to recreate what it must have been like to be in that universe. Their Very Best of... compilation is a perfect sampling of the aural absurdity Sam McPheeters, Neil Burke and their occassional guests had to offer, and draws from (probably?) everything they ever released, even the record I'm still not sure they really put out, 2001's Night Pirate LP. I'd also highly recommend The Golden Triumph of Naked Hostility, which compiles a bunch, maybe all of their 7"s (Normal Man, Botanica Mysteria, Immense Ovary Reject, et al.), if you can find it. Oh and Million Man March.

Men's Recovery Project - "Bleeding Gash"
Men's Recovery Project - "Get The Fuck Out of My Office"
Men's Recovery Project - "Avoid Pregnancy During Alcohol"
Men's Recovery Project - "Sexual Pervert"

Song of the day is Gonzales' "Gogol". Yeah, I've never heard of him either. Other song of the day is Ghostface's "Chunky".