One Third RPMs

How I learned how to survive

2007-10-11T12:54:00.000-05:00

It's been a while, I know. Here are some of the things that especially stand out from the new things I've heard lately:

Song: Starry Eyes
Artist: The Gang
Source: Tour Split 12" with Vague Angels
Imagine Archers of Loaf-era Eric Bachman jamming with New Order and a Velvet Undergound-era Lou Reed dropping by the studio to add a little tonal-noodling-but-don't-call-it-a-solo at the end for the fade out. Inspired, yet off the cuff and loose like the indie rock of my youth.

Song: Wheats (available at Epitonic)
Artist: Mazarin
Source: Watch it Happen
Gently psychedellic indie rock, like the more straightforward parts of On Avery Island. The stuttering drums and lightly chugging guitars give the song a vaguely triumpant sound, like a march with the martial overtones stripped out leaving only the sense of motion and direction. And the song is incredibly catchy. The whole thing left me a bit unprepared for lyrics, a series of ruminations on a breakup and attempts to deal with it. While sad and approaching bitter, they are clever and blackly funny in a way that the whole thing fits.

I must have spent 30 rainy days
Writing this simple melody
to tell you that I'm over you
Oh yeah, that's right, I'm not over you
la-la-la la-la-la-la

Side note pt1: This might end up being my used bin discovery of the year. It was "priced to move" and I really liked a couple of songs off "We're Already There", Mazarin's most recent album so I took a chance. In addition to this song there is a lot more to recommend the album, like the Built to Spill-inspired opener "Chasing the Girl" and the acoustic ode to Henry Darger.

Side note pt2: Mazarin are undergoing a name change to avoid legal consequences but will continue to exist in some form.

Artist: Andrew Jackson Jihad
Source: People who can eat people are the luckiest people in the world LP.
Song: the whole dang album

Like early the Mountain Goats meeting up with early Bright Eyes and drinking too much coffee before going into the studio and deciding to be too clever for their own good. (Not that Mssrs Darnielle or Oberst aren't clever, but neither achieve the level of smartass-ery on record that AJJ do. Oberst was always too serious and Darnielle dropped the slight tendancies he had a long time ago.) Full of the nervous energy of youth and the nervous energy that comes from dealing with your demons in front of other people and dark, dark, dark but funny. Spazzy, smart, sad, scary, oldtimey, invigorating, folk punk. Brilliant. They have some mp3s from the album on their web site.

Bros

2007-06-18T12:36:00.000-05:00

Song: Bros
Artist: Panda Bear
Source: Person Pitch
Day: 6/12-6/17

Last week I listened to this album until I had to force myself to take a break. I was certainly on the line with the looped, wall-of-sunshine-vocal pop of "Comfy in Nautica" (imagine the Beach Boys doing an album of prison work songs) but the second section of "Bros" reeled me in. The song stretches out, with parts repeating and shifting, extending and deconstructing each other in amazing ways. All the while it manages to be accessible, anchored by a fiercely strummed acoustic guitar and tuneful, albeit fractured, vocal loops.

Stuff I've been listening to lately

2007-06-07T13:43:00.000-05:00

The Ex - Turn and Dizzy Spells
Someone recently sold their collection of The Ex to the store I volunteer at and I bought it all up. I've been slowly working my way backwards through their catalog, and so far I've been pretty amazed. These two albums are rhythmic no-wave kind of stuff with an impeccable sense of pacing and structure, knowing exactly where to repeat & build and where to change.

Do Make Say Think - You, You're a History in Rust
All DMST albums (except the first one for some reason) eventually become regular parts of the sonic fabric of my life. This one took a few listens to grow on me but is there now. More of the amazing intrumental rock/lounge/ambient/experiemental goodness I've some to expect, with a few good vocals thrown in for good measure.

Faust - "It's a Rainy Day (Sunshine Girl)"
Kampfire Krautrock? The incessant motorik-style beat is there, but the instrumentation and arrangement feel organic, punctuated by a downright fun "ah-oom" vocal chant. And what lyrics could fit springtime better than "it's a rainy day/sunshine baby"?

Big Business - Here Comes the Waterworks
Big Business finally releases something that fulfills the promise of their pedigree.

Dalek - Abandoned Language
Ambient Noise Hop. Somewhere between the tech-paranoia of El-P and the chill feeling of Native Tongue bands, with a taste for noise and droll world-weary vocals.

Homostupids - S/T
Trashy noisy garage punk. Reminds me a bit of the better moments of Pink and Brown

Catena Collapse - Rai Rai Rai/Outback Songs
The '00s have brought us an increasing amount of bombast from emo hardcore bands. This is fine and all but eventually you get to a point where the music has so much drama it becomes imposing, mythic, trans-human. Catena Collapse come from a similar emo punk tradition, but they have a looseness that is approachable, human, even welcoming in its own way. Moss Icon, Current, or the All the President's Men comp are all reasonable reference points (as are the more obscure Plunger or the first Bob Tilton LP). How come all the good emo bands are from Europe these days, anyway?

Hefner - "Hymn for the Cigarettes"
The funny/biting chorus defies my powers of analysis and description.

Axolotl - "There are Sometimes Miracles"
This is currently my favorite track from the Way Blank album. Pop noise, like if My Bloody Valentine had decided to release an album of the shimmering, abstract interludes from Loveless and the EPs of that era.

Eluvium - "Amreik"
Ambient music. Reminds me a bit of the second side of Eno's Discreet Music where he reworks Pachelbel's canon, esp "The Fullness of Wind" version. Unlike the eno work, though, this nearly breaks my heart everytime I hear it. The rest of the album is good, but does not quite pack the punch that this does.

Built to Spill - There's Nothing Wrong With Love
Soundtrack for a drive to a spring wedding.

One Last Wish - 1986
One Last Wish is most of members of Rites of Spring playing music that sounds a lot like Rites of Spring. This was a lost album for a while until Dischord issued it in the late 90s/early 00s. "My Better Half" was included on a mix CD wedding favor and prompted a week of listens to this album.

Explosions in the Sky - The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place
honorable mention to the new album as well.

Pavement - "Old to Begin"
Not sure why, but phrases from this song keep popping into my head.

The no singing, but some dancing edition

2007-04-05T15:57:00.000-05:00

Song: With Tired Eyes, Tired Minds, Tired Souls, We Slept
Artist: Explosions in the Sky
Source: Live
Day: 3/29/07

Two songs into their set, Explosions in the Sky play the song I really want to hear and they play it with their characteristic awesomeness: the performance varies from epic beauty to grap-you-and-shake-you intensity, with enough space and savvy to allow the two to coexist in a natural way. The show is all gravy after that.

Song: Taken
Artist: Eluvium
Sources: Talk Amongst the Trees
Day: 4/1/07

This song falls somewhere between guitar driven post-rock and Eno's Discrete Music. I was lucky enough to see him do this live, opening for Explosions in the Sky. It was just him and a delay device slowly building a world of sonic wonder as the parts looped back on themselves. The recorded version is more mellow but no less amazing.

Song: The Universe!
Artist: Do Make Say Think
Source: You, You're a History in Rust
Day: 4/3/07

Do Make Say Think finally rock out. Not too surprisingly it sounds a bit like "kc Accidental" by Broken Social Scene (several DMSTers are in BSS and the song "kc accidental" shares its name with another DMST/BSS side project). All the great spatial/texural qualities of DSMT with a beat I can jump up and down to. Perfect. Especially good following the gentle "A With Living" that procedes it on the album.

I won't even mind

2007-03-29T15:03:00.000-05:00

Song: "When I Go Deaf"
Artist: Low
Source: The Great Destroyer
Day: 3/27/07

Last Night a Laptop Saved My Life

2007-03-26T12:58:00.000-05:00

Another long break, sorry folks. You should check out Akron Family if they come to your town. The best show I've seen in a while and I've seen a few awesome ones this month, including 3 shows by the Mountain Goats that started good and just got better, a pretty great set from Do Make Say Think and goodness from Subtle and TV on the Radio.

Song: "Friends Are Evil"
Artist: Jesu
Source: Live

Jesu play metal-influenced music with a dense, delayed, layered sound that is (rightly in my book) compared to early 90s shoegazers like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. The result is something impossibly heavy and beautiful and blissful and sad. Its like watching a slow notion video of a building being imploded. There is something wrong about the decay and destruction, but the sheer force is irresistible and there is a beauty about the patterns of the floors make while they collapse in on each other and the fractal clouds of dust that rise up.

Whenever I hear something like this - a band whose sound is dense and textured - I always wonder how they will recreate it live. I had visions of (main force behindJesu) Justin Broadrick with an array of delay and other effects pedals, juggling guitar and keyboard duties playing monster riffs and twisting knobs. Perhaps they would add an extra person for the tour. When he leaned over his MacBook and fired up a preset track, I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I'm old enough (read: rockist, although I'm not sure if people care about such distinctions any more) to like my live music "live", to have it dependent upon people and their ability to change their minds or make mistakes; to be unpredictable, not entirely programmed. (I should clarify, the laptop wasn't the entire show, it was just providing the parts that couldn't be created by a standard 3 piece rock line up.)

Still last night it was the computer's solo that stole the show. Towards the end of their set Mr. Broadrick picked out another track from his Mac and the unaccompanied opening of "friends are evil" started blasting over the club's PA. It's a low note played twice, slightly cut off and looped. The thickness of distortion abstracts the note from the sound, so it wavers somewhere between a riff and a slow break beat. I almost always at least nod my head or tap my heel during shows, and had been doing so throughout the set, but when the rhythm and sheer heaviness of the sound hit me I was twitching/moving/something with abandon, a nigh danger to myself and others. Soon the guitar, bass and drums came in, giving the laptop a little love, but it was the Mac that tore the roof off.

stifling those who strive

2006-12-22T15:36:00.000-06:00

(Its now 1/26/07 Way behind here. Sorry.)

Day: 12/11/06 - 12/13/06
Song: Lush Life
Artist:Johnny Hartman & John Coltrane
Source: John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (album)

I rediscovered this song after a discussion about jazz got me digging out some of my old albums. I was listening to it so much, I actually had to force myself to put the album away.

However, I've been stumped for the past month or so trying to figure out how to do this song justice. I don't usually do this, but I'm going to resort to the lyrics. Take a gander if you are not familiar:

I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come what may places
Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life...
From jazz and cocktails.

The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces
With distant gay traces
That used to be there you could see where they'd been washed away
By too many through the day...
Twelve o'clock tales.

Then you came along with your siren of song
To tempt me to madness
I thought for a while that your poignant smile was tinged with the sadness
Of a great love for me.

Ah yes! I was wrong...
Again,
I was wrong.

Life is lonely, again
And only last year everything seemed so sure.
Now life is awful, again
a troughful of hearts could only be a bore.
A week in paris will ease the bite of it,
All I care is to smile in spite of it.

I'll forget you, I will
While yet you are still burning inside my brain.
Romance is mush,
Stifling those who strive.
I'll live a lush life in some small dive...
And there I'll be, while I rot
With the rest of those whose lives are lonely, too..

Finished? Ok good. Another thing to know if you aren't familiar with the song is that the opening section, until "Now life is awful..." is what the liner notes call the songspiel, an intro loose melody that scrambles over the scale (think of the slow part about "Prutians landing on Plymoth Rock" part of "Anything Goes"). It sets the stage and establishes a milieu for the song proper which has a slower, more somber feel to it. Its important not only an intersting piece of melody and rhythm but it also give a context to the rest of the song, which needs a little help not to seem too over the top.

There is a tension in the song's lyrics that makes Lush Life compelling. The romantic sense of destruction that is shows up in lots of down-and-out songs (alt country and Tom Waits come to mind), is paired with an air of self conscious sophistication that separates the song from similar tales of woe.

The lyrics are incredibly bleak, yet also incredibly clever. The narrator is clearly destroyed ("life is awful", "while I rot with the rest"), yet there are intricate internal rhymes that would put most MCs to shame, and ridiculous couplets ("Now life is awful/again, I'm sure a troughful...") which suggest an aristocratic "dignity in the face of anything" ("all I care, is to smile in spite of it") that makes the whole thing bearable. It's as if the narrator is suggesting that heartbreak can be a game that can be enjoyed and perhaps won. Sure it hurts, but viewed from the right angle it can be savored. The finest scotch is 40% toxin.

But I can't help but wonder how far this show of dignity really goes. The lyrics are practically falling over themselves to show how clever they are ("relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life, to get the feel of life") to the point where they jar. No one rhymes awful and troughful. Does the narrator perhaps protest too much? Is he overdoing it, revealing the very thing he is trying to conceal?

When I first heard Hartman sing this I thought his delivery was too smooth, but I've come around. It is suave and sophisticated enough to obscure the rhythmic complexity of the lyrics and his tone is clean enough that the lyrics meanings are able to be front and center. As sung by Hartman, the song become stories within stories, with a vivid setting. This is literature. (Being accompanied by McCoy Tyner doesn't hurt, either.)

After Hartman finishes, Coltrane lightens the mood a bit with an almost jaunty solo. It's a nice change and normally it would be the thing I focus on, but Hartman's deft balancing act between suave sophistication, devistation, humor, detachment, bitterness and self mocking steals the show.

Streetwise, From the Big Bang

2006-12-14T17:38:00.000-06:00

Day: 12/6/06, off and on until the present
Song: many
Artist: Signal to Trust

12/6 as we were packing up at the store, someone put on the new Signal to Trust. As a fan who had given up on waiting for them to realize their potential, I am happy to say I was wrong. Really good indie rock in a 90s east coast/DC post-punk way. A lot of their sound reminds me of the unjustly overlooked The Van Pelt. Part of it is a similar vocal style, but the more interesting connection is the way each band makes suprisingly moving music out of stripped down parts and abstractly narrative lyrics. There are a surprisingly wide range of sound here from Sonic Youth and Spoon to a song that sounds like a lost track from Isn't Anything - but they have enough of their own style that I didn't really noticec at first. Irresistable for the kind of person whose interest is peaked by words like "angular", "indie rock", and "post-" (ie your humble reporter.)

Drive the Cold Winter Away

2006-12-14T16:50:00.000-06:00

Day: 11/30/06 and beyond
Artist: Nowell Sing We Clear
Recordings: Vol 1 & 2

Best Winter Ever

Raise Your Eyes

2006-12-05T13:34:00.000-06:00

Day: 11/29/2006
Artist: Navio Forge
Recording: As We Quietly Burn A Hole Into... Album

A used copy of this rare early 90s emo gem came into the store and so it had to be played. It's emo in the grand tradition of Rites of Spring, Embrace, Moss Icon and the like: diy punk/hardcore with its energies and musical vocabularies refocused. It is the independent spirit of hardcore trying to fights its way out of the hypermacho straightjacket it had built for itself, while remaining uncompromising and underground. The riffs reminiscent of early fugazi in their winding, spacious, and oddly catchy ways. The bass sounds incredibly heavy (but not distorted), like concrete blocks being dropped. The singer borders on being over the top with his near-sobbing, but there is a sincerity to the whole thing that makes it crushing, not cringing. (It's also helpful to remember that some of the lyrics on this record that might sound cliche had not been beaten into the ground by underground bands yet.)

If you can find this record and like emotionally and musically intense music that doesn't rely on metal tropes to generate that heaviness and intensity, definitely pick it up. Or, you can find some info and links to some mp3s here.

this hole that we fixed

2006-11-28T13:32:00.000-06:00

Not too much to report the past few weeks. I was in Japan - of which there is much to talk about, but it's mostly outside the purview of this little blog - so the few weeks before I left I was mostly listening to language CDs. Hardly song-of-the-day worthy. While I was there I wasn't really concentrating on music, but here's what I remember... For reasons I can't entirely remember, I had "We Built This City (On Rock and Roll)" stuck in my head for days. Axoltol provided a good sound track for walking around the central Kyoto districts at night. As far as Japanese sounds go, hands down the highlight was the Buddhist chanting I overheard while visiting one of the subtemples of Kyoto's Nazenji.

Back to regularly scheduled programming.

Song: Camel Toe
Artist: Fanny Pack
Day: 11/26/06
I live in a pop culture void and just crossed paths with this recently, years after the fact. Judgments like "Good" and "Bad" seem beside the point, the song is more a force, a bulldozer/trainwreck (bullwreck?). Getting in its way is an event. 'nuff said

Song: In This Hole
Artist: Cat Power
Source: What Would The Community Think
Day: 11/27/06
In the abstract I am a Cat Power fan. In practice I would say I am more of a "Nude As the News" fan. NatN is the reason I own What would the Community Think. When I listen to the album, I usually get impatient sometime during "Good Clean Fun", skip to NatN and then turn the CD off. (Digression: this habit is really a shame, since for sheer gut-punch harrowingness Chan's phrasing of "nobody does it better, baby you're the best" at the end of "Good Clean Fun" is unmatched. It is the shrouded picture to Carly Simon's Dorian Gray reading of the same lyric. Who knows what else awaits me if I would ever listen to the whole thing. /Digression)

Today when I reach the end of "In This Hole," I'm skipping back and listening to it again. Its low lament fits a dreary Monday on the first full week of work following a long weekend, which in turn follows a long vacation. Add to this the knowledge that winter will most likely be settling in this week. Really it’s not as bad as it sounds, either the day or the song. Again we're talking low lament here, too much more would be too much more for a sleepy first day back.

11/28/06 (tie so far)
Song: Love For Sale/Helen Fordsdale
Artist: Miles Davis/Mars
Source: '58 Sessions/New York Noise Comp (or No New York)
Today's weather is no less gloomy, but today it seems almost cozy. For some reason this always reminds me of 50s era Miles Davis at least in my more relaxed moments.

The flip side to Mile's cool is the No Wave freak out of Mars' Helen Fordsdale. The guitars scratch and scrape like a swarm of insects with Tourette's and are regularly interrupted by a slide/phased sound like an airplane flying quickly overhead. The vocals are high pitched and rhythmic. The whole thing hangs together thanks to the bass, which plays an amost melodic riff adding just enough order to keep the chaos thrilling instead of tiring.

make it a mirror

2006-10-20T12:19:00.000-05:00

Song: "Love and Space"
Artist: Akron/Family
Source: The Meek Warrior
Day: 10/13
The mystery song from the set I saw back in March is a mystery no more. I feel like I should hate this song. On the face of it, the song is AK AK at their most naively hippy, which should annoy the part of me that remembers being young and disillusioned with the world. The religous overtones should raise the hackles of the knee jerk agnostic/secular humanist in me.

But it doesn't. No doubt part of the reason is its a capella and I'm a sucker for group sing these days. More important is the restraint of the performances. If they were trying too hard, it would sound like they are speaking to me and trying to convince me of something. But they don't, they sing artfully yet plainly. It reinforces the commonality of the desire to live a better, more love-filled life, and directs that request to whatever force can make that happen. And I would hope few of us are nihilists to the extent that you could find fault in that.

Side note, am I the only one who can't hear the title of the new Akron/Family record without thinking of Timothy Treadwell?

Song: Theme from Fenn O'Berg (?)
Album: The Magic Sound Of Fenn O'Berg
Artist: Fenn O'Berg
Day: 10/15/06
This is the Fenn O'Berg song I always wanted to hear. The experimental electronic drones (but they're not drones, they are too active and buzzing to be ambient, yet don't move enough to be something else) are paired with a brass-and-string sample that give the piece a more easily digestable structure for the electronic music novice (which I am as evidenced by my use of the phrase "electronic music"). The piece ends up somewhere between triphop and a movie soundtrack of impending disaster and something far more relaxed.

Song: Four on Six
Artist: Wes Montgomery
Day: 10/17-10/18
Source: The Increbile Jazz Guitar of
Every so often I'll put on a Wes Montgomery album (I really only have 2 or 3) and realize its what I've been meaning to listen to for a while. Smooth but definately swinging post-bop (my records are from his combo period). This song has cool, angular, stepping riff that sounds like little else I've heard from that era, except for maybe Thelonious Monk.

Other stuff I've been listening to... The new Life at These Speeds Album is pretty good so far. A little more mainstream than the "fugazi meets mid-90s emo like Maximillion Colby or maybe Shotmaker" sound of previous efforts but it still has good energy and probably tighter songwriting than previous records. The raccoo-ooo-oo-ooooooooooon (or however you spell it) record on Release the Bats (Is Night People) is pretty good as well if one is into Animal Collective style weird folk.

I want a verb and you give me a noun

2006-10-09T13:18:00.000-05:00

roundup since last post through last Sat (10/7).

I'm not sure what's going on. Nothing really seems to be sticking lately. Perhaps it's because I've been sick for most of the past week, perhaps I'm going through a slump, perhaps its because the new releases I've heard recently haven't grabbed me like I think they should. (I'm looking at you, DJ Shadow and TV on the Radio. Don't worry I'll give you a few more chances.) I'm not worried about it, something always comes along, but not too much to report recently.

Song: "Brass Neck", "Kennedy" (tie)
Artist: The Wedding Present
Day: 9/29/06
We recently bought a CD collection at Extreme Noise, so I had the chance to fill in some gaps. Both this and the Channel 3 are a function of that.

I've liked these songs for a long time so its cool to have regular access to them. When I was growing up in the 80s I was little of an anglophile. Most of the interesting, new, and different non-metal music seemed to be coming from England (at least according to the outlets I had at my disposal like MTV and WEQX): New Order, Jesus and Mary Chain, the Cure, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, etc. I didn't have the financial resources to pursue these bands at the time but those sounds were engrained in me, which is why I like The Wedding Present's blend of frantic punk energy with a clean guitar tone and catchy singing. It's not quite nostalgia because I don't really associate these songs with anything in particular and I don't really pine for the late 80s, it's more like a puzzle that has been finally solved after sitting in a box for a couple of years.

Song: "All My Dreams"
Artist: Channel 3
Day: 9/30/06
I'd always heard a lot about CH3, but never listened to them till now. Good anthemic west coast punk. The I've Got a Gun tracks are alright, but the After the Lights Go Out is really solid, especially this track. The lyrics about dreams fading away probably should be a downer to listen to the day after your 31st birthday, but the music is so catchy and driving I don't really notice or care.

Album: Mingus Ah Um
Artist: Charles Mingus
Day: 10/2-10/6
Grooving, small group jazz that fits nicely between the song focus of big bands and the "hurry and get to the solo already" mentality of a lot of small combo post-bop groups. Interesting arrangments and in the case of "Better Git It in Your Soul" amazing songwriting. Plus I love the tossed-off anticipation of Jazz Samba that one of the saxophonists puts into one of the solos ("Self-Portait in 3 Colors", I think).

Show: Yo La Tengo w/Why? opening.
Day: 10/7/06
I hadn't seen YLT for a while. And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out was slow and quiet in a way that didn't quite suit my tastes and they seemed content to stay in that mode for a while. I respected their desire not to make another Electr-O-Pura, but at the same time I didn't feel the need to follow then too closely either. Still it had been 5 years since I saw them and why? was opening so the deal was sealed.

I'm not sure either band played the kind of set that people new to their music would have been blown away by, but the crowd was full of partisans that seemed satisfied. why? played a couple of older songs and some essentials from Elephant Eyelash - "Gemini" and "Light Leaves" - in their mostly new set. With Why? it is aways hard to judge the record from the live set and vice versa because the arrangements change a lot, but I'm excited about the new songs and hope they keep the xylophone parts. I have to admit YLT were close to losing me in the middle of the 2 hour set/encores, but I was glad I stuck around the full 2 hours (!) if nothing else for the always amazing "Blue Line Swinger", a song so good that it renders my analytical abilities useless.

10 days later, still not taking my own advice

2006-09-22T12:32:00.000-05:00

the album thing continues on.

A few weeks ago I read this year 80th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth. This has inspired lots of listens to Giant Steps and The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard recordings. The latter contain what are perhaps my favorite John Coltrane recordings (caveat: JC was incredibly prolific and I have only heard about 8 or so of his albums). It falls stylisticly somewhere between his modal period and his later freer improvisation so you get the best of both. The soloing goes in lots of interesting places but the "tunes" that the group plays still stand up as something more than just a tonal phrase to get beyond so they can begin soloing. The presence of Eric Dolphy is a nice addition to the group, especially when he breaks out the bass clarinet.

Lots of listening to the Mountain Goats, esp the new record, Get Lonely. They were here last week and played it from start to finish (with a brief side trip for "See America Right" after a slightly creaky attempt at something in the middle of the album). Certain songs suffered from the live treatment - I really missed the stumbling percussion and horn lines on "If You See Light" - but the quieter ones became far more affecting after I saw John sing them live. It feels a tad ghoulish to watch him go to whatever dark place he visits when sings these songs, but it is powerful.

That End of a Year album I talked about a while ago is shaping up to be my favorite punk/hardcore-related release this year.

I had really weird sleeping hours over the weekend, with late afternoon naps, later bed times and early rising times. When I get out of whack like this it means a lot of listening to instrumental music, waiting to fall asleep. In this case it was a rekindling of my affection for Philip Glass' Solo Piano. It starts out with a solo treatment of the music from The Thin Blue Line, which is what first hooked me when I used to borrow my parent's copy. The reason I keep coming back is the soaring (and decidely non-minimal) apreggios of Mad Rush.

At the store we recently got a copy of the first Current 7" which inspired a spin during my shift on Weds and then a lot of listening to the discography yesterday. Ah the days of emo music before emo music was "emo music" and it was still just punk music with the energy channelled at different things using a slightly different musical vocabulary. Intense, heartfelt vocals from kids who weren't afraid to get poetic over distorted guitars. Current's songs are a mixed bag, but when they are good its like they are speaking directly to your innermost being. Cynics might call the whole thing pretentious, but then that's why they are called cynics.

Chutes and Ladders

2006-09-12T13:44:00.000-05:00

Brief slide here. Part of the reason is I've been busy. Another part is I've been mostly listening to old favorites or things that are well covered elsewhere, which I suppose raises an interesting question about the mission of this thing; i.e. for a good portion of the last week or so, Yo La Tengo's "I Can Hear the Heart Beat As One" - a record that typically falls just behind Pavement, Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine, and Neutral Milk Hotel in lists of best 90s albums among the indie-aware - has been playing in my car. Does the web need more bytes devoted to this cause?

Perhaps. Ideally this thing straddles a line between bio-blog and music-blog, so if its what I'm listening to, its what I am listening to. In other words, although its not terribly original to write about "I can hear..." and actually a tad difficult when you are past the 100th listen or so, it is the facts of the matter. While it is not terribly exciting under criteria 2, it still fits under criteria 1. And I need to remind myself of that more often.

Moving on in roughly chronological order...

Song: Jackie
Artist: Scott Walker
Source: Sings Jacques Brel
Jacques Brel makes me wish I knew french. Rapid-fire images of literary old world decadence, an insistent rhythmic pulse, a unusual rhyme scheme (aabccb), and a brilliant kiss-off of a chorus that wiggles out of the corner the rest of the song paints it into (ie how to top the verses). Scott walker and the approriately overblown arrangement manage to capture the ridiculous manic thrill of it all.

Song: 3x3 Lines (It looks like you can hear a sample here
Artist: The Plan
Source: This Time Is Not This Place
Great mathy-emo-punk in the mid 90s rhythmic tradition of 400 Years and others who were melded the sounds of DC bands like Fugazi and Jawbox, the math rock of Slint and June of 44, and the abandon of San Diego bands. Some lyrics clunk a little 6 years on, but the pulse keeps everything rolling and the part where the music stops further proves the point that more bands need chants.

Artist: Yo La Tengo
Source: I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One
Great album with lots of classic songs. Sugar Cube... Damage... Deeper Into Movies... Green Arrow... Autumn Sweater... My Little Corner of the World... (Don't believe me? "Green Arrow" is one of This American Life's greatest hits. I think I read somewhere they used it so much, it got banned for a while.) The cover of Little Honda is still my nemesis, but the album is slightly too long anyway so I feel justified in skipping it.

What does your soul look like? (Pt. -7)

2006-08-29T13:35:00.000-05:00

Song: "Didn't I"
Artist: Darondo
Source: Gilles Pearson Digs America comp, via Big Brain comics
Day: 8/24/06
After arriving too late to see Monks singer/guitarist Gary Burger live, I wandered our fair city aimlessly, finally ducking into Big Brain Comics to escape a torrential rainstorm. For my troubles I was rewarded with this amazing song. Its a slow, sweet, falsetto, come-back-to-me-baby, soul number with a great string arrangement, tastefully understated guitar lines, a bridge/breakdown worthy of "What's Goin' On" and backing vocal ornaments somewhere between a sung horn line and Esquivel.

But wait, it gets better because Darondo's voice is kinda weird. His falsetto is not a smooth, Al Green style soul croon. Or it almost is, but there's this raspy edge to it as if he has laryngeitis. And occasionally his pitch is slightly off. The effect is like listening to those compillations pre-war 78s. This is a real person. I mean Al Green is great musically, but its hard to imagine him really having to plead to get his beloved back, because he's Al Green and he has that voice. (Yes I know he has had personal tragedies, but a) I'm talking sound here not biography and b) the triggering event was Rev Al rejecting her. Not that this makes it any less tragic, I'm just saying for the baby-come-back-I-was-good-to-you genre Al's got a slight credibility gap.) Or a better way of putting it is, when you hear Al Green sing that kind of song, that's how you wish you could sing it, 'cause it'd work. When Darondo sings it, its like you on a really good day. But that doesn't change the fact that neither one of you is sure its going to work, which makes it all the more moving.

Song: More Action! Less Tears
Artist: A Silver Mt Zion
Source: Pretty Lightning Paw
Day: 8/25/06
The Silver Mt Zion show a few weeks ago has got me revisiting their older records. This song is a tad more upbeat and fun than most of their songs with a big graceful riff (like doug martsch covering one of godspeed!'s more triumpant moments) and its playful intro mistake. How can you (unless you are a gramatical stickler) not love a song that starts out with a voice shouting "The name of this song is more action! The name of this song is less tears The name of this song is 1-2-3-4!" Kick ass.

Song: Silent Shout
Artist: The Knife
Source: Silent Shout
Every so often I'll give into indie hype and check something out that I probably wouldn't otherwise. This is one of those cases. I don't quite know why everyone is making a big deal about the things everyone is making a big deal about, like the effects on the vocals (hasn't any one ever heard a Kate Bush album before?), or the dark sound (um to my novice electro brain, I thought that's what half this stuff was all about, anyone remember Depeche Mode?). However, I can say this song (and the album) is really good.

btw - to answer my own question, I think the problem is twofold. People writing about music are a) younger than me and don't really remember the 80s and b) they have word counts to meet and I don't. So where I can say "this is stripped down dark-sounding electronic music with solid songwriting and interesting synth lines that doesn't make me feel like I am being pandered to", they can't. But ihmo that's really all the description you need. They conviently stream it on a website (although it relies on flash).

Or perhaps I don't listen to this kind of stuff enough to really grasp the uniquness of The Knife's particular genius.

Honorable Mention: I am still digesting the new album by the Mountain Goats. Preliminary thoughts most center around the string arrangment on the title song, its back-loaded-ness and the similie involving something coming something else like a drifter to a highway ramp.

Last evening down on lover's lane she strayed

2006-08-24T13:18:00.000-05:00

Song: Miss Otis Regrets (She's Unable to Lunch Today)
Day: 8/23, 8/24
Artist: Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald
Source: Ella Fitzgerald sings the Cole Porter Songbook
After a week of perfect weather (and also too much running around to really think about music), a few days of gray have settled in. Last year this would have meant Elliot Smith, right now it means Cole Porter.

Apparently this song was meant as a parody, a comic juxtaposition of gentility and violence. In the version I know best, Ella Fitzgerald's from her song book series, its played straight. Ella makes the song into a great leveler; no matter who you are, what kind of manners or upbringing you have you are subject to the affairs of the heart.

The song itself is an impressive combination of form and lyric. This clash is carried into its form which marries a sereis of very formal announcements "Miss Otis regrets she's unable to lunch today" with what is essentially a blues form of a repeated first line and a closing third that explains everything else. And its really this third line that gets me. This is where all the action happens, and melody highlights it with an unusually wide and bluesy interval jump that underscores Miss Otis's awkward pain that errupts through her otherwise impeccable behavior.

beautiful and strong

2006-08-15T13:20:00.000-05:00

Its been a little while, sorry. I the challenge of writing about A Silver Mt Zion seemed a little daunting.

Artist: A Silver Mt Zion
Day: 8/7-8/10
I saw them a week ago and listened to the first 2 songs off of Horses in the Sky for the rest of the week. Simply put they were really, really good. The hard part is concisely saying why.

Mostly it is about the vocals, particularly the parts where everyone sings. What I've always liked about the dark, large-group Montreal post-rock bands with strings is the way they mine the gaps between the potential beauty of the world (natural and human) , and the ways we routinely fall short of it. There is a strong feeling of lament, but they never lose sight of the hope that we can recapture that beauty and realize that potential, depite the madness and degredation we have surrounded ourselves with. In turn the depth of the lamentation makes the hope that much more precious and noble.

In A Silver Mt Zion, the group vocals become a powerful metaphor for this struggle. When all the members sing together, it clears the mental and sonic space. Singing is the most basic and readily available way of making music, and invites you to join in. I cannot play violin, but I can sing "When the world is sick/Can't no one be well?/But I drempt we was all beautiful and strong" and it helps. You can sing as well. We could sing together.

Song: Kiss Me Again And Again
Artist: Polmo Polpo
Source: Kiss Me Again And Again EP
Day: 8/11/06
This is a cover of Arthur Russel's/Dinosaur L's breakout song "Kiss Me Again". I haven't found the original yet but if you like Sandro Perri's work either as Polmo Polpo or Glissandro 70 you should check this out. Its a good marriage of the stretched soundscapes of the the Polmo Polpo "Like Hearts Swelling" record and the propulsive pulse of dance/disco.

Song: Believe It
Artist: Arthur Russel
Source: World of Echo
Day: 8/12/06
Cello and vocals with effects (as you might guess, echo and delay feature prominantly here) from '85. The treatments abstract the instrument and his voice, so they become something less recognized as "cello" or "singing" and something more heard as tones, textures and sounds. The parts are very minimal but the the experience is full and interesting. If you are having a hard time picturing this, think of Liz Phair's "flower" only serene and better executed.

Honorable Mentions:
Shows! Lots and lots of shows this week.

8/7 was A Silver Mt. Zion which was awesome.
8/9 saw an OK but way too late Frog Eyes and Wolf Parade show. I keep thinking at some point Frog Eyes is going to produce something transcendant. There are glimpses of it on the albums and when they play live, but they haven't quite nailed it yet. We'll see, maybe I'm wrong here. The Wolf Parade half of the show convinced me even more that Spencer Krug is the part of the band I find interesting. The other songs felt flat.
8/12 I caught Cloud Cult at the Pizza Luce Block Party. The set had some amazing moments. Facing the throngs jostling for beer and pizza was a difficult comedown after an intense closing song that temporarily turned me into a basket case.
8/13 The reformed Gorilla Biscuits played here on Sunday and were great. I am deeply skeptical of reunions, particularly of punk or hardcore bands, since they are supposed to be more than just entertainment (or so the scene claims). The very idea of the show was problematic and its execution did not clear those questions, but it was also very, very much fun so its best not to think about all that.
8/14 This Bike is a Pipe Bomb and Japanther - lofi fun. TBIAPB played fast, slightly twangy country/folk/punk with lots of goofy, easy charm. Japanther are bass and drums 2 piece with cassette tape accompaniment. People were dancing and having a good time. A show to clear out the cobwebs.

I would pay to be fulfilled

2006-08-08T13:00:00.000-05:00

Song: Beleaders
Day: 8/1/2006
Artist: End of a Year (here's a version from a previously released split w/ threefifteen)
Source: Sincerely
voice in ear: "Davin, no one wants to read yet another rant by someone well into their adult years about the tragectory of the word and idea 'emo'"
me: "but its key to understanding why this band is so compelling to me, see back in the mid 80s through the early 90s or so..."
voice in ear (interrupting): "what did I just say?"
me: "but come on, they are named for an Embrace song. Besides, I wasn't going to try to win the term back. You can't stop language from changing. Its gone, I give up."
voice in ear: "about time, you were starting to sound like you were trying out for that national language board I heard the french have."
me: "haun-haun-hau"
voice in ear: "yeah, I know, it's a cheap shot"
me: "still, all I am saying is what was cool about the first few waves of bands tagged with the e-word is that they were willing to push the boundaries of what punk/hardcore sounded like while still maintaining punk's immediancy and intenstity. I mean I love Minor Threat and Bad Brains as much as the next person, but sometimes I want to hear something else."
voice in ear: "What about your extensive collection of Amy Grant records"
me: "I thought I told you never to mention those"
voice in ear: "sorry, so for you it comes down to a retro-punk/progressive-punk thing?"
me:"well I have a lot of records with bands playing fast power chords. listen to this song. Its clearly got the drive of a punk song, but the main riff is a bass and two guitars playing off each other. A little like a fugue. It gives the song a loose, open feel even though the interplay is pretty tight. In this way they kind of remind me of a less showy 1.6 Band."
voice in ear: "who?"
me: "never mind. Or perhaps early Public image limited if you took out some of the dub elements and noisier tendancies and sped up the tempo some."
voice in ear: "uh, Ok"
me: "but also its about the lyrics. What's cool about Embrace or Rites of Spring or Heroin or Moss Icon or the Hated is that their songs weren't all about bad relationships and getting dumped, they had this outward looking element to them as well. End of Year picks this up with some (perhaps a tad sarcastic) existentialist commentary:
There's something missing, there's something missing
I've tried girls and jobs/all that's left is drugs and god"
voice in ear: "Fair enough. But Davin, no wants to read an over-long imaginary dialog. Who do you think you are, Plato?"
me: "shut up, you."

camel's eye

2006-08-01T13:10:00.000-05:00

Day: 7/28-7/29 of 06
Song: "Toast in the Water"
On the way up north to go camping Mike inadvertantly combined the colloquialisms "you're toast" with "dead in the water" resulting in this phrase and a weekend of inventing new lyrics to "Smoke on the Water". Examples include:
toast in the water/the soggy butter side
and
luke, I am your father/you know it to be true
we could rule the galaxy/if I joined up with you
(in the cool light of reason, its possible this last one might be disqualified since I don't think the original has the 4th line).
Oh Well, I guess you had to be there.

Day: 7/31/06
Song: Needles in the Camel's Eye (link courtesy of/heartlessly stolen from The Rich Girls Are Weeping)
Artist: Brian Eno
Source: Here Come the Warm Jets
I stumbled across a mention of Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and this song popped into my head. Now the Eno-savvy of you out there (or those of you who read the header) will no doubt point out that this song is not from TTMbS and you'd be right. But I've always liked this album better. Sure "Burning Airlines Give You So Much More" is probably a better song than anything on Jets, but if its pop you are craving, Jets is the better all around bet.

... which is indeed what I was craving. Needle in the Camel's Eye was the lift I needed to get me through a blistering 100 degree monday with the airconditioning only half functioning at work. Try it sometime, things can only seem so bad while you are listening to this song. (Setting aside buzz-kill reductio ad absurdum examples - dental procedures without novicaine, genocide - for a moment here.) From the band pounding away on their wobbly guitars to the way Eno sings at the edge of his vocal range with just the right level of ease and strain, the song is nigh perfect without seeming so; the arty/cacluated elements simmering just under the surface of the song's melody and drive. Even the guitar solo, a rock artifact that I'm usually suspicious and/or resentful of (unless its Lou Reed's interlude in "What Goes On"), is laudable model of restraint the accentuates the rest of the song instead od destracting you from it. And how can you not love a song with 4 grand pauses?

Elephant's eye

2006-07-25T12:12:00.000-05:00

The title is both reference to the fact that we are in the height of summer, which means growing season here in the midwest and the Elephant Eyelash album Why? released late last fall which I've been fixated on recently. Its a definate departure from his earlier quasi-solo efforts and collaborations like cLOUDDEAD, Greenthink, and Reaching Quiet, but a not too surprising progression given the sound of the Hymie's Basement collaboration or Oakland Asylum album. You hear bits and parts of his old rap cadence here and there, there is a little turntablism, and there's probably some Dr. Samples work, but mostly its an indie rock record complete with singing and a full band sound. And a really good one at that. He's maintained the slanted take on life and song structure that gave his previous work its distinctiveness and added a really strong pop sensibility and slightly more straightforward (and to me more affecting) approach to lyric writitng. Not quite a classic but it wouldn't surprise me if the next one was.

Song: Daniel Striped Tiger
Artist: Tiny Hawks
Album: Fingers Become Bridges
Day: 7/13/06

Song: You've got a right
Artist: Tiny Hawks
Album: Fingers Become Bridges
Day: 7/17/06
I know I've talked about Tiny Hawks before, but there's good reason for it. Their spazz-emo-prog is like all my favorite elements from my favorite bands of the early-mid 90s hardcore bands updated for today. Plus there's this wide-eyed hope and beauty and heart that shines through the furious strumming and tapping (eat your heart out Eddie Van Halen!) and drumming, which is why all that 90s diy noise was worthwhile in the first place. Their music is a restorative. And just plain fun, like "You've got a right" which is a quick riff that they manage to develop and give narrative motion to in just 20 seconds or so.

Song: Friends Are Evil
Artist: Jesu
Album: S/T
Day: 7/20/06
Metal meets shoegaze in an overwhealming and engulfing mass of sound, like being underwater in the ocean as waves pass over. It's similutaneously ego-crushing and narcisistic. You realize you are something tiny in something big, while at the same time the rest of the world is blocked out, so in some sense you are the world, at least for the duration of the album. For the same reasons, the music fits night was well, especially summer nights when you can be outside and be enveloped by the darkness and the warmth. I had never really paid much attention to this song until it happened to be the song that came on my ipod as I was going home this day, but it has some cool parts that make it stand out - a looped almost industrial part at the beginning and a cool coda of a more gentle but feedback-y loop.

Artist: Yellow Swans/D Yellow Swans
Album: Drift Yellow Swans
day: 7/22/06
Yellow Swans or DYellow Swans like to put different D words in front of their name. (Perhaps they are fans of Will Oldam/Bonnie "Prince" Billy/Palace x, perhaps they want to confuse record store clerks.) Sometimes they are just yellow swans. Other times they are Declawed Yellow Swans. Or Duh.... Or Dosed.... or Dyad.... Or... you get the picture. On this CD they are Drift Yellow Swans which is a pretty good description for their sound this time around. If you are not familar with D Yellow Swans, this is noise. Stressed circuits, tape loops, feedback, the whole nine yards. But this doesn't sound like "noise." There is an ambient structure to the sound. The first track even has a clear pattern and some tones. Its still pretty abstract stuff, which makes it different and cool, but there's enough here to ground it that you can listen to it (although I don't recommend driving to it; I've found I kind of space out too much for that) and not just use it as a sonic assault.

Artist: Shogun Kunitoki
album: Tasankokaiku
Song: daniel, but really any and all from this album
Day: 7/23/06
Its rare that something impresses me this much on the first listen (I got this album on this day). Its so rare in fact I'm a little scared of it, that it might be fleeting. Oh well, if it does fade away, might as well enjoy it while it lasts. This is instrumental keyboard and organ based music. It reminds me of the drone-y and patterned based elements of Stereolab but with the space age bachelor pad feel removed and replaced with a swirling, almost psychedelic quality. And perhaps some of the melodramatic grandeur of M83 (with a little less melodrama). And the arpeggios recall Philip Glass some. Like all of these folks, Shogun Kunitoki make experimental music that is accessible, immediate and dramatic. Church music for agnostics.

And did I mention they're Finnish?

Artist: Arthur Russel
album: World of Arthur Russel
Song: Keeping Up
Day: 7/24/06
Man I had a good run at the old record store the other day. In addition to the Shogun Kunitoki album and some Why? EPs I got this collection of Arthur Russel's music. I came to him via Glissandro 70/Polmo Polpo who have name dropped him (and the general excitement over the reissues that have been coming out recently). Tucked in among the left-field disco that I was expecting is this track which is a series of cut and overlapping vocal tracks with a spare cello, guitar and gentle bass drum accompaniement. The vocals are slighty disjointed and disorienting like vocalese chopped up by some glitch dj/producer. Or perhaps I should just say it sounds like The Books, only this is from the mids 80s. There is a delicate, organic quality that makes it irresistable.

Honorable mentions: Buck 65 - Bachelor of Science, Lightning Bolt - Hello Morning

Cadillac Ranch, or We Bury Our Baby Blue Sedans

2006-07-14T13:03:00.000-05:00

Quickly for the record:

Day: 7/11/06
Song: We Bury Our Dead Alive
Artist: Yaphet Kotto
Source: We Bury Our Dead Alive
After a quiet, clean intro, a wall of distorted guitars kicks in, not quite at hardcore tempos but with a more interesting rhythm. The vocals are somewhere between a roar and a scream, like the dude is about to burst. The whole thing gets transformed into something beautiful and empowering, but no less urgent, with the introduction of a high guitar line that seems to skip above the fray, like wire-based kung fu movie stunt. Simply DIY punk/emo/hardcore at its best. An amazing emotionally charged, politically influenced song about conscience and the duties and hopes thereof.

Day: 7/13/06
Song: Baby Blue Sedan
Artist: Modest Mouse
Source: Building Nothing out of Something
At least once a year this song will pop intself into my head. Usually in the summer because that's when I listened to this album the first time around.

Isaac Brock has a good ear for clever lyrical twists. The most obvious one here is the "I miss you when your around/I never miss you when I'm by myself" inversion, but I've always been a bigger fan of "henry you dance like a woodfooted indian" myself. The way he sings it, it sounds like an old couple teasing each other (perhaps thats due to the derth of Henrys these days) although perhaps I just hold on to that as a corrective to the feeling isolation and ennui of the rest of the song.

Minding the Gaps

2006-07-13T12:26:00.000-05:00

Catching up here and there

The song I mentioned that crushed me (this is a good thing by the way) is by Cloud Cult. I am not sure the name of the song, but I'm working on it.

Day: 7/6/06
Song: Vocal Test
Artist: Integrity
Source: Humanity is the Devil
I go back and forth between an almost naive optimism about the human condition and extreme misanthropy. This day, after witnessing new levels of pettiness, passive aggression and agressive agression in a local movie house of all places, I swung to the latter. Appropriately enough I had a copy of Integrity's Humanity is the Devil in the car with me to blast on my way home.

As you can guess from the title, Cleveland's finest weren't very satisified with the whole homo sapiens thing (there's even a little booklet/treatise included in early versions of the record about how the Judeo-Christian god has given up on its creations, handing over their care to the demons who are now 90% of the population trying to tempt and damn the remaining 10) and this revulsion comes through in their mix of hardcore, metal, and mosh. This track is just what it says it is, a wordless string of vocal screams over heavy, loud, heavy, riffs to make sure they can be heard. (Kind of like if instead of saying "check, check, check" while setting up, bands played slayer.) Since its not trying to be a "song" it has a direct, expressionist kind of punch. Music for the end times.

Day: 6/23/06
Song: please come home to hamngatan
Artist: the Mountain Goats
Source: Ghana
After they ended the US's hopes at making it out of pool play, I felt I should pay tribute to the Black Stars, by ...errr... listening to indie acoustic rock. But the name of the collection is Ghana! That counts for something right?

Anyway this song is one of my favorites in the tMG cannon, a simple idea excecuted with great skill. Like many of their highlights, this song captures a mindset and situation so vividly, its like meeting someone at a party whose on the verge of falling apart and then having them unload on you. Only its far more pleasant because you're not really at a party, you're at home listening to a record, and there's a pleasant tune that accompanies the whole thing. Also there's something about the mention of "moose" at the very end that sends this one over the top.

Day: 7/7/06
Song: Christmas Isn't Christmas
Artist: Meneguar
Source: I was Born At Night
Meneguar's combination of influences (Braid, Jawbox, Jawbreaker and other 90s bands that straddled the indierock/punk/hardcore divide) are a perfect combination for summer biking, which is what I was doing this evening. Energetic, insistant and defiant, yet still fun and catchy.

pleasant myth that makes my life worthwhile

2006-07-12T13:09:00.000-05:00

Song: Progress
Artist: Mission of Burma
Source: VS (bonus tracks)
Day: 7/10/06

Classic Burma: Its driving and catchy, while at the same time the song always eludes my ability to hear/process it all at once. There's a level of jangly noise here that makes the tunefulness of the song all the more interesting and special and the impassioned vocals clinch it for me everytime.

Rua?

2006-07-06T13:08:00.000-05:00

rua?

Sorry its been a while. While I've been away:

I've caught parts of the End Times Festival II, but that isn't the kind of stuff that I take with me. It more envelopes and/or throttles me while I am there. It's like a happening, Daddy-O.

I've been continually charmed by Think About Life's and Parts and Labor's rediscovery of the keyboards ability to be both a source of sonic abrasion *and* impossibly catchy melody. I talked about Parts and Labor a while ago. Maybe I'll post about Think About Life in more detail. Until I do, my quick take: imagine the gauzy, lofi keyboard wall of sound of Suicide put into the service of mid/late 90s indie rock. With a few Philip Glass and hip hop digressions thrown in for good measure. A little uneven but when it clicks, they're awesome.

I've been crushed by a song I do not know the title or artist of

If you liked the VSS (ex- angel hair, they have the distinction of a)being influenced by english post-punk way, way, way before it was cool b) releasing one of the most harrowing albums I own), the new Year Future album is really good. Perhaps this is what the loathsome thrill of the Sex Pistols was like before everyone realized it was just rock 'n roll and they got cannonized

Warhammer 48K

gone traveling, which always throws me off

Anyway back to our regularly scheduled programming. If I remember more, I'll let you know

Day: 7/5/06
Song: Portuguese Rua Rua
Artist: Glissandro 70
Source: S/T
A few years back when I was buying nearly everything that came out on Constellation Records, I stumbled across this awesome little album by this band called Polmo Polpo. It was a collection of drones and desert rock loops that built themselves up into beautiful and occasionally jaunty ambient compositions. The main force behind that, Sandro Perri is back on this collaboration with Craig Dunsmuir.

The result is a bit more dancy than polmo polpo and a bit poly-everything (rhythmic, melodic, tylistic), with a nice understatedness to it. I am not sure I know all the touchstones here (they quote Juan Atkins/Model 500's No UFOs, but all I know about that is its status as a Detroit Techno classic, and Arthur Russell is mentioned in the Constellation write-up) so I'll just say if you can imagine tortoise-style post rock with a techno approach to pacing and build and had it move its hips a little you wouldn't be far off. Or if you could imagine a mashup of Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and mid-era talking heads in their layered, poly, world music mode you wouldn't be that far off either. Layers of guitar and chants come and go, sometimes building, sometimes as counterpoint. Fun, mellow, exhilarating.

6/16, 6/18

2006-06-20T17:18:00.000-05:00

In Brief:

Day: 6/16/06
Song: Ave Maria
Artist: unknown soloist/Bretram O'Bryen composer

6/16/06 was the day of the funeral for my Grandma. I mentioned previously that her dad was a chior director, but I didn't mention that he wrote some music. Among the things he composed was this Ave Maria, written for his wife and published by McLaughlin & Reilly Co of Boston back in 1915. It was sung at grandma's funeral by an unknown Contralto.

Day: 6/18/06
Song: New Buildings
Artist: Parts and Labor
Switching things up some... Screeching Weasel and Sonic Youth fight in an alley. The Locust jump in. Ben Weasel staggers out bleeding. This song is a pop punk gem made all the more precious by being buried in noise, feedback and keyboard sonic terror. There's a live video of it at the jagjaguwar website.

Somewhere between here and there is even better than here or there

2006-06-20T17:07:00.000-05:00

Filling in the gaps from 6/1 to 6/14

Day : 6/6/06
Song: Raining Blood
Artist: Slayer
Source: Reign in Blood
Some enterprising folks notice today's date and decided to do something about it. No I don't mean the people responsible for the Omen remake, I mean National Day of Slayer.

I'm nothing if not a sucker for a gimick pseudo-holiday (although somehow I always miss Talk Like a Pirate Day, probably to the relief of those aaaround me) so I dusted off my copy of Reign in Blood and cracked it on the way to Work. I soon found myself fast forwarding to the end so I could hear the (sorta, they spell it differently) title track. It features a break down with one of the the top 5 metal riffs ever. You've probably heard it if you ever knew someone who liked metal or saw a tv show about extreme sports: a duhn-duhn-duhn followed by something that sounds like "In the Hall of the Dwarven King" if the king in question were really, really badass and a touch sadistic. If you follow the link to the NDoS website you might hear it playing in the background.

Day: 6/8/06
Song: A Sleepy Company
Artist: The Oliva Tremor Control
Source: Black Foliage
Its always nice when a song can surprise you. I've probably listened to this song more than 100 times and yet on this day I noticed for the first time what I am pretty sure are Pac Man samples in the middle section (the part that ends with "Dig a hole and listen for the history").

Day 6/9/06
Song: One Fine Day
Artist: the Mountain Goats
Source: Live
John Darnielle said he was beating the people who yell out old songs at his shows at their own game by playing a song that predated his first tapes. Apparently he used to play this cover at all his early shows. What's striking about the tMG version is that he strips away the sweetness of the Chiffons and exposes its the dark undertones of the narrator waiting, perhaps a little bitterly aand perhaps a little too sure, for that one fine day where (s)he will be wanted.

Days 6/10-6/11
See List below
Aaron suggested that we build a playlist for the trip down to Portland (to see the Mountain Goats again, of course) using the contents of his iPod. We took turns adding a song to the On the Go playlist unaware of what the other selected, eventually stopping when the total reached 100. Selections below. Special mention goes to "The Robots" by Kraftwerk which took on a life of its own.

If you're bored you can try guessing if I was the odd-numbered songs or the evens.

Honorable Mentions: "I'm Feeling So Fuckin' Fine" - Cloud Cult, "Flame" - Sebadoh, "money" and "paul cries" by Think About Life, the Glissandro 70 record

The Portland Trip List (sorry for the crappy excel export, I'm lazy):

Song #	Title	Artist	Album	Length
1	Portland Oregon	Loretta Lynn & Jack White	Van Lear Rose	3:49
2	Heroes	David Bowie	Heroes	6:09
3	Zebra	Man Man	The Man In A Blue Turban With A Face	4:03
4	Quito	The Mountain Goats	We Shall All Be Healed	2:03
5	The Jezebel Spirit	Brian Eno & David Byrne	My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts	4:53
6	Grounds For Divorce	Wolf Parade	Apologies To The Queen Mary	3:24
7	Harry Irene	Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band	Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)	3:42
8	Hopeless	The Wrens	The Meadowlands	5:08
9	(Nothing But) Flowers	Caetano Veloso	A Foreign Sound	4:19
10	Lonely Woman	Ornette Coleman	The Shape Of Jazz To Come	5:02
11	Lampshade	Beck	A Western Harvest Field by Moonlight	4:06
12	Banshee Beat	Animal Collective	Feels	8:22
13	Bicycle, Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle	Be Your Own Pet	Be Your Own Pet	2:06
14	LAX	Hot Snakes	Suicide Invoice	2:01
15	Beast For Thee	Matt Sweeny & Bonnie Prince Billy	Superwolf	3:41
16	House Of Jealous Lovers	The Rapture	Echoes	5:04
17	Academy Fight Song [1980 7" single]	Mission of Burma	Signals, Calls And Marches	3:09
18	Nightendday	Pelican	Australasia	11:14
19	Diptheria	The Nation Of Ulysses!	13-Point Program to Destroy America	4:15
20	Accordian	Madvillain	Madvillainy	1:58
21	I Don't Want to Get Over You	Mary Lou Lord	Live City Sounds	2:26
22	Reitschule	Do Make Say Think	& YET & YET	9:17
23	I've Been Thinking	Handsome Boy Modeling School & Cat Powe style='display:none'>r	White People	5:24
24	Painter in Your Pocket	Destroyer	Destroyer's Rubies	4:10
25	Loved Despite Of Great Faults	Blonde Redhead	Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons	4:12
26	Paperhouse	CAN	Tago Mago	7:28
27	Wild Honey Pie	Pixies	At The BBC	1:51
28	Testament To Youth In verse	The New Pornographers	Electric Version	3:57
29	Lake Of Fire Memories	Nels Cline / Wally Shoup / Chris Corsano	Immolation/Immersion	2:32
30	Superstition	Stevie Wonder	Talking Book	4:26
31	Green Onions	Booker T. & The MG's	The Very Best Of Booker T. & The MG's	2:55
32	Shoes	Akron/Family	Akron/Family	3:42
33	No Chorus	Dr. Dooom	First Come, First Served	2:26
34	(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais	The Clash	The Clash	4:00
35	XXX	Helium	Pirate Prude	5:19
36	John Hardy	Leadbelly	Absolutely The Best (lb)	3:13
37	The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism	The New Pornographers	Mass Romantic	3:56
38	Is This Thing On?	The Promise Ring	Nothing Feels Good	3:37
39	The Mess We're In	PJ Harvey	Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea	3:57
40	Naked As We Came	Iron & Wine	Our Endless Numbered Days	2:32
41	Easy	Liz Phair	Juvenilia	3:11
42	St. John The Divine	Ted Leo / Pharmacists	The Tyranny Of Distance	6:39
43	Five Years	David Bowie	The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars	4:43
44	Texas Never Whispers	Pavement	Slanted And Enchanted: Luxe And Redux	3:08
45	Gloria	Patti Smith	Horses	5:55
46	Soft Revolution	Stars	Set Yourself On Fire	3:16
47	Kick Me And Cancel	Robert Pollard	From A Compound Eye	2:10
48	Sister Jack	Spoon	Gimme Fiction	3:35
49	I Summon You (Demo)	Spoon	Gimme Fiction [Bonus Disc]	4:00
50	Define A Transparent Dream	The Olivia Tremor Control	Music From The Unrealized Film Script, Dusk At Cubist Castle	2:49
51	The Size Of Our Love	Sleater-Kinney	The Hot Rock	3:11
52	Brand New Day	Dizzee Rascal	Boy In Da Corner	4:00
53	Schizophrenia	Sonic Youth	Sister	4:38
54	Beats To The Rhyme	Run-D.M.C.	Greatest Hits	2:41
55	White Lines	Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5	Message from Beat Street: The Best Of	7:27
56	Whitney Walks	Jawbox	For Your Own Special Sweetheart	3:57
57	Who Are You	Tom Waits	Bone Machine	3:57
58	Back To Base	Fugazi	Red Medicine	1:45
59	Blood on the Motorway	DJ Shadow	The Private Press	9:12
60	What Do You Want Me To Say	Dismemberment Plan	Emergency & I	4:18
61	The Gift	The Velvet Underground	White Light/White Heat	8:16
62	New Room	Chavez	Ride The Fader	3:11
63	Public Pervert (Carlos D Remix)	Interpol	Antics Remixes	8:08
64	Human Interest	Drive Like Jehu	Yank Crime	3:24
65	The Fate Of The Human Carbine	Cat Power	What Would The Community Think	2:58
66	Livin' For The City	The Dirtbombs	Ultraglide In Black	3:07
67	Let's Dance	M. Ward	Transfiguration Of Vincent	5:00
68	Disorder	Joy Division	Unknown Pleasures	3:31
69	The Big Three Killed My Baby	The White Stripes	The White Stripes	2:29
70	The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get U style='display:none'>s!	Sufjan Stevens	Come On Feel The Illinoise!	5:23
71	Random Rules	Silver Jews	American Water	3:58
72	Help Us Stay Alive	Explosions in the Sky	Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever	7:19
73	Say Yes	Elliott Smith	Either/Or	2:19
74	Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl	Broken Social Scene	You Forgot It In People	4:35
75	Heartbeat	Wire	Chairs Missing	3:15
76	Mayonaise	Smashing Pumpkins	Siamese Dream	5:49
77	Black Cadillacs	Modest Mouse	Good News For People Who Love Bad News	2:43
78	Gravity	Moss Icon	Lyburnum	4:44
79	The Blarney Stone	Ween	The Mollusk	3:14
80	Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)	Talking Heads	Remain In Light	5:48
81	The Robots	Kraftwerk	The Man Machine	6:12
82	Terminus	Unwound	Leaves Turn Inside You [Disc 1]	9:39
83	Away Birdies W/Special Sounds	Grandaddy	A Pretty Mess By This One Band	1:59
84	Forget Remember When	Built To Spill	Carry The Zero EP	4:19
85	Love Lies	Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band	Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)	5:03
86	Deeper Into Movies	Yo La Tengo	I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One	5:23
87	She Will Only Bring You Happiness	Mclusky	The Difference Between Me and You Is That I'm Not On Fire	3:27
88	The Body Breaks	Devendra Banhart	Rejoicing In The Hands	2:43
89	Muffin Man	Frank Zappa	Strictly Commercial	5:33
90	Red Right Ankle	The Decemberists	Her Majesty	3:29
91	Postal Blowfish	Guided By Voices	King Shit And The Golden Boys	2:12
92	Lie Down On Landsdowne	Lifter Puller	Fiestas + Fiascos	3:35
93	Lazy	David Byrne	Grown Backwards	9:36
94	Yeah! Oh, Yeah!	The Magnetic Fields	69 Love Songs	2:19
95	Grounded	Pavement	Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: L.A.'s Desert Origins	3:35
96	Island Garden Song	The Mountain Goats	The Coroners Gambit	2:27
97	The Lyre Of Orpheus	Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds	The Lyre Of Orpheus	5:36
98	Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Truth?	Minutemen	Double Nickels On The Dime	1:50
99	So Into You	Shudder To Think	Pony Express Record	3:43
100	Engine	Neutral Milk Hotel	Jeff Mangum Live At Jittery Joe's	5:13

6/14/06

2006-06-15T00:25:00.000-05:00

Song: Fullness of Wind (Part (i) of "Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel")
Artist: Brian Eno after Johann Pachebel
Source: Discreet Music
Day: 6/14/06

My grandma died early in the morning on 6/14/06. I didn't really set out to have a song or post related to that, in fact I avoided albums that seemed like the obvious choices. Art can help throw our lives and emotions into perspecitve but it can also give them a roteness that I wanted to avoid. I didn't want to play a song to make me sad or whatever just because that's what I am supposed to feel at times like this. I want to just feel how I am feeling, or at least sort it out without trying to shoehorn it into 5 stages.

But perhaps it is unavoidable that things would have some resonance. It was more a desire to listen to something quiet and neutral that caused me to pull my copy of Descreet Music off the shelf yesterday, but somehow this song fit. I've always been a sucker for what I know as the Pachebel Canon. I can remember my mom (this grandma's daughter) playing the record for me when I was a kid and just really liking the melody and the grand, loping rhythm. This is the remix by Brian Eno on his pre-Ambient ambient album. He took the score and tinkered with it and gave it to musicians to play and recorded the results. In this variation, the fragments they play change speeds at different rates so they come in and out of phase. The canon is recognizable but it comes out in this interesting post-Steve Reich form: a slightly sappy, beautiful, grandiose and perhaps-a-touch-sad Renaissance (?) sensibility filtered through a modernist one. Which as I have finished typing this I realize is a good descriptor of my mood yesterday, for better or for worse.

P.S. I am not sure what my grandma would think. I never knew her tastes that well. Although she came from family with music in it (her dad was a choir director), I don't get the feeling it was something she focused on much. She and my grandpa had a turntable and later a CD player, but it was hardly used when I was there. (She did take pride in fact that my mom and my aunts knew her tastes and gave her CDs that she liked.) I know she liked crooners and classical classics so she probably would have appreciated the canon in its original form. I doubt she would have had much time for Eno's feeding it through his "self-regulating and self generating" system. She had an honest sweetness about her that didn't really notice or care about serious art's views of sentimentality, so Eno's experiment, interesting as it is, would probably have been beside the point for her.

Take Me Higher, Baby

2006-06-05T13:18:00.000-05:00

Day: 6/1/06
Song: (tie)
White Lines (Don't Do It) - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
White Lines (Don't Do It) - Happy Go Licky
I'm not sure what chain of events caused the Grandmaster Flash greatest hits collection to appear at Extreme Noise (the collectively-run punk emporium that I volunteer at on Weds nights) but I don't care. Will I pay $4.50 to have "The Message", "Freedom", "Nasty (Genius of Love)", "New York, New York" and "White Lines (Don't Do It)" plus 7 more tracks? You bet your 1200s.

I thought I would be writing about The Message, for which I've always had a soft spot, but "White Lines" is the one that grabbed me last thursday (along with "Nasty" and its generous sampling of "Genius of Love"; perhaps Tom Tom Club weren't so bad after all). Its a strange yet seamless mix of a great bassline, rapping, beatles-like arpeggiated harmonies (think of their version of "twist and shout") and a dance/disco attention to pacing and structure. Amazing.

Part of the reason its so compelling is my only real exposure to it was in the Happy Go Licky form. For those of you unfamiliar, Happy Go Licky was the shortly lived, reformed Rites of Spring. (For those of you still unfamiliar, Rites of Spring was the best known band Guy and Brendan from Fugazi were in prior to Fugazi. [For those of you still unfamiliar, sorry.]) HGL didn't record much other than some super lo-fi tapes of shows and didn't really sound much like Rites of Spring's emotionally, personally charged punk/hardcore (try One Last Wish [3/4 RoS, album way-posthumously released by Dischord], or Rain for that), but Rites of Spring were, like, one of the best bands ever, so when Dischord emptied the HGL vaults I snapped it up. Their White Lines barely resembles the original. They only keep in the bass line and the "Take Me Higher Baby" chant and put it through the harsh rhythmic grinder of no wave. Its basically a sloppy curiousity, but again Rites of Spring are like, one of the bests band ever, so its worthwhile to be curious every once in a while. I broke it back out again last night for the first time in a couple of years, bringing my little White Lines story full circle.

Every Hippy who goes home bloody feels like a martyr back in the city

2006-06-02T13:51:00.000-05:00

Show: Pink Mountaintops, Catfish Haven
Venue: 7th Street Entry
Date: 5/30/06
My folk-friendly upbringing is starting to show. I mostly lay it at the feet of Neutral Milk Hotel who had to release an album I like very, very much and then decide (t)he(y)'d had enough, leaving a gap to be filled. So I am something of a sucker for sonicly adventurous pop (side note: I define 'pop' more as a structure - verse/chorus/etc. with a certain idea about melody, hooks, etc. - than as actually popular music; this is probably a misleading, maybe I'll put a personal glossary on this thing at some point) with some 60s influences.

Latest up were Pink Mountaintops. Stephen McBean's mountain empire (there's Black Mountains as well) has gotten some decent notices in the online press as of late; so finding myself with the later part of my eveing free, I stopped by the Entry to catch them and Catfish Haven. The latter were better than I expected. The singer carries the show with an intense performance like Ted Leo if he had grown up listening to 60s R&B/soul, Jim Croche, and the Guess Who instead of Thin Lizzy (or so the consensus description seems to be) and the Who and spending his youthing front punk bands at ABC No Rio. Not typically my thing but they got my head nodding. Pink Mountaintops took the stage (and by took the stage I mean took every inch of it) with 7 people playing a variety of guitars, keyboards, percussion, bass and singing. They reminded me of a less spacey or gospel influenced Spiritualized but with more of a groove. Their performance was infectous while they were on the stage (or at least until the fatigue of going to work and playing a game of ulimate settled in on me) and in slightly different circumstances the crowd might have been actively dancing instead of just swaying and bobbing our heads. I can't say I took much of the show away with me, but it was fun while it lasted.

Another One

2006-05-30T13:37:00.000-05:00

Song: Another One Goes By
Artist: Mazarin
Date: 5/29/06
Source: Album, here

While I still think the standout track from this album is Louise*, after hearing the Walkmen cover this song on their latest album, this is a close second (btw I prefer the original, in keeping with my "like the first version you hear" trend). Its a very different song than Louise, which gets most of its charm from its failure to conform to pop expectations. "Another One Goes By" great pop with an artful arrangement that adds interesting texture and tones without being too busy or smothering. The sound is familar and yet still hard to place. It is wistful, relaxed and expansive, like a lazy sunny Sunday, or "Don't Dream its Over" by Crowded House filtered through something 80s and english with some blue-eyed soul and soft psychedilia sprinkled on top.

*During last november, when I was trying to play catch up with this list, I took a crack at explaining the awesomeness of Louise. I hate to see that effort go to waste, so if you'll indulge me:

The easiest description I can come up with for this is a doubletime version of Mazzy Star's "Fade into You". The vocals glide. The lyrics are appropriately poetic and vague. The guitars are acoustic play similar chords to the Mazzy start song. They're accompanied by "the ocean" (at least that's what the booklet credits Brian McTear with) duplicating the earlier's gentle and dreamy sense of atmosphere.

What makes the song standout is the subtleties of the guitar arrangement. Against the overall relaxed mood, the guitar is contantly strummed, creating a sense of forward momentum. More interestingly, the pattern of the chords changes, but not in a verse/chorus way. Shortly after the intro, the song settles into a four chord/four measure pattern. Then it extends it to a ten measure pattern, before returning to the four measure structure for a short period of time ... only to wander again. It's as if the the words were dictating the structure of the music rather than the other way around. It lends the song an impromptu, meandering feeling, like you are listening to a conversation or monologue set to music, and personalizes everything in a way that more traditionally structured music fails to.

Thanks fopr indulging me.

Don't you let us fit in

2006-05-26T15:51:00.000-05:00

Yes, another roundup. Surprise!

Day: 5/16/06
Song Whenzy
Artist: Tiny Hawks
Source: Live, Album, here

Short version:
Tiny Hawks played here and rocked. Musically they fall somwhere inbetween the spastic energy of early Gravity records bands and the disjointed mathy-ness of Cap'n Jazz or 12 Hour Turn, bound together by a strong tonal (not quite "melodic" but still pretty catchy as these things go) sense and skillful playing. When they were done the guy behind me said, "I'm dizzy now." They have a new album which just came out, but this song was one of the few they played off their previous recording and is available for free download to boot!

Long version:
Occasionally pesky questions pop into my mind as to why and whether I am still compelled by the diy hardcore/punk/whatever scene. After all I am 30, have a house and a job and supposed to be a grown up. Punk is supposed to be a young person's game of late nights and messin' with the man. Or something. Thing that are hard to do when you have to work in the morning and pay billz.

...and then a band like Tiny Hawks will come to town. They set up on the floor and played a whirlwind set with a mix of passion, fury, humor and heart rarely found elsewhere.

Truth is I never was too "punk" as it is popularly conceived. I never charged my hair or dyed it. I rarely sneer. This scene for me was about revolution but one of a small nature. It was about carving out the spaces - physicaly, mental, musical, social - where you could relaize the parts of yourself not embraced elsewhere and learn to cultivate them in the rest of your life. It was about stiving to create, even if only for short periods, a more free and humane world for yourself and those around you. Its not as cool as anarchy or as sexy as self-destruction. Nor is it as noble as fighting hunger or supporting women's shelters or campaigning for environmental causes. On the other hand it is concrete and immediate and helps give you the strength and confidence to pursue those other things.

This is what the show and band was about, from their ideosyncratic music to their choice of venue. Not to over sell it, in the end the Tiny Hawks show was just a concert where some intersting bands played. But those people in that undergound space reinforced this idea that diy is a concept with power and resonance. We can do it ourselves and with a little luck and dedication it will be full of passion, fury, humor and heart.

Day: 5/18/06
Song: Goin' Against Your Mind
Artist: Built to Spill
Source: You in Reverse (album), you can listen to a stream of it here
Built to Spill's return to form. I felt a bit let down by Ancient Melodies of the Future so I got the new album as much out of a sense of duty as genuine excitement. Thankfully duty faded away on this, the first track. Indie rock at its finest: catchy, adventurous, but in a simple, understated, "I could do that" way. (If I were as good a songwriter, that is.) It also has all the hallmarks of classic BtS: the propulsive guitars, the way they push the song interesting directions, the way Doug's voice floats above it all, the insistant melody. Its a song that has stuck with me, popping into my head at random times, like on this day when I was getting some lunch and a little voice in my head started singing "hiding things that no one wants to find."

Day: 5/19/06
Song: Sometimes I Still Feel the Bruise
Artist: the Mountain Goats
Source: Babylon Springs EP
New Mountain Goats! 4 new songs and a cover! This song is the cover. The grim humor of the lyrics lightens the mood some ("You left an impression/sometimes I still feel the bruise") and the restraint of the vocals and arrangement keeps it from being maudelin or a mopefest. Still this is perhaps the saddest music in the world. We're not just talking unrequited love or lost love here, the song is an ode to a lost, unrequited love. The understated execution lets the song do the work, letting the detatched ache of the lyrics soak through. It makes the song all the more devistating, creating a sense of the narrator's powerlessness to act on his desire.

Day: 5/20/06
Song: new paths to helicon 1
Artist: Mogwai
Live at First Avenue
Everything that made the early Mogwai records great. A simple, simple, simple melody made grand and impossibly beautiful through careful arrangement and use of guitar effects. So many things that are usually opposed - noise/pop, simple/complex, atmospheric/catchy, rock/bliss, spare/epic - exist side by side here. This is Ur-rock.

Day: 5/22/06
Song: The Other Side of Mt Heartattack
Artist: Liars
Source: Drums Not Dead
In a strange way this reminds me of one of my favorite songs, Spiritualized's "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space". I'm not sure they actually sound that much alike; I think resemblance has something to do with tempo, the repetition of the lyrics, and the similarities in the way the "aaahh-ah" vocal accompaniment plays off the guiar line and vocals of Liars' song and the way the main instrumentation plays off the various layered vocals of the Spiritualized tune. The point of comparison is interesting (if I do say so myself) because while they might be similar muscially they are quite different lyrically. Where Jason Pierce is singing about being unmoored (the story is the album was written after his logntime girlfriend and Spiritualized member married someone else), Liars could not be more anchored. "I can always be found" and "I will stay by your side" they sing. These straighforward, unadorned declarations are matched by their version of the music which abandons the arty, shimmering drones of the rest of the album in favor of a few simple figures which build upon each other.

Day: 5/23/06
Mountain Goats redux, see 5/19

Day: 5/25.06
Song: House of Cats
Artist: Meneguar
Source: "I was Born at Night" Album, here!
OK I've slept on this one for a while. THey toured through here last summer with Gospel and the people I know who went to the show came back raving. Now a year later, I'm finally getting around to giving the album a listen. What can I say? I should have listened to them (and gone to the show, but that's a different story).

Their sound falls somewhere between the great gaping Jaws of early 90s punk-type music - Jawbreaker and Jawbox - with a little Hellbender (especially the vocals) and Braid thrown into the mix. If that means nothing to you, umm... the guitars wind around each other in a driving, angular way like Modest Mouse in double time until they come crashing around the vocals. The singing is rough and tuneful and is refreshingly earnest but not preachy. The whole thing is a "jump around the room, pissed, defiant and gleeful" kind of affair. They're setting someone one notice but they also want to dance.

..and then they get to the breakdown/coda, which is a total anthem in and of itself. Click on the link and wait for the breakdown where they start singing "one hand is broken and the other needs a break", hopefully you'll see what I mean.

PsychHouseVigilante

2006-05-16T12:57:00.000-05:00

Or my weekend...

Day: Sat 5/13/06 (Tie)
Song: Psychward
Artist: Feederz
Source: Teachers in Space Album
I grabbed Teachers in Space because I haven't listened to it too much. I've always liked this song with its 2-chord sychopated psych-surf rhythm figure and its spiralling guitar line winding up and down while a detached female voice lists off the facts of the modern world (circa 1986). Too weird to be pop or punk, but not so out there it just feels like a wanky experiement; a great mix of punk, art and pop for when you feel alienated by the world or the safe confines of most music.

Song: Love Vigilantes
Artist: New Order
Source: the Metrodome
Still stranger than "Psychward" is hearing a somewhat osbcure New Order song at a Twins Game. (Although they both lose out to the guy trotting around the stadium in the foam rubber fish costume.) This isn't that surprising a choice - I doubt the Twins will be taking batting practice to "Leave Me Alone" or "Everything's Gone Green" anytime soon - but it reinforces how good New order are at pop when they want to be and surpising it is that more people in this country haven't recognized that. Of course the fact remains that they haven't, which is what makes it such a pleasant surprise to hear them in a mainstream environment

Day: Sun 5/14/06
Song: Full House
Artist: Wes Montgomery
Source: Full House - Album
Sundays are perfect for jazz, particularly when the weeks catching up with you and you want something not too abrasive (Feederz would have been a bad choice) but still has some "go" to it (as an old revelation records catalog used to describe their releases; I guess that quality is really swing). Either way Wes Montgomery, when performing with a combo, is perfect. He swings hard and but is still "cool". He here's backed up by Miles Davis' rhythm section of the time which probably doesn't hurt, either.

week's roundup

2006-05-12T13:26:00.000-05:00

Artist: Floor
Song: "Iron Well"
Source: Torche concert

Torche play heavy music with melody. I've discussed this before. They were here on monday and played a song I knew but couldn't place, turns out it was from the singer/rhythm guitartist's old band Floor. What stuck with me was the lyrics, specifically the phrase "let the bombs show us" which is delightfully, powerfully nihilistic and delightfully, powerfully satirical and fitting. After all what else have we been doing for the past 5 years but following the bombs, be they ours or someone elses? Thing is they didn't print lyrics on the album and a google search returns nothing so I can't say for certain what the song's about.

Few other quick notes: 1) its really odd to like a song whose lyrics are impervious to the power of google. 2) The music crushes. The songs "bombs" could also be a reference to Floor's (and Torche's) use of the "bombstring" a detuned string that doesn't really play a note, it just rumbles.

Artist: Hototogisu
Song: "ascend on blackened wings"
Source: the album with the green cover

Noise electronics over an ambient 2 chord drone. the drone gives the experience some structure, and the experience is like listening to some of the modal jazz coltrane (and others, I'm just less aware of them) did just before making the final free leap. Whats also interesting about this song and the others on this album is they start mid stream without any breaks or intros. They just plunge you in and let you splash about until you find your bearings, but typically give you something to latch on to.

Artist: the Ladies
Song: non-threatening
Source: They mean us

I spent sunday at Mayday, a very hippy event, and loved every minute of it. Still I can't help but appreciate Rob Crow quietly singing (over the gentlest use of a post-fugazi riff and a double-bass drum part I've ever heard) "I just want to say you can love whoever you want, love whatever you want. That doesn't make me a dirty hippy. Even though I was one in high school, I'm a hardcore punk rocker now." Just what I needed on tuesday night.

Artist: Skoal Kodiak
Live at a place that prefers to be not be mentioned by name in an electronic format

I'm at a loss at how to describe this. The drum and bass are driving and groovin' like a hard, mean, less sychopated funk combo. Then there's the other guy who triggers harsh but rocking miminalist loops and shouts through a heavily effected mic and plays a variety of homemade electronic noise makers, including something fashioned out of a clorox bottle.

I'm still not sure that captures the feeling, though... The music grooves in a away "noise" or "experiemental" bands rarely do. Instustrial music if you stripped away the goth overtones and they actually wanted you to dance? A lost Tom Waits/The Fall noise-disco collaboration? Check it out for yourself.

Honorable Mentions:
the Mountain Goats "Snow Owl", La Quiete - 12", Integrity - "Humanity is the Devil", Party of Helicopters - "Space... and How Sweet It Was"

you make me happy when skies are gray

2006-05-09T13:16:00.000-05:00

Song(s): Truth is marching in, Our Prayer
Artist: Albert Ayler
Album: Live in Greenwich Village: The Complete Impulse Recordings

I went to MayDay on sunday. It starts with a parade of massive, colorful puppets that goes into Powderhorn Park and then the elements of the parade are used in a pageant of spring, rebirth and hope for a better, more whole world. The 2 times I've gone, its one of the better public fests I've been to and has moments of great creativity and theater.

For me, the moment of the festival was the end of the "Story" part of the parade (the parade is divided into 2 sections, the story which has puppets that will be used for the pageant and then the free speach zone, where various organizations can walk behind and make people aware of their causes). I was watching the parade from near the intersection of Lake and Bloomington, a normally busy intersection made even more chaotic by construction on Lake street. The band laid down in the middle of the intersection and starts playing "You are my Sunshine". (Sort of like thi photo [if the photo doesn't appear try here] but with contruction cones, tore up concrete and cars.)

The visual image was striking: bodies in red in the middle of the upheaval of city living; their position was both one of exhaustion and vulnerablilty, and defiance and civil disobediance. "Sunshine" started out as an unfocused series of tones, almost as a dirge, or like these songs from the Albert Ayler: Live in Greenwich Village set. (For a moment before the music found its focus, I was really excited because I thought they were playing "Our Prayer").

It was perfectly fitting in ways I'm still trying to unpack. Mayday is about freedom and its form is one of wonder and intuition. The puppets and parade are made with great skill but they are not of the academy. Ayler's free jazz from these sets is "out there" but is always grounded in simple structures - marches ("Truth...") and chorales ("Our Prayer"). Unlike a lot of other free jazz, it doesn't feel like the product of jazz's (then) 50 year history of slowly severing its ties to songs, instead the music comes from the opposite direction grounded in an almost primative sense of music as raw sound and expression. The tone of the players in these recordings is brash and raw, almost amateurish, but it has a seeking and questioning quality to it, just as the fest's joy of possiblity is tempered by an awareness that we aren't there yet. I'm not sure this was the intention of the beginning but few other things could have summed up the hurt, hope, desire, freedom, joy, creativity, engery and curiousity of modern life that the fest (and Albert Ayler) at its best captures.

the dead will rise again

2006-05-05T13:21:00.000-05:00

Song(s): beautiful alarms, emergency (the latter is available from the label)
Artist: Wilderness
Days: since tues 3/2/6

Its odd that an album by a band that I rank among the least summery would finally make sense to me doing summery things.

Wilderness's debut was perfect winter music: dark, somewhat cold, but with an irresistable, precise beauty (to continue with the winter metaphor I'd say "like ice crystals forming on a window pane" but that's a touch too purple for me to include non-parenthetically). It still baffles me that the fine folks at Jagjaguar continue to release their music in the spring.

Late on tuesday night, I was biking back from a collective meeting. To me it was a quintessential summer moment. The air was damp but warm after a brief rain and I could comfortably be out late while the city went to sleep. It always reminds me of the thrill of staying up late as a kid. Like somehow the city and me, we're getting away with something by defying the wakeup-work-eat dinner-sleep logic of life. Its why my favorite pavement lyric is when steven malkmus sings "out on my skate board, the night is just humming" in "Range Life".

And I was listening to the newest Wilderness album.

On previous listens I had missed the sparse, stately geometry of the meandering guitars, rumbling toms, and bass counter melodies. The new album feels less formed. Its looser, almost as if it were just written for guitar and vocals. What I came to appreciate on tuesday and what has stuck with me since is the looseness of these 2 songs. (The rest of the album is closer in tone to the earlier album, sometimes excellent, sometimes harrowing, other times just alright) The guitar lines dance about a tonal center instead of settling themselves into riffs. With these two songs there's even a syncopated, dareisay 'jaunty' quality to the music, and a triumphant stateliness takes the place of the regal, detached statiness of the the debut. If these qualities make the songs less perfect and beautiful, they also make them more welcoming and approachable.

Which is what spring is all about.

Honorable mentions: "We Ate Sand" by Karp; "The Other Side of Mt Heart Attack" by Liars (Apparently it's "bands whose names are nouns but don't use a definate article" week)

Archives PT II

2006-05-02T17:44:00.000-05:00

Since paranoidandroid.net has died and is fading from the google cache, I'm reposting some things that used to live there.

Second, in early 2005 someone had posted asking for 10 essential songs from your favorite artist. Here are 10 or so Mountain Goats songs:
"(Its hard to pick 10 out of 400, but here goes...)
"The Recognition Scene" Sweden
"Golden Boy" Ghana
"Jenny" All Hail West Texas
"Cubs in 5" 9 Black Poppies
"Baboon" Coroner's Gamit
"Gameshows Touch OUr Lives" Tallahassee*
"Minnesota" Full Force Galesburg
"Cotton" We Shall All Be Healed
"Going to Georgia" Zipolote Machine
"Prana Ferox" Sweden
"Best Ever Death Metal Band..." All Hail west Texas

* I feel like Tallahasee needs to be included but am having a hard time settling on an essential, representative track. "Oceanographer's Choice", "Southwood Plantation Road", "First Few Desperate Hours" or "Old College Try" coud also work here"

Archives PT1

2006-05-02T17:41:00.000-05:00

Since paranoidandroid.net has died and is fading from the google cache, I'm reposting some things that used to live there.

First Up my favorites list from 2004:
"After much personal footdragging, here is a highly unscientific sampling of the live and recorded music that I stumbled across in 2004 that made the year cooler than it might otherwise have been (in no particular order):

Explosions in the Sky - live at Carleton College. Perhaps its becuase I've been wanting to see them for a couple of years, perhaps it was because I almost didn't make it, or perhaps they are just that good. Whatever the reason, the show was awe-inspiring. The band was intense and fully in each note, without sacrificing any of the beauty and evocativeness of the records. It gave me a newfound respect for their most recent (2003) album, "The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place." I liked it when it came out, but I was expecting it to sound more like their previous record "Those Who Tell the Truth...". That record found a perfect balance between Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Mogwai, taking the dark compositional aspects of GYBE and plugging them into the more stripped down approach of Mogwai. On "THe Earth..." they focused their sound more by dropping some of the drama-through-extreme-dynamics for more complex arrangements. Without the bombast, my short attention span would wonder whenever I put on the CD, but when I saw them live it all came together. With my attention completely focused on the music and the band playing the songs for all they were worth, I was better able to hear how the smaller changes - the way they altered the rhythm of the melody or changed the counter melody or the drum pattern - suggested the same kind of emotional arcs they had previously created with long creshendoes and guitar effects. The opening number of their set (and lost song on "The Earth..."), "Your Hand in Mine", has been one of my favorite songs of the last few months, along with Animal Collective's "Win A Rabbit" and Hot Snakes' "Plenty for All". It's beautiful and intricate with a hint of wistfulness, yet completely inspiring. Its a song so good I wanted to see "Friday Night Lights" just so I can hear the film's two new versions of the song in surround sound.

Hot Snakes - "Audit in Progress". It's the Hot snakes. It's John Reis (Rocket from the Crypt, Drive Like Jehu, Sultans, etc.), Rick Froberg (Drive Like Jehu), Gar Wood (Tanner), Mario Rubalcaba (Clikatat Ikatowi, RftC, Black Heart Procession). It's more of what they did so well on their previous records; perhaps a little more straightforward in terms of structure and a little more discordant. It's got "plenty for all" on it. What more could I ask for?

Ted Leo - "Shake the Sheets". I saw "A Very Long Engagement" recently and it struck me that my feelings towards Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Ted Leo are similar. As they have gotten older, their work has become more and more conventional. Jeunet abandoned the macabre fantasy of "Delicatessen" and "City of Lost Children" for the more familiar territory of love stories with "Amelie" and "...Engagement." Leo moved further from the Mod-punk of chisel and the experimentation of the "Tej Leo" album with records that sound increasingly like classic rock. With each new film or record I keep fearing this might be the one where each one's nods towards convention finally tip the balance into banality, but so far my fears have been unfounded. They manage to get more and more accessible while maintaining their solid mechanics (Jeunet's eye for images, Leo's ear for a good tune), quirkiness (Jeunet, which admittedly sat a little uneasily with the war stuff, but overall worked) and heart (Leo).

Futureheads - s/t album. Futureheads were the energetic uplift I needed to weather the post-election, pre-winter blues: good old fashioned angular punk with even older fashioned angular vocal harmonies. The last 3 songs, including their amazing cover of "hounds of love" would be a perfect EP; and, despite one or two slow moments, the rest of the album is almost as good. Plus the aforementioned cover finally convinced me to pick up the Kate Bush record that contains the original, and I thank them for that as well.

Animal Collective and TV on the Radio. These have been pretty well vetted in other places, so I'll just add that it was refreshing to hear records that were melodic and familiar but were also continually surprising.

Devendra Banhardt and Joanna Newsome - Live at the Women's Club Theater and records. Both sound like thet went back to the field recordings that inspired the first generation of popular folk artists and filtered it through their own highly ideosyncratic visions. They not only proved that decades of coffee house banality hasn't yet drained the life force out of the "old, weird america", the strength of their output suggests it might be the perfect launching pad for a new, weird america. Or as Banhardt sings on "A Sight to Behold": "Its like finding home/in an old folk song/That you've never heard/Still you know every word/and for sure you can sing along." The end result is something cloaked in sounds that have been done to death since the 60s which manages to remain unique and foreign, but accessable. After that, the similarities between the two fade. Devendra Banhardt with his finger-picked guitar, more closly resembles the popular conception of the singer songwriter, while Joanna Newsome is harder to describe. She has one of the most unique voices I've heard (dolly parton meets bjork? an teenage appalachan beth gibbons?), one of the more unusual instruments (classical harp), with a style that sound like the missing link between singer-songwriter folkies, the hypnotic arpeggios of minimalism, and Lomax-style field recordings. Both were also great live. Devendra Banhardt had a raving-visionary stage presence coupled with a goofy, laid-back charisma (this despite recovering from bad "iowa tuna curry" - three words that should probably never be used together). Joanna Newsome had the difficult job of taking the stage after Mr. Banhardt for an audience that had mainly come to see him (myself included), but when she opened with an a cappella and then climbed behind the harp to launch into "Bridges and Ballons" I was won over by her tunefulness, her air of folksy wisdom and wonder, all of which was backed up by her palpable joy and confidence in what she was doing.

Xiu Xiu - "I Luv the Valley (Oh)" The whole "Fabulous Muscles" album is good but this was the song I kept listening to over and over. There were a lot of notable vocals this year: vocals used in surprising ways - Futureheads, TV on the Radio, Animal Collective, (and if I had heard bjork's album I would probably throw that in this list as well) - as well as vocals that were plain old surprising like Joanna Newsome. However, I found Jamie Stewart's strangled, distorted "Oh" in the middle of this song the most affecting. The surprisingly straight forward indie-rock accompaniement goes into hiding as he lets out this single sylable, which becomes the culimation of the song's slow-burn tension, while diffusing it at the same time.

Amanda Woodward, Icollide, Endahl - since the burning of the Babylon (insert reggae joke here) it had been a while since i had seen a DIY-ish show. What better way to come back to the fold than with French emo? Not quite the combination of heaviness, fury and melody that marked forebears like fingerprint and jasmine, but great in their metallic-rock-meets-mid-paced-emo-punk way. A live show and new album ("La Decadence de la Decadence") that turned me around on a band that I was pretty ho-hum on before. PLus I got see a friend's band open for them.

Textbook Traitors, Foresnics, Baroness, the Vets, and a local band whose name I didn't catch - Live at a diy space that prefers to remain nameless. Another amazing show, even though I really only caught about 2/3rds of it. I missed half of the first band's set and the show ran so late for a weeknight that I had to leave before the Vets started (I think they started setting up after 1:30 AM). Thankfully, in between I got to see Textbook Traitors play their perfect Reversal of Man style hardcore before they broke up. Think the child of sonic youth and grindcore: heavy and dischordant with rapid changes like grindcore, but with slower tempos and no cookie monster growls. The riffs are so noisy they are almost expressionistic, but Textbook Traitors resist the tempation to push it too far and the insistant rhythms give the music a viceral imapct and hook. Forensics were good, but a bit all over the map from riff-heavy rock to instrumentals that sounded like Drive Like Jehu's quieter, more involved songs. The event of the evening, though, was Baroness who came from nowhere to blow everyone away with their seemless combination of crustcore and metal. Not usually my thing, but it didn't matter that night.

the Mountain Goats - "We Shall All Be Healed" Yet another album full of catchy, literate and moving songs from the Goats with "Home again garden Grove", "Cotton", Young thosands", "Palmcorder Yanja", and "Against Pollution" being amongst their best. "We Shall All Be Healed" was also notable because it felt like the full arrival of the new Goats. "Tallahassee", the first full studio recording after many years of endearingly lowest-fi records, felt hesitant, but on WSABH the songs seemed like they were always meant to have extra instruments on them. Plus it was great to hear John Darnielle stretch out his songwriting and try new approaches, like the surprisingly winding vocal lines of "Mole" or the jazzy break down of "Cotton."

Walkmen "Bows and Arrows" & Destroyer "Your Blues" - These are harder to write about because they came out so long ago and I haven't listened to them as much recently as Futureheads or Animal Collective, but there was a time when I had these records were in pretty constant rotation. The Walkmen sound like the so-called "rock revival" of a few years ago as re-imagined by "Small Change" - era Tom Waits. Rocking, but with a world-weary cool, "Bows and Arrows" felt like the soundtrack to a subway ride home from the hipster party your friend dragged you to. Destroyer is Dan Bejar, the other songwriter from the New Pornographers. Years before rockism became a thing for people to get all steamed about Destroyer had been exploring the lines between artifice and authenticity, with songs and vocals that wore their craft and appropriation on their sleeve, but remained catchy and moving, like a joke so good you will it to be true. On "your Blues" he fed his smart reinventions of 70s art rock through midi-synths to create an orchestra on an indie rock budget. Whether intentional or not, it was a move that forgrounded the tension between craft and emotion even more. What makes the album great though, is that all of this is art-school gravy on a big tasty pile of pop potatoes. These songs were going through my head for weeks, and the darting arpeggios at the end of "Notorious Lightening", despite of (or perhaps because of?) the cheesy synth tones, was one of my favorite musical moments of the year.

Extreme Noise 10th Anniversary show - Extreme Noise Made it 10 years and celebrated by having the legendary Drop Dead play. A good time was had by all. Perhaps too good a time since the triple rock management asked us to wrap it up a little early, cutting short the raffle (thankfuly the tickets were given out for free and most people were too drunk to notice or care). But Drop Dead proved once again why they are legenday.

Reissues:
Brian Eno - these have been covered better by other people, but I recently found the reissues used and I *do* see what all of the hullabaloo is about.

Discordance Axis - "Jouhou" Not quite the masterpiece of their final record "The Inalienable Dreamless", "Jouhou" captures them shifting from being a great grindcore band to being a band that exemplifies the genre, while sounding like none of the (admittedly few) other grind acts I've heard. At some point around the time of this record guitarist Rob Marton seemed to realize that Drummer David Witte was so unreasonably talented that he could do most of the heavy lifting of making the songs sound "grindcore" all by himself, which meant the he (marton) had free reign to come up with whatever riffs he wanted to. The result is a heavy, dark, fast, disjointed metal/hardcore mixture that isn't afraid to strech out into new territory, while never losing site of the fact that the first order of business is to be a heavy, dark, fast, disjointed metal/hardcore crushing machine.

Uranus - To this Bearer of Truth. Uranus combined elements of crust, metal, hardcore and chaotic emocore into a dark, furious, and epic sound that has had a large influence over the DIY punk/hardcore scene for the past ten years. This CD collects their out of print discography. In my bolder moments I would offer their "Panacea" for one of those "songs of the century" lists. It starts out promisingly enough with a atmospheric, drone-y intro before settling into a heavy uptempo verse that marries the locked groove of metalic hardcore with the floating, frantic feeling of Gravtiy Records-style chaotic emo, while the singer howls away as if he is simlutaneously screaming and growling. This is all good enough, but then something amazing happens. The drummer shifts his eigth-note accept pattern to the beginning of the measure the second guitar responds with a riff of hollow chords and high octave jumps. At this point even though I've heard this song 100+ times my jaw always drops. It's a revolution in sound, as if the song and all he troubles that inspire it have been crushed under its/their own weight and something new is ready to bust out of the rubble, wounded but soaring, aware of its origins yet ready to look beyond them. The song eventually settles down into a closing riff, but for a few seconds it shows the promise of a world full of new possibilities, which is all one can ask of art. I'll admit its not for your average listener, but I'd like to think its worth whatever effort is required to listen to it. The rest of their all-to-brief catalog is almost as impressive.

Honorable Mentions
Arcade Fire - A really good album, a sold out show in the friggin' cold. Not that I'm holding it against them. I do like the album, just seemingly not as much as the rest of the world

Mono - I haven't seen Mogwai in a while but I got to see Mono, who blew me away live. Unfortunately when I put the new record on at home, it left me a little flat. I heard it at a club recently and at high volume it sounds a lot better.

Acid Mother's Temple live at the triple rock. I will never write off that hippy acid rock ever again.

MF Doom. Another banner year for the metal faced villain (who if nothing else has a great knack for stage names). I think I like "MM Food" better than "Madvillainy", but don't tell anyone I said that.

Quantumm Records tour - too much talent to fit on one stage, this show left me smiling for a week.

Malady - ex-members of pg.99 and City of Caterpillar get together for a more straight-ahead rock sound than their previus bands. The parts are interesting, reminding me a bit of the first drive like jehu album. They're not quite there yet, but all the pieces are there. Hopefully they avoid the hardcore band disease and stick around long enough to record the great album I think they have in them.

Tom Waits - Real Gone. Perhaps his best since Bone Machine. Of course 3 of those albums weren't really tom waits albums, they were songs from shows that he collaborated on, but it was good to confirm he still has it in him.

Pixies - Live Sure I have a few quibbles, it would have been nice to hear "is she weird" or some more stuff off of Trompe le Monde, but if I only get to ee one pixies show every 12 years, I want it to be something like this."

Weekend Round Up

2006-05-02T13:16:00.000-05:00

In brief, music related to my weekend:

Friday (4/28/06)
Song: Divide and Conquer
Artist: Husker Du
Album: Flip your wig
This was inspired by thinking about the Islands a couple of days ago. Like "Swans" this is another song that keeps going under its own steam, hardly changing (although the structure of the lyrics helps to create a sense of progress and narrative) and I had grabbed it for my morning commute. Then it appeared later on in the evening as I made my way to a party. Weird.

Saturday (4/29/06)
Song: Suggestion
Artist: Fugazi
I found out that the woman who cuts my hair was at the center of the great Fugazi "Suggestion" controversy of '98 ('97? one of the years I wasn't in the cities).
Honorable Mentions: Johnny Hartman And John Coltrane "Lush Life"; Birthday Suits at the Hexagon

Sunday (4/30/06)
Whatever opera plays throughout Match Point. Welcome back, Woody.

she'll sing again

2006-04-28T12:51:00.000-05:00

Song: Lena's Song
Artist: Angels of Light
Source: Album (Other People's Songs)
Date: 4/27/06

Angels of Light is Michael Gira (Young God records, Swans) plus whomever he gets to back him up. On this record most of the Angels are Akron/Family which is reason enough to be excited about anything on this album.

Or that's what i told myself. I have to admit I still had some doubts. A/F operate in a strictly backup capacity here and I'm not too familar with Michael Gira. This song, which opens the album reassured me. The simple chiming riff (not sure what's playing here it sounds like a combination of instruments - guitar, mandolin, bells - in unison) eases you into the song (and the album) and perfectly sets off Michael Gira's lazy baritone. He uses his voice quite effectively throughout the song adding various shadings to the story of Lena, varying from a plain sung Johnny Cash style to subtly emotive phrasings. The music is similarly not-flashy-but-interesting. The bridge is accompanied by some Beach Boy like harmonized "bahs" and there are interludes of primitivist clapping and wistling that lighten the mood. A simple song with just the right touches to make it shine.

in the stream

2006-04-27T13:14:00.000-05:00

Song: Swans (Life After Death)
Artist: Islands
Source: Album
Day 4/24 - today

Its probably lazy to compare canadians bands to other canadian bands. The famously open border (at least for a little while longer, anyway) and a similar cultural background ensures a lot of give and take. Yet, I can't help but think of other musical neighbors to the north when I hear the first song of Islands' debut. The sparse guitar and weird synthy/spacey/thermin-y sounds of the opening recall Do Make Say Think and the structure of the vocals, which ride a simple but propulsive riff/harmonic progression, remind me of a scrappier, less bombastic Arcade Fire. And then there are the hints of the Unicorns (Islands features a couple ex members) clever and gleefully cheesy pop.

Which is all fine and good and gives you a sense of what it sounds like, but only gives minor reasons why the song is compelling. (If I had an editor she'd be dragging a red pencil over the above paragraph right about now). Really the specifics of the sound are secondary; it's the (for lack of a better word) groove that I keep coming back to. It's hard to explain - we're talking indie rock, not parlament here - but there's an organic, self-sustaining quality to "Swans", a perpetual motion of verses and choruses that reminds me of the quality (but not really the style) of groove and momentum that Stereolab works up at times. Maybe a better comparison is the story of Lou Reed spending most of the Loaded sessions playing the chords to sweet jane over and over, writing new verses every time. The music just doesn't want to die or get tired and it carries the song along with it for close to 10 minutes. The band in fact seems helpless to stop it and can only stop the rock by diverting it into a heavy jam that sounds a little like Built to Spill in their classic rock mode. (Not a bad thing.) Once altered, the beast can be slayed. (Thankfully they do not commit the most heinous of rock sins, the fade out.) But it doesn't stop it from keeping me company throughout the past few days.

Saucy like pesto

2006-04-24T13:42:00.000-05:00

Song: various Cheers
Artist (and I use the term lightly): TBA
Day: 4/22/06 and 4/23/06

The "about Ultimate" section of the Ultimate Players Association website defines Ultimate as "Player defined and controlled non-contact team sport played with a flying disc on a playing surface with end zones in which all actions are governed by the 'Spirit of the Game.'" That last phrase is a big part of why I play it. It's the idea that sports should be fun and that sportsmanship (in the best sense), respect, enjoyment and competitive play should go hand in hand.

One of the Spirit traditions is cheering the other team. Usually a cheer is a song with the lyrics reworked to reflect the other team and the game, but it could be a haiku, a skit or just about anything else. As ultimate slowly expands beyond its quasi-hippy roots, this tradition is slowly dying but my team, TBA always cheers. Its a fun, creative way to end a game and invariably I leave tournament with the cheers we've composed running through my mind. So here's what I've been humming to myself the past couple of days. (The first line is the name of the team we were cheering, followed by the tune we stole):

Dudes (tune: She'll be comin' round the mountain)
(I forgot the first cheer on sat)

Hot Karls (tune: Darling Clementine)
Hot Karls, Hot Karls Commie pinkos from Carleton
We're not sure what your name means, but we're quite sure its a sin
Hot Karls, Hot Karls You sure can play some disc
HOt Karls do you ever kiss your Mama with those lips

GAC A (tune: yesterday)
Yesterday,
we were looking forwad to today
The winners bracket seems so far away
Gustavus you had your way

Suddenly
My man's not standing next to me
He's catching the disc where I should be
I believe in the Gusties

High, they played so well
There's so swell
They came to play
I threw something long
But it bombed
like meister, jaeg

Jaegermeister

NDSU (tune: Oklahoma)
North Dakota, where a new team's gearing up its game
With their shirts of yellow
On every fellow
Except for the one that's on the dame

North Dakota, we're glad you came to give us game
The disc is rising
In the land of the Bison
Your team is bound for future fame

Hot Karls rematch (tune: Hot Time, Summer in the City)
Hot Karls, playing on the hill
Cutting for the disk and getting their thrills
HOt Karls, saucy like pesto
Gonna go home and write your manifesto
(Mike Taylor guitar solo, jazz hands)

St Olaf B (tune: giligan's Island)
Just sit right down and you'll hear a tale,
a tale about SOB-ld
They came from St Olaf,
from the town of northfield (town of northfield)

(thunderclap)
The weather never got too rough,
The wind came and went
Your handlers sliced through our zone
And now our cup is spent (now our cup is spent)

So joins us here each year my friends
At the Thrill on the HIll
We look forward to playing again
And drinking Jaegermeister

Don't waste me in the ground

2006-04-20T17:29:00.000-05:00

Song: "Naked As We Came"
Artist: Iron & Wine
Day: 4/19/06 & 4/20/06

Iron & Wine
"Naked as we Came"
I put on Iron's & Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days to drift off to sleep to last night and this song is the last thing I remember before sleep took me. All I really remembered from when I was dozing off was Sam Beams voice singing gently over an intricate guitar figure vaguely reminiscent of Pink Moon-era Nick Drake (specificly, "In the Morning") and I wondered if I would be as entranced upon waking and reading the lyrics.

And I was, and more. As I listened and then broke out the CD booklet several stories unfolded. The lines...
"She says 'Wake up its no use prentending.'
I'll keep stealing, breathing her"
...spoke to a casual, loving rituals of long term co-residence. Perhaps he is pretending to be asleep and she is teasing him about it.

But then the topic turns to death:
"Birds are leaving over autumn's ending
One of us will die inside these arms"
At first I wasn't certain, the "die inside these arms" can be read 2 ways, the Cutting Crew way and the literal sense. Soon it's clear he means it literally...
"She says 'If I leave before you, darling
Don't you waste me in the ground'"
.. and the "Wake up, it's no use pretending" retroactively took on a sinister tone. I satarted to ask myself, what is the she asking the narrator to "wake up" to? Terminal illness? (side note: "Don't you waste me in the ground" has to be the best request for cremation ever)

Viewed in their totality, though, the lyrics suggested a 3rd reading of a couple talking about their inevitable, not impending deaths and planning for it in the context of their marriage, love, and family. Odd morning conversation perhaps, but the ease and comfort that pervades the lyrics and the music is inspiring.

Whichever way you interpret it, the fact that it can lead you in a couple of different directions (not to mention the beautiful singing and guitar playing) makes it something special; the song becomes a minor triumph when you consider it does all this with just 12 lines of lyrics, 3 of which are repeated.

This is my current Second Favorite Death Song, sandwiched in between the Mountain Goats' "Shadow Song" after Why?s "Light Leaves". Full lyrics below:
She says "wake up, it's no use pretending"
I'll keep stealing, breathing her.
Birds are leaving over autumn's ending
One of us will die inside these arms
Eyes wide open, naked as we came
One will spread our ashes 'round the yard

She says "If I leave before you, darling
Don't you waste me in the ground"
I lay smiling like our sleeping children
One of us will die inside these arms
Eyes wide open, naked as we came
One will spread our ashes round the yard

Stuff I've been listening to lately

2006-04-19T13:22:00.000-05:00

A quick rundown of things I've been listening to the most when I haven't been writing here.

Akron/Family
Any and All
My favorite discovery of the past few months. New, weird folk that also takes its cues from Radiohead, mathy post-rock and White Album era beatles. There's even free-jazz energy explosions and gentle electronica. The self titled album shades more towards the modern sounds than the split with angels of light which is more settled in folk-rock sounds. Both are excellent. Intelligent and interesting songwriting combined with virtuoso playing, but in the service of something immediate and occasionaly transcendant. And they have awesome group vocals full of grit and beauty that hit me in a similar way Jeff Magnum's did on In the Airplane Over the Sea. And a great live show to boot. And I have yet to hear a song better than "Running, Returning" since getting their S/T debut. OK I'll stop now.

Jesu
S/T
I never knew I was awaiting the marriage of shoegaze and metal until I heard Jesu. In retrospect it makes sense, more sense than some of the other acts who have directed their gaze towards the early 90s. Distortion, like echo, reverb and phase takes the often-thin sound of "clean" amplified guitars and makes them take up more space. I'm just so used to hearing distortiou, I've forgotten. Jesu is the sound of metal slowly drifting out across the universe - as if the space program had put Black Sabbath into Voyager instead of Bach. If California ever slides into the ocean, like they threatened it would when I was a kid, this will be the soundtrack to the footage of civilization meeting the sea. Crushing and beautiful.

Wilderness
S/T
All the post-punk comparisons you've heard are more or less apt and so what? It's great. What I love is the use of space and how it allows the listener to inhabit the icy beauty of their songs. The fact that they come from Baltimore and are vaguely reminicent of some bands from that area that I love greatly (Moss Icon, the Hated) and admire a lot (Lungfish) probably doesn't hurt, either.

Animal Collective
Feels
I think I'm too pretentious/rockist to really like the pop of my time, so Animal Collective serves that role when I need a dose of infectious catchy exuberance.

Wipers
1st 3 albums
This collection is bookended by 2 albums of great catchy, garagey punk with enough angular guitar phrases to keep things interesting. Hearing this you can hear the qualities of so many awesome bands that sprung up later in the northwest (Sleater-Kinney, Unwound), (p)recast in a 1st wave punk/new wave context. Then their is the Youth of America LP with its drawn out, almost dubby experiments. They make perfect sense now, but in 81? Gutsy and perhaps revolutionary. The set of the 1st 3 albums gives you bonus tracks too.

Explosions in the Sky
Any and All, (except the special limited EP, which I missed out on.)
Always and forever. If you want a description as to why, I wrote one a while back that still lives on in the google cache

Long break = long post, sort of

2005-11-17T12:56:00.000-06:00

Here's where I appologize for not posting more regularly. My story is simple I got backed up on vacation and didn't want to post until I got caught up. Then with each day there was that much more to catch up until it was overwhelming, blah blah blah. Yes I fell into lazy blogger syndrome. Hopefully anyone who ever read this can forgive me.

Maybe I'll post a "catching up" entry soon. My plan is not to let it ruin future posting, though, so we'll see.

But enough of that, here is where I praise Torche and "Vampyros"
Day: past week or so
Artist: Torche
Song: "Vampyros"
Source: self-titled album

Torche is almost a guilty pleasure. At the record collective I volunteer at, we get a bunch of the southern lord-type records amongst all the punk releases: slow, detuned rumblings that last for dozens of minutes made by cryptic figures with names like Earth, Sunn0))), Sleep. Torche has some similarities. They are slow,low, and heavy, but a lot more listener friendly. My knee-jerk reaction is to go for the more difficult, purer expression; and when I look at it honestly, Torche feel like a lite version of said bands, hence the potential guilt.

But, like a said, "almost". It's hard to care much about guilt when band blends heaviness and melody as well as Torche do on their self titled debut. Take "Vampyros" for example. Do you remember Louder than Love-era Soundgarden? Wished they were somehow more sabbath-y and had managed to travel forward in time, listened a few Jawbreaker records, and then go back? Maybe then have Quicksand or Helmet cover the results? "Vampyros" is for you.

THis song is more driving than usual, operating at a high midtempo instead of sludge time. The song is propelled by a palm-muted chugging, (but not chugga-chugga, I doubt they are nailed to the X -- their sonic contemporaries are labeled "stoner rock", after all. [speaking of which, since when did all the dope smoking bands play slow heavy rock? I remember the days when an affection of marijana lead directly to membership in a grindcore band or trading dead tapes. Am I out of touch?]) riff on the same power chord. 10-15 years ago I just would have just noticed the heaviness of the sound, but in my post Godspeed and Sterolab days, I notice how great a drone/pedal tone effect it creates, especially when the vocals kick in. Steve Brooks actually sings and its downright catchy and kinda interesting as these things go. The phrasing is offtime and the notes jump around a bit, as if he were bouncing off the chugga drone line (is it too much to campare it to a trampoline? oh well I guess I just did).

But like all good pop songs (and make no mistake about it, this is a pop song, even if it is a pop song that sounds like a gigantic locamotive that has run out of tracks but trudges on anyway) they save the best stuff from the chorus. They stop muting their guitars allowing the power chords to stretch out. The vocal melody becomes for focused and less rambling and if you aren't hooked by the jump Steve Brooks makes between "vam" and "pires" (accompanied by doubled vocals for extra impact) you're just not paying attention. And the bridge, ah the bridge. The two parts of the song merge seemlessly together by both guitars playing interweaving single note lines, taking the stacato drive from the verse, while allowing the notes to ring out, foreshadowing the tunefulness of the chorus.

And of course, what an awesome title. Of course its silly, but what else do you sing over a heavy palm muted riff? You could sing about devils, but its hard to take any of that seriously these days. I suppose the other option is misanthropic doom, but it doesn't fit and its been done so much, again its hard to take seriously. Torche doesn't even try, instead offering a impressionistic grab bag of metal imagery. Sometimes it works (the line "vampires own the night" has a certain ring to it) sometimes it sounds like they are fishing ("harikari/missionary" huh?). But come on what's cooler than fire or vampires, unless its fire AND vampires.

How about a little fire, eh scarecrow?

2005-06-23T13:13:00.000-05:00

Day: all last week
Song: Don't Save Us From the Flames
Artist: m83
Source: Before the Dawn Heals Us

I had resisted picking this album up for a while because I was under the impression it was getting pretty severely trashed. Pitchfork gave it what seemed like qualified praise (it was still praise though) and the cartoonist/editor of Questionable Content dedicated a sidebar to warning everyone about how bad it was. I picked it up anyway, since I am pretty much a sucker for anything that gets compared to My Bloody Valentine (or the first 15 or so releases put out by Gravity Records, but that's a story for a different time) in a remotely positive way. Still I put off listening to it for a while for fear I would be disappointed and just got around listening to it in the past week.

A quick look at MetaCritic shows I was mistaken, a victim of limited my own limited reading habits, which is good and bad. Good because its a pretty good album and deserving as being recognized as such. It’s bad for purely selfish reasons. As a obscure scribe nothing is more fun than cheering for the underdog and proclaiming the genius of something overlooked that could perhaps benefit from your efforts. Alas for my own delusions of importance, even the people who hate the album (like QC) love this song. And for good reason, this song is pretty much indie crack-rock. Let me count the ways... There's the catchy uptempo pop barely sticking its head up from under a thick blanket of rich soundscape; the analog synth melody floating over a bank of dreamy vocals; the way the song starts at 10, before bringing it down for the verses, Pixies-style. Throw in a Interpol-like breakdown and a coda featuring a sound somewhere between the Godspeed!'s screwdrivers-on-strings trick (think of the "Monheim" section of "Lift Your Skinney Fists...") and the Werlitzer sound the New pornographers occasionally try to bring back and I defy anyone who knows half of the bands I mentioned to offer any resistance.

The hole's the size of this great big world

2005-06-11T15:03:00.000-05:00

Day: all this past week
Song: Modern Girl
Artist: Sleater Kinney
Source: The Woods

I feel like I should be using this space to praise the direction Sleater Kinney have taken with their new album, The Woods, because it is a breath of fresh air and for that reason probably their best record since The Hot Rock. (It's also a testament to the strength of their back catalog that they could release an album as excellent as One Beat - an album that if I were in a band I would say, "that's enough, we've done all we can. Lets go back to our day jobs before we embarrass our selves by trying to follow it up" - and have it feel like they were treading water.) But I think that will be coming soon enough. Right now what I want to listen to is "Modern Girl".

As any music writer/geek/hack will tell you, Sleater Kinney has its roots in the riot grrrl scene. Said writer will then go on to drop a sentence or two about Bikini Kill or Bratmobile before mentioning the bands the members of S-K used to be in. What they'll neglect to tell you is why these bands were interesting. Before I continue, I feel a disclaimer is in orde. I am only speaking as a sympathetic but somewhat confused and outside observer. Riot grrrl was never for my whitemiddleclassmale self. Because so much of it seemed to be about grrrls creating both a space to speak for the themselves and the vocabulary and concepts with which they could forge an identity, trying to speak for the scene with any air of authority as a whitemiddleclassmale seems especially wrong-headed. Yet it was this process which made the music and scene so interesting to an outside observer. Because the given ideas about what it meant to be a girl or a woman or a punk seemed inadequate, they played them off each other trying to preserve what was good about them while highlighting and criticising the problems. It created exciting areas of possibility both in terms of the lyrics and the scene's politics as well as in the music itself.

You can see this in Modern Girl. The opening riff is an alternating two note figure that begins a bluesy minor-key (or perhaps chromatic? my ears aren't quite that good) descent, but where the turn-around occur, they instead resolve the riff by going major, balancing things off the rock with a hint of pop. The vocal line is simple a catchy, almost maddingly so. The lyrics are of a piece with the music, starting off with blissed-out optimism that borders on naïveté, again almost maddingly so. With each new verse they becoming more and more defiant and the song becomes more ornamented, adding a slowly swelling organ, my favorite harmonic accompaniment this side of early Dylan, and finally a few bars of drums. Along with this they use the studio like they never have before (a constant for this album), slowly saturating the tape, until everything is wrapped in blanket of distortion. All the while the simple tune is constant, a defiant bit of sunny optimism in a gathering storm of anger and cynicism. Which I guess is what reminds me most of the riot grrrl recordings I've heard. The song engages in a complex juxtaposition, using one thing to temper the other, while refusing to choose between them: pop and rock/punk, fun and politics, a childlike tune and studio sophistication, why should we have to chose? Why can't we have the best parts of all?

Day 6

2005-06-04T20:55:00.000-05:00

Song: 06day6
Artist: Explosions in the Sky
Source: Download!

The other day, a friend of mine sent me a link to a french site that was hosting several mp3s of live shows from Explosions in the Sky. This was pretty exciting. As I've mentioned elsewhere seeing Explosions in the Sky was one of my favorite musical experiences of 2004. Needless to say, I started downloading immediately. But since EitS's songs are pretty long, there was plenty of time to poke around the site and after a few clicks I saw "nouveau titre en studio" followed by a link. Now my french is not too good, but now I was really excited and a little scared. Their last proper album, "The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place", came out in 2003 and their recorded output since then has been good but not up to the standards of either "The Earth..." or "Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever" which preceeded it. Their contribution to their label's compilation was fine but a little flat, and the music they recorded to the Friday Night Lights soundtrack was good, but having to fit their post-rock compositions to the external demands of a film's pacing rather than letting them work according to their typically looser and lengthier sensibilites limited the emotional range and impact.

So it is with relief that I say "06Day6" is a return to form. The song opens with a big reverb-ed riff played over and over again. There is a fair amount of space in the sound, like the themes that close a symphony where the entire orchestra is playing the same part over and over again. It's a little surprising, feeling like the end of something rather than the begining. (On the albums the songs often run into eachother, so this makes me curious if this song is supposed to follow something else -- "The earth..." only had 5 tracks, so perhaps this was recorded as an album closer? perhaps they have recorded more than their website would indicate?) As the riff builds and dies, a sustained note bridges into the song's second section. "06day6"'s final three minutes are a the kind of intricate guitar chorale that makes me love this band. The guitars slowly get added back into the song, the first one playing a chordal foundation, then another adds a long, sustained accompaning line and finally the third plays a more punctuated counter-melody. Each line is complementary to the others, shading the feeling created by the earlier parts and giving the song a sense of development and direction. They build until they reach the limit of the possibilities of their polyphony, and then they pull back, creating new space to build upon. The effect is somewhere between the typical start-build-fade dramatic arc of instrumental post rock and a more lyrical exploration of a feeling, with enough ambiguity to have it fit beautiful-blissed moods or beautiful-sad ones.

I Sell Ice to Eskimos

2005-06-01T14:04:00.000-05:00

Day: May 31, 2005
Song: Origin of Species
Artist: Angel Hair
Source: Pregnant with the Senior Class: Discography

In my early 90s chaotic emo pantheon, Angel Hair are always just behind heroin, Mohinder, and Universal Order of Armageddon. The 7" was great but most of the time I found the album was a bit too noisy and arty. Listening to them again I can hear a genre at a tipping point. The other early bands on Gravity Records incorporated a certain degree of noise and sloppy playing turn their hardcore anthems into barely controlled chaos. It gave their recordings a kind of expressionist quality while still being recognizable as songs; Angel Hair pushed it one step further using the texture of buzzy guitars, distorted screams, and rolling drums as effects in and of themselves while slowly relaxing their grip on riffs or melody. You can hear what was to come: a scene burned out on itself subtituting irony for earnestness, and self-conscious craft for expression. What saves them from the hipster rabbit-hole of artiness for artiness sake is that they knew how to use these techniques to convey something other than just letting the listener know they knew how the chaotic emo game was played.

"Origin of Species" opens with a few seconds of looped static, before one of the guitars starts playing a high, discordant riff. To me "riff" connotes a kind of blues-inspired repeated figure - not quite a melody, but something tuneful enough to support the song. The "Origin" riff is more of a rhythmic figure, conveying motion but not a tune. This becomes clear as the song jumps to double time and the other guitar comes in with a muted single note figure. The original becomes a place holder, a familiar pattern to orient the listener for the assault to come. The bass's first note is thick and ugly like the gears of a neglected machine snapping back to life before it, too, joins the headlong rush. Having established a mood, the band shifts the playing and the arrangement. The guitarts or rhythm section drop out at various times, opening up space for the vocals, or giving the guitars a place for a recognizable multinote line. The effect is almost Romantic (in the esthic sense, that is) of a voice (human or melodic) struggling free from the fury that surrounds it, even if that fury is self-created (which in turn is an interesting tension: conveying angst while struggling to come out from underneath it). Of course you still need to work through guitar parts stripped of melody and a guy screaming in demented ways. And the whole thing is buried under trebly static. But if you can get beyond all that it's a thrilling rush coupled with enough in-your-face drama to make any art with bombastic intensions jealous.