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Keeping The Urge Alive: Dive, Captain, Dive!

2011-05-16T22:35:00.000-07:00

It's 2011. And I just purchased a newly-recorded Urge Overkill album. On vinyl. When are we?

At 16, an older friend tipped me off to the joys of Urge's masterpiece
- Saturation. I call it their masterpiece because to my mind, it's
where their (too early for irony) '70s rock-god image-mongering met
the effortless hooks of savvy ex-punks. They were loud, hooky, and
catchy as the flu. Over the years, I've eventually come to the
conclusion that I prefer the previous album The Supersonic Storybookfor it's alternative guitars and Exit The Dragon for its beautifully
ragged Exile On Main Street "everything's-faling-apart" atmosphere.
As good as each of those are, Storybook is too ragged, and Dragon is
too wiped-out to really register as "the one". No, for sheer
summertime adrenaline, Saturation is the one to go with -- glossy
and shiny as a new pair of sunglasses, and stomping like a mammoth.
Riff after riff, thundering drums, and enough "whoo hoo hoo"s to get
anyone smiling.

Now, as many years have gone by since Urge Overkill's last record in
'95 as the years I had under my belt when I first heard them. And
they sound no worse for wear on Rock & Roll Submarine. I have no
idea what that ridiculous title means, but as a fan who loves seeing
that "UO" logo on an album, that cover is wonderful, as
is the interior blueprint of what would be included in a giant,
spherical, multi-story submarine (tiki bar and bowling lane are
ESSENTIAL). But what matters is what's inside the grooves, maaaan. It's no instant
summer classic, but this is the followup that Saturationdeserved but never really got. Enter the Dragon had more in common
with the disheartened rawness of the indie rock of the 2000s, but
despite evidence of aural lessons learned from Dragon, the sounds
here are mostly cribbed from the lumbering rock monsters of the past.
As far back as Americruiser's "Ticket To L.A.", they've been working
Marshall-stack classic-rock riffs into something sassy enough for the now-aging Gen X -- with the added bonus of this decade's audio engineering, they manage to polish most of these songs to a fine
sheen.... not in a derogatory way, more like the way Cheap Trick could
be heavy and rockin' and slick as hell on their classic early albums. Like the way a band like... say... Urge Overkill managed back in the day. With all the flangers and layers of guitars and interweaving
harmonies, Rock And Roll Submarine sounds more like the proper
followup to the "breakthrough that never came" after Saturation failed
to make the boys the mega-stars they so clearly believed they were.

But what about the SONGS? Well, they're solid. Urge always wrote
great riffs, and backed them up with cool arrangements and good
vocals. The drums pound, the bass pulses, and the guitars churn out
memorable riffs left and right. Sure, it's a new rhythm section, and previous drummers Jack Watt and Blackie Onassis each had their own style, but it was never the rhythm section that made you listen to Urge, right? By adding new drummer Brian Quast and bassist Mike Hodgekiss from the ever-awesome Gaza Strippers, Nash Kato and Eddie "King" Roeser are now free to double up the guitar crunch. The pair,
reunited inexplicably after some Dino Jr-level infighting in the late-'90s, once again
step up and deliver their trademark "badass rock'n'roll" vocals (a style, not a judgement call), and it sounds perfectly... well...
right. I can't quite put my finger on it, but all the pieces just add
up.

Of course, many (ok, MOST) are writing this reunion and album off as some weird
nostalgic joke. But the more I think about it, nobody makes records like this anymore. Straightahead rock and roll records, highly self-aware, but delivered with enough swagger that it backs up the (self-)hype. Surprisingly, the presence of
Urge Overkill into the 2010s is far less irony-laced than I expected, since the previous incarnation is now primarily remembered as "early users of indie-rock irony" and "that band with that Neil Diamond song from 'Pulp Fiction'".
Their velvet smoking jackets and turtlenecks seemed like an insane
gimmick in an era of dour po-faced seriousness. So it's actually refreshing
that by leaving smarminess largely to the wayside, Urge Overkill comes
across as one of the LEAST "affected" rock bands out there. A
completely absurd value statement, to be sure. When Urge is one of your
most direct and honest bands, the cosmic balance has been upset. In an era of high-concept
albums and theatrical rock shows, it's pretty refreshing to
have a quartet of guys go out and unapologetically rock the fuck out.

Amen.

Transmission Intercept: Neptune Balance/CTRL

2011-04-16T03:21:00.000-07:00

[begin transmission]

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-- begin tracking: Central Target, remote login--
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[begin message]

FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION.
NEPTUNE BALANCE IS REAL.
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-- track source: Boston, MA --
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[directive: maintain current status. Re-assess on Friday.]

[static]

[end transmission]

Wrote For Luck, Not For Skill

2011-04-10T05:49:00.000-07:00

While going through a "Madchester" phase this week, I came across a review of the Happy Mondays' Bummed that stated that in Manchester at the time of the musical movement (circa '88-'91), if you were a music fan, you had to pick a side of the fence: the Happy Mondays or their contemporaries and fiercest rivals The Stone Roses. The rock and roll pedagogy has stamped that The Stone Roses is (subjectively) the superior recorded artifact, but that could be because it was the band's (ostensible) debut album. And far be it from me to say it's not impressive -- in fact, it's one of my all-time favorite albums. Desert island stuff.

But you know what? I think I'd have to side with the Mondays.

Just because an artist perfects a form doesn't mean they're the truest avatar of that movement. And one could successfully argue that the Roses not only helped pioneer the sound of dance beats meeting funky indie guitars. But they sounded refined, tight, and shimmering. While the Mondays clearly leaned on their producer in the studio (not hard to do when you're working with Martin Hannett and a pre-trance Paul Oakenfold), and maybe it was Shaun Ryder's hoarse holler, but something about the same mixture of pop guitars and polyrhythms in the Mondays' hands sounded dangerous and vulgar, but irresistibly seductive. It's the thuggish edge that made Oasis heroes and Blur a cult act in the U.S. (until "Song 2", but still...). It's what some friends and I used to call "music school syndrome". Not that technical ability or craftsmanship necessarily matters in what makes "good" art, but the loose, ramshackle, and dangerous element of the Mondays just edges out the magic of about half the Roses' oeuvre.
I'm not saying it's without it's charms, but that first Stone Roses album sounds pretty "pop classiscist" after nodding your body to some of the tracks on their rivals' masterstroke, Pills 'N' Thrills 'N' Bellyaches. Club music could be considered, despite it's often dire lack of lyrical or melodical virtuosity, one of the most direct antecedents of the original spark of 1950s rock and roll. That might seem like sacreliege to any self-resepecting rock geek, or even anyone who owns a Beatles album, but roll with me here. Rock and roll was music for people to go to a bar and dance to, then probably go home and screw. It's crass, but true. I've got collections of old R&B and rock numbers from the mid-'50s that are easily among the most vulgar and horny things I've ever heard -- and I own three different 2 Live Crew albums. The Mondays were barely musicians in some cases, if the live recordings I've heard are any reliable evidence. But they got up, got messed up, and probably got laid on some crazee psychedelics. I was always a little irritated by Oasis' claims that they didn't care about Blur when they clearly took great care to stoke the media-created rivalry, even on the records.

But the Happy Mondays seem like they truly didn't care about the Roses' messianic status in the pecking order. They couldn't be bothered. It's the same reason I prefer the Stones to the Beatles. I can't deny that the Beatles wrote more accomplished pop songs, but those three notes to "Satisfaction"'s main riff say a lot more to me than the entirety "A Day In The Life".

And the Soup Dragons are awesome, no matter what you say.

A Brief Inside.

2011-04-09T06:51:00.000-07:00

While watching the documentary about Blur, No Distance Left To Run, and seeing their performance in the Rough Trade record shop in London, I've decided that one day, I'll need to take a pilgrimage there. As a rock music history fan from the U.S., I realize Rough Trade began life as a bricks-and-mortar record store before becoming a seminal post-punk and indie record label. But coming from this side of the ocean, I've always seen and used the term "Rough Trade" (in the musical sense) as an aesthetic signifier, describing a certain post-punk, pre-Britpop alternative music ethos and sound established in the U.K. in the early-to-mid 1980s.

Actually going to the store might be the closest I've ever come to physically stepping into an abstract concept. A physical example of a philosophical movement, a la the Bauhaus or Warhol's Factory. Heavy stuff, man.

Goodbye, Musicland... I'm Glad You're Dead

2011-04-06T22:59:00.000-07:00

Found online, in the comments section at avclub.com:

"[The mid-to-late '90s] must have been the absolute worst time for music. Pre-internet downloading, post-alterative radio and MTV. You just had to buy a CD from FYE for $18.99 and hope it didn't suck.

Fortunately, another decade's gone by, and hipsters have it made now. We all have instant access to entire worlds of alternative music. If you told me to listen to a CD by the Residents in 1999, I would have drove around town all day and not found it. Now I can get Eskimo from Amazon for $8. If you told me to listen to an unsigned band from Terre Haute, Indiana, I can find their music. It's a music lover's wet dream."

-commenter "Raymond Luxury-Yacht"

An interesting point. It sort of runs parallel to something David Thomas of Pere Ubu said a few years back in an issue of The Big Takeover, about the digital era de-valuing music. Back in the day, when I plunked down that $18 at Musicland for who-knows-what, I STUDIED it, I pored over the liner notes. I memorized lyrics. If the artist thanked a band and I liked the album, I'd work to track down something by the thanked bands (sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn't). Now, with a terabyte of music and Wikipedia at my fingertips, so much of it seems so... ephemeral. I find myself less deeply invested in the art of obsession as I grow older because suddenly, I don't have to drop 40% of my weekly busboy income on a couple of new albums. It costs me little-to-nothing to take a risk and check out music I've never heard. Back then, when it took all of my resources, it was a different story... having to cast your lot and stick with it. Food for thought.

It's reminiscing about that period that made me realize why I'm not following the lead of many other bloggers and posting YouTube links and embedded MP3s in my writing. While I work in a multimedia format (the internet), I'm a writer a heart. And the inspriration to become a writer stems from the years of having to hunt for any information on an artist to better understand their art... wading through and filing away articles and books with dizzying written descriptions of music. It's like word jazz, improvising over a theme inspired by the subject. Capturing the tenor of what you're describing, assimilating it, and then adding your own fingerprint is the game. Greil Marcus, Simon Reynolds, Lester Bangs, David Fricke, Clinton Heylin, Marcus Gray, Everett True... all of them have, at one time or another, written pieces that serve as an "artist cover" in another format. And all of them have inspired me to go buy an album without hearing a note by the band in question. Some of them seem to aim for a piece of writing that echoes the subject's own creative achievements. They're not reprinting lyrics, or following musical notes on a staff. But they, through their own language, capture the communicative esssence of the subject so beautifully, that there's not only no need for an acutal audio soundtrack, but if you DON'T know the record, you can roughly conjure it up in your head. I knew what to expect from Pere Ubu a few years before hearing them. Not what they sounded like, but how they sounded. A shaky, high voice desperately yelping postmodernist nightmare poetry over a fractured slashing of antonal guitar despair and jagged synthesizer stabs? Sure, you might have the notes wrong, you might not know the lyrics -- but you can get the spirit. It's almost too easy to point to Lester Bangs (eternally over-and-underrated), but his pieces on Miles Davis and The Stooges have a tactile quality that take it above strightforward music criticism in the "news reporter" sense. You could smell the electric heat of the amplifiers and feel the battered black Tolex hanging from a used Fender guitar amp. It's writers like Bangs that made writing about music an interesting art form in itself. Some writers fall more on the academic end of things (Reynolds), while some, like Bangs, are far more visceral and almost free-associative at times.

In that $18-an-album world, I would have to have faith that when Jon Savage raved about the fizzing raw nerves and beauty of the Buzzcocks, that his description would carry over to me, communicate to me the essence of the music, and if I decided to muster up the courage to take a gamble, it was an educated risk of my hard-earned pennies. And if the writer was good, it often paid some wild dividends. That's why I don't tend to post a bunch of links to live videos, etc, very often. I'd like to see if the writing can stand on it's own as a creative force. Why gussie it up with digital bells and whistles when it's the prose that's the point?

In Praise Of Vini Reilly: Post-Modern Guitar Heroism As Forefather

2011-04-05T22:01:00.000-07:00

Part One: In Praise Of Vini Reilly

I first became aware of the Durutti Column when I was about 16, coming across their entry in the old-fashioned paper edition of the All Music Guide. It sounded, at the time, like something I’d be interested in later, once I'd successfully gotten around to finally hearing all the great records that were on my "essentials list"... in part because it sounded like they'd fit my sensibility, but were clearly more in the "esoteric intelligentsia" category of pop music... something I strove for, but hadn't arrived at yet.

Of course, the review of their initial album mentioned something about the original pressing's sandpaper sleeve (meant to destroy the records around it on the shelf), and I loved the idea of experimental guitar music in an immediately post-punk context. My limited worldview had already exposed me to things like Joy Division and some of their Manchester ilk, and while I loved the rock-crit approved UK Post-Punk Scene, it wasn't exactly easy territory to wade through... especially outside Cincinnati, Ohio…. for a perpetually broke 16-year-old.

Once I hit college, I eventually heard some of their stuff, and even picked up that first album, The Return Of The Durutti Column, when it got remastered. It was likeable, agreeable stuff, but apparently not dark or challenging enough for my taste at the time. Despite the early presence of mad genius producer Martin Hannett, it wasn't obviously and immediately boundary-pushing, so I filed it back under "seems like I'll dig it later". The same thing happened after seeing the portrayal of Durutti frontman/founder/constant Vini Reilly in the film 24 Hour Party People -- it made for a great running gag about his agreeablity in the face of no visible encouragement, but he was more a comic relief. The music was something I'd warmed to, but as I'd been digging into the pop music that immediately followed Reilly's initial work, it had the effect of hearing Big Star after you've heard the Posies – a diluted impact, squelched by decades of descendents. It was still interesting, though I didn't fully get the appeal at the time.

After devoting myself to the pursuit of more experimental music, I needed to make a conscious effort to go back through my record collection and assess some more of the "pure guitar experiments" -- Fripp & Eno, late-period Slowdive, Neu!, etc. When I finally got around to a few Durutti Column albums, what surprised me most when I really listened to it was just how STRANGE the music was, but with a spirit that was inviting. It's as lopsided and unpolished in many ways as the Fall, but it's aim isn't to shake the listener out of a comatose humdrumity through jagged noise and repetition... it's as music, to PLAY, to make sounds, to act as a soundtrack to life. However, while most music under the “ambient music” tag often makes the effort to become almost inaudible, supporting the natural webwork of sounds that make up white noise, Reilly seems as though he's trying to camouflage his music... not make it blend in, but with production choices and rhythms that could almost be mistaken for music from another room, or a car passing an open window. It's not an attempt to hide the fact that it's music, nor are the sounds TRYING to explicitly mimic real-world sounds (for the most part... those "bird" synths that start off the album largely blow that argument to hell), but to make you hear music and natural sound in the same manner. If you listen to this and drone music long enough (hearing the sub-harmonies skitting around once your brain resets its "baseline silent") you'll start to hear music EVERYWHERE in weirdly synchronized rhythms. It's eerie. You'll eventually have to cleanse your brain with some early Prince records, and when that statement is true, something has skewed wildly. But that's another musing for another column.

Punk allegedly got rid of the guitar hero. Post punk was built on a framework that largely rejected that “big rock show bombast” mentality as excessive, showy, and unnecessary. What makes post-punk identifiable musically is that it's music is clearly built on a foundation of punk rock... you needed punk to have happened to make it. And that close to it chronologically, guitar "heroes" were few and far between... the stigma and shame simply would have been too much to bear for any forward-thinking axe-slinger. It wasn't until three or four generations after post punk that many of the American underground bands would bring traditional technical values back into the vocabulary with bands like Dinosaur Jr and the Meat Puppets. In late-70s England, however, there were a few players who didn't agree with the "guitar is outdated, synths are the way forward" outlook. Rubbing against the times, people like Vini Reilly decided that the guitar wasn't dead, it just hadn't been explored in every direction yet. Taking the blues out, taking the sexuality out of the "rock god" allowed players to use the instrument in not necessarily new, but non-traditional ways (at least, in the rock context). The difference between Reilly and his brethren is that he was often concerned with sounding pleasant.

Speaking generationally, Vini Reilly could be considered (bear with me here) the Eddie Van Halen of the UK post-punk set. Both players attempted to push the limits of their genre (experimental pop music/heavy rock) with new technologies and sounds. Eddie used super-high-gain amplifiers and "hot" guitar pickups to get that blasting, crunching sound that allowed him to innovate by using double-tapping and other tricks of technique (prodigious talent likely didn't hurt). Reilly used tape delays and primitve synth circuits to re-shape his guitar tones and atmospheres into something that the mainstream hadn’t really attempted yet, beyond gimmicky novelty tracks. Led Zeppelin and Beethoven may have given birth to Van Halen, but Brian Eno and John Cage were the fathers of the Durutti Column.

Part Two: Solipsistic Soliloquy

While recording the other night, the thought occurred to me that my latest method of composition is recording a series of what some might call "micro-loops", and layering them until a common composition reveals itself. For example, 8 seconds, while a long time for a single musical phrase, is still a very short amount of time. Using recording equipment, I've found myself layering these loops over each other for hours. Each loop is only roughly 8 seconds, but when 50 of them, in various keys and rhythms and tones play at the same time, something else tends to emerge. Practically, it's simply the law of averages... the loudest notes to emerge will be the ones that were played the most times at a synchronized point in the loop. If I hit "E" more often than any other note, you'll hear "E" pop out of the din more often. But there's usually no set destination to the compositions as they're being recorded, and while my ear is trained for music, it's not trained for theory.

But sonically, what happens when the layers are stacked up over and over and over is a strange effect... one I'm certain that musicologists have studied, but one I hesitate to investigate, for fear it will kill the magic. What happens is that melodies that you never played begin to appear through the sonic haze. Repeating melodies, due to the simple technology that's being used to record these looping musical phrases. Since each note in the phrase could recorded at a different time -- a different point in the layering process -- it likely has a different technique applied to the actual guitar playing, or has an entirely different tonality to the guitar, or a differing "sonic space" due to more or less reverb on the surrounding notes in the composite phrase. These phrases begin to make themselves heard after enough layers mesh that it's hard to hear specific phrases on their own in their entirety... somehow another layer was recorded louder, or with a more distorted tone, drowning it out, taking over the melody, before a chorus of seven layers of guitars glide over a single chord, or bend and sway sickly under the thrall of a vibrato dip. To put down the instrument and hear the ghosts inside the music composing melodies and songs that I've played but never ACTUALLY PLAYED... it's somehow magical to me. Haunting. As though these melodies were already there, floating through the air, waiting for someone to rip open the air and pluck them... tuning into some frequency beyond my control.

Standing there, listening to the recording playing back, a symphony of guitars - moaning, singing, crying, laughing, screaming... all humming underneath a haunting melody that no one ever played. But it's there. It exists. Sometimes it's even beautiful. But no one played it to make that sound. It's truly collaborating with the technology, rather than using it to my own ends. I'm not enough of a technically accomplished player to perform the melodies in my head. I'm not enough of an expert on the electronics and technology to know exactly what effect that turning one knob on my effects bank will do. German electronic composer Klaus Schulze once laughed and told an interviewer that no matter how he tried, he wouldn't be able to replicate the beautiful analog synthesizer sound he was making for them the next day. There's an element of chance, an element of danger in recording and performing without a net, without playing established music in an established genre. Gang Of Four spoke on the “Sound Opinions” podcast recently and confessed that their earliest songs were punkier than the music they later became lauded for, and in their estimation, there's a safety zone to learning how to write a song that goes "verse/bridge/chorus, verse/bridge/chorus, key change, out"... but they point out that in a way, that's not playing in a style, that's playing in a genre. Everyone has to start with genre, that's how you learn. My genre was punk. Some people start playing and play country. Some play classical. You play to a form, a format that inspired you. It’s a latticework the vines of your musical tomato plant grows up. But according to bandleaders Andy Gill and Jon King, the goal is to attempt to stretch beyond genre and reach beyond it to where the art is being created free of genre restrictions, be they form or tone (i.e. punk has to be angry) to really SAY something, be it lyrical or making a musical statement. Now, rather than tying myself to the pop music genre restriction, I'm working toward a different and new (to me) method of composition, one that allows for a percentage of chance and intuition to work simultaneously, rather than polishing my abilities to succeed within form. It's the very essence of coloring "outside the lines" -- it's dangerous, but can be rewarding. It can be just awful sometimes, but you never know if you'd hit a progression that moves your spirit if you don't take that gamble. It's the essence of jazz, applied to quasi-melodic (OK, "not entirely dissonant") electronic experimentation with a good old wood and steel contraption generating the sounds. Primitive human technology filtered through cutting-edge technology has a magical way of forcing the humanity of the "driver" through to the end result.

The beauty of the process is the crafting of each track live... listening to the looping, loping melody, adding a spare, interlocking part, attempting to tentatively integrate into the whole, in and out of what's already there, and then once successful, moving on to new sounds and ideas. By relaxing a mentality of absolute control over what I INTEND the end result to be, and simply letting it develop naturally (not predicting a fatalist, it's allowing me to create melodies in an automatic fashion. I provide the impetus, the ghosts in the machine tell me how it's supposed to sound when it's all done.

It's completely uncommercial, equal parts inspiration and chance, but it's something very, very pure. In fact, the last time I watched 24 Hour Party People, I even got a little choked up when the film's version of Durutti Column supporter/benefactor (and Factory Records head) Tony Wilson attempts to lift Reilly's spirits after a spartan Tuesday night crowd (ok, an empty room). It's a moment that stands as a testament to Wilson's belief in the power of rock and roll, and why we're all here in the first place. He puts his hand on Vini's shoulder and assures him, "Whatever we acheive, the important thing is that you make... wonderful music." And really, isn't that what making music should really be about?

The Dirtbombs Start The Party (Again)

2011-04-02T07:11:00.001-07:00

When I heard about the Dirtbombs' new album, Party Store, I was fascinated. As a card-carrying member of the 'Bombs fan club, and a lifelong fan of primitive early techno music (too many "synthesizer magic" demonstrations in elementary school, and "3-2-1 Contact" episodes on electronic music tech. A few years as a kid in Europe at the dawn of the '90s didn't hurt), it seemed like a really strange choice for a group as sweaty and organic as the combo that put out the garagey Dangerous Magical Noise and the R&B covers masterpiece Ultraglide In Black. But something about their last album hinted that all was not well at the mod shindig these groovy soulsters were rocking. 2008's We Have You Surrrounded kept the band's two (biggest) strengths intact: a slicked-back sense of how to inject groove and soul music into a rock format, and a vicious intensity that masked some seriously dark undertones. To an armchair socilogist like me, Surrounded is one of the finer records of the latter half of the last decade because it captures the tenor of the times so well... a post-9/11 terror state... bombings, riots, Egypt and Libya on the verge of collapse... it ain't exactly the second Age Of Aquarius. Along with Gorillaz Demon Days, it managed to merge a rocking-in-the-face-of-it spirit with a one-eye-over-your-shoulder reality check.

So what happens when you end up in an about the worst example of urban decay (sorry, Detroit!) in one of the bleakest times in memory? You look back to see what your predecessors did in times of strife. In this case, they danced.

The late '80s in Detroit were nobody's idea of a Garden Of Eden, but in a testament to the human spirit and the effects of psychedelic club drugs, some brilliant minds were creating what, to them, were the updated sounds of the European jet set. What happened, of course, is that their creations got away from them and became some combination of the Iron Giant and a lumbering Johnny Appleseed, changing the face of the pop music landscape for the next, oh, thirty years. But this isn't really about what happened in electronic and pop music from 1990 onward. This is about what it sounds like when the times around you don't look good... when there's no money, no love, no peace, no future, and you realize there's nothing you can do So you just... fucking... dance.

Don't forget that bandleader Mick Collins has been denying the Dirtbombs' status as a "garage rock" act since the band's inception. Every time I read an article with the man, he's frustrated at being pigeonholed. I mean, it has to be a little tounge-in-cheek, because as anyone who's seen them live can attest, they put the sweat and blood into crashing drums and fuzzed out guitars like nobody's business... it's pretty close, Mick. But he's always categorizing the group as a "dance band", and at first glance, it's hard not to wonder if this concept (garagey combo plays TECHNO songs?!?) isn't some kind of contrarian impuse to say "YEAH, JERKS - WE ARE A DANCE BAND, SEE?". My faith in their abilities made me want to check it out, but even a devoted fan like myself was skeptical that it could be a success. It seemed more like the type of album that's usually mentioned in conversation as "Oh, you know, they're all good, except of course for that techno covers one, but that was just a weird one-off experiment". Depending on your taste, its a charge that could be levelled against any genre-exercise album (Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue", The Byrds' "Sweetheart Of The Rodeo", etc). I didn't doubt Collins' love of the music: as a longtime Detroit scenester/supporter, I can't imagine he wasn't jacking to some of the futuristic sounds of Derrick May and Model 500. He's been threatening a Dirtbombs "bubblegum" record for years now, too. But jumping from being a MASTER of one genre to even being "pretty good" in another... that's a tough move, Mick. So this album was approached with a little caution.

On first listen, it was just a surprise to hear the MC5-like sound of the band's ramalama constrained to such a repetitious form... but luckily, years of damaging my brain with Fall albums and Krautrock bootlegs kept me on board. I was intrigued. Had some things to do. Put it on later... and well, I pumped it into the CTRL Sound Department's speakers, strapped on my guitar, cranked up the fuzz, and played along ALL NIGHT.

The Krautrock mention up there isn't without a point... the early "Bellville Three" (techno pioneers May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson) material was essentially an update of the sounds Kraftwerk were making at the time, modelled for ritzy club play, but if you trace that back even one more link in the chain, Kraftwerk were simply the first all-electronic Krautrock band. If you can imagine what Kraftwerk's best-known songs would sound like on traditional instruments, you're simply regressing to early Krautrock pioneers. It's then strange to go FORWARD in time, from Kraftwerk to their disciples, to imagining transferring those electronic grooves on organic "rock" instruments, instead of the other way around. The difference? The Dirtbombs have soul on their side. They make these robotic grooves swing and bump rather than click and thump. As several reviewers paid far more than me have already pointed out, the Dirtbombs play everything like they're going for the jugular, so to hear them so savagely attack these minimalist phrases and extended rhythmic grooves with the same brutal intensity that they tear into a Motown cover. Or, for that matter, a Brian Eno cover. Or even an INXS cover. These guys (and girl - Ko Melina, of the highly underrated Ko and The Knockouts) don't fuck around. Ko delivers her finest vocal performance to date on this album, cooing in the "diva" counterpoint role so often necessary on these old techno and house songs. Lethal doses of inventive arrangements, thanks to the unconventional twin-bass, twin-drummers lineup, leads to a ton of danceable rhythms pumping out of the speakers. Guitar squonk abounds, too... the band hasn't abandoned their love of thrashing tempos, incisive guitar lines, and more fuzz than the chins of a Portland hipster bar.

So I think it's great. But will anybody else? Fuzz fans with an affinity for a VERY specific type of dance music (hard to find on albums as it was a 12" singles genre, and dance music is so forward-moving, much of it is considered "old and useless" within a year), it seems like a pretty niche market, geared mainly toward... myself? I genuinely have no idea if the band expected a market for this type of album. Open-minded listeners with a penchant for repetition and fuzz will fall in love with it, but its easy to imagine a lot of casual fans from the rock end of the spectrum being turned off at the near-complete lack of hooks and even vocals. It's not an instrumental record... but there's not much "singing" to be found. Technophiles will steer clear because it's a crunchy rock act playing ancient songs. If one even has a distaste for techno beats and repetitious buzzsaw faux-sequencer lines, this isn't your cup of tea. The band hasn't simply adorned their songs with the trappings of another style, a la the '97 "year of drum 'n' bass", but the Dirtbombs swallowed, digested, and completely recreated this style within the parameters of their style. Whether this is a good thing, or even a necessary thing, is the subjective element here. As a fan of both highly-specified categories, I'm in lurve. But if you're not... you might be better served by the singles comp. Buy this and give it a listen -- it makes better background music than you might think, but there's a high probability this isn't something for everyone. But I just spent about 3 hours pushing a tube amp to new levels of overdrive to rock along with one of the last great "rock and roll bands". So I guess that's a pretty positive review.

intercept: CTRL NEWSWIRE

2011-04-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

[begin transmission]

[static]

-- begin tracking: Central Target, remote login--
-- LOCATION: appx. 42.362603,-71.062274 --
-- trace source: [radio device blocked by weather; report to 'storm force'] --

[begin message]

THERE'S A NOR'EASTER BLOWING, AND WE'RE CURRENTLY HIDING OUT IN PLAIN SIGHT. CHECK YOUR LOCAL STATION. THINGS HERE MOVE PRETTY FAST. BUT NOT AS FAST AS WE DO.

LIVE-IN-THE-STUDIO REMIXES LAST NIGHT WHEN THE SPIRIT THREE AND NEPTUNE BALANCE COLLABORATED AT CTRL ON A 2-HOUR TRIP-HOP PERFORMANCE.

PLANS ARE CURRENTLY UNDERWAY FOR A NEPTUNE BALANCE EP BEFORE SUMMER 2010.

THE SPIRIT THREE IS EXPECTED TO COMPLETE A NEW E.P. IN THEIR LIVE SERIES NEXT WEEK, WITH AN ONLINE RELEASE TO FOLLOW SHORTLY THEREAFTER.

WE'RE CURRENTLY IN TALKS WITH SHAKE AND LAZER MOUSE ABOUT NEW MATERIAL, AND MAY BE ANNOUNCING ANOTHER NEW SIGNING TO THE LABEL SOMETIME THIS SPRING.

FINALLY, AFTER SOME LEGAL WRANGLING, IF ALL GOES WELL, WE MAY DIG INTO THE ARCHIVES TO PROVIDE A GLIMPSE AT THE ORIGINS OF THE COLLECTIVE. THINGS ARE AFOOT. NO JOKE.

SURREPTITIOUSLY,
MIKEY SHAKE

[end message]

-- track source: Boston, MA --
-- track sender: CTRL, Primary Agent --
-- monitor radio waves, target --

[directive: terminate sweet potato supply WITH EXTREME PREDJUDICE]

[static]

[end transmission]

transmission intercept: CTRL expanding/begin surveillance

2011-03-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

[begin transmission]

[static]

-- begin tracking: Central Target Hub Ultra-Linear Unit (CTRL, C.T.H.U.L.U.) --
-- trace souce: Northeast United States, likely on land, Earth --

[begin message]

Hello out there.

Since our last announcement, things at Central Target have been heating up. More communication breakdowns, less all-night Zeppelin parties, and fewer lyrical drops into the communiques.

Fa fa fa... wait, never mind.

I've recently spoken to my trusty new business partner, who shall remain temporarily nameless, but is now 1/2 of the Central Target Recording Label. He's a master of music and a titan of industry. A gentleman AND a scholar. Please wish him welcome, everyone. He'll be operating out of a new secret lair we're opening in Cleveland. I've seen the video screen in the control room... like the bridge of the Enterprise. Secret rooms, parking structure, indoor roller rink... truly incredible. But you read right up there when I said Cleveland. No, we're not relocating -- we're EXPANDING. That's right... we're oozing west, kids.

Despite the best efforts of our helper monkeys, our communications center is not fully operational. But don't worry. Despite the fact that we here at CTRL are somewhat quiet, we're more than comfortable... spending our days in chic lounges and recording studios, making music. Some of it pounding, some of it haunting. In the immortal words of one Mr. Hammer, "It's all good." While we expect the release of significantly more music than has been previously offered, we're also expecting a bit of a quiet period on the release front for the next 4-6 weeks (although other content should still continue to be updated intermittently). But don't lose hope, true believers, not only will we continue to ape the style of beloved childhood narrators... we're also going to hit it hard and hit it good as soon as we regroup. Figuratively speaking, of course.

We're currently in the process of deputizing some collaborators... accomplices if you will. Much like television's "the A-Team", we've been keeping our eye on several potential staff members/contractors. It could even be you. Just know that we're watching, and that at any time you might be called into the most dangerous, fabulous, secretly powerful cabal of artists to which you've ever been privvy.

Hang tight, boys and girls... and just remember the slogan I heard from Kevin almost a decade ago. I'd paraphrase, but it would just lose something in the translation.

More soon, once we contact our girl in Dorchester, once we refuel the brain trust, and once we run the electric bill sky-high at 3:30 AM. Trust me, it will make sense later.

Gotta run.

Diabolically.
Mikey Shake

-- track source: Boston, MA... Cleveland, OH --
-- track sender: CTRL, Head Agent --
-- monitor radio waves, no hard line installed --

[directive: determine purpose of CTRL, halt world domination]

[static]

[end transmission]

The 100th Post!

2011-02-19T06:49:00.001-08:00

We've made it to 100 here at the CTRL! It's with that in mind that the information in the following comminuque is both technical and philosophical... isn't that what each and every one of you faithful readers comes here for?

The Central Target Research Labs are up and running, with a library, lounge, galley, communications center, recording studio, nearby escape route, and an in-house exotic eatery.

Despite the toll that the relocation has taken on us all, several projects are in the works, including the production of a soundtrack for a lost 1960's biker/exploitation film, a review of the latest album by Detroit music legends The Dirtbombs, new Spirit Three material, as well as a series of random and insightful dispatches originally created between 1:00 AM and 7:00 AM.

However, despite the best effors of our tech team, we're currently without a way to broadcast these, as a freak accident has knocked out our comminications equipment. So, all of our efforts are currently self-contained, until a way to jack into the system presents itself. Then, we'll naturally flood the channels with new updates. Until then, hold tight.

We're working on it, don't worry.

So until then, I'll leave you faithful followers with the following postulation.

I was watching the 1987 film version of Less Than Zero (a longtime favorite book of mine, but I'd never seen the movie), and found myself wondering if a plastic, shallow, day-glo wasteland of superficiality presented in the film is somehow preferable to a twitchy, paranoid existience where imminent doom is never far from anyone's mind. Of course, years spent decrying the artificial, dead-inside gloss of the late 1980's makes (and a naive longing in my adolesence for "gritty reality") this is a bitter pill to swallow, but as defeatist as it may seem, it sure seems prettier than the alternative.

Grim, huh? It's February. Let's not get too peppy for another month, people.

Thoughts Found Online: A Quick Update For The Faithful

2011-01-27T02:54:00.000-08:00

'Found thoughts' for you... an excellent point about the state of most "indie rock" (the musical 'style', not the act of being a band/artist on an independent label) and its influence derived from Radiohead, who, for the LAST TIME, I do enjoy.

"What strikes me most about them is the absolute lack of playfulness in their music. Everything about them seems absolutely calculated and simultaneously stoic and histrionic. Nothing about them feels immediate.

There's also the matter of their influence on independent rock since the release of "OK Computer." I feel like a large percentage of music championed by Pitchfork and their ilk is derived from or greatly influenced by "OK Computer" and its followups and the musical principals extolled therein. The punk values of "indie" throughout the 80s and 90s where replaced with prog rock values."

- "PB", avclub.com reply boards, Jan. 2011

Interesting. When confronted with the question of how I could come up through the same "pre-indie" channels of alternative rock and punk, yet feel so distanced from the state of current "indie rock" (i.e. "blog rock") is because I approach it expecting the same punk-derived value system (both musical and philosophical) I encountered in the "alternative" scene throughout college and the early years of the current environment. I'm looking at it as a punk, they're looking at it the way prog-rockers would, which, to my mentality, is anathema.

And don't worry, faithful readers, Central Target has not forsaken you. We're simply in the process of updating the new and improved Central Target Research Labs.(CTRL). The lab equipment has been moved in, there's still some light cleaning to do, and we're desperately in need of that phalanx of teenage Swedes to shuffle things around, but it's coming along nicely. Here's a snapshot from the "moving-in" process:

We may be taking January off in the "Spirit Three Live EP Series" after the relocation and the sad passing of a member of the Central Target family, but we will be back in force, and rest assured that January is not going to pass without some type of surprise.

Switchblades And Lollipops,
Mikey Shake
Central Target Research Labs

The Central Target Research Lab

2010-12-16T03:26:00.001-08:00

Well, 2010 is winding down, so it's time to keep running from the Man, as always. We here are proud to announce that we're moving into some new digs... the new Central Target Research Lab. It's essentially a private new hideout/base, replete with an in-house Indian restaurant, a recording studio, media center, library... and it's all "transport adjacent" for a quick underground or airborne getaway. If we can get that team of interns (forced labor) we're hoping for, there might even be a tiki bar.

We'll be keeping you updated with pictures of the installation as it progresses, but please forward your hate mail, marriage proposals, and kinky photographs to the new address:

Central Target Research Lab (CTRL)
Secret Lair, Deep Underground
Boston, MA 0212

(No C.O.D.)

How To Be A Grouch: The Top Seven Of 2010

2010-12-16T02:55:00.001-08:00

So it's that time again. I'm spurred on my by my colleague's mention of his impending list... and my own guilt about not really even thinking about mine in ages. See, 2010 was big for me. Got a good job that I like, that lets me write professionally... got married... moving to a nice new place before the year is out... and more specifically around here, started up a new musical endeavor of my own... which has tended to make me listen to more ambient/drone/experimental stuff than I have in the past.

So maybe, I've just been busy... maybe that's why I'm finding it so hard to muster up a top 10 albums of 2010. Scrolling through the digital Post-It (TM) that I've been keeping on my laptop for years... the one that says "Best Albums Of The Year"... it's December, and I've only got eight. The ones I've been thinking of adding would take my pool of candidates up to 13. Not the glorious two-or-three dozen I've had in some recent years to sift through and really decide what cut my jib the past 3-6-5. Nope, a slim, trim 13. So screw it. I'm calling it off. There will be no top ten this year (*waves arms in that "simmer down" motion to quell outraged threats and hysterical sobbing*)... no, not this year. In this year, I present to you a top SEVEN. Not a TEN, a SEVEN. There were plenty of albums, new to me, that I heard that I liked. A medium-sized percentage of them were even from this year. Several were even albums I really enjoyed listening to over and over, but they were like flings... nothing that really stuck. So here's a short list of what I REALLY, REALLY liked,

7. Wu-Tang Meets The Beatles - Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers
I just found this a week ago, and the earliest date my completely half-assed search for info on it pulled up was in January, so there. It is what you think it is, just spliced 'n' diced Beatles bits with the Wu-Tang swarmin' at you like a bad fever dream. Not revolutionary, in this post-Danger Mouse world, but it's a good example of how far sampleadelic culture has come since a JBs break first got lifted by an enterprising DJ. Well-done, with surprising sound quality and a nicely-put-together cover. The best part? It's the most fun you'll have if you're that rare breed that straddles a line between Liverpool and Shaolin. The re-contextualization appeals if you're jaded by hearing another Beatles song ANOTHER time, and it's fun to hear tales of feudal ghetto warfare over psych-pop breakbeats.

6. Sade - Soldier Of Love
My adoration for this record is based almost entirely on the title track. Most of the rest doesn't begin to live up to that pinnacle of (in my opinion) her career. But it's good enough to get the whole album on this list. Low on the list, though, but still... It's a great album, but my god, that song. It wouldn't have such power if it weren't sung by a returning champion we didn't understand... we hadn't seen her dark side. Hearing the jagged, murky landscape of this song, traced with a voice that is older, more nuanced... but still familiar? Fantastic.

5. The Dead Weather - Sea Of Cowards
I'm a Jack White fan, yeah, but I'm no patsy. I've said it before, but he's gotta earn his keep. Lucky for him, it was a thin year, because this ain't his finest-ever. But so what? A greasy, sexy profanity of an album, it's dark, angry, sexually-charged, and loud. It's primitive, thudding, grinding rock music. Electric guitars turned up to "loud" and banged on rhythmically. And it's pretty great. And if he keeps making these, I'll take back most of the good things I said about the second Raconteurs album. promise.

4. Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroid
I can't really give a fair description of this record, because I don't really know how I'm supposed to be listening to it. Is it coming from an R&B/soul angle? Because it doesn't make sense as an R&B album. It's not a "rock and roll" album either. And forget pop, this is almost (nay, certainly) willfully weird. And that's its best trait. The songs are great, the presentation is great, the experimentation is great. One of the only reasons this wasn't my favorite album of the year is that it felt "still a little unformed". If Monae can keep her artistic freedom for another album or two, those will be the ones that really knock it out of the park. Like Prince, circa Dirty Mind... we'll be looking at it in ten years as the great warmup that's also a classic in it's own right.

3 Malory - Pearl Diver
It's the sound of dreaming about clouds while floating underwater in bright sunlight. Pensive, layered, thoughtful, beautiful.

2. Ceremony - Rocket Fire
Cold but human, noisy but pretty. I can't listen to it quietly, because there really is no quiet in there. Ceremony wraps synth-pop drum machines in the gauzy wrap of fuzz and static. If you're in a city sometime, close your eyes and listen. Start to isolate sounds... the radio across the street, honking horns, people yelling, that white-noise of a hundred thousand people moving around? Now fix in on the way that nearby construction saw's whine is rubbing against the screech of bus breaks down the street... now bring in that jackhammer a block over. Pummelling, pulsing rhythmically, but not too loud... just an insistient, continuous machine-gun "brrrap-brrrap-brrrap-brrrap". You suddenly realize the synchronization of those sounds... or your mind somehow glues them together... and you hear, in your head, just for a second, the way the sounds make some alien type of music together, like they're playing off of each other... that's what Ceremony sound like.

1. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
...speaking of albums that will be better appreciated later. It's funny how after all those years of Albarn getting Ray Davies comparisons for his incisive Brit-life lyrics, he'd years later slide into that other Ray Davies role, that of underappreciated storyteller, who nobody listens to until it's too late. The way we can look back on some of the Kinks' mid-period work and ask "How was this a commerical failure?" This is great pop, it's danceable and it has catchy hooks. It's conceptual - the band is cartoon character ape-people who live in a fortress. It's post-modern pop music that makes a patchwork out of its guest stars, painting slashing swathes of texture over unfamiliar backgrounds. It's social commentary, in a not-too-veiled way. It's a tabloid story of a phoenix-like second-chance career from a former Buzz Bin bad boy, who's both a Royal National Treasure and a one-hit wonder. Here he's making the most personal album of his career, and even if it's not his best, it's his bravest yet.

Special extra credit to albums by Erykah Badu, John & Exene, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, School of Seven Bells, Manic Street Preachers, Black Mountain, High On Fire, Beach House, and several others my mind is far too full to conjure up right now. Nice job!

Ram It Down: A Point Of Entry For Judas Priest To Deliver The Goods

2010-11-26T09:29:00.001-08:00

After spending time, once again, debating with the best man at my wedding over the merits of Iron Maiden versus Judas Priest, I decided to commit: I'd listen to the nominal entirety of Judas Priest's discography, since, as a Maiden Man (uhhhh..) I was LESS familiar with the collective work of Priest. Granted, the tone of my analysis was not unbiased, since I was essentially comparing Priest, who I don't know really well, although I really like them, to Iron Maiden, who I already know I love. But I figured all it would do is make me like Judas Priest more, since I'd be more familiar with them, right?

So I dove in. On Thanksgiving. Five days after my wedding. Seriously. We drove to Thanksgiving dinner rocking out to Stained Class. Loud.

I love my wife.

So... here's my take this week in the case of Priest v. Maiden.

If each of these bands were a movie trilogy, Priest would be Max Max. Hot, sweaty, vaguely futuristic, most certainly surly, a little violent, but rooted in greasy machines. It will start out great (Mad Max/Sad Wings Of Destiny-Sin After Sin), get over-the-top awesome (The Road Warrior/ Stained Class-Defenders of The Faith), then peter out while doing the things you love in a familiar but tired way (Beyond Thunderdome/Ram It Down-Turbo). Iron Maiden, on the other hand, would likely be Lord Of The Rings -- probably went on too long, had lots of stages you could have done without, but when you're done, it's usually the more awesome stuff I remember.

For ME, I think my preference for Maiden comes from two things: context and production. Judas Priest sounds dated to me, thanks to their attempts to stay contemporary. A forgivable sin in the early 1980s, when all the technology to MAKE those sounds was new and wild, but now all that chorus on those guitars smothered in gated reverb remind me of the soundtracks to a million Saturday afternoon movie closing credit themes. Defenders Of The Faith is a particularly egregious example, which buries some of the band's best "hard era" songs in a digital reverb din that makes it impossible to separate from inages of Remo Williams duking it out with Action Jackson on top of a half-finished skyscraper. Maiden had their own production problems, to be sure (some of the synths on the post-Powerslave era are a bit airy to belong of an Iron Maiden record), but it seems like they held out LONGER for one reason or another, with simply a greater percentage of their so-called "classic period" sounding less specifically of its time.

The worst effect of this is on the dueling guitars that made each act so brutally awesome. Whomever it was that botched so many production jobs for Priest certainly owes K.K. Barrett and Glen Tipton their apologies. "Here's an idea for you, audio scientists: if you're going to have dueling lead guitars, why don't you give each of the players identical tones, so you can't distinguish between who's playing what!" Oh wait, you did that, and dampened the brilliance of one of the best twin-guitar lineups since Scott Gorham and whoever else was in Thin Lizzy at the time! Maiden's albums seem to have a distinction in tones between Dave Murray and Adrian Smith that allows you to hear another aspect of the guitaring that differentiates the two even further: melodies. Downing and Tipton RULE, alright? And while I would love to be in the front row banging my fucking head while they rip up some guitarmonies, on (overproduced) record, too much of that same tone turns into sort of a chorus-y, phased mush. It's to the players' credit that this isn't noticeable unless you're listening with a critical ear. Their soloing is astounding, and the riffage and melodicism of the solos is brilliant, but poor production harms it, and I've even listened to the remasters for this comparison. It's hardly the band's fault, and again, I'm sure that in the room it's practically a religious experience, but on record, and that's all anyone really has to go on, it's a little same-y. Maiden seems to utilize counterpoint melodies in the lead guitar parts, rather than intricate harmonies on the same melody. Which is a different beast, really, with a different number. But if you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison... I prefer the intertwining melodies version.

I wouldn't be stupid enough to compare Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson to Judas Priest's Rob Halford though. That's a fool's game. Both these dudes are as good as metal/rock vocalists come, and that one's strictly down to preference. However, we can talk lyrics. Maybe that's where my "mid-80s rock tone" pre-condition jumps in. Because honestly, my "bands to trilogies" metaphor up there didn't come out of nowhere. Judas Priest were bad boys, singing about cars and sex and being badasses (leather-and-studs image notwithstanding). Iron Maiden's Steve Harris was a nerd, through and through. He wrote about history and fantasy literature... a song based on the 1960's pop-art TV show The Prisoner? Dork. While the lyrics on either band's oeuvre of dust sleeves are all pretty silly, the macho strut of Priest somehow (and I don't pretend to understand why) comes off as sillier. Which makes me a complete nerd, but if you've read this far, you're pretty comfortable with that fact.

But the obsession with say, "hot rod metal" vs. "dragonslayer metal" has one other hidden facet -- the fact that they had different ancestors. Sure, they can both be traced back to early proto-metal like Sabbath and Zeppelin. But Maiden leaned a lot harder on European musical influences, while Priest was undoubtedly more fueled by American music. The boys in Maiden were more likely to incorporate some classical passages in with their galloping sound, with phrases that recall what many 20th century ears hear as the "old fashioned" central European sounds of movies featuring wizards and warriors. Add to this the scales of the British folk tradition (of which you can certainly hear shades in some of Iron Maiden's mid-period albums), there's a foreign medieval-ness to their sound that appeals to me. It's got just a little more of that "Battle Of Evermore"/Jimmy page version of Olde English folk to add a different texture. Judas Priest, on the other hand, are basically a blues act. Blues as filtered through John Lee Hooker's electric guitar, Elvis' frenzied gospel intermingling, Keith Richards' simplification of technique, Jimi Hendrix' amplification of sound into an almost physical element, and the giant scope of Zeppelin. But make no mistake, despite a few proggier moments on their earlier records, had they not discovered that their strengths were speed and aggression, they could have made a string of albums that sounded like Foreigner. Thank god they didn't, and once they found that recipe around the time of Stained Class, they transformed into a piston-pumping machine of greasy, full-throttle open road juggernaucity. (Nice, huh?) Of course, Maiden aren't off the hook either. Original vocalist Paul DiAnno often gets the blame for the less-than-awesome vibe of the first two Iron Maiden records, but it's lazy to attribute it solely to him. Bassist and songwriter Steve Harris was writing interesting songs that showed the path they would later take, but let's not mistake "interesting" with "very good". I like them, they have their charm, but each of these bands is allowed a few early missteps. I'm looking at you Rocka Rolla.

So ultimately, the bands certainly share some characteristics, but were separated by several years in making their first albums and really didn't sound all that much alike to music nerds. Once again proving that we're all wasting our lives, because in the grand scheme of music history, I don't see why I should even be able to distinguish between the two bands.

So, in short, I'm really, really glad I plowed through all that Judas Priest. i discovered at least 4 absolutely awesome records (Stained Class, Hell Bent For Leather, Unleashed In the East, and the almighty Screaming For Vengeance), none of which are marred by awful production. Incidentally, the last great Priest album, unmentioned here, is Painkiller, where the band finally caught up with the '80s thrash scene that they influenced. Brooooootal. I still prefer Iron Maiden, but I like my "epic fantasy rock" more than I like my "cars, sex, and being awesome" badass anthems.

Of course, Kiss annihilates both these sets of wimps with one giant ball of fire, but that's another column.

Spirits In The Frequencies

2010-10-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

By losing oneself in the repetition, in the hypnotic assault of a single note, a single repeated phrase, allows your ear to open wider, and listen deeper, and hear aspects of sound your brain has trained itself to ignore as noise. Those sounds, harmonically related to each other (mathematically, even) interact and play. It's a simple matter of resetting what your brain has locked in as it's "noise gate".

The best part is that while you are controlling the foundational note/part, those "phantom notes" dance in harmonically sound but unguided ways... that you aren't controlling, per se. It's essentially giving your ears a window into a spectrum where music exists that nobody's actually playing. And if hearing pure, natural music sounds appealing to your brain, trust me... it's worth trying.

2010-09-17T07:34:00.001-07:00

You can't get mad at a drowning man because he's drowning. Maybe he did bring it on himself, and maybe there are things that he needs to change, but none of that matters at that moment. All that matters right now is that you help him.

Don't Kill Me, I Want To Be A Messenger

2010-09-16T03:25:00.001-07:00

"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'" - Kurt Vonnegut

Ladies And Gentlemen... The Spirit Three

2010-09-07T23:40:00.000-07:00

The news has stopped for a few minutes, maybe I can wedge in a little overcooked musing on something or other... shall I give it a go?

I've recently been faced with an interesting creative challenge. With my interest in creating straightforward pop waning, I seem to spend a lot more time making experimental ambient music. Now, this is a strand of my musical diet that has always been there (since about the time I bought my first delay unit in high school), but has rarely bubbled to the surface, since it seemed tantamount to musical self-abuse - sure I have fun doing it, but does anyone really want to hear it?

The principal stumbling block is that in a mindset where repeatability is a key - i.e., it's no good unless you can repeat the process and get the same result... scientific musicality, in essence - an activity in which rolling around in sound, largely improvised, and unique to that performance seems somehow, well... false. Not bad, but not "real", whatever that entails.

But that was my own hang-up. In a world where recording exists, and in a medium (experimental music) where the recording and sonic manipulation is a given factor in the end result, it just doesn't matter... you only have to be able to do it right once. And sometimes, not even that, thanks to multitrack recording. Suddenly, the idea of it being a necessary factor to be able to play the same part the same way every time seems not outdated - after all, I still love pop music - BUT more than anything, it seems quaint. Suddenly, I'm working in a different field, with a different set of rules than before, and I'm finding that these rules offer a freedom of form that leads to new avenues of creativity.

The most interesting of which is that this inclination to experimental improvisation has been bubbling under for years. In 2004, we made the first Shake EP. It was intentionally primitive garage rock, inspired by the Oblivians, Cheater Slicks, et al. Only one of the songs was "written" before the recording session, and that was only in the most basic form, as it was only two different two-note two-note riffs over a thumpy beat. The point was that between getting home and going to bed, the goal was to create, and then have the creation exist as a separate entity, outside my head, before the day was through. That forced creativity can create some excellent accidents, and is freeing in that there's a certain sense that it doesn't matter what the end result IS, simply that there is an end result, a product created for whatever purpose. In my mind, that physical end result of spontaneous creativity, whether subjetively good or bad (I had a metalhead plumber friend who LOVED the Instant Record EP and garage rocker friends who hated it), what matters is that there is a thing that wasn't there before that you created. And if one keeps doing it, one gets better.

Naturally, there are some hidden clauses in that freedom - i.e., I'll respect your right to make something like that, but there's a "minimum competency level" that my aging ears have begun policing. However, that level is still pretty low. I'm willing to listen to just about anything if that spark of mad creativity is there, even if the result is (and it usually is) less-than-aurally-pleasing.

So now, I'm faced with a dilemma. I've come to terms with the fact that I have a limited audience... embraced it, even. Granted, I'd like my friends, whose opinions I respect, to LIKE it, but it's not necessary. Do I keep going down a road where I'm making music that pleases me with the sole intention of creation of an artifact and the enjoyment of making it? Or do I declare that art is invalid without an audience, and perhaps attempt to focus the energy on something more appealing to a wider group, thereby increasing my chances of this so-called "art" (blech) reaching a larger crowd?

The answer, of course, is the former. It doesn't matter whether or not anyone will hear (or if they do, care for) the music, it matters that this is a piece of something that wasn't there before. Sure, it might not be appealing, but it is an honest, true-to-life of a creative endeavor. It isn't forced, it isn't striving to fit a pre-determined style (it's not like I'm doing anything innovative, but I have no particular influences beyond "they play droning, heavily-effected guitars in a repetitive manner". There are a wondrous number of groups and players that have experimented with feedback and modulation. This is just another one. But the "keep doing it and get better" mantra fails me a bit when it comes to something this inherently structure-light. Without the classical pop format, the rules for whether or not something is good or bad get much more blurred. Right now, when I listen to the free-er end of avant/ambient/psychedelic music, my primary scale is "Is it boring?" That's not a lot of pressure to perfect a style, to be sure. But what if there were JUST enough pressure to keep things moving forward on a practical level, in a resolutely static style of expression? With a certain amount of pressure from a deadline, that's how. A deadline for a record series. One per month... a single at worst, and an EP at best. Some will be better than others, some will be worse than most of them. But they will be, and they will each have something appealing about them.

So please, in addition to Shake, welcome The Spirit Three into the world.

[And no, the name actually has nothing to do with Spiritualized and Spacemen 3... that's just a happy coincidence. You get an EP named after you if you're the first person to comment and say where the name comes from.]

Help The Aged: Counting Down To The Year 2000 (When We're All Fully Grown)

2010-08-25T03:22:00.000-07:00

As a certain type of youth, there's a certain appeal to a certain type of adulthood. The period between becoming a grown-up and becoming an adult. Adrift, probably surviving on cigarettes and whatever drinks you can scam a girl into buying you, and distinctly outside the norm. Over-educated and underpaid, you probably think you're under-appreciated as well, a self-absorbed intellectual, fascinated by social strata, since it's so easy to stand outside it, because who'd want to be a part of that anyway?

Which brings me to Pulp. To an American tennager in the mid-90s, Pulp held the seedy allure of an exotic sort of rinky-dink glamor, the kind that only that specifc kind of demographic above could create. They were certainly adult, what with their songs of sex and pubs and bad break-ups, and all the drunken hopelessness that comes with that. Their songs sounded like people making do with whatever they had, because none of it mattered anyway, but as Pulp frontman/mastermind Jarvis Cocker put it, "there's nothing else to do." Pulp comes across like a combination of Mississippi blues and Johnny Rotten: we're singing to make ourselves feel better... but there's really no future. I could never tell whether the group (whose spiritual guide is Cocker, without a doubt) was truly sticking up the common people, because they were all so clearly educated and intellectual in ways that "the masses" they often describe could never be.

Just like Jon Spencer, it's not so much a spokesman role, but works when you take Pulp/Cocker as an advocate and supporter - they love the realness of these people, the messy, visceral down-to-earthness, but, like Ray Davies, are ultimately just drawing sketches from the outside. I can sit in a bar near the docks at Chelsea and peoplewatch, and maybe even strike up some conversations... but I'm not one of those people. They're good people, but that's not me and it never will be. I'm not denying that Cocker probably grew up poor, and scraped to get by, and may not be a rich rock star (er, may not HAVE BEEN a rich rock star), but just like D. Boon and Mike Watt, coming from blue-collar doesn't necessarily make one that... sometimes you end up special, not like everybody else. Just like the country club set occasionally spits out a slacker with a contempt for it, a genuinely fey and pretentious poet can sometimes rise from the roughest background. That's not a slight... but something tells me ol' Jarvis wouldn't have done too well working down at the mill in Sheffield. But their examination of that segment of society, filtered with the "wasted art-school youth" of their backgrounds, had a way of making the tragedy of young adulthood seem romantic. And that romance is seductive. It's intoxicating.

There's an appeal in rooting for the underdog. We all know that. There's also an appeal in sticking it to authority, who tell you how things are supposed to be. In their prime, Cocker and Co, managed to do both... dancing in wood-panelled bingo halls with regular people on Wednesday night, flipping the finger to the establishment who had no time for the common folk. I think they had the right idea... it's all falling apart anyway, and none of us have any money, so why not have a little fun?

What's funny, is that on the other side of things, now that I am an adult (nominally), gently easing out of that period of my life, is just how nostalgic tracks like "Countdown" and "Mile End" make me for my own situation BEFORE I got there. Listening to songs of misspent young adulthood make me nostalgic for the years of adolesence when I listened to songs of misspent young adulthood looking forward to it. A therapist might have a field day, but some of my best memories of adolescence involve desperately trying to claw my way out of it. Granted, mine weren't as full of sordid sexual encounters and disco-going (I can't stand most clubs... something tells me i'd enjoy a disco in the UK in '94 a little more than most of the trance clubs these days...), but it's just funny how... well, CHARMING their brand of dirty-mirror, low-rent sleaze seems with the benefit of hindsight. Hedonistic and ever so dramatic, but charming nonetheless.

I should point out here that Pulp only briefly touched this magic observational balance. Let's say a couple of albums and a handful of singles. Their other work is wonderful, but it doesn't have the same sort of charm. In fact, almost as much as I loved Different Class and His 'N' Hers, I was listening over and over to their messy "sophomore" album (first album post-hugeness), This Is Hardcore all through my senior year of high school. I even have the band's logo from that album cover etched into my backpack in white-out if you don't believe me. Apparently that record was a giant cocaine-fuelled nervous breakdown set to music, but its soul-inflected film-noir sound spoke to my more dramatic (and depressive) tendencies. The title track in particular is a party-stopper. I'm serious. The buildup where the guitar comes in will KILL anything in the room with it's bashing bleakness. But it's worth hearing. It's just not the low-budget Roxy Music mod/disco of their "classic" period.

Britpop seduced me after I started to move beyond what grunge and alternative rock had become - a big, label-fuelled cash-grab full of artfully coiffured guitarists in silk shirts and leather pants, who'd been playing Poison licks only 3 years prior, but now they had a lip piercing and a tattoo. Oasis spoke to my populist tenencies. They wanted to pull my heartstrings with supersized anthems, and I damn well wanted those strings pulled. It was a good deal to cut. Blur spoke to my intellect... painting pictures of the way modern life in the suburbs really was, pulling back the curtain on convenience and showing the hollow core. A bit too clever for it's own good, but not pulling any punches and inspiring. But Pulp... Pulp spoke to my sense of romance. I wanted to be able to meet up in the year whatever with my friends, once we were all fully grown. Get sloshing drunk and wander around all night. I wanted to remember the sordid details of staying out all night fuelled by loud music and cheap alcohol. And now, listening to this music that painted pictures in my teenage mind of a life that I hadn't lived yet, I wanna go back to those days again. Not forever, just for a while. And Pulp can get me there fast.

The Universal And The Fractal

2010-08-24T03:34:00.000-07:00

As the risk of stating the obvious, sometimes greatest hits albums do serve their purpose.

I tend to follow the Bruce McCullough edict that "greatest hits albums are for housewives and little girls". Rarely does a band have a hand in choosing what's selected, so what you end up with is a smattering of what some label rep thinks is the best assortment of hits, usually in chronological order. That order usually stinks, because it exemplifies how a band fell off after their initial spark, or took forever to get going, making it an album you rarely reach for (I'm looking at you, Soundgarden). If it's not in strict chronological order, it's often in some random jumble that sticks 3 weak songs back to back (to back!) right in the middle of the playtime, leading me to turn it off once it gets boring.

But sometimes, a band is so good... that it turns out right.

The Best Of Blur is one of those times.

Now, I was late to the band. I felt pretty cool for finding their '97 self-titled (traded to a guy in school for an Alice In Chains EP). I was firmly stuck in my punk phase, and even with broad tastes, hadn't really dug up much of the U.S. deep underground. For a teen swimming in the dizzying Second New Wave Era of '94-'98, who needed to look much farther? But it was a sad record, still packed with hooks, and the strangest, most gnarled production texture ever. Of course, by the time I made this epochal discovery, they'd risen and fallen as the biggest band in England, and led by future Gorilla (and then-aspiring agitator) Damon Albarn, their snide Kinksian British POP competing with Oasis' more thuggish lager-rock and ultimately turned their backs on their musical homeland, indulging guitarist Graham Coxon's fascination with American indie and lo-fi acts like Pavement and Sebadoh. But what did I know? I was a 15-year-old.

Of course, over the years, I became a massive Blur fan. I could identify with their perfectly suburban take on modern life... the obsession with newer, sleeker, faster, prettier, easier... alluring, but as Blur would say, it's mostly "rubbish". They probably ended the '90s as my favorite of the Britpop wave, just edging out Pulp's sordid backroom glamo(u)r. I liked Blur because I WAS Blur. Smartass, arrogant, bored, frustrated, ultimately hopeful, but not terribly optimistic. They were nostalgic for they way things used to be, they way they SHOULD still be, but didn't seem to be anymore.

After a canon of classic Britpop, an experimental lo-fi branching out, the difficult follow up ("13", and then an interesting denouement (Think Tank) without musical director Coxon on board, they all went their separate ways, before '90s nostalgia kicked in and their later work, initially dismissed in the U.K. as Yankophilic dilettantism, found itself suddenly "ahead of it's time". They came back, did a reunion tour, everybody loved it... cool.

But that's all framing details. Their greatest hits package works because at face value it's a collection of better-than-average songs in a thoughtful sequence that highlights their individual quality and the sustained strength of the songwriting and kaleidoscopic reach. But forget all that... greatest hits packages work in one of two ways. For the casual consumer, they say "hey, here's a band whose songs that I heard I liked, I should get this, those and others I like are probably on there without all that other stuff to wade through!" And those people would be right. But I look at one and usually say, ok, knowing what I know about this band, how well does the album collect representative highlights that I'll like from this band?" As a fan, listening to The Best Of Blur is like watching a half-hour of really good previews for great movies you've already seen.

A fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole"... you've seen these... they look like primitive computerized psychedelic art. Well, this album plays like one. Each of Blur's albums has a very particular mood set over it, and while there's often a lot of room for movement, and maybe it's just the state of my life when I acquired each album, but the sequencing and track list of TBoB is like a volley of memories flooding back. The *ahem* highs and lows of "Beetlebum", and the rush of "Song 2" bring to mind that scrappy, dirty, raw guitar vibe of that self-titled album, before zooming away on the funkified wheels of the slick and dancey "There's No Other Way", from their debut album, which managed to synthesize Madchester baggy and lush shoegazing (and which I seem to like a lot more than anyone else seems to). From there, it flits around, but the emotions are programmed correctly, giving no pretense as hanging together cohesively in it's kaleidoscopic reach, but working like a stack of photographs pulled from a box. flip through them, know they're from different trips, then mix and match. It's amazing how effective the songs are, which is obviously credit to the strength of the writing. Their first classic, Modern Life Is Rubbish is almost completely ignored, but not only is that album very, very unified, it's also very, very British. And not that these boys have ever really HID their heritage, but it would be very insular to put much of that on a greatest hits, innit?

Moments from Parklife hit hardest, though. When the bouncier title track or "Girls And Boys" pop on I want to put on my docs and pogo around the room, but "To The End" and "This Is A Low" bring with them, even in miniature, the resigned nostalgia for a time clearly past that made Parklife such a powerful album in its entirety. That's the magic. That each of these moments, sequenced this way, bring with them all the complex statements that the albums were attempting to communicate as well. so when I listen to "To The End", I feel like I've spent all day with Tracy Jacks, and the trainspotting Englishman who feeds the pigeons, and those kids who just got back from a Bank Holiday rave on Majorca. And we're all at the dog track, having a pint before getting home to watch the telly, and I just remembered that you can't go back to the way it used to be. That's a pretty complex feeling to deliver in just a few minutes. Now, as I said, it's the SONG'S job to do that (and lest anyone forget, this is a BRILLIANT handful of songs), but the sequencing makes sure that you never linger in one area too long. Within a few minutes, that same imaginary "self" is whizzing through his teen years to the strains of "She's So High". It's complex and messy, and not even a perfect analogy, but what is?

Of course, I'm probably wrong. My sick, desperate psyche is probably searching for some greater meaning in life right now, and I'm just strongly identifying with some emotional signifiers that I had connected with during a particular emotional development phase when I was younger and am suddenly finding myself looking for solace in the "simpler" days of high school and college... a respite from the hectic responsibility of the adult world.

But someone who put this together made sure to place "Song 2" second on the track order. I've seen countless "best of the '90s" CD comps with that track... and most of them bury it late in the teens.

So there's hope...

Hanging On For Dear Life: Ceremony's "Rocket Fire"

2010-08-07T07:53:00.000-07:00

In the music press, it's virtually impossible to write a review of Ceremony's work without mentioning the joint history shared with current noise-rock toasts A Place To Bury Strangers. I made an effort to avoid doing it and it ends up being the lead-off to this review. The two bands shared members in a Virginia band called Skywave, whose work is also excellent... but if A Place To Bury Strangers is the sound of a giant explosion, Ceremony is closer to the jet that dropped that bomb blasting into the stratosphere, blasting away so hard it feels like it's going to break apart. No more or less powerful, simply sleeker... and far more propelled. And they've never sounded better than on their new album, Rocket Fire.

It's a journalistic risk to recite the basic facts from a band's bio sheet, but for a group with such a sparse web presence (usually confused with a Bay Area hardcore band with the same name, who sounds NOTHING like our noisemakers in question), it might not hurt. Based around a guitar/bass duo and a drum machine, the band has released two other albums, or an album and a demo... or two albums and a demo... hell, I do this for a living and I'm having trouble pinning down just where their discography begins and ends. Like I mentioned, info on these guys is sparse.

Too sparse, in fact, for such a divine sound. If one end of the noise/shoegazer revival of the past few decades explores how to make noise into music (The Vandelles, APTBS, Ringo Deathstarr), Ceremony falls toward the other end, who use the noise for songs that would probably be just fine without feedback or static. They're all the better for it, but an ambitious tribute band could recast most of these tunes as spare, wiry, Luna-esque pop and the melodies would stand up. The shades of electronic-tinged post-punk (errr.. New Order comes to mind) certainly act as sonic touchstones, and the noisy, blurry sounds of some of the original shoegazers certainly aren't far off... but Ceremony doesn't quite sound like the Telescopes, or Ride, or the Swirlies, or any of the others from "back in the day", really. Sure, there are distant vocals, feedback crashes, white noise, and hissing programmed hi-hats. Sure, it could be described as a "wall of sound". You could name several bands that remind you of this one... but you'd still be a little off. I remember My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" being peppy and uptempo and danceable, but the speeds and hair-raising sounds on display here combine like an adrenaline rush.

The jet analogy above, however, has another layer... even if their tracks aren't all truly uptempo, there's a fantastic feeling of hanging on for survival, lest any of us fall off... and that urgency makes things feel breathless, even when the tension releases a little bit. Imagine trying to keep your grip on a seamless steel jet at 30,000 feet. It keeps pushing higher and higher, the sky gets darker and darker... and just when you think you're about to go weightless, things kick in and away you go again. It's no new concept that the enjoyment of a substantial amount of shoegazer music depends on one's ability to appreciate subtle variation within a fairly specific template... but Ceremony is able to keep Rocket Fire thrilling by focusing on (work with me here) variations of that subtle variation.

While that may sound like a microscopically silly way to praise...well... anything, the point is that the band takes comfortable and established concepts (lovely melodies filtered through the "shoegazer" sound), makes it feel riveting through their own abilities as sonic alchemists (subtle variation number one), but then -- most importantly -- plays with that jet-engine rush by tightening the tension and releasing it over the course of about an hour. By the end of it, you're simultaneously satisfied and wrung out.

Despite the logistical headache that fact-finding turns up very little info, there's something refreshing about a lack of ephemera about Ceremony. It hearkens back to a simpler time, when a good record stood on its own. Granted, technological development had a lot to do with it (I was a teen in the mid-to-late '90s), but I remember when a good record was it's own background info. Check the credits and thank yous to find other good bands, but that's about it. Before I could check Wikipedia pages or add bands on Facebook (and let's not forget following their minutiae on Twitter), all a band could give was a good album. If it was good, it was good, if not, then who cared? Ceremony is making me forget about all the information overload, and the fact that Rocket Fire keeps revealing secrets on the 9th or 10th spin is telling me all I really need to know.

A Record Review, Finally

2010-08-05T08:17:00.001-07:00

For all the discussion on the ultimate purpose of art, sometimes it can all be boiled down to the fact that most people want their art to either reflect their emotions or help them escape them. Sometimes, these tasks are one and the same, and that type of moment can be transcendent, but it's a rarity. No, the nuts and bolts of it is that we either want to recognize our own current situation -- whatever that might be -- so that we don't feel like the only one, or we want it to give us a little vacation from your problems... to help us forget that we've got troubles, and allow us to forget them, leave them behind... be it for a minute or ninety. You can either laugh at the ridiculousness of a comedy, or be brought to tears by a drama, but ultimately it's escapism vs. solidarity.

The new album by Malory can give you both.

Malory is a German ambient band, not a lone woman. Their first album, Not Here, Not Now (2000) is absolutely enthralling, if not exactly innovative. Weaving ambient tapestries of not-quite-sure-what-it-is-making-that sounds and haunted production, it might be one of my very favorite albums of the past ten years, if only for the depth it brings. It's not melancholic, it's not euphoric, it's not contemplative, and it's not propulsive... but it's almost all of those things at once. Shades of Brian Eno are obvious, but without sounding derivative, the band manages to synthesize the best aspects of ambient pop from the last 25 years, from Slowdive to fellow Europeans The Ecstasy Of St. Theresa. Malory, however, is solidly in the Ramones camp; not in sound, but in the fact that while they don't have much stylistic diversity, they excel at their language of choice.

The new album, Pearl Diver could be called more of the same... which is something I'm sure that would not be taken as a compliment by the band, but is met as one of the highest regard. Over the course of four albums, only the subtlest of changes has been rolled out... this album certainly has more hooks and vocals than the early work, but it's hardly a detriment - I'm still not sure if it's an improvement. Some of the band's earliest Slowdive influence has receded, but the guitars are no less gauzy and the vocals no more emphatic. Once again, the melodies unfurl like slow motion parachutes, the percussion is often a wispy pulse from a half-remembered dream... in short, it's a beautiful aural vacation.

However, this isn't an example of cut-and-dry "reflection vs. escapsim". At least, not for this writer. While the tones and timbres are blurred... unclear... the melodies and music of it all is so utterly human, so primally basic, that you'll think most of the melodies on here are lullabies that you can't quite remember. No matter the mood, I keep coming back to this album again and again and keep finding that it's there to both reflect my feelings as well as escape them. If I'm feeling down, the gentle hum is there as consolation, and I keep finding myself lost inside its depth. If I'm feeling good, it's like doing the backstroke through clouds on a warm night.

I'd initially intended to go into detail about particular songs, but that would be doing the album a disservice. While you absolutely could listen to an individual song, it's best taken as a whole, even if you don't take the whole at once. Each bite is better knowing it's part of a larger tapestry. I was recently reading an interview with one of the members of German electronic pioneers Cluster, who said that while many other musicians were concerned with where the song was going, they preferred to swim in drones and static music to really create an environment, rather than continually move forward. By establishing a "space" using whatever sonic devices one chooses to use, it makes it all the more powerful and dreamlike when that whole world shifts just a little.

Now that's an album.

When It Rains, It Rocks... Top Albums of 2010 (So Far)

2010-07-08T03:53:00.001-07:00

Talk about a drought.

2009 was one of the most overwhelmingly good years in recent memory for a music fan of my rather peculiar taste. Old favorites, new discoveries, a mixing of styles and even some genre surprises. There was nearly enough to make a list of the twenty best, rather than ten, and while 15-20 might've been a little stretched, it wouldn't have been filler for the sake of filler.

So what the hell happened?

I don't want to sound like I'm denigrating the artists who you'll read about below - they've all done great work, and would deserve a place in contention even if this year were flooded with other good releases. It's just that they've stood remarkably alone. There have been a few "good, solid" albums that I've really enjoyed and will continue to listen to that just aren't what I'm looking for in a "best of" wrap-up (Ted Leo... I'm looking at you!), but those listed below are certainly ready to slog it out when December hits, in the supreme year-end roundup.

5. The Dead Weather - Sea Of Cowards
I have this theory about Jack White. He knows that rock stardom is fleeting, and immortality comes only as a martyr or a legend (or both). He's no fool, and he's no con man either, no matter what his Tesla-spouting snake-oil salesman persona might indicate. He's as real-world shrewd as he is eccentric, and ever since he got his foot in the door, he's throwing out everything good he can do... the man just wants a legacy before Boethius's wheel throws him back down to the dirt once again. But none of that's important, really. This is, just like last year's album, a greasy slab of voodoo blues. It's the Exile to the White Stripes' Aftermath. There's really no better or worse, it's just that one's about overall vibe and the other is about songs. Lead singer Alison Mosshart is less enamoured of aping White's vocal style this time around, but the band grinds like The Birthday Party if they were mainlining crude oil. No highlights to pick, because this bastard's one big oozing grease smear.

4. Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - I Learned The Hard Way
Like The Dirtbombs, the Dap-Kings are almost guaranteed a place on my list anytime they grace us with a record. It's not that I'm enough of a fan that I'll accept anything. It's just that they only really do one thing, but they do it better than anyone else. A 60's soul album cut in Brooklyn by a bunch'a youngsters and a force-of-nature soul singer. The songs and production are tight as a drum on this one, but if you liked their previous work, you won't have any surprises. Except maybe for how much you like it despite having heard their book of tricks before. Of course, I still love to watch breakdancers at work, so there are just some performance arts that seem to thrill every time. This is one of them.

3. John & Exene - Singing And Playing
OK, so this one isn't fair, really. I had the good fortune of being woken up to go see John Doe and Exene Cervenka play an acoustic, Storytellers-esque performance to a seated crowd. Apparently, before the tour, they went to a friend's place and recorded this EP of low-key new tunes, covers, and material from their time fronting punk legends X. Not only was the show an absolute thrill, but the CD-R EP that played in the car ride home was the perfect extension of the night. Recorded about two weeks before I purchased it, it's the sound of two people, who love to make music, doing it very well. Get your eBay finger working.

2. Sade - Soldier Of Love
Even if this wasn't a great record, the title track would have at least put it up for consideration. Sade, it should be noted, was music for my mother to listen to up until I heard this track. The soundtrack to hot summer days en route to a mall in Virginia, sandwiched between Phil Collins and The Police. Someone convinced me to give it the single whirl... it was only a click away to stream... so I gave it a shot. Every so often, R&B music seems to capture the times better than rock (which is a uniquely navel-gazing form, for all the alleged social change it's capable of). In the late-90s, it seemed like the robo-funk-hop of Timbaland and the Neptunes perfectly summed up the future-looking, crest-riding, hedonistic party that we were all headed to, intoxicated with our own self-assuredness. It's clearly a different time, and "Soldier Of Love" embraces our own (circa 2010) twisted solipsistic tendencies in an increasingly bleak world. For all the hope that's been bandied about the past couple of years, things have been pretty grim lately... for lack of a better term, it's been a fucked-up decade to become an adult. Wars that can't be won against enemies we can't understand... political unrest and division, society tearing itself apart at at the grey concrete seams. The vocalist's metaphor for emotional war plays out over a jittery, paranoid groove torn from Massive Attack and filtered through recent Prince. Far and away the best thing on a record full of grey, conflicted moods, it's an excellent starter for a day of wrapping yourself up in paranoid bad vibes, because they're the only armor you have.

1. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
Speaking of bad vibes... these simians aren't usually dancing the night away. I'll admit, that while the first Gorillaz album was good, I saw it as the Britpop version of Prozzak... a successful but restless pop star has a fun dalliance into assumed cartoon character personae and multimedia experiments, plays some good songs, and then a "let's get back to reality, shall we?". I was wrong. Their second album, Demon Days, was, to my mind, the finest example of "post-millennial, culturally relevant musical cross-pollination" in the last decade. Which is to say it managed to summarize those darkest of days by throwing everything in the mix and sounding contemporary without dating itself. The key to the whole thing is that, well... it still cares. We might be completely fucked, but there's still a chance for redemption. It doesn't offer it, but it lets you know that some of us might make it out of this alive. If Sade was a bad night alone, this is the album for the day after. Guest stars float in and out of the mix over sounds that aren't easily pigeonholed... once again tossing hip-hop, dub, rock, world music, et al, into a musical Cuisinart. Lofty concepts would be interesting enough in print alone, but this is a great album... and doesn't everyone need something to listen to after the end of the world?

Brighton Rock

2010-07-02T05:29:00.000-07:00

Perhaps, Richard...

But vitriol was the order of the day. In hindsight that last post could be seen as a meta-example of the very argument itself: transcendent writing must bring an understanding of humanity to the table. A sudden rush of emotion filterted through a creative outlet. I'm not saying it WAS transcendent Pulitzer material, but it's far more interesting to my sensibility as a READER than a rational recounting of emotional reactions days after the fact. Isn't it that same drive that inspires a poem to be authored, or a song to be written? That mad rush to grab an instrument of any kind and trap the animal, to contain it so that it can be shared with others, and exorcised from your mind? After all, what is art if not life simply filtered through the artist's perception? It's a shame that all that was taken from it seems to be the desire to write about "sore ankles" and "smelly markets", because to a certain sensibility, it's the aggregation of that type of detail that make up the human condition, and makes whatever flights of fantasy an author creates ring true.

Few people care about the nuts and bolts of a disagreement if they don't understand the context and weight that each side brings to the table. Perhaps that's an oversimplification, but it's not inaccurate. Many (but I'll concede that certainly not all) audiences prefer to ask why the clock has a bird in it, and what that means, rather than request a schematic for the mechanism. I respect that, but personally find schematics crushingly boring. I'd rather be reading Hemingway. And I hate Hemingway. I'm almost done with his works, but can't find the time these days.

Shoehorning one type of creativity into another shape simply because that's what the audience says they want does everyone a disservice... it gives the audience a weak approximation of the original spark, and usually only presents them with something they already know and like. That's fine and dandy to *ahem* "give the people what they want", but that impulse to be populist often stifles what might have been a truly inspired creative moment otherwise. That's the impulse that creates "cover bands" in local bars... picking up a guitar and playing someone else's songs over and over. Sure it's fun, and there's a place for interpretation, but there's no soul to grinding out recreations of someone else's actual creativity. It's an artistic dead end. Write your own! Even if it's malformed or ham-fisted, it's undeniably authentically artistic, and represents some aspect of the creator at that moment. Not all interpretations are bad, but interpreters, no matter their technical gifts, are rarely artists in their own right. There is a place for "confined" creativity (in this case, writing), but rarely does that transcend the forced template of its medium into a place that makes it truly artistic. In case our antagonist has ever been to Goodwill or, perhaps, St. Vincent de Paul, he might've seen thousands of books that meet any given set of criteria, but are lost to (or under) the dust of time because they had no soul, all they were was a set of writing rules that could have been passed out by any college writing instructor.

While this antagonist, who we can call "Duke", made a very valid point for the practical benefits of understading the technical qualities of the medium (i.e. brevity and a less self-aware persepctive), and is certainly well-informed and well-read enough that his opinion shouldn't be considered wrong, his taste is limited by the value system that he has defined over the years, learing what he likes and dislikes. He's entitled to filter out things that don't interest him, after all, why waste time when you know what you like? If what an audience likes is pre-determined, and an artist doesn't fit that finite scope, why should that artist try to "move the mountain". It's easier at that point in life to not waste time with that which doesn't interest them.

Which is a perfectly reasonable course of action. But one that precludes a truly objective sense of critical analysis.

But this is a music blog. While many find Ornette Coleman's untethered sonic experimentalism inspiring, others find it too "free" (in the jazz sense). I'm a fan of Coleman's work but know that "Duke" doesn't like jazz. Why attempt to play him Rashaan Roland Kirk or Miles Davis' On The Corner? To break it down to the rock metaphor that my readers tend to think in (and expect, becuase there's nothing here but consistiency): some people find Dylan's "With God On Our Side" inspiring. I find it didactic and tedious, no matter how it succinctly sums up the racial and political discord that was happening at that moment. I want more than reporting on the facts. Plenty of people turned their noses up at "Maggie's Farm" and "Phantom Engineer" at the Newport Folk Festival in '65. Pete Seeger was on the other side, looking at something that wasn't his, and since it wasn't something that was a part of him (an important contrast to "him being a part of IT"), he may have understood it, but it wasn't something that he could viscerally, emotionally connect to in any positive way. So he chose to wave around an axe and look for the power lines. It would be churlish to compare "Duke" to Seeger, because to do so would unfairly imply ignorance that isn't there.

I'd rather be a Bob Dylan than a Pete Seeger any day.

Have fun on the "Ariadne". Hopefully your German comes in handy. Of course, if "Duke" was right... I shouldn't even know what any of that means. The irony, of course, is that he made the mistake of giving me that in the first place. Hope this one wasn't too long like the last one...

-Harry

A Letter To Holly Martins

2010-06-27T19:37:00.000-07:00

Dear Holly,

A great man once said "you're full of shit". He said it to me about 5 minutes ago. I'm pretty sure he was drunk. The argument was that great writing is based on economy of word. That's a cliche originated by someone who can't write, no matter what Plithy The Elder may have said. Great writing makes the reader feel, makes them connect to something that's bigger than both the author and the reader. There's a bigger energy to be tapped into. The goal is to make the reader feel. Whether it's to feel what the author feels, to feel what the author wants the reader to feel, or to feel an imagined idea that emanates from neither is irrelevant. Ultimately, it's art. It exists independently of either, to hopefully succeed in whatever the author's intent was, but ultimately successful simply if it can represent anything. Anything at all. After all, these are just complex lines on a blank page.

However, what a reader wants is ultimately at stake. No audience will ever be swayed if they've decided what they like. I once gave a great man an album by Johnny Cash that based on evidence, was convinced he would like. It was a masterful comeback album, and no matter how much I pushed, he wouldn't listen to it with open ears. No matter what The Man In Black was saying, this listener decided it wasn't for him, and no amount of convincing would sway the mountain. A year later, the mountain called and offhandedly mentioned just how good it was after they'd picked the album up on their own. The audience must come to the art, and the art cannot move that mountain, and a smart artist shoudl eventually realize that they've got better things to do than waste their time trying.

Writing cannot exist without a voice. It loses its life, becoming merely lifeless adjectives on a page, waiting to be strung together. Every writing has a voice, and no matter how prominient, it must be present.

I've spent the first part of this first-person narrative deyning that voice and find as a reader that it's insufferable, boring reading, suitable for fans of encyclopedias and Dan Brown novels. This great man argued at great length with me, over a great deal of wine, that a writer must get outside themselves to be truly great. This writer finds that to be completely ignorant of turly great writing. A great writer must be they eyes of every reader. If that makes said writer selfish by inserting themselves into a discourse, then that writer be damned (and I am, many times over). Let the audience read the true-to-fact adventures of Graham Greene and be happy that the details were accurately portrayed. Thank goodness Van Gough accurately portrayed the blaze of brilliant stars, and thank those stars that Monet was able to trace the finest, photorealistic detail of his landscapes.
Of course, the above is laughable in many ways. While brevity is critical (not to mention the soul of wit) , it's not everything. If brevity and economy of writing were truly the be-all-end-all of written communication, there would be no poets other than William Carlos Williams, and his writing is as awesome in its technical skill as it is boring. "Jaws" was on TV last week, and could easily be contained in a 30 minute serial where 3 men board a boat and kill a shark that has attacked people. "The Third Man" is simply a story of a drug smuggler faking his death, and not telling his friends. Had Welles (or Reed, depending on who you believe) not included the infamous "Cuckoo Clock" soliloquy, there might be no soul to the film, there might be no heart that makes the reader think that any of this matters either way. Simply conveying information in a effective way is the sign of a weak writer (which I have to do in a different fashion professionally), and if that pleases the reader, it may have achieved exactly what it was supposed to with who it's supposed to, but will never transcend that feedback loop and become art. Which is why I've never read more than one and a half John Le Carre novels. They're engrossing from a structural plotting perspective, but read like a transcription of a spy mission from back at HQ. There's no point in recounting details unless they make the reader understand the human element. I want to feel Smiley's heartbeat as he evades the enemy, to smell the fish stand next door, to taste the blood and feel the ache in his ankle. A writer must balance being an everyman, while still being themselves, giving every OTHER man a perspective from which to pinpoint where THEY stand. We've all smelled fish tasted blood, been afraid. Those who care about the (non-plot-essential) name of the fish stand or what type of bandage is on the ankle miss the point, and aren't who should even waste their time reading. They'd be better served doing something themselves, or at the very least, finding a writer who will give them what it is THEY want. Writing about that objectively is a waste of time and/or ink. You can't please everyone all the time, and it's a fool to try.

As this is a blog, it's selfish writing. I could have re-edited this as a series of wonderful third-person senteces that gave the reader the details, but that would be doing them a disservice. I don't assume my writers are stupid, or aliens coming down to earth and I have to explain things to them, because I don't want to waste my time writing to idiots. People are not evil, nor stupid. People consume art because they want to know what THAT artist's perception of the world is, and any other choice is simply collecting details like so many blank stamps. Can you picture a museum full of identical paintings? Sure, they fit the criteria, but are worthless to anyone who cares what it means. It's the difference between a bureaucratic memo and a poem. Why spend an afternoon looking at paintings when you could look at photographs that are much more accurate, right?

Apparently, by that logic, the true poet of the 1960's was not Allen Ginsberg, but Walter Cronkite.

That's a perspective that I do not share. As a person rather than simply a writer, it's recently been suggested that my personality is hung up on itself. The irony of mentioning this in my writing is not lost on me, after all, sir, as I told you earlier, I may be naive, but I'm not blind. As heistant as anyone SHOULD be to consider themselves an artist, no artist can truly remove themselves from the creative equation and remain an artist of any stripe. I write because I have to, and I'm pretty sure some of you will, if not follow, at least understand the persepctive. If not, you're wasting your time with this, and I suggest you look elsewhere.

See you in Vienna, and I'll call you if I make it to the States again... tell Valli I said hello.

Love,
Harry

---------------------------------------

PS...

To have someone apologize for giving you a gift that helped you become who you are is a humbling thing. Humbling and tragic, because to have a gift you value described by the giver as a mistake is crushing.

"Thanks for that dog you gave me all those years ago."

"Oh, no problem... it was a terrible dog, I wish I'd just put him down."

"Oh.... well, thanks anyway."

An artist (and again, implying that I am one is certainly bringing up some bile in my throat) should never forget where they're from, but sometimes, they realize that their life has moved to a different place. A place where their understanding is different. A place where they truly become themselves, and a place that they couldn't be had they not been given what they were, even if the giver doens't understand what they gave.

Sometimes the greatest gifts are accidental and misunderstood. While they may cherish what they once thought and where they once were, it snaps into focus that no one can truly go home again, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. And there comes a time in everyone's life where they have to face that fact. Maybe, just maybe, they'll be able to read between the lines and know when to call a cab.

"Wait... doesn't 'What's The Story, 'Morning Glory'?' really just translate to..."

2010-06-15T08:33:00.000-07:00

"...'what's up, Boner'?" Or is it a back-and-forth? Like: "What's the story?" ... "Well... I've..."

Never mind.

Anyway...

I've got a math equation for you.

THESE...

...plus THIS...

...multiplied by THIS...

... equals a whole MESS of fun.

Not much writing happening here recently, on account of all the writing I've been doing elsewhere. But I'm trying to make sure to practice more. Hell, once there's enough worth recording, I'll do that, and then maybe post it here too. Who knows? This is principally a "thoughts on popular culture" blog. But who cares? I'm my blog, and I'll do as I damn well please!

Anyway, I took these for other purposes, but thought I'd pass the love along, so that you, Dear Readers, can see the softer side of your humble narrator. And now here's a picture of a cat. Because that's what The Internet has done to me.

"You Wanna Play 'William Tell'?"

2010-05-29T04:17:00.000-07:00

Did you ever hear the one about the boy who got what he wanted? He had to fight tooth and nail to claw his way back to doing what he wanted on his own.

Your humble narrator recently got a job working as a writer. Professionally. Which is one of the more thrilling things that's happened over the past two head-spinning years, and a lot of things have happened. The negative effect is that the last thing on my mind is creative writing... after a 1 A.M to 7 A.M. shift of writing concise sentences about death and destruction for the morning news. While I wouldn't trade it for any other job I've ever had, it doesn't make it easy to do what I love in the way I love to. Any thought of writing... I mean real self-giving writing... has been buried in the back of any part of my mind, underneath a tarp that covers "run a marathon tomorrow" and "look into an all-bran diet".

I've been wanting to. Trying to. But it's been brutal.

Until now.

To help things along, I've been revisiting those things that made me fall in love with the written word in the first place. A few months ago, my radiant fiancee bought me a copy of J.G. Ballard's complete short stories, and after chewing through selections from that and a used copy of High Rise, I remembered that Ballard was a master at creating a nightmare of the same ingredients that make up everyday life. Modern life as horror, twisting technology with humanity. Which is a fascinating way to look at things... the idea that what is exactly the same as always has always been completely different, and nobody has time to notice. It's brilliant. But it wasn't enough. So I went to the source.

William Burroughs wrecked my brain. Once my teen mind got past all the graphic depictions of pederasty and heroin abuse, I understood that his brilliance wasn't as a storyteller, it was as a conceptualist. His art was utilizing both the meaning and the actual physical combination of letter symbols to make up a word. By (literally) chopping up sentences and recombining them to create new meanings from the way "Part A" juxtaposed with "Part B", which completely dislocated the meanings of everything before and after, his words and meanings became completely intertwined... just as he severed their connection. Sure, people say he could be a mean-sprited junkie, but if you had all the damage going through your head that he did, you might give him the benefit of the doubt. Or you might not. All that matters is that his work was brilliant, and devouring Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, Naked Lunch et al... revealed to me that not only was there a LOT more to the world than my eyes had seen (and I'd been all over Europe), but there was a lot more inside that had yet to be investigated. It was like it helped to unlock something that was always there but couldn't be described, simply because I'd never seen it before.

It's funny... just a few days ago, I was reminded of having dinner with my parents when I was about 15. We were always a family that had a sit-down dinner almost every night, they insisted. My mom once asked me what I'd been reading lately. In my sullen teen cloud of discontent, I told her that it was some guy called Burroughs. He was a Beat, you probably haven't read his stuff. Then she told me about the time she meditated with Allen Ginsberg. Very few moments in my life have I been so shocked.

The older I get, the less I realize I know. Moving from where I was to where I am drove that point home in a wonderful way. I feel humbled and awed by things almost constantly now. Nearly every day, something happens to renew that feeling of discovery.

I've missed it.

It Ain't No Modern Miracle: A 32-Years-Late Counterpoint

2010-03-27T06:22:00.001-07:00

In a recent article, I made reference to my longtime love for The Clash - which should be no surprise to anyone who's ever read my music writing, or whom I've talked with about punk rock. I love the band despite their many shortcomings, and in my reignited passion for them the past few weeks, I've switched back into "research mode", digging up tons of information on them while pumping their music through my headphones. The first of their albums I'd ever heard was a crackly, chopped-up tape dub of Give 'Em Enough Rope made for me by an 80-year-old man who lived across the street from my grandma. The same man who sold me a stack of punk and garage LPs at age 15 for a dime apiece (I was helping him sort out the "junk" from his recently purchased garage-full of albums). It was on the same 90-minute high-bias tape as most of the first Modern Lovers album (a good tape). I listened to that tape over and over and over that summer as I stained the new back porch for our neighbors, so my opinion is most certainly biased, but even so: why the hell does everyone knock that album so much?

Let's do some math. There are ten tracks, five of which ("Safe European Home", "English Civil War", "Tommy Gun", "Last Gang In Town", and "Stay Free") are stone classics. Of the other five, three ("Guns On The Roof" "Drug-Stabbing Time", and "All The Young Punks") are good, but a bit "Clash-By-Numbers", "Cheapskates" is an attempt to stretch out their sonic template a bit, and "Julie's Been Working For The Drug Squad" is topical, stylistically-divergent filler. Not bad, but it doesn't add much to a powerful record.

So why all the hate, general public?

If we work backwards, I'm willing to concede that "Julie" could have been left off, but it doesn't do a lot of harm there, and would probably fit better on the more freewheeling London Calling set, thanks to it's barroom piano. "Cheapskates" as well - I've always liked it, but it's not a great song, I'll admit.

So that's the bottom of the barrel. If "Guns On The Roof" didn't have the same exact riff as "Clash City Rockers", it would be a lot more forgivable, and does fit into that "Mott The Hoople Syndrome" of writing songs about the trials and tribulations of being in The Clash, along with "All The Young Punks". Some of the self-importance of the lyrics is offset by the brilliant arrangements of guitarist Mick Jones. Jones never really got his due (as many before me have stated) as a masterful arranger, and (unlike his bludgeoning contemporaries in the punk scene) wove tapestries of guitars to rise above the three chord blur that kept a lot of bands in the punk rock ghetto that The Clash escaped. Which brings me to "Drug-Stabbing Time". Not a great song, maybe even weaker than "Julie" in a way, in that it's so much of a musical step backward in an album that pushes to move forward.

Which leaves us with five amazing songs, and an unfairly slandered producer. I'm not saying that Sandy Pearlman is completely innocent, but he seems like a good enough dude, and for the world-beating scope of the music this band was writing, the muscular sonics he brought to the early Blue Oyster Cult albums he produced make (no matter what any punk purist says) perfect sense for the ambitious music The Clash were making at this point. BOC might have been the epitome of "non-punk" in 1978, but heard today, their first 3 albums sound more like Radio Birdman than Led Zep. Anyway, a smart musical director and arranger (Jones), combined with a producer who knows how to make things sound BIG (Pearlman), isn't a bad combination, unless all you want is wiry scrubbed guitars and inaudible bass.

So, the songs are slower (therefore longer, this wasn't a structural overhaul - it's still verse/chorus/verse), more "expansively" arranged, and less immediately topical (not as many "ripped from the headlines" songs as the self-titled debut). But what is there, under those parameters, might be among the best minutes the Clash released.

"Stay Free" is a favorite of mine. I love pop songs, and on top of that, when I discovered this album, I could identify with the protagonist of this song. I don't understand being on the dole in London in 1977, but I know what it's like to be a teenager dreaming of rock stardom, practicing my guitar "daily in my room", and getting into trouble. The bass-and-drums breakdown before the solo, the heart-tugging bridge... it's a charmer. It belongs in the middle of side two, but it fits perfectly there as a nice album track.

The bass guitar is what makes "Last Gang In Town" so great. The timing is a little rough, but that sells it. I already have a vision of the band as a gang of outlaws (I know they're art schoolers in reality, but why not give into the myth?), and it's just a solid "badass" song, with great Joe Strummer vocals and another good guitar arrangement. "English Civil War" is much the same, with a nice musical and lyrical reference to the "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" chant of the U.S. Civil War, and although there are few specific ways to recommend it (above others) in writing, isn't writing about music like dancing about architecture?

The lynchpins of the album, though, are so good that it's almost a shame they're stuck as the first and third tracks, even though one makes a perfect album opener. "Tommy Gun" has a nice Topper Headon touch with the machine-gun-emulating snare rolls, but it's once again Jones' suitably "epic" lead guitar playing that offsets a great chord progression and reaching vocal with even more emotional depth. It's beed deservedly hailed as a classic, and should be on any collection that attempts to round up the best moments by the Clash. The vocals are hurt, angry, demanding scathing justice for someone who will chop down innocent people... it's a personal reaction to a political subject, which is far more profound than merely reporting on it, or supporting/condemning it. I don't care about whoever it is that's willing to die for their cause in the lyrics, but I do care about how Strummer feels about it. That's one of the clever tricks of this songwriting team: even if you don't agree with all their political views, they're not telling you about the problem, they're telling you about their perspective on the problem. I watch the news every day for at least 2 hours, and I'm sick of it. I want to know the human side of these stories. The Clash can do that like no other band.

What does that leave? Ah, yes. "Safe European Home". For years, on my fuzzy cassette, I could only make out impressionistic snatches of the lyrics, trying to piece together an image when you only have half the pieces of the puzzle. It's the story of Strummer and Jones' songwriting trip to Jamaica (the reggae-loving bassist, Paul Simonon, is apparently still irritated at being left behind). They get there, get robbed, expect to see the rude boys and sound systems they've been listening to for years back in London, only to end up run out of town, scared for their lives, glad to be back and safe in their European home. Knowing more about the band's story, it's especially heartbreaking to hear how they were so thrilled to go, but the reality was so different from the fantasy... instead of lighting spliffs and vibing to some heavy dub, they were almost knifed and escaped with the clothes on their backs. The fact that they were largely honest in the lyrics is commendable - it would have been easy to write a song about the great time they had being punk outlaws in Jamaica, but why not be straightforward. "This isn't myth, this is real!"

Those powerful lyrics about the realities of fantasy are wrapped up in some of the most explosive three minutes and fifty seconds I've ever heard, and I've listened to a lot of goddamn rock music. It blasts out of the gate with a downstroke guitar stun, but cracks in half after the first line for a jumping-bean bassline and a call-and-response vocal. The chorus is a jarring, jagged call to arms. After being wrung out with more of that, suddenly, the skanking guitar line you almost hadn't noticed (but was playing underneath most of the song) becomes the only thing you hear, other than what seems to be a collection of only backing vocal tracks. Now that this other guitar is the fixture, a rhythm section fades up underneath it, playing in a slightly different tempo and style than before, marrying the TNT rock 'n' roll of the opening with a lithe, snaking, and above all, sheet-metal-metallic reggae sound, creating a coda for the song that surpasses any other famous rock and roll coda you've ever heard. It makes "Layla" look like a crackwhore. If this isn't the best song by The Clash, it deserves credit by making you absolutely believe that it is during it's play time.

(All) that said, why does this album get such a bad rap? I understand the U.K. press' initial backlash, in that with the Sex Pistols punk throne vacated after their implosion, the new kings were traipsing off to make an epic (label pun intended) hard rock album. On top of that, it didn't sound like it was recorded in a living room, and few of the songs were addressing the current issues in England at the time (furthering my assertion that purist punk should be viewed much as folk music was, or Public Enemy's theory that rap music was like "black people's CNN"). So maybe the initial reaction of "This isn't punk!" is justified, but as late as 1999 I was still getting shit for wearing a t-shirt with the cover on it. The contention then was it was a flaccid, overworked follow-up to a classic gritty record, probably still influenced by the original '78 review from Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. I like Marcus' writing, and I certainly respect his opinion on the matter, but I'm not afraid to stand up and say that I think he was wrong then. That was 30 years ago, though; maybe he's changed his stance since, and I don't know about it.

Coming from a particular aesthetic view of the world, Rope must have seemed shocking after ONLY HEARING their first album. With hindsight, the Clash weren't just a great punk band, but one of the very best rock 'n' roll bands, as borne out by their follow-up, London Calling. But the world hadn't heard that when Rope came out. I'm willing to accept the badmouthing up until about 1980. Then the game changes. Was the world so much smaller in 1997 that a 20-year-old review from Rolling Stone still held that much sway over public opinion? There weren't that many info sources back then (before the rise of the current state of the 'net), so I guess a long review like that could taint public opinion enough that many critics afterward would have just lazily regurgitated from THE source of music news, before people realized that R.S. was a stapled supply of backup toilet paper. The fact that the only CD version of the album until '99 was one of the most poorly-mastered CDs in history doesn't help. The Clash were among the most deserving of a remastering campaign, as the initial versions of their album on CD were among the most abrasive, tinny, and anemic transfers ever. The used, beat-up LPs sounded better, and when the released the live album in '99, it was the first time I'd ever heard a real decent kick drum on a Clash song.

So you can keep your derision, you can save your "sophomore jinx" bullshit. The only reason that Give 'Em Enough Rope isn't considered an immediate classic boils down to punk didacticism, sloppy journalism, and the fact that it was bookended by The Clash and London Calling. So then next time I'm playing it (loudly), you can fucking keep your lazily regurgitated complaints. I'll give you some rope, you do the rest.

[For this and all other album reviews, I strongly suggest heading over to grooveshark.com, who I am in no way affiliated with. Lots of free streaming music, and a great way to listen to songs from this album for free from anywhere without having to buy it first.]

Either Side Of The Divide

2010-03-26T00:44:00.001-07:00

I was just reading an A.V. Club article about "pop culture that makes you feel old", and while I got a good laugh and startle at the fact that there are college sophomores who can't envision a world without new episodes of The Simpsons and Law & Order, it reminded me of another piece I read on the changing tide of pop-cultural savvy. The author suggested that when I was a teen in the mid-90s, it was important to be conversant in pop culture if you ran in the circles my friends and I ran in. References to '70s cop shows, able to quote Ghostbusters, and have an intmiate knowledge of Saturday Morning Cartoon Culture. And while some of the hip young elite of that era are still working, and still using that knowledge for good (a la Robot Chicken), they're the old guys, with the new generation (which I'm straddling the line of) not caring about any of it.

Now, I'm technically part of the "Generation Y" subset, and while I would love to distance myself from that as much as possible, I will only say that it's true that I was way more interested in the culture of people 5-10 years older than I was, and didn't have much time for the cultural interests of my peers. Which makes me both precocious and a snob. I was a clever kid, so I tended to follow not my high school cohorts, but what I read was happening elsewhere in the world. I missed out on a lot of "moments", but I stand by my choice.

So what happened? Where did Weezer's references to Kiss go? Why did nobody care about Thurston Moore's favorite breakfast cereals from the early '70s, as reported in Grand Royal Magazine? What happened to sitting around a record store and debating the guy behind the counter about which (still-sorta-obscure-even-then) Big Star album was the best one to get first? Why won't anyone believe that Urge Overkill's Saturation is amazing?

9/11 happened.

Boom! Didn't think I'd go all Giuliani on you, huh?

Now, I got a lot of crap from my friends about how I was stuck in the '90s when I was just post-college, wearing my Dinosaur Jr t-shirt and listening to Sonic Youth's Dirty 'cause it was sassy, maaaan. (I never did that last one). But that's what I knew and liked at that point, a line of taste that had been established only 5 years prior, but even by that point they were the "good old days". Who gives a fuck about the merits of the goddamn Smashing Pumpkins if you're worried about getting blowed up all the time? Our leader (ostensibly Slim Pickens from Dr. Strangelove) was reacting to the biggest attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor or earlier by waging TWO wars (can't say he wasn't ambitious)... suddenly our thoughts on the potential drug metaphors of H.R. Pufnstuf seemed a whole lot less important.

There was a gap where we were all freaked out, and when the dust settled, we young people found ourselves on either side of a large cultural divide. There were those who were old enough to entrench themselves, and those young enough to reset. I was on the former team. I have an additional theory that the younger set had their "irony circuits" scrambled in the shakeup as well, their "irony training" was disrupted prematurely. I understood the humor and culture jamming when I saw Adam Yauch in a Madonna t-shirt. Yauch was a former punk rocker turned rapper, Madonna was the queen of plastic pop in the 80s. Yes, recontextualization was fun, playing with semiotics was a good laugh, but this group (I say "younger", but it's a mental thing, I guess) ended up taking a lot of this at face value, scrambling the point. I see Rivers Cuomo extolling the virtues of Def Leppard, the first level I get is "he's talking about a crappy hair metal band, but he's in a catchy alternative band. That juxtaposition is ironic." The second layer below that is I happen to know that Cuomo, in his teen years, was actually a big metal fan. OK, even another interesting layer. But what I don't do is hear that and say "Rivers thinks Def Leppard is awesome. I like Weezer. Def Leppard must be awesome." Simplistic thinking like that is why we have people who have tricked themselves into liking crap like Journey. But the difference and value of being attracted to something directly vs. a few levels removed is another discussion.

My point is that after the dust settled (sorry), while amateur ironists and pop culture archivists like myself put that stuff on the shelf for a while. Other things took precedence, like being in our 20s and not being blown up on a plane. Things got grim. Things went from the kaleidoscopic Beastie Boys to the Ballardian imagery of Radiohead. Everyone said that OK Computer was ahead of its time. They were 5 years right. The first half of the decade, to me, sounded like a coma patient hooked up to a frayed wire, making it twitch. Whatever I listened to (especially older music) sounded like a dusty dream from the past, like finding a photo album in the attic. How could I listen to Pet Sounds in the intended way when we could all die at any moment? The navel-gazing anxiety of Death Cab For Cutie and Spoon seemed far more solipsistically appropriate for the moment than anything else, and even the larger-than-life stuff went from celebration to redemption as Coldplay, Travis, and their ilk flourished, while granddaddys U2 left behind their most interesting experimental phase (Achtung Baby - Pop)to reclaim their throne of overbearing, pandering Epic Rock... that I thought they realized better after Rattle & Hum.

And now I'm a relic. Most of my cultural peers, who were a little older than me, are now occupied with kids, careers, families. They'll occasionally pull out their LP copy of Check Your Head or Emperor Tomato Ketchup, but that's about it. I don't often connect culturally to my peers, due to my dislike of Dave Matthews and today's indie rock. And I'm starting to slip gently into that point where everyone more than 3 years younger than me is an idiot with terrible taste. I don't give a fuck about American Idol, and I sure don't care about this Lady Gaga crap (shitty dance pop is shitty dance pop). So what now?

I don't know. Does it matter? It's only pop music...

Get Damned Or Get Out

2010-03-22T00:40:00.001-07:00

I've stepped away from rock music for a little while. I was just getting tired of whatever I was hearing. Every time I'd listen to a 4-piece guitar/bass/drums/vocals rock band I'd think "Heard it already!" and let my attention wander. So I dipped into some jazz for a little while (which isn't generally my thing, but it was pretty palette-cleansing), then electronica (heavily trip-hop), and one of my other loves, heavy instrumental dub reggae.

It was the dub that was critical in leading me back to rock recently. My nominal introduction to quality dub music was Mikey Dread's remixes and productions for the Clash, whose dub works I went back and listened to. Specifically, I wore the grooves out on the second side of the original Black Market Clash EP, which has "Bankrobber/Robber Dub" (not the version that's on the CD version!) into "Armagideon Time" into "Justice Tonight/Kick It Over". There's a fantastic bootleg out there that collects all of the Clash's dub material called "This Is Dub Clash". I won't post it here, but if you're inclined, maybe google it to see what comes up, or you could compile it yourself.

Anyway, dipping back to the Clash, one of my first musical loves, lit the pilot light on my rock-based listening again. Rock music still sounded like tired garbage, except for the purest, most incisive rock music out there, so over the past few days, I've slowly been reloading my wiped iPod with pure rock or punk bands, the bands that have the energy and madness and hooks and drive that seduced me in the first place. While the Ramones are practically a prerequisite for any "Mike's Favorite Music" assessment, it's been the U.K. punk that's really turned me over. My first punk interests were almost exclusively British and late-'70s. What I've found is how my perspective has changed. It would take a miracle for my idealized opinion of the Clash to change, but where I once saw the Pistols as trailblazing heroes, I look at them now as a bunch of peacocking brats whose way of giving authority the finger is recording about two amazing albums of noisy classic rock. I still love them, but the pose becomes more evident to me with each passing year. The Buzzcocks are the band I would most likely be in if I were in that era - classicist, catchy, relationship-obsessed songs, and maybe a little vulgar but not really very offensive. The older I get though, the band that really surprises me over and over is the The Damned.

The Buzzcocks (or even the Undertones, if you want to get all Irish about it) are the band I would most likely be in, but the Damned are swiftly becoming the band I would most like to be in. Unconcerned with politics, always there to undermine the gravity of the situation with a well-placed pie in the face, they weren't afraid to experiment sonically with weird psychy touches and funny effects (although the second album illustrates this well, it sadly wasn't very good), and under all the "we're just here for the beer"/class-clown image, they were a lethally potent rock band.

Listen to "New Rose". Producer Nick Lowe made those drums sound like I want every drum I ever record to sound, the band is flailing with manic intensity and stumbling over itself, there's a little "rock history" nod with the whispered Shangri-Las intro, the hook is enormous, and it's all over in under 3 minutes. Oh, and the b-side of this, their first single, is a Beatles cover. Huh? Even though it's admittedly the best song on the first album, the whole album is great in almost exactly the same ways throughout.

Not only that, but once they moved away from the ramalama Stooge-punk that left with founding guitarist Brian James, their more experimental work is just as good in completely different ways. Machine Gun Etiquette is funny and rocking and silly and colorful, The Black Album pushes punk into gothy psychedelic power-pop, and Strawberries is a backstep into poppy punk, but it may even be the best yet. They got no respect, were constantly shit on by the punk rock elite and those that believed what they were told by said elite (even me - reprints of the Pistols' magazine articles and interviews from the era were taken as gospel by my friends and I in that pre-"everything's on the internet" era), but in hindsight, until their dramatic fizzle in the mid-'80s the Damned were cranking out great-to-better-than-average rock albums, and when they came back in the mid-'90s, they were back to being great. Now that's impressive. "Least likely to"... yeah, right.

Gettin' Listy...

2010-03-13T02:15:00.001-08:00

Alright, so here's the first go-round. I've been racking my brain for 5 months, and this is the best list I can come up with, although I'm sure I'll be obsessing over additions and corrections for most of the NEXT decade. Here's the "contenders" list for the "Best Albums Of The Decade". The list is made up of albums that were important to ME in some way, or reflected a particular aspect of the times to me in a specific way, or whatever. Not the "best collections of notes" or "most relevant to the most people", but all personal, and somewhere in between. If I do it right, what it SHOULD do is give a pretty clear idea of what new music I've been listening to over the past 10 years. However, it might be prudent to note the fact that my favorite musics include styles that peaked years ago, so this doesn't reflect the heavy listening to classic punk or garage rock or shoegazer or dub or any of those other styles that nobody is really making anymore.

The plan? To take this randomized list and divide it into two parts - the semifinals, baby. One side of the line will get a rose and move on, the others are going to have to go home, maybe a checkup at the free clinic, and then their own lists, VH1-style. Just kidding, I think. Although we'll see. Once we've whittled it in half, we're hoping to have a conference with Mister Brent over at Dogdoguwar, where we discuss the merits of our respective choices, now that all the turn-of-the-decade hullaballoo has died down, we can do it right. Without further ado... your contestants!

The Raveonettes - Chain Gang Of Love
The Strokes - Is This It?
The Big Pink - A Brief History Of Love
Dinosaur Jr - Beyond
A Place To Bury Strangers - s/t
Spiritualized - Songs In A&E
Joe Strummer - Global A Go-Go
Basement Jaxx - Rooty
Daft Punk - Discovery
M.I.A. - Kala
Malory - Not Here, Not Now
Luna - Romantica
The Postal Service - Give Up
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Johnny Cash - American IV
Guided By Voices - Isolation Drills
Fountains Of Wayne - Welcome Interstate Managers
Primal Scream - XTRMNTR
The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
Asobi Seksu - Citrus
Madlib - Shades Of Blue
Danger Mouse - The Grey Album
Gorillaz - Demon Days
Queens Of The Stone Age - Songs For The Deaf
The Dirtbombs - Dangerous Magical Noise
The White Stripes - White Blood Cells
Modest Mouse - The Moon And Antarctica

Floating Away On The Detritus Of Pop Music

2010-03-11T01:03:00.000-08:00

Part of the charm of getting older is that you get to get bitter about what you view as the idiocy of youth... and specifically youth culture. As I spent my teen years as one of those weirdo cranky outsiders, it's actually quite nice to get less bitter as I get older, but it coincides with a downturn in the quality of popular music. If I were 27 in the early '90s, I could be an alt-rock type, in the late-90s, I could have been a Stereolab-loving aesthete, while still taking ironic pleasure in the harmless but vapid pop charts. Ten years out, there is very little mainstream pop music that's worth listening to.. and that's coming from a guy who's willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. To quote a writer named Huw Jones, from Slant Magazine:

These days our stars are force-fed to us by Simon Cowell and reality television, our chart-topping singles merely cover versions of songs that were cutting edge decades ago, and the entire concept of "pop music" is relegated to fodder for our celebrity voyeurism: penned by the talented, performed by the beautiful.

Which is why I am thrilled to tell you that I love the new Gorillaz record.

Will it top my "best of 2010" list? Probably not. But I love the idea of a resigned pop star piecing together some entertainment through a motley group of outcasts and also-rans, making a record that sounds contemporary simply because it stands in such sharp relief to the prevailing trends of the day. Title allusions aside, this album reminds me of nothing so much as Wilson the beach ball from Tom Hanks' Cast Away - this is an album made to make oneself happy, to keep yourself active and happy, lest you become swallowed by the blackness of it all. It's got a touch of melancholy that things aren't as good as they could be, but it's still making an effort... and by continuing to hold on, it's the most hopeful record I've heard in years. Pretty strange stuff coming from a group of cartoons led by a former popstar.

I was cautious. Albums this loaded with name guest-stars are usually a red flag to me (see Massive Attack's "Heligoland"), but when Snoop Dogg's voice comes wafting out of the speakers, it triggers a strange familiarity. Here's an artist who hasn't been crucial in almost 20 years, but his voice is so comfortable, it gives you a way into the moaning keyboards and lurching beats. Every review I've read of the album makes note of the "weirdo grandfather" vibe that Lou Reed's appearance gives off, and the doomsday declamations of the Fall's Mark E. Smith... but these are just signifiers for nerd-types like myself. In a project this conceptual, the creators are banking on your familiarity with these voices - they want you to listen to this thing pre-loaded, so that you can appreciate the cast of characters. It really does help if you know past work and history by the likes of Reed, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, and De La Soul. It's like casting them all in a play, but typecasting every one of them. When your brain flips through a rolodex of larger-than-life characters, it's concpetual shorthand. They're not just bringing a performance to the table, they're bringing everything they've done. But by playing to type, pop listeners with no interest in the Velvet Underground will still get the "vibe" of the dry declamations by Ol' Lou.

Of course, none of this would work if the music didn't hold up. And as many have noted, the melange of modern styles that Gorillaz have combined since their first record in 2001 has become less state-of-the-art and more State Of The Union. Combining hip-hop and pop and electronic and indie rock in a highly-concpetual [i.e. cartoon] fashion is no longer as confusing and surprising as it once was, so instead of dwelling on the squelching hooks, we can focus on the emotion behind it. Musical leader Damon Albarn (you like how I didn't mention him until this far in?) long ago made his reputation as a pop writer, and on the last two or three Blur albums (depending on how you look at them) gave us his gift for setting moods through textures. And if the haunted machines of the first two Gorillaz albums didn't clue you in, his under-heard work with The Good, The Bad, And The Queen showed us that he could craft deep nests for throbbing bass grooves (courtesy of The Clash's Paul Simonon, who appears here, along with his Clash bandmate, Mick Jones). This album is nowhere near as fresh as the first one, but its depth isn't even discovered on the third or fourth listen. The pop is poppier, the murk is murkier, and by cobbling together something that stands as its own pop island, floating further and further away from Simon Cowell's mainland, waving goodbye, and ready to cobble together something from whatever it has left, one has to wonder why more people aren't building their own islands out of the scraps that nobody else seems to want anymore. Again... not bad for a bunch of cartoons.

What Time Is Love?

2010-01-30T07:57:00.001-08:00

Forget part two... I don't even remember what I was going to write about anyway.

For those of you that have been following us here at the Central Target Research and Sound Laboratory, you'll realize that while this is a music blog, it's not really about music. Music is merely the frame with which to hang a given topic on, providing an ostensible topic for the moment, but usually elaborating on whatever I've been thinking about in the real world. Incidentally, I realize fully that it's poor writing to explicitly lay your literary devices on the table within the same work you're using them. However, while to you this blog might be entertainment, but to me it's a project of "personal journalism", so let's not quibble.

The thing is, I've been very taken with certain types of electronic dance music lately, specifically the Detroit school of early techno music and the minimalist work of Richie Hawtin's Plastikman project that I have, as of late, found difficulty finding a respective perspective to latch on to.

In high school, I finally began to investigate electronic music, after years as a punk. As a media-saturated child of my age, techno and dance music seemed like a wild, colorful adult world, and based on the imagery of 1980s dance club culture, it was very, very adult. Conversely, as a boy, I spent a few years living in Vienna, Austria (with my family - I wasn't just a globe-trotting preteen). It was 1989-1992, and acid techno and house were exploding all over Europe. It was absolutely omnipresent, and there was still enough E-influenced, Day-Glo good-naturedness to it that a part of me has always believed that it really was the dawning of a new era in culture. The early 90s were a culturally cool time anyway, with the coked-out decade of greed winding down and an explosion of multiculturalism. Although I didn't understand the social framework at the time, it felt like everyone was walking around with their eyes open and embracing vibrancy for a while. I loved the squelching soundtrack of acid house music, and ever since have always had a soft spot for it. By the time I hit high school 5 years later, my tastes were a lot more elitist, preferring the jittery, brainy end of electronica (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Warp Records) to the ass-shaking end of things.

As I've mellowed my position with age, I've noticed that there's a ton of intellect in the better dance music, and the late-80s/early-90s Detroit scene is a perfect example of this Zen minimalism. The "Belleville Three" have all made wonderful records, both dancefloor-ready, and cerebral enough to stand up to armchair listening. However, it's Plastikman (one of the several aliases of producer Richie Hawtin) that's been eating up a lot of my listening time. Minimal to the point of being subliminal, the tiniest change in the music can warp the beat into another rhythm, building brilliance out of only the barest essentials. His second album, Musik, is a masterpiece.

On the other side of the spectrum is my love of dubbed-out ambient house. The Orb, in this writer's opinion, stands above the pack as a favorite. The rubbery, intergalactic psychedelia of their first few albums is the soundtrack of an outer-space journey in your own head. Tinkling atmospherics and soft, cotton-wrapped beats eventually gave way to ambient noodling in their later years, but everything they did up to (and sort-of including) Orbvs Terrarvm is worth checking out. In fact, see if you can track down the full 39-minute version of "Blue Room", the longest single ever to top the UK charts, with a memorable TV appearance featuring the band members in space suits, playing chess in front of footage of dolphins. Trippy.

Since I've spent so much time between headphones, though, I find myself without anything to say about the music, as there is little vocabulary in the rock dictionary to capture the essence of some of this intensely introspective music. I've always looked at electronic music (dance-derived, rather than the electronic experimentation of early artists like Stockhausen) as running on a similar but parallel universe to the rock sphere since about 1977 - just as rock has developed sub-genres and stylistic diversions, so has this electronic music spawned acid house, techno, trip-hop, trance, drum 'n' bass, gabber, microhouse, and on and on and on. There's so much to dive into that with this introspection phase, I've just been cruising around in my own head for a few weeks. How do I hang my hat on that?

Realizing today that I've been neglecting my writing duties, I've decided not to change my listening from a techno and dub diet, but to dig deeper, to push further, to peel back the layers and really find something to say about this music. Maybe an album review of AFX's Analogue Bubblebath 3 (one of the greatest acid techno records ever), maybe a reflection on the co-opting of psychedelia from guitar-based rock to the mindspace of bedroom beatniks, or maybe just me blathering on and on about just how good 808 State is. We'll have to see.

Part 1: Clearing The Field

2010-01-02T02:12:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's easy to get complacent as a fan of anything. When you're immersed in something, it's easy to forget the boundaries, and easy to forget that there are very few innovators in any given field. I listen to a lot of music, so sometimes, it takes something extreme, something that I rarely listen to, to shake me out of my jaded state and really make me perk up. Quality is not the issue, as it's easy to hear and appreciate a great record that still fits within the boundaries of "normal" music.

I put on some James Chance & The Contortions today and it was like I'd never heard anything so aggressive in my life. Now, the funniest thing is that yesterday, I was listening to The Birthday Party (R.I.P. Rowland S. Howard), and felt the same way. I often forget that sometimes I need a brain cleansing. So many "confrontational" bands or musicians are simply "confrontation signifiers", throwing out all the established imagery, conjuring up an image of danger or confrontation without actually being so. And there's really nothing wrong with that. Art is art, it is not life. Art is a representation of aspects of life. However, when (specifically) music is authentically confrontational, there is a certain "magic ingredient" that is almost palpable, but hidden in the spaces between the notes - it can't be quantified, but it's obvious when it's present.

It's easy to get wrapped up in this world of signifiers, but it makes it incredibly powerful when dosed with the real deal. And No New York, the compilation of No Wave heavy hitters, sounds like the real deal. So does the Birthday Party's Prayers On Fire, but it's Chance and his ilk that I'm listening to right now, and it's so disconcerting that I'm having trouble keeping my thoughts straight enough to type. It's not the knowledge that early shows often ended in actual physical confrontations, sparked by Chance himself, in an attempt to shake the jaded NYC audiences out of their complacency - it's that this music often sounds dangerously close to coming apart at the seams. "Dish It Out" is the sound of frantic, sweating fear.

On Thanksgiving, my mom makes a cranberry walnut salad that I love. It's tasty, but so tart that it completely cleanses the palate... something that this raw nerve, live-wire music can do. After hearing something this harrowing, it's easy to lean back and just enjoy the nuances of something that's not so intense.

And while I'm listening to these records now 30 years out, this is not the only era to generate bands like this. However, it is a rare occurrence. If you ever spot one live (and it will most likely be live, since bands this electrifying aren't usually around long enough to properly document), take heed. Both in the cycle of rock music and one's listening habits, palate-cleansing, cranberry salad moments like this are like forest fires... clearing the debris for something new and fresh to grow. Which is why it's serendipitous when the universe draws me to music like this at the same time it presents me with the sonic alternative, which we'll be discussing next time on Central Target, in Part Two...

Top Ten Albums Of 2009

2009-12-09T03:27:00.001-08:00

It takes a special breed of person to make end-of-year top ten lists of a given category. I don't mean "special" as in exemplary, or somehow a cut above. Interestingly, though, that demographic dovetails nicely with the type of person who might think that their ranting and hyperbole might be interesting to the whole wide internet. So here's a list of Mike's Choices for the top ten records of the year. The year might not be over, but unless the Young Jeezy record or Rod Stewart albums is going to BLOW MY MIND, I'm going to call it. These are ranked, largely, by how much enjoyment I got out of them, how much I liked them. Not terribly empirical, but it seems to work for me.

1. The Big Pink - A Brief History Of Love
Huge without being silly, atmospheric without being limpid, it's just booming, thundering neo-shoegazer of the finest variety. Maybe not the best record of the year on a technical scale, but I've listened to and enjoyed this album more than any other this year, and it only came out in September. Bits of everything from My Bloody Valentine to the Jesus and Mary Chain are folded into the mix, but without ever really sounding specifically derivative. I heard the "Velvet" single and had to go out that day to get the single, just to have a real physical copy of it. It's that good, and there is no hesitation in me naming this my favorite album of the year.

2. The Vandelles - Del Black Aloha
Coming from out of a buzz-less nowhere with their debut EP, they followed up with a full-length that did everything you would want a first album to do after a killer EP... more of the same, but deeper. Sonically, it's halfway between some wicked surf band we've never heard of and a blast of feedback like a bucket of cold water in the face. Once again, Jesus And Mary Chain comparisons aren't inaccurate, but it's more than just sounding like a good band that makes this a great record. Thrilling sonics, oceanic reverbs, swaggering hooks... it's got what a good rock record needs to have.

3. Dinosaur Jr. - Farm
With some of the more jagged edges sanded down from the unexpectedly amazing Beyond, what we have here is an imminently satisfying collection of wistful melodies and extended soloing. If you like Dinosaur Jr., you'll love this record... but if you don't like the band, this album might just win you over anyway. Barlow's rumbling bass guitar and Murph's furious tom rolls build a structure to hold up swirling, winding, neo-psychedelic explorations wrung from Mascis' Jazzmaster. It's impressive that any band could make a record this good, much less one that broke up less-than-amicably 20 years ago.

4. Early Day Miners - The Treatment
Not so much the sound of a band changing... more like snapping into focus. After several albums of hovering, beautifully longing soundscapes, tunes that felt like ghosts, a sharpening of hooks and shortening of tunes makes this feel like a new band. Post-punk seems like a touchstone, but it's hard to put my finger on just what this sounds like. Danceable rhythms, mercurical guitar lines, and hooks. Lots of hooks. A surprise? Maybe. A delight? For sure.

5. A Place To Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
Having been angry that I slept on their self-titled first album, I was thrilled to hear about this follow up. Where the first album was a collection of recordings cobbled into an album release, this is the first one recorded as an album. What does this mean? Sonic cohesion. Every one of these static and reverb epics flows into each other, sounding like a monolithic call to feedback arms. Again, it's a good year to be a shoegazer.

6. The Dead Weather - Horehound
I'm no great champion of the Kills, singer Alison Mosshart's main gig, but I've got no beef with them. I'm on record as being a Jack White fan. So what's the deal with this ill-recieved project? Voodoo blues. Dark, oozing, psychedelic evil grooves. And it's fantastic. I do like the White-sung tracks a little better, but there's not a truly weak track on this. People didn't like it because it didn't sound like the White Stripes. So what? This is way more Captain Beefheart than B.B. King. If you wrote it off, try it again. If you haven't heard it, now's the time.

7. Sune Rose Wagner - Sune Rose Wagner
It doesn't sound like a Raveonettes album, but it couldn't have been made by anyone who wasn't in the Raveonettes. Gossamer, drifting, dreamy - I hate to fly, and this record put me at ease from Cleveland to Boston. All the Spector-esque arrangements you've come to love, but like Dylan's Time Out Of Mind is sounds like it's being recorded by ghosts. It's beautiful, and the fact that it's all sung in Danish makes it even more ethereal. Forget the Cocteau Twins, this is what dream-pop should sound like.

8. Varsity Drag - Rock 'N' Roll Is Such A Hassle [Live]
Ben Deily left the Lemonheads in '89, put out a record with his new band, Pods, in 1994, then disappeared to have a real life until '06, when Varsity Drag debuted on record. This career-overview live disc shows that while he hasn't been prolific, Deily has certainly been consistently excellent. Everything from early L-heads songs up through 2009 material, it's a fantastic collection for anyone who likes good punky rock songs. Considering how good these songs are, I don't think I need to sell it any further.

9. The Raveonettes - In And Out Of Control
I've never considered them one of my favorite bands, but it seems like every year the Raveonettes release a record, it makes my top ten list. This year's is no different, in that it's completely satisfying, sounds wonderful, and has good songs. I just can't get enough of their surf/spy guitars and cooing backup vocals. Last year's Lust, Lust, Lust was a comeback of sorts for a band that never went away - it was just a lean, dark rock record. If you have liked almost anything on this list, you'll like this record. I guarantee it* (*this is in no way a guarantee).

10. Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown
Far better than I expected, not an earth-shatteringly amazing record, but it's nice to hear a band that I know are honest about doing what's good about big, huge, old-fashioned rock music. It doesn't feel ironic, it doesn't feel put-on, and even though it feels like a little "outsized/ridiculous", that's OK. It's not smarmy like some of the other epically huge bands of the day, and even though I would never want to hear another record that sounds like this, this one sounds good to me.

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Also-Rans: This was too good a year for music to constrain it to the top 10. There were several excellent records this year that just barely didn't make the cut, but deserve one more largely-unread blog to sing their praises.

ofthemetro - "April Is The Cruelest Month/Roboboogie": honestly, there would have been a place for this at the grown-up table if it had been more than 2 tracks. It was a best albums list, but this is only down here because of a technicality. What does it sound like? Electronic music that sounds HUMAN. That should be all you need to know. http://www.myspace.com/inastationofthemetro

Asobi Seksu - Hush: More dream-pop than shoegazer, it shows that you can strip huge things down, and if they're really good, they'll stand up. This does, and it's beautiful.

Death - ...For The Whole World To See: pre-punk, Motor City Dirtbombs-esque garage'n'roll that proves that obsessive record collectors deserve to be listened to from time to time.

Madlib - Beat Konducta, Vol. 5-6: Hazy hip hop fragments from the underground's best (I said it) producer.

Sonic Youth - The Eternal: solid, tight experiments from the kings and queen of avant-alterna-rock. Fantastic.

Metric - Fantasies: Haunted, danceable modern pop. It SOUNDS perfect, and probably would if it sounded different, too.

Mos Def - The Ecstatic: Not enough hip-hop on my proper list, but not for want of trying. After being written off for a couple of albums, Mos Def comes roaring back with his best since his debut.

Spinnerette - Spinnerette: hard-edged Rock that shows that Brody Dalle is a lot more than a punk screamer. Almost made number 10 up there.

Tonight May Not, In Fact, Be The Night

2009-12-04T05:18:00.000-08:00

Since the dawn of well-recorded music, the fidelity has been a subjective factor in the listener's enjoyment, whether they know it or not. Those who are largely unaware of how audio recording works might not realize it, but that "something about it" that people often refer to when talking about their relative appreciation of a particular recorded work is most likely the constructed sound of music in a way that our ears wouldn't normally hear it.

Since the advent of multitrack recording, this problem/benefit has been compounded. In the early days, microphones and tape would pick up a performance live, as it was performed. But being able to record parts or instruments individually, a crafty recording engineer could now put each element in it's own space, so to speak.

For instance, you could make the drums sound like they were in a small, highly reverberant concrete room, but make a guitar or piano sound like they were down a long metal hallway, while putting the bass right next to the listener's left side. Of course, these are all illusions created by the signals your brain gets about REAL space... it's all a trick.

In some eras of popular music, certain production tricks became the standard, and often, eras with a higher number of standard "tricks" are what sound dated. Certain chorus effects and reverbs can come together to instantly scream "1980s". It was a colder, more digital sound than what was prevalent in the '70s rock arena. Until the legion of dimwit new-new-New Wave revivalists invaded the rock underground, the prevailing opinion was that "70s sounds were warm and natural and therefore good, '80s sounds were cold and harsh and bad". Now, aside from the phramaceutical trends of the ages, this is often true, in a purely rockist sense of the word. Some of those '70s classic rock moments stand up to the "timelessness" test because they have the same sound that people have had through the ages. Warm overdriven guitars and drums that sound like they're in a medium size room are going to be familiar sounds.

However...

There was, in the 1970s, a particular production sound that was so weird and unnatural, despite all of its concessions to normalcy and regularness, that sound more unnatural to me than even the weirdest stuff from '85. So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I humbly submit two stone-cold-classic records that I have a hard time listening to - not because of the harrowing lyrical content, but because of the bizarre production values. Ladies and gentlemen: Tonight's The Night and Berlin.

"B'whaa?" you may be asking. These are what, to some eyes, should be my favorite albums by each of these artists. Harrowing raw-nerve lyrics set to road-burned melodies at the trough of each artists' downward spiral. Confronting the darkest impulses of the human condition. Considered by many their respective artistic peaks. Maybe so, but I pull them out so infrequently that I couldn't sing you most of the songs on either of them, even though I love them. The problem is that I haven't been able to pinpoint why.

The closest I can get is that every instrument has been over EQ'd to death. My ears don't hear like that. You can't spend weeks getting the drums to sound just the way you want them and then set the other instruments to an entirely different set of calibrations. This problem isn't quite as apparent on Berlin, which is largely a collection of "piano and strings" showtunes anyway. But I've been in a lot of rooms with a lot of sloppy rock bands, and while all the playing and activity on Tonight's The Night is "correct", the sound of it isn't. I'm betting that coke and quaaludes have something to do with it, too.

Are there others? By that I mean good records from the pre-punk '70s that just sound wrong to you? I'm sure somebody out there could come up with a good list.

My Little Blue Window/Radio Silence

2009-11-28T02:10:00.000-08:00

Recently, a lot of my listening has been taken up by one Mr. Elvis Costello, or as some of you may know him, "Declan MacManus: International Art Thief". I've been a huge Costello fan since high school, which may explain why I wasn't exactly a ladies' man, but it was also reassuring to know that there were other angry nerds out there. My Costello listening never really ceased since then, but for me, it's certainly more of an autumn/winter thing, and I've recently pulled out my EC discography from its digital crate.

It seems that whenever I pull out ol' Declan's records, I not only discover new things about the records that I love (which is most of them, but I'm certainly partial to his '77-'80 output, from My Aim Is True to Get Happy!!), but I usually discover a new record once a year or so. Apparently, I'd never cleaned my ears out to bother to listen to his 2002 "comeback", When I Was Cruel. it seems to be the weird, dark, seething record that he was threatening to make back in '91 with Mighty Like A Rose. The great thing about Elvis is that he's never really been pigeonholed by people who know his music. Sure the "angry young man" image sticks in people's minds, but he's always been as stylistically shifting as even David Bowie, he just changes shape within the "post-New Wave songwriter" boundary. Everything on When I Was Cruel seems dark and muffled, giving it a similar vibe, if not exactly sound, of groups like Massive Attack. That haunted, dark, angry sound is a welcome refresher to those of us who love Costello's razor-sharp wordplay. I've been on record since I was 17 as digging his Burt Bacharach collab, but that was a little sweeter - nobody can pen a put-down like Costello.

Back in '02, I was doing summer duty at a mall record store when I was home from college, and we were pretty restricted as to what we could play (thanks, GloboCorpMedia, Inc.), but When I Was Cruel certainly got lots of play from me, but I wasn't giving it a fair shake, cause I was young and angry, and it wasn't This Year's Model. So I've heard the record, but I'm 7 years late in getting to it's glorious, muffled anger - so what's your point, Mike?

My point is that I'm sick of the Day Glo, pseudo-cheerful 80's retroism of today. It's like people have fooled themselves into feeling things that they're not actually feeling. I'll freely admit that I don't understand why anyone would live at that surface level all the time, but I think that some of these people genuinely think that they feel certain things, but it's all ironic, and some of them don't even know it:
Teen2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen1: (shakes head) I don't even know anymore.

Maybe it's because we're coming out of a dark time, and some of the people in their late teens and early 20s weren't properly emotionally equipped to deal with being plunged into a paranoid era about 8 years ago. The '80s were pretty Day Glo and there was the constant threat of nuclear war. It's back again. But I was old enough to deal with it. And I'm bitter. Bitter at those people, bitter at the spirit of the era, bitter that nobody else seems to be feeling what I'm feeling. Ignoring it with solipsistic dance squiggles and silly haircuts doesn't protect you from fear - you have to fool yourself when all is said and done.

So I'm going to start writing some lyrics for the album I've got in the can. And they're going to be bitter. Because nobody else seems to be doing it with any articulation or conviction. Fuck this dance music. Things might be getting better, but bopping to reheated, rehashed Synth-Pop horseshit isn't going to make this any better. Duran Duran was bullshit then, and their progeny still are. You can't dance your troubles away when the world is falling apart. They say that those that don't know their history are condemned to repeat it, and apparently they've never heard the tale of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

Don't Know About You, But...

2009-11-22T05:04:00.000-08:00

i-ron-y: [ahy-ruh-nee, ahy-er-]
5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.

------------

So, I'm going through my thrice-a-year Pixies binge, because I'm pretty convinced that they might be in contention for the highly unexpected position of "one of my favorite bands ever".

I didn't really like the Pixies when I first heard them.

Annette, a manager at the restaurant I worked at in high school loaned me Doolittle, passing it along to me like it was a secret. I assume this is the way people with older siblings find out about cool music. I had to mooch off my friends' older siblings. This would have been about '96 (I think), and I just didn't get along with the record. It was a little scratchity, almost too quirky, and the screaming wasn't really my bag at the time. I was just out of my "nothing but hardcore" phase (done with screaming), and the mysterious ambience of Guided By Voices (which she also loaned me, at the same time) held a lot more sway over my listening habits. Everything about the Pixies seemed so out front and clear and flat, like a photograph or film, while GBV was murky and deep.

But I diligently taped it, and kept going back to that cassette ever couple of weeks. I didn't really like it, but I couldn't help but want to listen to it more - it was like a compulsion. I didn't feel like I needed to like it, but it was so alien to me, I just wanted to see if it was as strange as I remembered it being. Naturally, as happens with most listeners (usually earlier than it did with me), I had some sort of epiphany with that record, and it was like a sudden, jolting realization when I understood I was listening to it wrong. I was taking all my preconceived notions - about it being a seminal "alternative rock" album, an influence on Nirvana that never broke through 'cause it was too weird, and the way that fans a generation ahead of me talked about it - and filtering through that.

All I had to do was open my ears and realize that it was just great music, you know? These were pop songs. Skewed, fractured, with scratchy mariachi guitars and screaming and stomping, but they were also 2:30 pop tunes. Shortly after I had this realization, I finally understood why Weezer had constantly been pegged as Pixies soundalikes. "Debaser" could have been on the Blue Album with a different vocal track. The more I listened, the more I liked it. The more I liked it, the more I listened. It was a good time to be an obsessive high schooler.

As I kept writing songs, in my so-called "punk rock" attempts to get away from "classic rock" songwriting (rootsy, verse-chorus-verse, maybe an acoustic guitar), I was drawn to the way their songs were short, like punk, and they were just played wrong as well. Where my primitive tunes had 8 bars of verse, 8 bars of chorus, 4 bars of bridge, 8 bars of chorus again, these Pixies albums were full of moments where they'd play a riff 7 times instead of 8, giving it this weird push-pull, with unexpected changes that actually SURPRISED me. And if Black Francis was the heart of the band, Kim Deal was the soul. She was what really hooked me overall. The frontman was scary, screaming like a deranged hobo about aliens and whores and surrealist films, but Deal's charming normalcy and audible sweetness was reassuring - as though to say "Hey, I know this is weird, but it's cool Go with it, it'll be a fun ride." As prickly as Black Francis seemed (as though he'd flip out at any moment), Kim had this sort of "Oh, Charles...!" vibe that didn't defuse the insanity, it just made it seem like a lot more fun.

All of the records are good, although my favorite often changed. Doolittle, is probably their best, the most realized combination of fucked-up weirdness and super-catchy pop. Lots of my friends claim that Surfer Rosa is, like, THE ONE, and I know a few people who think that Trompe Le Monde is the best thing they did, due to the combination of heaviness and texture (the keyboards on that are actually really good). I'm the only person I know who really likes Bossanova, thanks to my love of surf music and space rock, although I know it's probably their weakest album. My favorite is Come On Pilgrim, not because I think it's their best, but because it's the most unique. All the songs sound like they were recorded live, in that order, on the same day, over the course of about 45 minutes. No super hits (no pop magic like "Wave Of Mutilation" or "Velouria"), and every one of those songs is catchy, but sounds like no other song I've heard before. And it was their first EP! How does a band do that?!?

What's the point of all this rambling? I'm coming to terms with the fact that while they've always been a band I really liked, and obviously thought was great, they may have just edged up into that rarified strata of "Mike's Favorite EVER Acts", up there with The Ramones, The Clash, Elvis Costello, et al. I would not have expected that the band I put on in high school and though "Too shrill. Too quirky." would end up a perennial favorite. And I stand by my assessment the other day. I am in the "Breeders" stage of my life right now. I no longer FEEL the way these songs feel. But they sure do compliment each other well.

Beat It, I Wanna Hang Out With The Psycho Mafia.

2009-11-19T05:27:00.000-08:00

It's never good when you're having a foul day by 8:30 AM. Too many people around me spitting negative vibes has cast its long shadow over me - I'm only human - and now I'm seething, gnashing, lashing out. I'm feeling pissy and just want to be left alone. Anymore, when I'm in this mood, I don't tend to want to thrash about or pound pound pound my head to clanging electro-industrial beats like I did in my youth. Anymore, it's something low and rumbling like Tricky, or something fully crotchety like The Fall.

I never used to like the Fall all that much. I filed them in with early Gang Of Four as "post punk that everyone seems to love, but is a little too dissonant and dry and amelodic for my taste". I was, of course, gravely mistaken. I knew, however, that I just hadn't heard the "right" entry point, out of their 2,487 albums and EPs. I think the first one I had was a cassette of The Infotainment Scan in middle school. Eh. Not the best point to start at on either count. I heard that they started kinda Northern UK Punk-y, so I picked up Live At The Witch Trials and Early Years and liked 'em, but as a punk fan, they struck me as a case of a non-punk band doing the punk thing, and doing it quite well, but it felt like by enjoying them, I was shortchanging a band that, apparently, was quite a bit more than that. Sort of like really digging on Joy Division's recordings as Warsaw, or the first couple of Police singles - they're all good work by bands that went on to do more interesting things in related fields. But to define those bands by that work would be rather limiting and shortsighted. I was lost as to where to go next, so I tried a few, some were good, some weren't. I guess I was just lost in the wilderness for a while, largely put off by the prickly Mark E. Smith.

The older I get, the more I like Mark E. Smith, in that he might be a complete prick, but he makes no bones about it. He doesn't hide it, and you just know that that's what you're getting.

"Fuck off."

Today, it's been This Nation's Saving Grace. For a while, this "mid-period" for the band seemed a little overproduced, a little les "raw" than the early stuff that I guess I liked, but right now, I want to hear one noisy riff, repeated over and over with frustrated, grey, clanging vigor. I want to hear it decay and start up again, like some sort of broken machine, repeating it's head-nodding, rhythmic fervor over and over and over. The Fall, as music, is equivalent to watching a band like Pere Ubu from outside the room, only to have the door slammed in your face for peeking in. They don't give a rat's ass about you. Or anyone. Not only is it surprising that they release this music to the public at all, but that they release it in HUGE volumes. But even still, they don't care if you buy it, really. Which I guess is what made the music so impenetrable for me for so long. It's completely uncompromising in a way that so much avant music wasn't. Where Beefheart and the Residents created a new language for you to listen to, The Fall just play droning vulgarities in a language you already know, only they're not talking to you. They don't go out of their way to be weird or difficult, they just are.

So bug off, everyone. Leave me alone. Leave me with my Fall LPs.

Can't Fight The Breeders

2009-11-15T05:15:00.000-08:00

I'm getting older, I realize. See, nowadays, I want to live at the Breeders, and visit the Pixies. I realize that this statement might seem silly and crazy, but when I was a youth, I was amped up and wired and on edge and constantly on the verge of freaking out - i.e., my reality was similar to the vibe I get from the Pixies' oeuvre. I used to like to vacation in the Land of the Breeders, a hazy, noisy, pretty place with mountains and pretty harmonies. No less rockin', but a little less spazzoid.

Now that I've mellowed with age, I often feel a certain placidity and calm, and like to occasionally get nuts and bounce off the walls. Unfortunately, other than rounding up some singles 'n' b-sides 'n' stuff, I didn't have a lot of background music for that feeling. The Breeders haven't been the most prolific band of the past 20 years... 4 albums? The enjoyable but less-than-epochal Title TK aside, however, each of them has been downright magical.

There are very few recording acts that just completely confound me. I'd like to think that I'm a pretty well-versed music consumer and creator. I know how certain sounds are made, and I know how to achieve that, and how it all fits together. I may not always be able to speak the language, but I can understand what you're saying to me. However, there are those rarified acts that I just can't fathom how they put together that sequence of sounds and timbres to make the music I'm hearing, and often, the Breeders are one of them. The way the Deal sisters put the parts of a song together is completely confusing to me. Which could be part of the appeal. The best part of it, though, is, much like the Early Day Miners, the wizards behind the curtain are almost completely without pretense.

Maybe it's the Deal sisters' Ohio roots, or the down-to-earth mentality I keep seeing around Boston (Kim's temporary home in her Pixies days), but it seems like a completely unaffected piece of primitive art. To assume that the Deals are some kind of savants is doing them a major disservice, though - don't underestimate these women. They know their field, to be sure. But part of the reason that everyone loves them (in the same way people love their Dayton neighbor, Bob Pollard), is that they seem like people you could know, regular people, who have this other side to them that creates this magical atmosphere. Maybe it's her deadpan Midwest accent, but Kim Deal has always reminded me of someone who could have been my babysitter when I was a kid. A little older than me, waaay cooler, but still wouldn't mind eating cereal and watching cartoons. The key, however, is that this side of the band is never distinct from the lush, jagged, hauntingly crushing music that they can whip up like a fever dream. It's not distinct, and in fact the music would be weaker if that side of the personality wasn't visible through the haze.

The Breeders, though, like myself, have mellowed with age. Their 2009 self-released EP, Fate To Fatal, is a wonderful follow-up to the stellar Mountain Battles. There are lots of stories about these people, including nasty band break-ups, drug addcitions, arrests, bad feelings, back-biting - but all that really, truly feels in the past. Like Mountain Battles, there's a sort of, err, "elder statesmen" vibe to this, that says to me "been there, done that, who cares? let's just kick back a little..." It's not that the songs are lacking anything, but without the constant threat of everything suddenly falling apart, the four songs here are allowed to breathe a little bit. There was a day when any new music from the Breeders was met with baited breath, simply due to the scarcity and the event surrounding it all. Despite the fact that it's now a different era, the fanbase is still there, and it's actually nice to hear music like this without the crushing weight of anticipation. It seems like it's nice to the band, too, becuase this feels a lot more alive and organic than most of the other records I've listened to this year. Add it to the list!

[Bonus points to any reader who can tell me why I found the title of this post so damn funny when I wrote it.]

Gettin' SAD: Keeping Your Chin Up In The Clutches Of Autumn

2009-11-04T12:53:00.001-08:00

Fall is once again upon us (at least those of us up here in the Great Northeast), and I've only seemed to make that definitive the night before last, when I put the new album by Early Day Miners on the turntable and let that slow swell of mood once again creep over my very soul. Not bad, per se, just a sort of isolated loneliness that is hard to combat, no matter now much happiness and how many loved ones you surround yourself with.

I'm one of those guys that gets SAD (that's seasonal affective disorder, kids) like clockwork, and the fact that I've been off the Prozac for far too long is putting me in a very melancholic state of mind. Perusing the upcoming album release calendars tells me that, barring and huge surprises, the EDM record will probably be the last "great" album of the year in my book. I mean, the Tom Waits live album will be fun but not revelatory, the Nirvana set at Reading '92 will certainly be enjoyable, but I've had a bootleg of that for years. Where does that leave me... the abysmal new Weezer album? This time of year is usually the point where I tend to stop looking forward for a few minutes and just exist. Lately, that's meant a lot of Brian Eno and "comfort music" - perennial favorites that I know so well I don't really need to LISTEN to them, just have them there as a companion. Some dub reggae, the Clash, Stooges, and the aforementioned Nirvaner (Boston pronunciation).

So what now? There's a debate in my mind as to whether to make a concerted effort to uplift my mood with bright, jangly pop that could make even the heaviest heart step lighter, whether to compliment my mood with autumnal music to ponder the great questions, or whether to explode it all and start listening to things that are so unrelated and all-over-the-place in mood that I don't know what to think and I'll just find myself confused. The problem with the first option is that most of that jangly power pop is ultimately of the blues tradition of singing a happy melody to cheer yourself up. Seriously, Altered Beast or Bandwagonesque or even the first Gin Blossoms album is beautiful, but once you listen to the lyrics, you'll be reaching for the nearest razor blade. The problem with the second option is that if I lean too hard on the "complimentary" music, it could teeter things too far to that side and I'll end up worse off than I am now. When you have evocative music to be plaintive to, it's easy for that to snowball. And as far as the third option... well, The Residents alone cannot sustain a man.

So the big question is, what makes for good autumn music? Right now, I'm leaning toward some psych-flecked Mod pop from the mid-'60s - The Creation, The Smoke, Nuggets II - because it's peppy enough to keep me upbeat, but most of the lyrics are so evocative and impressionistic that they don't really SAY anything to me. It's too cold out to really rock out to some sweaty garage rock, so the Dirtbombs and their ilk are largely off the table. Is there anything that might speak to me but keep me from feeling completely bummed for the next couple of months?

We here at Central Target turn to you, Dear Reader, for your sage advice!

Punky Screams, Robot Rock, And Album-Cover Panties: Spinnerette Crosses The Radar

2009-10-10T02:11:00.000-07:00

I used to have a couple of Distillers records, but then my hard drive crashed.

My friend Kevin is a big fan, and what with my casual interest in the punk rock, he thought I'd like them. So a couple of years ago, I picked up Coral Fang and (I think) the self-titled one, and liked them, more than most things I hear on Hellcat/Epitaph/whatever punk label they're on. I could never believe that it was actually a woman singing those songs, cause those were some gnarly, raspy, whiskey-and-razorblade vocals. But, they sounded good and I liked them, although I got most of my "gutter punk" love out in one concentrated burst in high school, I do enjoy it, and they were a lot more tuneful than their often too-grimy-for-my-ears bred'ren.

Point being, that I heard them, I liked them, and then I rarely bothered to walk over to the corner I kept them in, you know? Which is why I'm as surprised as anyone that Brody Dalle's new project, Spinnerette, just put out a record that's now in the running for my Top Ten of '09, a good year for my listening if there ever was one.

See, I went to Kevin's wedding last weekend, and he set me up with the Distillers discography, to replace the ones I ripped and sold. They came in MUCHO handy on our drive from Warsaw, IN to the Indy airport, because on the way up, we had no CDs in the rental car - just rural Indiana radio. Which is grim. Christian Country and Regular Country grim. "All-Skynyrd Weekend" grim. But listening to those Distillers records again in an isolated environment reminded me of just how (*ahem*) tuneful they are. Kevin had played me a little bit from frontwoman Brody's new project Spinnerette, which is to Queens of the Stone Age as the Distillers were to Rancid. Apparently, Brody's a gal who tends to shapeshift depending on her current beau (not true, but it's an easy analogy to make, and I'm feeling tired and lazy*), and while it's not a WILD departure, it certainly sounds more like current dude Josh Homme's band than her mush-mouthed ex's mohawk brigade.

The opener, "Ghetto Love", sets the tone, with robotic (yeah, I used it again) drums/claps, a fuzzed out Devo bassline, but downtuned, like the Network gone a little sexier and a little more badass. Brody reveals her inner Rachel Nagy, applying her rasp not to a punky yowl, but a snarling croon. I never listened to the Distillers for their sex appeal, but Spinnerette sounds like a sexy, amp-fuzzed assembly line. Brody's probably at her best here, as far as vocals are concerned. As much as I love a crazy-ass Australian punk woman screaming bloody murder at me, this record connects a little more with my hips. The mixing on the record, as well, pushes the Queens comparisions, but they're really comparisons that could be made to any of the projects in that Homme/Goss/Johannes axis - parts appear out of nowhere, set strangely in the stereo field, surprising you with dry, up-front backing vocals, or reverbing a bassline into near-oblivion. Its effect might be a straightforeward hard rock record, but none of the parts tell you that's where it's going... it might as well be a primer for psychedelic production with piledriving guitar riffs as the base, "just because".

The playing and production on this are all top notch, with far more apparent care into the actual sonics of the record than the Distillers (hey, that's not a knock, I just know what it's like to record punk rock), but this is clearly Brody's show. Her vocals go from dangerous to delicate, evidenced on the lovely and hauting "Distorting A Code". She sounds effortless, but clearly a lot of thought went into her musical and vocal performances. Delicate and thoughtful are not two adjectives I would have expected to apply to Dalle's vocals 3 years ago, but it's a very pleasant surprise. It's just as carefully-crafted as anything you've ever heard - the sound of a talented but pigeonholed artist wanting to show what she can do. And she is an artist, despite what some might think of the Distillers punk bashing, and this is her "no, really, I can do all KINDS of stuff" album. It's to her credit that she had a clear vision and knew which sympathetic sidemen to pick to acheive it. Does it belong in the Desert Rock family? Absolutely. But it certainly sounds like an original take on it. My love of punk rock girls and talented artists and bludgeoning riff-rock and robotic pop hooks all tell me I love this record, and I do. So there we go. Spinnerette is now in the running for one of the highly coveted spots on my Top Ten of '09 List.

[*Yeah, it's glib, and I shouldn't feel the need to justify a pithy comment in an otherwise flattering review, but upon review, her intentions certainly seem genuine, and the artists she's quoted as influences seem feasable. Brody deserves better, as a woman in rock, than for some douche like me to make a sexist comment like "she sounds like whatever man-rocker she hangs around", although I might make the same comparision if she were a guy in the bands, not dating the respective frontmen. If the shoe fits, right? But this is more Queens than Rancid.]

Today's Editorial Mistake: Brought To You By The Internet

2009-10-09T03:43:00.000-07:00

If you've been here before, you most likely know my contempt for the hyping machinations of Pitchfork.com, which I won't even do the service of linking to. I've been thinking a lot about my own creative outlets recently, and while I was perusing the internet today, came across their review of former Queens Of The Stone Age bassist Nick Oliveri's solo album, Death Acoustic. I heartily enjoy the Queens (to the surprise of many of my friends), but am certainly no diehard or historian, but today's reviewer states the following:

...when he offers up lines like, "I use crystal methane by the boatload/ I live off straight booze, I just don't fucking care," in "Outlaw Scumfuc", you don't really question the validity of that statement for a second. In some sense, it's effective songwriting, as the listener gets some insight into Oliveri's persona...

Without bothering to reference the fact that the song "Outlaw Scumfuc" (charming title, isn't it?) was originally written and recorded by one G.G. Allin, one of the most disgusting, depraved people to walk the earth. I have no real problem with the song, the cover, or Oliveri's choice, but nobody bothered to check the liner notes? Fuck this noise... I'm out.

The Treatment Is In The Medium, The Message Is The Cure

2009-09-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

Just when things get boring and I can't seem to find a new band to thrill and swoon to, the universe will unveil for me a reason to keep on digging. I've been experimenting with guitar ambience and musical space for a while now, and just as it seems like my only options are shoegazer gravedigging or moving on to power pop, I get the opportunity to see one of the (unfortunately) secret prizes of the Midwest or any region - Early Day Miners.

Now, there is a bit of bias here. I used to work with their record label, as I lived in their hometown of Bloomington, IN. But that's where the bias ends. They might be a perfect fit for the wide-open spaces of southern Indiana, their haunted guitar lines echoing through a thousand cornfields, but Bloomington is too often a fickle mistress, and while it's nurtured them, it's never given them the due they deserve.

Their new album, The Treatment, is not so much a departure from their previous work as another angle. People (well, critics) too often mistake a consistent artistic vision for complacency, but I'm going to lay it down for you: while their records often don't sound dramatically different from one another, EDM explores variations of a theme, mining (ha!) the space between notes for as much drama and depth as the notes themselves. Sparse has practically been the raison d'être for this combo, but the new album adds an unexpected twist: pop songs.

As much as I love the band, I'd be hard pressed until yesterday to sing you one of their songs. There are tracks that I like, and the melody in those songs tends to bury itself in the whole movement and breathing of the song, almost as if each inhale and exhale were the melody. Beautiful and intricate, with songs gently shifting from one to the next, but "poppy" wouldn't be a word for it. Last night, the lineup was certainly stripped down from the 6 or 7 piece version that I've seen over the past few years, consisting of drummer Marty Sprowles, bassist Jonathan Richardson, guitarist John Dawson, and vocalist and guitarist Dan Burton, who doubles on keyboards. The first surprise was the rhythm section - what was previously a rumbling monster, all tom fills and powerful drama, is now focused, sharp and driven. Sprowles keeps things here tight, clipped, and snappy, propelling the band with a motorik sensibility, even if his playing is more complex. Richardson's bass, however, is the anchor of the band. Never dull, never calling immediate attention to itself, but holding the bulk of the clearest melodic aspects, these two click into a post-punk groove that wouldn't sound out of place on the first Comsat Angels record. A bass-and-drums combo this tight gives the guitarists room to move by remaining steady as a rock, but not steady at the expense of soul. Rarely do I find myself watching the bassist and drummer at a concert as much as I found myself last night, marvelling at the way things seemed to click perfectly into place.

But as a guitar player, it was the guitar that's always seduced me on their previous records. Although it's anyone's guess what transpired in the studio, in the live setting, it was Burton's textures that laid a bed for Dawson's stinging leads to rest on. While Burton had his work cut out for him (at one point he was playing his keyboard, his amp controls, and his effects board at the same time), while it only took some well-placed echo and reverb to make the ringing leads seem larger than life. I'm still amazed every time I see them that this few people are able to create the sounds coming out of the speakers. So we've got a tight, snapping, growling rhythm section, slicingly concise leads, and more spatial textures than you can shake a stick at. Now what was that about pop songs? Oh yeah, I found myself and others in the all-too-thin crowd singing along by the second or third go-round of most of the choruses. There was even a little dancing. In the same way that great bands like Codeine, Galaxie 500, and the aforementioned Comsat Angels were able to create amazing pop songs that almost shunned attention - the songs passing themselves off like obvious secrets, inherently understood - the Early Day Miners write anthems without being preening. Had U2 not desired to rule the world and remained an atmospheric pop band (and maybe traded in that blowhard singer), they would be lucky to be making albums that sounded like this.

So what does all this mean? It means that all the people who have accused Early Day Miners of having the sound but not the tunes need to ear their words. It might be a bit of a development, but listening back to the earlier albums, such as 2005's masterful All Harm Ends Here, all the ingredients are there, but the band merely seems like they were merely choosing to ignore the poppier side for the atmospheric until now, acknowledging it's presence but putting it on the shelf for later. Now that they've chosen to release it, it proves just how adept they are at crafting soundscapes: these ones actually sound pretty catchy.

Overlooked Classics: "Good God's Urge"

2009-07-18T02:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when exposed to something at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right set of circumstances, one becomes connected to that thing, no matter how your rational mind may tell you otherwise, and no matter how incorrect it may seem with the rest of your life, there are things that we love, for which we can offer little to no excuse. We like them. And there's nothing wrong with that.

One of the benefits to this blind appreciation (I won't call it devotion, as there ARE limits to an otherwise sane person), is that one can then find elements of excellence that others would have overlooked, not being willing to devote the time or energy that someone who was more inclined to enjoy it would. And that's where I stand on Porno For Pyros.

Jane's Addiction was one of those things for me. So, just as I'll buy anything that has "The Stooges" printed on it, I'm inclined to check out anything "Jane's Related", from bootlegs to side projects. Some of these are excellent (the post-JA Deconstruction album), and some are unspeakably awful (*cough* the Chili Peppers' One Hot Minute *cough*). But some of them are not only worthy of your time, they're better than they deserve to be. Jane's worked because of the balance between members. Without guitarist Dave Navarro, leader/vocalist Perry Farrell got too artsy and freaky and self-indulgent, and without Farrell, Navarro would mire down in a sea of hackneyed metal cliche, for instance.

So upon the breakup of Jane's Addiciton, Perry Farrell started Porno For Pyros, and no Navarro or bassist Eric Avery meant it was going to be far more wigged out than he has any right to make (Satellite Party, anyone?), right?

Nope. Porno For Pyros' self-titled first album has its moments, but it's by and large a tight, rocking band that strays into the oddball at times, but is ultimately pretty satisfying. Guitarist Peter DiStefano was a lot more textural than Navarro, the band was by-and-large less aggressive, it was a nice soundtrack for the early 90s: intellectual, artistic, hooky, bohemian. This was a time when Dee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart" was ruling the charts. People were ready for freaky boho rock. Grunge had cracked the listening public right open and the world was ready to hear anything.

By 1996, however, their second album sank like a lead-lined rock.

1996, buddy! Korn was happening! 311! Tool! Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was like quadruple-platinum! Alanis went huge and Metallica went alternative. The Fugees, No Doubt, and Rage Against The Machine all had number one records in 1996. You expect me to listen to your understated album full of acoustic guitars and tropical percussion? Freaky hippie stuff with soundscaping?

Well, yeah.

"Tahitian Moon" starts out with a crazy noise guitar and cuts loose into the sound of laying on a beach under the stars. Otherwise icky hippie hand drums and trippy songwriting is obscured with enough haze to make it absolutely delightful. I once spent a week canoeing to this album, and it somehow fits the outdoors, near the water. "Kimberley Austin", in particular, reminds me of a song that's been barely written, but caught on record in that magical period between songwriting and arranging, when something can sound fresh and spare at the same time. Could it, as a song, have benefited from a little more fine-tuning? Yep. No doubt about it. But the freshness of it completely overrides it - any more and it would be overcooked. I think that sums up this whole album, in fact. Despite the layers of overdubs on everyone's part, this album is absolutely a perfect example of being laid back.

The players, as well, deserve some credit here. Guitarist DiStefano is quite possibly more inventive than Navarro (who guests here) in a sonic way, and Mike Watt, possibly the greatest bassist in the past three decades, lays WAY back on the tracks he features on, avoiding his Minutemen-style bean jumping, preferring to slide into notes and let the lines breathe. Stephen Perkins brings the most intricate and well-placed percussion of his career to the table, and to Perry Farrell's credit, he keeps his ego in check, almost always coming across as just one of the group, never dominating the proceedings.

Good God's Urge had the misfortune of being released in one of the worst possible musical climates for what it is, and due to that, was largely overlooked, even by former Jane's Addiction fans. In this post-millenial musical world, the disc has enough variety for the iPod Shuffle generation, but stands as a remarkably solid piece of work as a whole.

In short, it's absolutely worth the $.99 it would cost you to pick it up out of any used CD bin in America. I love this country.

Two Faced: In A Silent Way

2009-07-17T05:33:00.000-07:00

While I was a young man in college, I had a chip on my shoulder about jazz. You see, I was an outspoken proponent of the artistic merit of rock music. I worked in the rock and roll department of the Indiana University School Of Music. A prestigious music school to be sure. But we rockers in the staff were sneered at, belittled by the cultured classical divisions, as well as the jazz department, who felt that out music was often a blight on the school, a vulgar epithet that was better left unmentioned among the cultured musings of so many jazz historians.

Seems silly, coming from guys whose music developed in brothels and bars, don't ya think?

Were I feeling more academic, I'd consider spouting off about the heirarchy of popular music, how jazz was derided by the upper class in the early part of the century, only to be replaced at the bottom of the ladder by rock and roll in the latter half of the 1900s. However, I'm not feeling that way.

You see, partially because of my youthful ignorance, and then magnified by my resentment of the superior attitudes of academic jazz fans, I've never been a big fan of jazz in practice. In principle, I have no problem with the genre, but in practice, I've never been a big fan of it. I've studied it under some wonderful luminaries, but never fully appreciated it, at least, not to the extent that most jazz fans seem to. I have my problems with the attitudes of many hardcore jazz fans, but this is not about the fans, this is about the music.

Much of the more "classical" jazz music follows a particular format: start out with a "head", which is the main theme of the piece, let each member solo, returning to the head at either the end, or between each solo. My problem is that the "widdly diddly" soloing, while technically proficient, and in the best cases, really beautiful and melodic, has always been a drag to me. I don't really even care for guitar soloing - I'd much rather hear lead lines played in service of the song, not as an excuse for showing off or for "getting down" in the heat of the moment.

I realize this is a serious oversimplification of a genre, and please forgive what may have come across as ignorance. There are, however, two large exceptions to my listening taste when it comes to jazz. The first is free jazz. Wild excursions into dissonance, arhythimc sounds skittering across the air, bleating raw and wild... it's essentially the spirit of punk music with the opposite approach: you have to be REAL good to make this primal noise, rather than the anyone can do it approach of punk rock. Nobody ever accused Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane of not being able to play.

The other exception, and the reason for all that wind-up, is when jazz players take themselves and their abilties out of the equation, and play for the moment that's in the air, not the next one. When the music sits and thinks and pulses and flows like a living organism. Miles Davis' The Complete In A Silent Way sessions is a perfect example of this.

Not strictly downtempo, the closest comparison I can make in the rock world is Can's Future Days, it's jazz without being strictly jazz, ambient without seeming motionless, and experimental without losing grounding. Mysterious and murky in ways that the more "rock world" lauded Bitches Brew isn't. Bitches Brew has cultural importance on its side, but the funky rhythms of that album have tainted most other "fusion" music for my ears. On the In A Silent Way sessions (which, I should point out for the cash-strapped, the official album is more than representative of this box set, on which both album tracks appear), it never loses its status as jazz music, but it is perhaps the most subtle and atmospheric jazz music I've ever heard. Electric pianos abound, but not quite in that "instantly dated" Fender Rhodes tone that a lot of Bitches Brew has, and every element is clearly within the jazz realm, but somehow, the whole is more avant-garde than the sum of its parts.

Of course, my other favorite Miles Davis album/sessions is The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, another dark, mysterious album that owes more to funk than jazz, but that's another story, and betrays what perspective I come at this music from. But the regard in which jazz fans hold In A Silent Way surprises me. While it has vague precedents in Miles' music, it stands as a major break to what he'd done before, while not quite ever sounding like anything he put out later. Sure, Filles de Kilimanjaro indicated, in hindsight, where things might be going, but Bitches Brew (released immediately after In A Silent Way) was a whole different creature, one that seemed to prove more influential on not only jazz fusion, but Davis' own future works. More percussion, more polyrhythm, and more creeping funk influence led to what is probably the pinnacle of that direction, 1972's willfully singular On The Corner, which seems like it's a descendent of a completely different lineage.

So what's so appealing about In A Silent Way? I dunno. And that's it. It's mysterious. I can only compare it to the moments BETWEEN lines in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, the moments of deep mystery, tension, danger, stillness... by removing the head/solo/head/solo format, as well as the aesthetic, Davis and the rest of the band have managed to create jazz without jazz, jazz as ambient soundscape. Ultimately standing on its own, it's a recording that neither gives ground nor takes it, daring you to come closer, luring you in, never letting you know what's on the other side.

Prove It. Just The Facts.

2009-07-11T03:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if Television's Marquee Moon is ever going to stop giving.

I purchased my first of several copies of it at J&R Music World when I went to NYC the summer after I turned 16. My incredibly cool aunt and uncle had to work, so they basically turned me loose on Manhattan, which would have made my mother worry her way into a coma. I hit every music and book store I could find. But Marquee Moon was the first disc I bought while I was there and spent most of the rest of the trip just wandering to the tunes of that and the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat. At the time, I figured "when in Rome, make sure you have an appropriate soundtrack". I'll admit to being both disappointed and confused with Television at the time, along with the fascination that kept me going back.

"It's a punk record!"

"Err... no it's not."

I was in about my second or third year of punk-dom. I'd read articles and books about the CBGB scene, and knew that Television wasn't standard issue punk, but was willing to give it a go. Even at the time I could tell it was important, but was a little disappointed in how measured, how polite, and how jammy it seemed. In hindsight, my blueprint of punk only included things like the Stooges, not Albert Ayler, so I didn't get how this was punk, how this was rebel music. Obviously, I came around as I got older. Having said that though, it's surprising that it didn't just go on the shelf for a few years. It was an active part of my listening diet all through the rest of high school and into college. One of my professors got me back into it from a different perspective, reminding me that this wasn't the "Marshall backline, Les Paul, epic stage show" sound that was so prevalent at the time. With that in mind, I could hear how, to a teen in 1977, this must have been a revelation. It SOUNDS like it was made with a reasonable drum kit, a few gutars, and a few little Fender combo amps. Realizing that gave the album a fresh meaning to me, and it was like a new record again.

After college, I was a little lost as to what to do with my life, and I found the extended soloing to be both comforting and inspiring to just THINK to, as people in their early-to-mid 20s are wont to do. Recently, after moving across the country, gaining some maturity and realizing the power in subtlety (i.e., not all music needs to be drenched in fuzz and sweat), I keep different meanings in the same notes that I almost know by heart these days.

Will this albunm ever get old?

I just realized that I've written about Television before, in a blog post for an old, now defunct, blog back in 2006, and while the tone is a bit less refined, it's not awful. It does, however, have a completely different perspective, even three years ago. I was thrilled at finding a bootleg called Portable Electricity, happy that it finally gave Television the low end I felt they were lacking, and because the recording quality is muddy, the whole thing seems heartier and deeper, making them sound more like the punk godfathers they've always been touted as. While I understand that point of view, I don't know if I still feel the same. They were a guitar band, supposed to sound like subway brakes and clattering cityscapes. They didn't need to sound like what I was predisposed to want. Granted, the boot (which came from has been released as Live At The Old Waldorf) does make a case for them being a rockin' band, but after finally meeting Marquee Moon on it's own terms, it's even more enjoyable that whatever predisposition you'd want to lay over it.

And that, I believe, is the brilliance of this record to me. No matter what mindset I bring to the table, the album stands up to it. Punk rock? Listen to that rhythm guitar that opens "See No Evil": it's that "Subway Sound" that everybody talks about the Velvets having. Rock and roll classicism? "Guiding Light" has your 6/8 ballad down pat. The guitar interplay between Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd predicts Luna by about 15 years, and most of the songs have a push/pull that pretty accurately lays some groundwork for post-punk. However you want to listen to this, it will deliver.

Their discography, ultimately, allows for a this same range, but it's not quite as tied together. Bootlegs of their pre-MM material show a rougher band working closer to the garage bands of the mid-60s; their second album, Adventure is the softer, nuanced side of the band; the live collection The Blow-Up shows them stretching songs to their tensile breaking point, adding improv to garage tunes, creating an almost free-jazz-and-garage-rock hybrid, and their reunion album is spare to the point of ghostliness, sounding like nothing so much as post-millennial indie rock. But the brilliance of Marquee Moon is that it's all there from the outset. Not to take away from the later records, which often fit a specific tone, you can listen to Marquee Moon to enjoy any of those. My iPod usually has two Television records on it: Marquee Moon and whichever other one I'm feeling in the mood for. In a punky mood? MM plus a bootleg of the Brian Eno demos. Feeling heady and volatile? MM and The Blow Up. Introspective and reserved? Marquee Moon and the self-titled reunion album. You get the idea.

It's a rare feat to find an album that applies to everything while always sounding just like, and ONLY like, itself. This is one of those. The reissue makes it even more beautiful, by including their first single, the magnificent "Little Johnny Jewel". Highly recommended.

What I Learned In Music School

2009-07-11T02:02:00.000-07:00

"...the fact remains that if you take one note, any note, and let two different people play it, what comes out of one's axe just might be nothing more than the note, whereas through some magic the other's note might be just a little more expressive, probably because there was something, a kind of inner urgency and yearning, behind it. And all the conservatories and theory books and virtuoso chop-flashings in the world aren't gonna make one iota of difference in regard to that one humble note."
- Lester Bangs, "Free Jazz Punk Rock", 1979

The Circle Of Hype

2009-07-04T02:07:00.000-07:00

Brent, of Dogdoguwar fame, had the whizzbang idea to listen to the three most hyped records of the indie-rock world this year and livechat our thoughts as the albums unfolded. In the essence of length, I'm chopping it up into three sections. As we reviewed the albums chronologically, first up was Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, which was nominated for "Best Album Of '09" as early as December of '08. Here is that chat...

[Brent's comments are regular type, and if that wasn't enough, I've labelled them with a big 'ol "BRENT". Mine are sleek sexy italics. And since this is MY blog, I left my name off them.]
---------

BRENT: Before we start listening, maybe we should predict how much we'll like each of them.

Sounds good... I'm gonna say "pretty good, B" to Grizzly Bear, C+ to Animal Collective, and a D to Dirty Projectors. I should say though, I've only heard pieces of any of the bands' other work, so those grades are really basically random.

BRENT: I've heard the last album by Animal Collective, "Strawberry Jam", and the lead singer's last solo album, "Person Pitch". I heard Grizzly Bear play at the Pitchfork Festival, and was very unimpressed. Dirty Projectors, all I've heard is their song with Dabod Byrne on the "Dark Was the Night" charity record and a few stray tracks. Oh, and I know they covered Black Flag's "Damaged" in its entirety.

I love Dabod Byrne. I've only heard Projectors material from that Damaged cover album. As a Black Flag fan, I had to hear it. Oh, and my typing is terrible, as our readers will find out.

BRENT: How were the covers? I know of it, never heard anything

Written from memory, allegedly, not actual re-listening. It was like if you and I tried to cover Cracked Rear View from remembering what it sounded like. Allegedly. I don't buy any of that crap, but whatever. By being so contrived and theoretical, it made it pretentious

BRENT: Now I'm trying to imagine how I would actually want to cover Cracked Rear View.

HA! We have more important things at hand though.

BRENT: "A Place to Bury Hootie"

*ugh*...
so where do we start? who's up?

BRENT: Let's do this chronologically and start with Animal Collective.

oh, wait... I'm an ass. So real quick: what's your grade for this one?

BRENT: I'm guessing a C or C- for this one.

Oooh! Let's rock it... ready?

BRENT: Absolutely

alright.... GO!
Ah yes... "Maggot Brain". I love this album
[By the way, Dogdoguwar readers... I'm the snide one. Nice to meet you!]

BRENT: I can't fault an album for starting with what sounds like a toilet flushing

YeahI was thinking more "bong-y". Oh. Psychedelic handclaps. Oh boy. I think i can hear that they have beards. I don't know how I can tell.

BRENT: Because only bearded hippies play drums like this

Yeah, true. I long for the golden days when it was just an ambient thing. Pre-drums. When the song started, I thought "I hope this picks up!", and now I wish I hadn't said that.

BRENT: My sociology-sense just goes nuts when they start trying to do the "tribal drumming" thing

I'm trying hard not to judge this on people I knew in college's taste, to take it for itself, but big 'drum circle' drums and underwater ambient bits worry me

BRENT: The outro wasn't bad

yeah

OK, this one sounds like Tangerine Dream.

BRENT: In a good way?

Sorta. Not in a BAD way. But that synth riff that faded in was very TD. The vocals are throwing it off a bit. Actually, I'm sort of enjoying this vocal arrangement. But I'm on decent headphones.

WHOA! What the hell is that?

BRENT: This is better than the first track. What surprised you?

The thudding percussion coming in, breaking up the space rock ambience. All low and squelchy. See, I like this one a bit less than the first one, because this sounds like a lousy Beach Boys song from the "Still Cruisin'" era.

BRENT: I thought it kind of worked well

it does. just unexpected, I guess

BRENT: Yeah, it is a bad Beach Boys song, but that's better than a bad song one would hear at People's Park

Very fair. And I think the Beach Boys thing comes from the singer sounding like a cross between Mike Love and the guy from They Might Be Giants.

BRENT: Good point. This song does go one about 2 years too long

Much like Mike Love's ego. ZING!
I'm finding the sudden urge to wander into the next room and grab a snack. Not because this is awful, but because it's just like nothing.

BRENT: Ok, this song can just shut the hell up now. None of it seems to belong in the same song

Immaculately recorded, so I guess it does SOUND really neat in the stereo field and all the reverb and whatnot. But you know when you're listening to something on your computer and then open a YouTube window, crushing the two audio sources together?

BRENT: Exactly.

It's like Squarepusher, Bright Eyes, and an oompah band all have windows open. I'd like to see that browser history.

BRENT: You know what I do when that happens? I try to find on of the sources to turn it off. Animal Collective lets it run for 5:16. We still have a minute and a half. I think your time is better served by getting a snack

Wait, it's getting nice... like shoegazer looping. Well, for a few seconds. Neat stereo panning... You think "Summertime Clothes" is going to be the "big rock song"?

BRENT: It's going to be the big "rock" song

If I ever write a proper review of this album, I'm going to call this "Animal Collective's 'Takin' Care Of Business'".

BRENT: It is the best thing so far on the album

I'm going to disagree. I feel that ambient MOMENTS in the first few songs were actually really great, in an Orb-like way, but this, so far, is the best SONG.

BRENT: I'll agree with that

That uber-chipper double-timey rhythm kinda thing rubs me the wrong way though. Overdone since '05... like when they put that Sufjan Stevens song into 'Little Miss Sunshine'

BRENT: It's got a real Yes or ELP vibe to me.

This vocalist is driving me crazy, but that's because I think he sounds like Conor Oberst, and I have a bias against Bright Eyes. I say bring back Mike Love. I already regret saying that.

BRENT: Yeah, it's a no-win scenerio

So does Mike Love get all the techno songs, and Conor Oberst gets the drum-circle ones? A touch of Rivers Cuomo in Mike's voice, too.

BRENT: That little repeating riff is pissing me off

agreed

BRENT: Yeah, I hear the Cuomo comparison.
Ok, when I said I hated that riff, that didn't mean I wanted to hear more of it.

Oh, everything else is fading, but it's staying.. I can't really win.... they're good at the ambient intros and outros, but no good at spacing out parts of the song. When they go spacey, I want them to rock and move a little more, and then they do, and I don't want that once I hear it. it's weird though. I'm getting, so far, a "more than the sum of it's parts" vibe from this one
I'm liking it objectively a little more than I expected. But I bet fake Conor Oberst is going to drop by and make me a liar.

BRENT: It's not bad, to be sure, but I can't fathom getting very excited about it.

Nowhere near that pre-emptive "best of the year" hype, so far. But to assume that it won't end up on the list would be doing the same thing I've damned the press for doing previously.

BRENT: It will end up on all the lists, but I have yet to hear anything that makes me feel like it deserves to be there.

I could, however, see this in my largest group of contenders for "Top Ten". Based on what I've heard so far, it would probably lose out in the first round of whittling. It's not great, but if I can put that Meat Puppets on my list, I could see it in the candidates. But I've already heard 10 albums this year that I like more than what I've heard on this. I was, however expecting more "organic stringed instruments" on this. Like recognizable acoutstic guitars that sounded rusty or something. It's more electronic-psych than I expected.

BRENT: It sounds about like their last record, which, as I said, I liked well enough.

Makes sense. The pseudo-samba thing I'm hearing now is pissing me off, though. Because it feels like they're using that whole style of music with all it's history at the most surface level, almost like HYPERirony. "A samba... isn't that weird? That's Awesome!" So ironic they're not sure if they get it and genuinely think it's awesome, like hipsters and yacht rock.

BRENT: When they do come across an enjoyable sound, they don't hold it long enough. They play the hell out of the annyoing parts, though.

YES!

Again, I can't state enough how nicely recorded the space parts are. The intro to this song sounded WONDERFUL on my headphones. Then Mike Love comes back with a Modest Mouse song and ruins the mood.

BRENT: This one is alright, well until I started typing.

You're right about them repeating things. "Guys Eyes", which just started to do that thing the Beach Boys did, but without any of the payoff of a good countermelody vocal coming in.

BRENT: Now that you mention that, I want to hear 60's Mike Love sing "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes"... Yeah, a good lead vocal coming in across that vocal bed would have been excellent. Without that, it's just kind of nothing.

I don't need my psych-rock to sound like music that came before it, but if it DOES recall obvious touchstones, try to meet the standard. Like, I'm not going to try to make a record that sounds like the Zombies, but if I clearly wrote a record that sounded just like the Zombies, I'd try to make one that was good in that particular sense of "good", since that's the arena I was working in.

BRENT: You know, the Beach Boys never went full prog-hippie, which one might of expected, given Mike Love's Maharishi leanings. This is kind of what that might have sounded like.
I'm very glad they didn't

Yuck. Agreed.

"Repetition in the music, and we're really gonna use it. Repetition in the music, and we're really gonna use it. Repetition in the music, and we're really gonna use it."
-Mark E. Smith, The Fall
PROPHET

BRENT: There's always an appropriate Mark E. Smith quote for an occasion.

BRENT: On paper, just putting together the touchstones of this, I should like it. Beach Boys, shoegazer, psychedelia, etc.

They started a song called "Lion In A Coma" with a digeridoo? And it's CONOR singing? Screw this band. I agree on the touchstones, though. I think that's the reason i'm not being harder on it. I think, "Well, it's sorta like X, and you LIKE X, so this must be alright."

BRENT: Ok, I actively hate this song

The weird time signature in this one is irritating the hell out of me. I like weirdly-timed music, but this one feels like, "Look how good we are at musician-ing!"

BRENT: "Hey, we listened to Captain Beefheart that one time!"

"Remember that?!? Let's DO that!"... Alright, I'm liking the start of this song.

BRENT: Now, let's see how long it takes to switch to something more irritating.

Let's mark once it gets screwed up.... 3:04 into it.

BRENT: There's a thin line between being atmospheric and being boring.

This is like if "Summertime Rolls" by Jane's Addiction didn't have any foreward momentum, and that was written and recorded by a bunch of heroin addicts.

I'm gonna hate this song.

BRENT: YES

...and it's SIX MINUTES LONG!

BRENT: Oh God. Seriously?

The Lion Sleeps Tonight with a Casio samba?!? We're gonna get through this, man...
Are they yelling "sports bra" in the background?
Oh, "Support Your Brother", I think.

BRENT: It's "sports bra"

I wrote this song when I was six and just started mashing my fists on my friend's Bert and Ernie keyboard.

BRENT: If you want to get angrier, just imagine the day-glo colored scenester kids just going nuts doing the hippie dance with their hands to this song.
2:10 PM

Ah crap... thanks for that. Probably wearing a Ninja Turtles t-shirt and Kanye glasses. Are ironic mullets still a thing?

BRENT: probably

When did this go to a house song? With calypso vocals? I think I get why hipsters and indie kids like this. I'm having a moment.

BRENT: enlighten me

There are SO MANY STYLES on this record, often all at once, something in the brain registers that it must be good if it's that layered and wide-ranging. It's a mash of everything you commented on above, combined with heavy psych and prog, electronic dance music, hippe jam bands, the earthy side of Krautrock, a la Amon Duul II, soul, pop... on and on. It's without a doubt EPIC and swooping, but for me, those elements aren't glued together right.

BRENT:Thank god that ended

Having that epiphany during that joyful energy burst at the end of the track was sorta nice though. It's weird hearing an acoustic guitar now.

BRENT:Fair enough

Kittens And Sunshine

2009-07-02T01:24:00.000-07:00

"Hi. My name is Mike, and I'm a 27-year-old man."

The group responds collectively, "Hi, Mike."

"... I'm a 27-year-old man, and I like Nine Inch Nails."

(smattering of applause)

--------------

See, I liked Nine Inch Nails in high school. Of course I did. It was the mid-to-late 90's, I was confused, and when I wasn't thrashing away at some punk tune, I was wallowing in that whole angst thing. We all did it in one form or another.

Once I got to college, NIN seemed like a rather distant memory. What was once cathartic seemed silly and overwrought. To put the dating in perspective, when I was in middle school, I bought The Downward Spiral, when I was in high school, I picked up The Fragile, and the next one came out after I graduated college. I didn't buy it. I was an adult, ready for adult things. Goth-y industrual pop for eyelinered post-adolescents was a thing of the past.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. - The Bible

But then things started to turn. I read about the alternate reality game that Trent Reznor used to market Year Zero, and it seemed really neat and creative. I followed the blogosphere's coverage of Reznor's one man war against the Big Label Machine. It all seemed cool, post-millennial, and ethically/morally right, as someone to the left of the Big Label Debate. But what about the music? I'd heard tracks from the first '00s NIN album (With Teeth), and they were OK, but squarely in the "heavy modern rock" category. Meh. I worked in a record store and at a place that manufactured CDs, and the heat-sensitive discface to Year Zero was awesome, but I didn't really listen to it. I picked up a promo copy of Ghosts I-IV becuase it was free and I like ambient records; it was good for a few background listens, then it went on the shelf.

So what changed? I gave up. I needed something new and aggressive and electronic-tinged and modern. Reznor's seemed to be loosening up in the past few years, with his April Fool's Day 2009 joke coming across with some serious hilarity (the Kanye-baiting cover, the tracklisting, the producer... comedy gold). I downloaded the free-to-the-world album, The Slip, and it was great. Cool, heavy, angry, intricate... a wonderful album, made all the better by the distribution method and the intent with which it was made. Distanced from the brilliant marketing, Year Zero is probably even better, I'm just totally over the whole concept album thing, so The Slip's concise songs-as-songs mentality appeals to me just a bit more.

The irony of something so resolutely in my angsty youth blossoming into one of the more interesting, most mature sources of music in modern popular rock is not lost on me. While Reznor hasn't been one of my favorite lyricists (he still treads in cliched darkness more than I'd like), the fact that it's forward-thinking rock made for an intelligent audience is fascinating to me. Especially since (with a few exceptions) most of the Nine Inch Nails fans I know in 2009 are people I'd rather not know. Unfortunately, I think that a lot of his potential audience feels like I did, with their (completely valid) preconceptions of NIN keeping them away from music they'd most likely enjoy.

So let's hear it for Trent Reznor. Congrats on getting sober a few years back, congrats on using that experience to allow yourself to move beyond moody platitudes, congrats on fighting the good fight against the corporate monster, and congrats on managing to be commerically viable while fiercely maintaining your own independence.

Please don't screw it all up now.

Make Sure The Mic Is Grounded. Otherwise You'll Be In For An Angry Show.

2009-07-01T15:22:00.000-07:00

I guess it was the name and the fanbase that kept me from getting into Built To Spill until well after I was out of college. Which is unfortunate, cause I would have LOVED them in college. So when Dave tells me he can't believe that I don't know them, and says he's gonna give me a couple tracks from their live album, I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa..."

I don't generally like live albums, you see.

But he sends me these tracks, which obviously I love, and then the whole record. And I totally flipped for it. Which is weird.

Not cause it's a solo-heavy "guitarist's record". Not cause it's anything but an awesome album.

It's because it's a live album.

I have a few live albums I like, and some of the better ones are the ones that were heavily studio "adjusted". Cheap Trick's At Budokan is about as good as a live album gets. Hell, it's about as good as ANY album gets. But overall, I'd rather hear the studio versions. If I really want to hear a stripped down, "just the band playing" version of a song, I'd rather hear a demo than a live version of a song I already know. Hearing a live album as the first time I'm exposed to a band is the kiss of death as far as my record collection is concerned. It's not because I'm against the idea of live records, it's just that they're often so much more flaccid, as most bands don't start playing a song live until they've recorded it anymore, and so then they're trying to recapture the magic of a moment created in the studio, and it's sad.

Built To Spill aren't any more of a "killer live band" than they are a "fine-tuned studio band". It's not like they're the Grateful Dead, who (allegedly) have to be seen live to be fully appreciated. So what made this so special? The production's thick enough that it may as well be a studio album. It's not that I'm enamoured of the jamming - as a rule, I avoid records that are full of extended jams; I think it's because there's a certain energy that pervades the proceedings that just relaxes and lets the songs happen. And not worrying about overdubs and space and the cost of tape, it's got a natural fluidity that is a very rare magic indeed. It's hard to find records where you can hear a song blossom, improvised, to realize it's full potential, while still remaining in the service of the song. A live record that shows what the band is capable of, but still manages to sound like a studio record that was recorded live, you dig? Think about it too hard and your brain will hurt. Luckily there's tons of AMP NOISE on the album. That'll make your brain stop hurting as much. And seriously, who leaves amp crackle and hum on their album?

So, the point is, most live albums suck. They're the defintion of cash-in, designed to bilk consumers out of cash for a version of a song they already have, and by recording at a concert, the cost to create the record is drastically lower than it is to create revised studio versions. But there ARE exceptions. Built To Spill's Live is one of them, At Budokan is another. While The Smiths' late-period live album is my favorite of their records, it wouldn't hold up in the pantheon of the greats. And I realize that the Sound Opinions podcast covered this EXACT SAME GROUND a few weeks ago, but the question is, what are the most underrated live albums of all time? You can keep your Live At Leeds and Get Your Ya-Yas Out!, I want to know about those secret gems that nobody ever adds to those lists, but realizes they should have two days later. Things like Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, Suicide, Big Black, Black Flag, and even the Butthole Surfers. Im going to ponder this and come back later with which ones and why, but in the meantime, drop any suggestions in the box...

Race For The Prize: Who Gets Where?

2009-06-28T02:47:00.000-07:00

This week, we here at the Central Target Research Lab are conducting an experiment. Given the same new album at the same time, will two people with (frighteningly) similar taste reach the same conclusion? Brent Shelley, our associate over at the wonderful Dogdoguwar has agreed to take part in this experiment, paving the way for next week's marathon joint live-review session! So, below is the Central Target review of the Lemonheads' new covers album, Varshons.

Let's get this out of the way: the Lemonheads' new, all-covers album sounds exactly like the Lemonheads.

They've had 3 distinct choices in cover material their whole career - the punky/poppy classics, the weepy country-pop type, and the "really?" fringe artist. "Mrs. Robinson" fits the first, the Empire Records-featured version of Big Star's "The Ballad Of El Goodo" is the second, and there was that unfortunate Charlie Manson cover on 1988's Creator. The Wire and Linda Perry covers here fit the first group, longtime Dando idol Gram Parsons gets the nod to fill the country quota, and Manson here is replaced by the cuddly-as-a-kitten G.G. Allin. However, there are a few little surprises.

It's far more acoustic than expected, for one thing. I was expecting Evan Dando to "Lemonize" these into fingerpoppin' brisk power-pop, which is the rarity here - seems ol' Evan would rather reach for the acoustic these days. You'd also NEVER know that this album was produced by the Butthole Surfers' ringmaster himself, Gibby Haynes. Dando's longtime buddy kept his weirdness off of this album, and honestly, it's the better for it.

However, nothing here is particularly revelatory. It all sounds good, and it's all well-perfomed, chosen, and produced. It feels like a collection that a friend of yours with a serious Lemonheads infatuation would hand you, saying, "Hey, here's a disc of all the covers they've done in the past 5 years." It all does sound "of a piece" (as opposed to the erratic production qualities a comp might have), but it never escapes the fact that it's a covers album. While it would be easy for a Cramps fan to pick "Green Fuz" as the highlight, it's the G.G. Allin cover here that's most interesting, as Dando's deep vocals push it to "Nick Cave Goes Pop-Country" territory. Frightening.

Three years since the last Lemonheads album leaves one wanting to hear more Dando & Co., and while it takes a lot of effort to make power pop that sounds effortless, and it's unfair to judge this by what it isn't, it's hard to shake the feeling of wanting to hear these guys really come into their own, rather than someone else's.

B+

Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!

2009-06-26T03:02:00.000-07:00

I've never owned a copy of Thriller.

I had a dubbed cassette side of most of it when I was about seven years old. I didn't really need to own it. It's songs were ubiquitous. When I was a kid, playing my parents and friends' records, flipping the LP over was always a drag, cause it broke the rhythm, and the beginning of Side B was never as good. Thriller's "end-of-A-into-B" was perfect. "Thriller" into "Beat It" into "Billie Jean"? Flawless.

I always liked Bad even better. It didn't feel like it had as many hits, but it also had the good fortune to be HUGE once I was old enough to understand music. Bad was, in fact, badder, in a sense. It hit harder. It was darker. The video in the subway was cool, the Moonwalker movie felt like Brazil to an 8-year-old, and "Smooth Criminal" is still my favorite Jackson song.

Minor key, hard-hitting drum machine, it's on par with "Sign O The Times" for urban paranoia, just smoothed out for mass consumption, "Smooth Criminal" painted Jackson as dangerously aware of his own self-image. He wasn't crying over Annie, he was the one who did it. I didn't know what Reagan-era social tension was until years later, but I knew what it sounded like. Mechanical, ominous, violent and paranoid, this was post-millennial pop made 15 years early.

How is it that something so ahead of its time was so successful in it's own day? It's because the King Of Pop appealed to everyone. Maybe it was his ever-changing look, but somehow he was rock enough for the rockers, hooky enough to dominate pop radio, Quincy Jones made sure he hit the R&B charts, kids loved him as a some kind of grown up version of one of us, and adults liked him because to them he'd always be a kid. He worked with Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, made records that attempted to exorcise the demons that packed his closet but were still successful enough on their own that MILLIONS of people bought them. Until the unfortunate personal issues in the '90s, he was almost certainly the most beloved pop musician anywhere. He was the king. He will be missed.

And I think I'm going to go out and buy Thriller today.

The New Space Rock (Of Martian Earwax Dream Frequencies)

2009-06-21T03:09:00.000-07:00

OK, so I like the Flaming Lips, right?

I know what you're thinking. "Oh boy, another blogger talking about the Flaming Lips."

Yeah, I am.

"Oh, Mike hates everything, he's probably going to slam something about the Flaming Lips..."

Not really, no.

See, I have a long history with the Lips. I discovered them around 1995. I remembered seeing them around a few years prior (I was only in middle school at the time), and while I loved the colorful madness of "She Don't Use Jelly", I'd heard the Transmissions From The Satellite Heart album, from which their hit was spawned, and thought (wisely for a 7th grader, if I can pat myself on the back) "I don't get this yet. I like the catchy parts, but there's more to this than I understand..." "She Don't Use Jelly" and "Turn It On" were great pop songs, that little kid Mike could bop around to, but there was some serious freakadelica going on under there that was beyond where my little head could go. When I was 16 1/2 (I remember, because it was just after I'd gotten my license officially), I was at a hip coffee shop in the collegiate area of Cincinnati, and above the (completely "90s") coffee bar, there was a used CD store. I was an emerging record nerd, but like every 16 year old, I had very little money to speak of, so I had to choose carefully. I ended up with the Lips' Clouds Taste Metallic, which completely scrambled my little brain. To steal a critical buzzphrase, it was perfect "acid bubblegum." Pop songs wrapped up in weird production, static noise, strange psychedelia, and druggy atmosphere. Psych music was supposed to be boring and jammy, right? This was amazing! It was a favorite of mine over the next couple of years, a bit of a secret pleasure (punks don't like hippes, right?), since it was a follow up to an "alternative one-hit wonder" who'd been on 90210, but a wonderful headphone treat for late-night bedroom listening. I'd hear bits and pieces about the band, like they had a vast back catalog, that they had a 4-disc set meant to be played simultaneously, their guitarist had almost died from a spiderbite, etc.

It came at a weird time in my life as well. I was just emerging from the other end of high school, ready to go out into the world, and I remember it was all I could listen to in summer of 2000. I'd heard about their new album The Soft Bulletin, but heard that it was heavy on the pianos and strings, so i'll stick with my whacked-out electric bubblegum psych, thank you very much. I'd been in love for a couple of months, the weather was beautiful, but there was a change in the air. In fact, I can't even think about Clouds Taste Metallic without remembering the fact that that's all I listened to driving from Cincinnati to Bloomington, IN to go to college. I was distraught. The girl I loved and I had decided to stick together and see what happens, despite the distance. I listened to that CD over and over on headphones as I drove away on a rainy day, leaving behind the best thing that I'd ever had, not knowing what would happen next. I just can't divorce this album from that memory.

Once I was at school, I kept seeing people in Lips shirts, hearing murmurs about them, and I thought "College is awesome! People here are into this weirdo obscuro band that nobody cares about!" Of course, I didn't realize just how popular The Soft Bulletin was among certain indie channels, many of which I had yet to discover. Luckily college would ruin me as far as that goes. Some of the first CDs I bought at my favorite record store in Bloomington (which I later ended up working at) were the early Lips albums, with their fourth full-length, In A Priest Driven Ambulance just blowing me away. But whenever I'd run into someone in a Lips shirt, they'd be almost unaware of anything prior to The Soft Bulletin. A couple years later, I got a handmade (!) promo of their follow-up, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, and loved it's futuristic prog-hop, as did everyone else, and the rest, as they say, is history. I've recently warmed to the songs themselves, but I fail to believe that The Soft Bulletin is REALLY as good as people say it is, and I don't trust anyone who claims to be a "big fan" but doesn't know a note prior to that album. Surely I'm not the only person in my age bracket who remembers that seven-year period where you could find Transmissions in every cutout CD bin because they were jsut a one-hit wonder band of weirdos. Clouds Taste Metallic was even more derided because it didn't even have the hit on it!

So what's my point? It's that this is a band with dual identities, and rarely shall the twain meet. The funny thing is, the fulcrum of this see-saw that they balance on is their most ambitious, mysterious project, Zaireeka, the 4-disc set, meant with all four discs meant to be played simultaneously. If you think of it as the dividing line, you can divide the Lips' catalog into the pre-Zaireeka "acid underground" music and the "grand progressive" era that follows. Each have their merits, and I generally prefer the earlier period, but the older I get, the more I'm digging on the later stuff. If you want to be glib about it, you can divide it into "guitar" and "synth" phases, but it's more than that. The outlook changed.

I spent most of last night listening to the post-Zaireeka albums and enjoying them. While I don't think they have the same brilliant spark that the earlier stuff had, it's more a case of people who have passed that stage experimenting with different forms. The fact that this music, poppy as it may be, has become some of the most popular rock music of this century so far is flabbergasting. Not to say it's not good, I'm commenting on the bad taste of the general public. But then I thought about it...

For years, I've been calling Radiohead "our generation's Pink Floyd". They fit the bill. Flirting with avant-garde textures, serious, each album a major musical "event". A band with very little in the way of public image (although with similarities to Public Image), making "serious music" that is both critically and popularly loved. But here's the fault with that. I run in nerd circles, where nerdsd flip out over Radiohead. If you step back, they're popular, but they're too self-consciously intellectual for the masses to really dig into without feeling stupid. Their fanbase is fantatical, and does whatever they can to dig deeper down the rabbit hole. Radiohead is the Yes of our generation. That's not a criticism (what with my previously noted distaste for Yes and their ilk), nor is it a comparision of the actual note-for-note music. However, as a handy critical shorthand for their place in the market, it fits.

What do dorm rats put on when they put towels under their door and smoke pot between classes? Who sells out festivals for the masses to get sufficiently freaky to? The music and the attitude is different, but the Flaming Lips are our Pink Floyd. Seriously. They're way more fun. But they're like "prog lite" for my generation. And that's cool. They do it well. They're infinitely more interesting on a personal level, and they strive to let people have FUN in ways that Floyd would never have considered. But is the spectacle of Wayne Coyne in a bubble on the crowd, or wearing 5 foot foam hands, or covered in fake blood that different from having a real plane crash into a 50 foot wall on stage? Nerds can examine the winding narratives of Coyne's lyrics while bro-dudes can mellow out to their squelchy, loping synth explorations, and rocker dudes can marvel at the interplay between Coyne and Michael Ivins and Steven Drozd.

Is this sacriliege? Is calling a band that started as (basically) a Butthole Surfers knockoff the new kings of prog-pop? Maybe. But I ask you to find me a band that better exemplifies the sort of mass appeal based on completely fearless freakery than the Flaming Lips do. Radiohead fans? Flaming Lips fans? C'mon... call me out. Let's hear what you think.

"Someone Is Waiting" (I Am Not Waiting)

2009-06-13T05:11:00.000-07:00

Enough, already.

I'm calling a sort of truce. I just read a story on Stereogum discussing how the Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca may very well be the best album of 2009. This comes after a JANUARY 2009 opinion that Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion is the best album of 2009. My problem with these statements is not just the ridiculous levels of hype (please see this article for my thoughts on internet music hype.

I recently posted a link on my Facebook page to Mark Prindle's Record Reviews, specifically his "Micro-Reviews of Hip Bands That The Kids Dig" page. My friend found herself rather irritated at what she perceived as his "indie hating". She and I have a history of me teasing her for "indie favortism", and she calling me out as a biased punk rock nut. Writer Mark Prindle has an affinity for punk as well, although his site covers everything from metal to hip-hop, and his fondness of bands like Polvo, Superchunk, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, etc., is well-documented. He's on Pavement's DVD for crying out loud! I found her position to be a bit defensive, as Prindle states at the head of the page that these are silly, first-impression reviews of bands by a writer known for a less-than-completely-serious style. Examples:

A Place To Bury Strangers - Fans of Bauhaus and Joy Division crank up the reverb and churn out the gothy post-punk. Pointless and idea-free.

Bon Iver - Acoustic strum with ambient wind tones and falsetto vocals. Without the falsetto, it'd just be boring; with the falsetto, it's unlistenable.

Fiery Furnaces - A brother and sister creating artsy (and shitty) indie rock from keyboards, guitars, drums, samples, special effects and haughty unlikeable female vocals. Even when the brother happens upon an intriguing musical loop or orchestral arrangement, the songs are no fun because the sister sounds like a schoolteacher or Patti Smith or some crap.

Joanna Newsom - A harp-playin' pianist woman with a ludicrously childlike voice. Might appeal to "Juno" fans. Sounds like a mixture of vomit and shit to me.

Jens Lekman - Swedish indie singer-songwriter keeps it sissyish and light, like the worst the 1970's had to offer. His music features sampled horns, accordions, strings, pianos, Caribbean percussion and all kinds of other terrible things. I was going to compare him to David Byrne's fruity late-period stuff and Jonathan Richman's post-Modern Lovers crap, but then I checked Wikipedia and discovered that he is already compared to both of those artists. So instead I'll just compare him to a pile of dog shit.

Now, please don't accuse me of baiting, as I know the latter three are bands that she likes. The first one is a band I like, which I added to be fair. Also in the interest of fairness, I just picked what I found to be some of the meaner, funnier ones, which happen to coincide with the sphere of bands that my friend enjoys. More power to her. I love debating music with her, and while our tastes often converge, they just as often differ. We spent many hours working at a record store together, even involving customers in our epic debates. She's wonderful and I respect her taste, so hopefully she reads this. Because then she can explain something to me.

I understand the appeal of bands like Fiery Furnaces and Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective. I make no critique of people for liking those bands strictly on their merits. However, I don't exactly understand what those merits are, apparently.

What makes an album like Merriweather Post Pavilion a 12-month early contender for album of the year. As I recall, that discussion began in 2008. It's adequate music played in a way that is not traditional but not entirely innovative that from a purely objective standpoint hangs together as an album well. How does that make this any different than, say, the latest offering by James Taylor? I understand that it's a different kind of music, but those criteria match, right? What is that magical ingredient that makes The Dirty Projectors special? I'm not damning them, and this isn't an indictment of "indie music" (whatever that term may mean by this point). I know music, I understand music, and I've been neck-deep in "non-mainstream" music for well over a decade. However, I do not understand what makes these hyped albums so special. Is there anything?

Now, I'm not stating that I don't feel that these albums are capable of praise. Sure. Especially if they encompass certain signifiers of the genre that make one pre-disposed to enjoy a certain genre. I, for one, hear a wash of heavily effected guitars and indistinct vocals and I say "That is like shoegazer music. I like shoegazer music, therefore I like this." While I could see a historical progression from bands such as Pavement (to many people, one of the very definitions of "early indie rock" in the "genre" sense of the name, which is another complaint for another time), it seems as though the parts of those bands that are appealing were removed, and what's left was used as the foundation for the next generation.

Now, I'm not a stupid man. I understand that what I just said was tantamount to waving a red flag for my detractors - by referring to what I find "appealing" is a apparently subjective moment in what purports to be an objective examination. What I'm referring to as "appealing" are the elements (all that I can think of) that are widely cited as elements that made those bands "important" and worthy of continued examination. Again, using Pavement as an example, what has generally been referred to as the elements that made them an important band were their use of noise within both traditional ("Summer Babe", "Cut Your Hair") and non-traditional song structure, their use of lo-fi recording techniques, and the atmosphere of "slack" (a terrible term) many attribute to a loose sense of collective rhythm and vocal technique. In critical shorthand, they were catchy, noisy, lo-fi and sloppy. But ultimately, they had songs. I own every Guided By Voices album, a good bakers dozen of the more important EPs, about 12 Bob Pollard solo albums, and even some Tobin Sprout albums, which, to some, makes me qualified to say that in my opinion, the reason that Bee Thousand was a breakthrough record and Same Place The Fly Got Smashed was not production (which was the same), but the songs. If Bee Thousand didn't have any hooks, nobody would have bought it other than the 30 people buying GBV albums up to that point. And when I listen to bands like The Dirty Projectors and their ilk, I hear "indie rock signifiers" without songs to back them up. It's the sound and the fury, signifying nothing.

Now, I'm not immune from this. I like a lot of rote garage bands, I like a lot of really awful punk bands that have nothing going for them but speed and whine. Power pop is arguably the least innovative form of rock music. My taste in dub reggae is, by definition of the form, is to find as many reworkings of the same rhythm track as possible. But rarely do I hear somebody say "Oh, you just don't GET it," about Jon Spencer or The Exploding Hearts. These forms (in many respects)are visceral, if it doesn't catch you, it doesn't catch you. And that's fine. But indie rock seems to propagate a "nerd revenge" attitude; "if you don't like it, you don't get it, so stay out." I spent 10 years in "indie rock". I cut my teeth in bands that adored Superchunk, saw Fugazi on my 19th birthday, worked at a CD manufacturing company that was owned and shared office space with three sucessful indie labels, and have worked at two indie-oriented record stores for a combined total of four years. But things in contemporary indie rock have evolved so far into "symbology + image" (in a rock history sense) that I often find myself wondering if there's any of the original spark left.

So yeah, what I'm saying is that things aren't as good as they were in my day.

[And in the interest of full disclosure, while I have written a song called "Jens Lekman (Is Trying To Ruin My Life)", I do enjoy a fair number of his songs, if only because I had to listen to them at two different jobs for about 3 years. At least they're SONGS.]

When To Speak Up

2009-06-12T00:54:00.000-07:00

OK, so I do a lot of bitching about these so called "snobs" and "hipsters" and their relentless search for "cred" in their listening tastes, if you can call it that. However, I'm not being clear enough in my intent here. I've told you what they're doing wrong - i.e., pretending to like things that are awful (or worse, genuinely liking some of these awful things) - but not telling you what to do to avoid this trap. And if you do this, you'll rarely find yourself falling into that trap again.

Don't deny what you do like, no matter the company.

If you LOVE the damn Bee Gees(probably the most laughed-at thing on my iPod right now), I'm not saying you need to silk-screen a shirt about it, I'm just saying that if someone is having a conversation about, say, the Dirtbombs, and mentions their cover of "I Started A Joke", and comments on how the Bee Gees suck, disagree. It's not that hard. Don't just nod and go "yeah, uh-huh," and then make sure to delete the Bee Gees from your computer as soon as possible. I'm not saying everyone has to like everything, but anyone should have all the facts first. I may hate Phish and the Dave Matthews Band, but I rarely use the phrase "they suck", because it's not them causing the dislike, it's me. They're merely just existing. I've listened to them and chosen to dislike it. I can't make a judgement call on anything until I hear it. But once you have all the facts, and then vote either way (oh snap, Pitchfork Fans! Did he just make that reference?!?), don't let anyone tell you that you suck for feeling positive about something.

Stand up for it! You don't have to be known as the "Bee Gees Guy" (or girl), but you have all sorts of ways not to let your own taste get trampled by others. you won't start a fight. Promise! Here, I have a few different responses, and their most likely result:

1) "Hey, I love the Bee Gees!"
The other party will look at you incredulously, but if you tell them WHY (important: not why they're wrong, but why you're right), whether or not they show it, they'll probably go home that night, download some, and either agree or disagree. Either way, your principles are not betrayed.

2) "You don't love the Bee Gees?!?"
A bit riskier. Putting them at the defensive could be dangerous, unless you know that your viewpoint is 100% valid (i.e., some major point to illustrate their worth). However, while belittling the other person's viewpoint is the epitome of uncool, you follow their response with "Well, have you heard Odessa? Oh, then you don't have all the facts!" Maybe prompting change, maybe not, but at least you didn't let their predjudice steamroller you.

3) "Have you really heard the Bee Gees?"
Again, risky, calling their qualifications into question. If they say yes, find out what they know, then see if you can add to that. If they say no, they've automatically been put in their place.

4) "Why don't you like the Bee Gees?"
Put the ball in their court. Much like a "no" answer to the last question, the limit of their knowledge may now be exposed, negating the whole argument.

Boom. There you go. Stupid, ignorant people should not be allowed to get away with things just cause people are too timid to stand up for what they believe in. If they did that I'd be British, and that would SUCK. I'm sick of people selling out their principles and beliefs just because someone they're afraid of alienating says something stupid. Silence is complicity.

This Is Going To Be A Problem: Best Records Of '09, Part 2

2009-06-10T07:33:00.000-07:00

I was going to wait to do another "Best Of So Far" until I had more to write about... you know, in like 4 months But somehow, I've accumulated another FIVE albums since the last roundup. And I'm being picky! So, since reviewing "current" albums might help make this more of a... LEGITIMATE music blog, here's 'Part 2' of the "Best Of '09 So Far", this time in no particular order:

5. Green Day - "21st Century Breakdown"
I think over the past month or so, I've made my feelings on this album pretty well-known. However, to play by the rules, this is a damn fine hard-rocking concept album by an excellent band that has twice now lost cred due to their audience, not their abilities. I remember being a seventh grader who was into Green Day, so it's not the band's fault that today's seventh graders like Green Day. So what if they sell a billion records to the Hot Topic crowd? A well-written, immaculately-produced power-pop-punk by a talented band having a late-career renaissance. This album should have been unlistenable, but to it's credit, not only is it a worthy follow-up to the blockbuster American Idiot, it should be considered excellent all on its own.

4. Mos Def - "The Ecstatic"
Maybe it's me. Maybe it's the fact that I really, truly discovered Mos Def late in the game. His flawless first album knocked me out, and I even really liked the sprawl of his messy second album, The New Danger. But once I was a fan, and saw his third album released with no cover art and not much good music to speak of, all while watching his acting stock rise, i was convinced he'd traded one career for another. In hindsight, the "don't pay for it" True Magic had "contractual obligation" written all over it, I was just too disappointed to see it. The Ecstatic might not be perfect, but for an artist I'd all but written off (as a recording artist), this is an unexpected delight. Clear-eyed, impassioned verse over swirling, razor sharp beats that dissipate into vapor before your eyes, this is what modern hip hop should sound like. Production from some of the Stones Throw Records luminaries I already love doesn't hurt things, but this is Mos Def's game all the way. Maybe I'm too excited about this with the thrill of the new, but if more hip hop records sounded like this, I'd listen to more hip hop.

3. Sonic Youth -"The Eternal"
At this point in the game, Sonic Youth is what it is. Their impact on "alternative" rock music is unquestionable, and they can settle into their role as elder statesmen (and woman) of alt rock. Skronky guitars, jagged rhythms, sassy lyrics about being kool, you name it, they've got it. So why is it such a surprise to me that this is so good? Everyone raved about 2006's Rather Ripped, which was a welcome record to me if only 'cause it shortened song lengths, added more hooks, and got rid of Jim O'Rourke. This feels like the more lived-in version of that sound. It's rocking, edgy, but not trying to reclaim some lost youth. It rocks in a mature way, without feeling like a band past it's prime. And for a band to make a record this rocking, catchy, interesting and fresh THIRTY YEARS SINCE ITS INCEPTION is a pretty good deal for us listeners. To put that in perspective, if Sonic Youth were the Rolling Stones, this would be 1983. Blows the mind, doesn't it?

2. Meat Puppets - "Sewn Together"
Sadly, I'm pretty sure that when the big final list gets made next January, this one will be cut. There's nothing exceptional about it, but I'm sick of asking for exceptional things from my albums. What about a really, really solid record that doesn't break any barriers? Just because something perfects something that's been done before doesn't make it any less than something brand new. This is better than the first reunion album, 2007's Rise To Your Knees, and it's the sound of two brothers locked into a groove, playing vaguely psychedelic, country-tinged alternative rock. Every record they've made since 1985's Up On The Sun has been underrated, and while this isn't on par with their earth-shattering genre-defying second album, it's about as good an album as you could expect anyone to make. Hopefully the Kirkwoods keep making records like this for years, full of lovely songs, wonderful production, skilled performances, good energy, and acid-tinged atmosphere.

1. Dinosaur Jr - "Farm"
It doesn't have that same shock that Beyond had. But that was because the Mascis/Barlow feud ran so deep, and because nobody had made a record that sounded like that since 1994, not even J. Mascis. So finally hearing Farm just proves that this isn't a fluke. Am I bitter? A little. I've been championing this comeback since 2005, and everybody's acting like they haven't been calling me crazy for the past 4 years. My initial reaction to this record was strange, since, as I said, it didn't sound like a time capsule in the way that Beyond did. it's weird to hear Dino Jr take on modern indie-rock. Of course, that's just being really picky, as it still sounds JUST LIKE DINOSAUR JR. But ultimately, for better or worse, it's Sebadoh that's really had the impact on indie rock since the mid-90s. Imagine if your favorite Dinosaur record had more songs where J was trying to sound a little like Lou, rather than the other way around. But this is all details. This is Mascis' album, through and through. Every inch of this album has fuzz growing on it, Big Muffed to high heaven. It's a Jay-Lou-Murph Dinosaur Jr album released in the year 2009. It's got Marshalls and fuzzboxes and Jazzmasters all over it. I shouldn't even be talking about it, I should be spending this time listening to it.

I realize that these reviews spend a lot of time talking about the context, not the content. "Sonic Youth is old", "Mos Def's last album was lousy", "Green Day's fans are twelve", "Meat Puppets did something revolutionary once", and "Dino Jr reunited" could easily have taken the place of most of these reviews. But aren't I going to need something specific to write about once the list is finalized?

You're Only As Cool As Your Favorite Blog

2009-06-06T16:02:00.000-07:00

Hey, remember our youth?

Doesn't matter how old you are, 'cause if you're young enough to use the internet, this will probably apply to you. I'm talking about the days when we only had a few channels (figuratively) to receive pop culture. The one radio station in your town that played the stuff you like, or in the case of my generation, MTV. We had a few ways to find out about the new cool thing, and since everyone in our sphere watched/listened to the same outlet (that's what made us "of the same sphere"), we all had access to the same material, specifically music.

2009: Radio's a lost cause, unless you live in a heavily college-oriented town, in which case you might pick up a good college station. MTV's a joke, since when they do squeeze in a video between episodes of The Real World and My Super Sweet 16, it's crap that somebody is paying a lot of money to hype. I don't mean that to be snarky, it's just the way things work anymore. So we've turned to other outlets. For most, it's the internet. What, you expected something else?

Now that everyone has limitless avenues of exposure to music and culture, one has to trust their outlet to keep them in "cool," if cool is what they're chasing. But since this isn't a unified outlet that everyone is tuning in to, they'll most likely be getting slightly different information, unless their blog is getting it's info from a bigger, more popular, and "guaranteed cool" source.

Now, there are a couple of problems with this model. Number one is the idea that there may be a "mother blog" that begins a trickle-down effect. If this is the case, we have to find it and kill it. Pitchfork, I'm looking at you. But this network keeps to it's own yard and is so afraid of being outré, that what you essentially get is a case of a million bloggers scrambling to be different just like everybody else. I don't care how many blogs post about them, The Knife, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Joanna Newsom SUCK. But wouldn't you hate to be the one voice of dissent in the blogosphere? Suddenly you're uncool, and nobody trusts your validity as a tastemaker anymore. It's tantamount to badmouthing Nirvana in '92, after they get a new video into rotation. More than a few "what's WRONG with him?" glances have been shot for less grevious offenses.

[I do, by the way, understand the irony that I'm badmouthing those acts on a blog, thereby negating any credibility I might have had with their fans. I just don't care.]

So where does that leave things? Well, as stated much better elsewhere (and forgive me, Mr. Shelley, if I appear to be misconstruing any of your meaning), the music-based blog world is turning into a more technologically advanced version of the British music press. Why go to blogs? Sensational "I got here first" scoops, and "free" samples. Once you run out of good bands, however, you're forced to give "scoops" that don't necessarily deserve it, just to keep yourself reputable as a scoop-source. And it's easier to back up your case when you're posting new songs that sound like other songs that have previously been approved - how else can you explain electroclash? By that point, you've lost the point (and the plot). Once people realize that what you just fed them is crap (please see the electroclash reference), they'll spit it back out, a backlash will ensue, and then you'll have to come up with something new-but-not-too-new, and the cycle will continue. The build-'em-up, smack-em-down frequency builds up speed, and then you're just swimming in crap.

But you've gotta trust your blog. If not, you don't know what everyone else says that cool is. And if you don't know what define cool as being, how are people gonna respect you? Your taste?

This Is Where I Came In

2009-06-06T02:04:00.000-07:00

I had an insomniac idea for an article the other night, scribbled it down next to my bedstand, and I think it could be good stuff, but it's going to take some work, so maybe next time. Plus, I've got something rattling around in my head that's freaking me out enough that I oughtta get it out.

I'm starting to love the Bee Gees.

Not that mid-to-late '60s baroque pop. I don't like it when hipsters from Brooklyn do it now, I don't care for it when the Bee Gees did it years ago. And if I hear one more hipster compare Odessa to the Beatles and the Zombies, I'm going to punch somebody. I'm talking about full-on chest-hair, gold-medallion, warbly-falsetto DISCO-ERA Bee Gees. How the hell did this happen, none of you ask? I'm a-gonna lay it down for you.

I was sitting on the computer yesterday, and I came across the "Barry Gibb Talk Show" clips from Saturday Night Live. Used to irritate the hell out of me, I found it hysterically funny this time. Barry Gibb as a barely contained ball of furry rage that slips into falsetto the angrier he gets? Funny stuff. The thing is, the music they were using in the background wasn't far off the silky, string-laden '70s R&B I love. But this background music didn't go on and on as just an excuse to dance, this seemed like songs. So I go out into the internet and snag some greatest hits, if you catch my meaning. I also do a little research. Here's a band, way past their prime, and clearly a POP band, not a disco or R&B band, although they had their blue-eyed soul moments. You've got a songwriter hired to write some genre songs for what's certainly destined to be a cheap-o exploitation film. He decides to crank out a couple of songs, set 'em to the fading disco sound, and collect a check. End of story, right?

Now, I only saw Saturday Night Fever all the way through recently. And that was after I found out that the article it was based on ("Tribal Rites Of Saturday Night," Nik Cohn, 1975) was fabricated, and it was actually about British Mod culture. It was basically Quadrophenia with sillier clothes and different music. Dead-end kid finds an escape from his dead-end destiny in a youth culture where he has a moment as a big shot, only to be drug back down to reality by his dead-end friends and family, and end up ? Yeah, totally feel-good popcorn fodder.

So the movie wasn't really about disco, and the soundtrack wasn't really authentic disco music (at least the Bee Gees parts weren't), but a finely-crafted fake approximation of said music by a pop expert.

Who cares? These songs are immaculately arranged and performed. There's some silliness, and I still hate the trappings of disco as much as I hate the fashion trappings of any subculture, if not more. Growing up, disco was my enemy, cause that was the enemy of the punks when they kicked up, 20 years prior, back when disco was a real threat, musically and culturally. I'm supposed to hate disco, and generally I do. I'm not blind, either... I grew up on punk rock but I'll be the first to tell you that punk has some of the lamest fashion statements EVER. But, taken without all the context, the Bee Gees disco era is as good as dance music gets. It works as both smooth music and propulsive music, on par with something like Aphex Twin's "dreamy melodies over skittering beats." Genre aside, the ability to craft music that operates in the fast lane and slow lane at the same time is something every few musicians can master, and it's certainly an impressive feat.

So as guilty-pleasure as it might seem, and remember, this is coming from a punk rocker, the Bee Gees disco-era hits, removed from the silly and absurd culture they sprang from and (for many) embody, are some of the finest danceable soul songs I've ever heard.

Screw your Odessa, hipster bitches... you should be dancin'... Yeah...

Why Am I Always This Way?: Green Day, Pt. 3

2009-05-30T01:39:00.000-07:00

Apparently, there is a button that just deletes everything you just wrote. Luckily I was only one or two sentences in. But that might be fateful. No matter how many times I've laid out this final entry in the Green Day Defense/Tribute, none of them seem to work, especially since I've hyped this entry, and even though I can't imagine anyone out there has been on pins and needles waiting for it, I'd like to finish things up nicely.

A man (or woman) is defined by many things in their life. However, some are more definitive than others. There are three moments that had a deep impact on me, that in many ways defined the course of my life, that in some ridiculous fashion, were all centered around Green Day. It's silly, I know, as I love the band, but am not a fanatic, i will not ever get any tattoo based on this band, I do not know the members' middle names, or what pets they have, or even their spouses' names (OK, I know Armstrong's wife's name, but that's only 'cause he named his label after her). Nonetheless, these big three moments, while not the most defining moments in my life, are all probably in the top ten.

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When I was in the 8th grade, I found myself out mowing the lawn, as many 13 year olds often find themselves doing. Naturally, I had Dookie (the ALBUM, jerk) in my walkman (cassette, no less), and was howling along to it, trying to hear myself over the din of the ancient death machine the parents strapped me to every week. The fact that it was those retro 80's headphones with the thin metal band and the little foamy puffs over your ear didn't help things. So I'm singing along to that record when I realize that after a couple years of singing to that record, I can sing a lot better than I used to. Now, I was in the school choir as a kid, and thanks to my dad, always had music around and was probably already musically inclined, but at this moment, I realized that my "rock"-type singing had gotten better. Not great. Nasally, not 100% on pitch, but not bad. Better than some bands I'd heard by that point (although my dive into awful indie rock vocals didn't come for another couple of years).

"Wow," I thought. "Maybe I could do this, like, in FRONT of people. I've got a guitar, and I sing in my room, but maybe I could, like, perform!"

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Let's get to the big one, so that I can end it with a happy one. About a year and a half prior to my "I can do this" moment, I was in Mr. Rowe's science class at West Frederick Middle School. Green Day had just hit the radio with "Longview" and "Basket Case", the latter of which flipped me out. It was most likely my first exposure to punk rock in any accessable form (my previous understanding came from the movies, and as we all know, the 80s never got confused about what punk was. Remember the guy on the bus in that Star Trek movie with the whales? What about the "punks" who listen to funk metal in "Point Break" Ugh...).

"Basket Case" cracks my head open, and the next time I'm at the mall, I sneak off while mom's in some store to go to the record store to find a tape. Yeah, a tape. Dookie was a new release on a major label. It was like $13. For a CASSETTE. I don't have that kind of swag at that age. So I lurk away. Luckily, one of my neighbors has their previous record, Kerplunk, and runs me off a tape of it. I think it had something good on the other side, but I don't remember. in any case, it wasn't labelled and had no track list (that's the important part here). I love it. Even more than "Basket Case". What I liked about the radio songs were the speed, volume, and hooks - I was looking for punk rock but didn't know it. I was, however, at a disadvantage. There was no hipster obscurity points in these days. Not in Middle School. I'd save up my money to buy that cassette, but until then, I was in love with Kerplunk.

A few weeks later, I'm in science class (Remember? Where this all started?) and on our way out of class, I'm on the fringe of some conversation with Heidi (who wore Cranberries shirts and was a vegetarian in the 7th grade - a future barista, I'm almost certain), Jake (a pretty-boy airhead, but certainly the nicest of the bunch to me), and Neil (thuggish frat-rocker type, probably in the private sector these days... middle management?). So they're talking about Green Day.

"I really like Green Day," I chime in.

Now this was a bold statement for the new kid to make. I didn't fit in with anyone, as I'd spent a few years prior living in Europe, so I missed a whole bunch of the important evolutionary years in pre-teen culture in the States (ages 7-9). There was a lot of stuff I didn't get, and didn't fit in at all (although I bet almost everyone felt like this). But here I was, and I'd made a statement, a definitive statement about something. Something that it was already established that the "cool rocker kids" had approved. This was about all we had at this point in our lives, so "claiming" a band was almost like staking out your identity. In that class (1994), we had a "Pearl Jam Guy", "Nirvana Guy", "Doors Girl" (there's one in every class)I'd been woken up by punk rock (not, at that point, really knowing it, or even what punk was), and was planting my flag in it, for better or worse.

"You're just jumping on the trend. You probably can't name any of their songs besides 'Longview' and 'Basket Case'. So trendy..."

I knew most of the words to Kerplunk. I listened to it every night, almost. I'd had my mind completely opened by this music that I thought was almost perfect, the same way certain people reacted to the Beatles, Elvis, the Stones, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, etc. I had even seen Nirvana at that point, pre-fame, in a GYM in Vienna, Austria. It was by accident, and I hated it, but I saw them playing. But this Green Day thing, I didn't understand it all, but I loved it.

And I didn't have a fucking leg to stand on, 'cause I couldn't name a single other song. I stood there feeling dumb and betrayed. Especially since in the heady days of the early '90s, being a part of the pack was about as uncool as could be. This was the alternative revolution! It was like having the wind knocked out of both me and my sails. I just sorta stood there as they walked off, my identity dismissed and stomped on. It hurt. Not like tears hurt, but hurt. I resolved to go out and get that Dookie tape, and it took a lot of scrounging and pinching and saving change from my lunch money when mom wasn't paying attention to save up that thirteen bucks. And when I did, I memorized the thing. Lyrics, song titles, liner notes, references, as well as any press I came across on cool music. I swore that the next time, they wouldn't be able to dismiss me again. But something funny happened while I was obsessing. I liked it more. And then I found references in liner notes to thanking other bands, and I'd hear the other bands and love them too.

Now, I was never able to rub Jake and Heidi and Neal's faces in my newfound knowledge, since just walking up and spouting would have been social suicide, and in those days, I cared about that. But my insecurity and painful dismissal by the "cool" rocker kids is, I realize, fifteen years later, what made me them music geek I am today. It was the moment that I went from listening to music to diving into it. All these years later, I've played on stages with some amazing bands, worked in a cool indie record store, and was a college level assistant instructor of rock and roll, and I often find myself wondering if that would ever have happened if it weren't for that moment walking out of Mr. Rowe's class.

Despite the theory of the Butterfly Effect in the evolution of time (not that shitty movie, but sorta), my life might have been completely different. I might not have started playing guitar, in which case I never would have started playing out, in which case I never would have met Shannon, and I'd probably not be in Boston in a newsroom right now. And that's just one example. So Jake, Heidi, Neal, and maybe Peter? Thanks, you assholes. And fuck you. (That's the years of built up punk rock.)

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Do you remember your first "9 to 5" job after you left school? I do. It was the Credit Union of the university I went to, which is going to remain un-specifically-named, just in case Google still wants to smite me. Anyway, my better half was a few years behind me in school, and I took this job to bide my time until she was out and we could move away from Bloomington together, in search of greener pastures. So I buckled down and after a difficult job search (everyone in a college town is overeducated for what they do), I ended up as a member services representative at the main branch.

It was essentially a soul-crushing job. There were some cool people there, but it was largely horrific. Most of the people who worked there were nice people, but too many of them had been there more than 7 years. This was not a 7 years sort of job. The management was (cliche as it may sound) very similar to the "Lumberg" character... assigning needless busy work for no reason other than to do so (again, more on that in a moment). I spent most of my lunch hours dashing downtown to the record store (Tracks) to try to find some used CDs that would make me happy on the way home... about the only happy I got except for that 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM window when I could hang out with Shannon at home after dinner and before bed.

American Idiot had been out about 6 months. The title track had been all over the radio, and teenage America was lapping it up. I was the bitter, jaded old man who'd been into Green Day the last time they were famous, and still stinging from the commercial failure of the brilliant Warning, I was skeptical of this new "eyeliner and studded belt" version of Green Day. But, one early spring day at Tracks, I picked it up (new, which was weird for me), 'cause I couldn't find anything else, and loved the Banksy-esque cover art. Well, on the way home, I rolled the windows down and cranked that album up. I was so drawn in that I faked a stomach ailment that day so I could leave early and listen to it in my car some more. The first song was sort of political, but it was the rest of it. Was it a great album? Really good, but not great. It was the fact that this album was a rehash of Quadrophenia and Zen Arcade, except for my time, my present. Rehash might be a harsh term... how about reiteration? It was the story of a young teen who leaves home for the real world, only to become disillusioned and try to act to change his circumstances.

All the years I'd spent listening to it's forebearers, I was hit in the face with another concept album with a similar theme, and I realized that I'd betrayed myself. I was wearing a nice blue oxford and some khakis, but it wasn't the dressing that mattered. I'd sold out. I was miserable for $10.00/hr plus benefits. I sold my soul for security.

I drove around for another 2 1/2 hours, miserable that I'd betrayed what I thought I believed in, and realizing that being miserable was not worth what I was getting paid. I wanted to quit my job. That weekend, we were going to visit my parents, and over dinner with them and Shannon, I let is slip that I really didn't like my job and wanted something else. To my surprise and eternal gratitude, they all agreed with me. they supported me.

The next week, on a Friday, my boss came over to me to follow up on some online training tutorials we were supposed to do. It was 3:00 PM, my absolute downtime, which I relished, since us member service reps didn't get breaks, this was our break.

"Hey Mike, did you do those tutorials we had the meeting about Tuesday?" (Three days ago.)

"Uhhhh... not yet. You mentioned they weren't due to the admin office for another 6 weeks. I figured I'd read up on them and then take them" (I was lying, I wasn't going to read up on them.)

"Well, it'd be great if you could do those, alright?" she ordered me, like a gopher popping her head over my cubicle wall.

As she waddled away, I called Shannon.

"Can I do it? Can I do it today?" I asked, since we'd talked about me staying on for one more paycheck, just to have some money in the bank while I hunted for a job.

"If you really want to, yeah, do it.".

There are three times I cherish when Shannon has answered a question for me. The first is when she said she'd be my girlfriend, standing in her driveway when we were in high school. The third is when she said she'd be my wife while we looked over Boston from high above. The second was this conversation I'm recalling.

I knew that the HR machine would be closing at 4:00 on this Friday, and I knew that the branch closed at 6:00. I waited until 4:05 to walk into my managers office and quit.

Shortly thereafter I got a job at the very record store I'd bought American Idiot. It was (to start), $6.00/hr, no benefits, and 20 hours a week. I didn't care. I was free. It was like I'd just woken up from a bad dream. And that was when I turned into a hippie of sorts. You shouldn't have to be unhappy. You CAN change your situation. Was I scared? Yeah. But I did it and my life has been better ever since. I worked that job for over a year, because that's what I thought adult life was. "You're out of college? Here's a soul-crushing but decent paying job. Have fun until you die." I thought that's just how life was. But it's NOT. I got off the treadmill, I moved to Boston without a job (eventually) to an apartment I'd never seen. And it's great. I took control of my life. And I felt like the 15-year-old me, the one that really believed in Quadrophenia and Zen Arcade, would be proud of that, in it's own way. Honestly, I wish it were a "cooler" record I could say "changed my life", but now that I've written it all down, it certainly does seem like it fits that description.

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Epilogue:

So there it is. Three stories, two of them sorta interesting, about major moments in my life that I would certainly say helped define who I am. The only two unifying threads are Green Day and me. What does it all mean? I have no idea. It's just things that happened. My concept album isn't done yet, but these three moments would probably be tracks. The universe has a deeper meaning I can't understand, but I do know that these things are all intertwined somehow.

Just don't ask me if I have any personal moments related to Toad The Wet Sprocket

Procrastination Time: Top 7 Of 2009 So Far...

2009-05-26T06:53:00.001-07:00

[Initially posted on my last.fm account ("MrShake"... add me!), this was too relevant to what I do here to not post. I know I've promised the big finale of the Green Day Trilogy, in which I confess where all my insecurity comes from, how I learned to sing, and how American Idiot was indirectly responsible for the biggest decision of my adult life, but I figure I oughtta build the suspense for that. This should tide you over, since I know you all have been clamoring for more content what with my daily posts [insert emoticon face with "silly" tongue sticking out here, 'cause I won't]. This list was compiled prior to my hearing the new Green Day album, so you can forget about that until the end of the year. With all the writing I've been doing about them, I didn't want to revise to include it right now. Leave a comment, tell me I'm an idiot, you know, whatever...]

OK, so I realize it's only late May, but that means that next week, this year is half over. So in honor of that momentous occasion, I thought I'd put up a list of my favorite 7 albums of 2009 so far, both as something to do, as well as a way to force myself to say something new about the ones that make it through to the end of the year. So without further ado...

7: Madlib - Beat Konducta Vol. 5-6
Some people gripe about Madlib's instrumentals, and those people are crazy. On paper, it's all soulful jazzy samples over blunted beats, which sounds like it's been done a million times over already. There's something about Madlib's ear that makes these fresh. It's to this album's immense credit that I can't find words that will make it seem unique and interesting, you'll just have to listen to it.

6: Death - For The Whole World To See
I could go on and on about how these three dudes from Detroit were both out-MC5-ing the '5, and how they're like precursors to the garage/soul hybrid that the Dirtbombs are currently rockin', and how they only ever released a limited single before retiring to Vermont as a weirdass Gospel band, or, oh yeah, that they're a trio of '70s black dudes doing fucking searing garage punk. But I won't. This record would have made my top 7 this year(-ish) if it had come out yesterday and had no "rock nerd appeal" sorta story behind it. Bass driven, loud as hell, tight as the Bad Brains, and just fantastic.

5: Volcano Suns - "The Bright Orange Years"/"All Night Lotus Party"
Yeah, it's cheating. These records came out in the mid-80s already, but since they've never been on CD (ever!), and they have more bonus stuff than original album stuff, they count, OK? Imagine if your favorite 80s college/alternative band had a sense of humor AND rocked mightily? "Bright Orange" was written by former members of Mission of Burma and future members of Big Dipper. "Lotus Party" is darker, heavier, and different, but just as good. It's hard post-punk alternative rock that likes to have fun - like driving around with a buddy on a Thursday night cracking jokes about everything. I bought my old LP of this from the main dude in the band. He gave me a few bucks off due to my good taste.

4: Asobi Seksu - Hush
More Cocteau Twins than My Bloody Valentine, more Slowdive than Jesus and Mary Chain, and since I'm getting older, that's OK by me. The third album from these neo-shoegazers is a lot more poppy than a lot of their previous work, and by poppy, I mean repeatable phrases and hooks. It doesn't have the wall of sound that their breakthrough Citrus (incidentally, my #1 of 2006) has, but it's beautiful in the way that it can strip away a lot of the noise and remain beautiful. The only comparison I can make is the gorgeous chiming texture of Slowdive's Pygmalion after the oceanic SouvlakiIf you can dig something pretty, and I think most of us can, this is a must-have.

3: Sune Rose Wagner - Sune Rose Wagner
Exactly what I expected from this, but better. Imagine if the lead songwriter from the Raveonettes put out a solo record. Less "black leather, rock'n'roll", and a little more personal, with a sound like an intimate version of pre-murderer Phil Spector. I hate to fly commercially (it's not natural for humans to be in the sky!), but this was the perfect soundtrack: propulsive, cinematic, intimate, otherworldly. Like tuning into a radio station in Heaven in 1961. I don't even notice that it's sung in Swedish.

2: The Vandelles - Del Black Aloha
I heard their EP at the end of last year and liked it, but thought they'd break up and that would be that. Not too far from A Place To Bury Strangers, this has more go-go surf to it, but just as much noise. Remember that Jesus And Mary Chain album with both "Kill Surf City" and "Surfin' U.S.A." on it? This is like a whole album of that. Of course, to reduce them to a noisy surf band would totally be unfair to all the racket they kick up too. Sometimes that white noise/feedback saddle can be a little contrived, but this album makes it work, and it makes me glad I heard this one this year, so I won't be kicking myself for missing out on putting it on this list.

1: ofthemetro - Under The Sound
OK, so this isn't really an album yet, more of a work in progress. It is still, however, my favorite "release" so far this year. Two tracks from it are now available, and if you haven't looked at my charts recently, you wouldn't know that I've been listening to "April Is The Cruelest Month" and "Roboboogie" over and over. It's electronic, but it's got all the finesse and drive as the best rock albums, while still maintaining some of the glacial beauty and austerity that comes from sequencer rats. Not quite ambient, not quite dancefloor fodder. Reminiscent of the prettiest non-ambient songs by Aphex Twin. Remember track 8 on Analogue Bubblebath 3? (Available for download HERE.) That's the same ballpark, as well as one of the most gorgeous electronic tracks I can think of. Too much electronica is squelchy noodling, but since this comes from a former rock artist, it's lean, never forgetting that it's a song, not a "piece". I'm hoping and assuming that I'll be able to round up more of this by year's end and call it an EP or something.

(Intermission)

2009-05-24T03:16:00.001-07:00

I went home from work two days ago and popped in True Romance. If you haven't seen it, it's a great movie. "Star-studded" would not be the right term for it, but everybody in it is somebody you know - us movie geeks are just able to name them. More importantly, it's got all the benefits of having a script by a young Tarantino, without the slavish genre-stylization that often, for me at least, gets in the way of the story. But I digress, I'm not here to damn ol' Quentin's way with a camera, but to praise his dialogue.

Dare I say, I can't think of any other movie where I'm as in love with the words being spoken as I am watching True Romance. I love Kevin Smith's movies, but it often feels as though the characters are reading speeches they'd planned before they walked into frame. I'm not saying it's poorly acted or poorly directed, as it never feels as though the ACTORS are delivering these speeches, it merely feels like characters who planned ahead. And while True Romance has it's moments of "nobody talks like that", there's a vibrancy to the script that makes the characters feel like real people. I know Clarence Worley. Loves Elvis, works at a comic shop, goes to see Sonny Chiba movies on his birthday... this is my kinda people. A lot of credit has to go to a very, very talented cast, but this is a movie I'd love to just rip an audio track of and listen to it on my iPod. It makes me want to write a movie, just so I can maybe capture some of that sprightly excitement. This movie is restoring my faith in writing. Who cares that it's 15 years old? Who cares that it's directed by the same guy that directed Top Gun AND Days Of Thunder? Go rent this movie... better yet, BUY IT. You'll be glad you did. And after re-watching it, I'm willing to give Christian Slater a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card for Alone In The Dark. Yeah, this is THAT good.

X-Ray Hamburger (Side Projects and Other Ephemera): Green Day, Pt. 2

2009-05-22T01:17:00.000-07:00

Side projects are often a waste of time. Either too specifically stylized for the general populace to enjoy, or too much like the parent project to seem anything other than redundant. I've been in bands, and after a shorter period than many would care to admit, the urge to deflate the balloon a little bit, to "take the piss" as our Brit pals say becomes overwhelming. When things get too serious, they're not fun anymore, so side projects for musicians act almost as a pressure release valve... you can have your cake and eat it too by making music that is supposed to be percieved as "less important" somehow. Green Day are better than many at this. I'm not going to include moments where someone played with somebody else's band (a la Dirnt playing in Screeching Weasel), or The Frustrators, as I have never been able to track down one of their records, but once I make my point, I don't think that will be missed.

From an academic standpoint, let's start with the least important of the side projects: Pinhead Gunpowder. Now, saying that it's the "least important" hurts, because it's a fantastic project. This is a Bay Area punk supergroup, where all the members started on equal footing, even though one went on to global fame. Billie Joe Armstrong got together with some buddies from his friends' bands and made a record. Then he gets what I like to call "stupid famous". Why would he keep making records with PG? Cause they're great. This could be thought of as a "keepin' it real" project, the kind of authentic good time that megastars find all kinds of contrived ways to grasp. Tin Machine anyone? The difference is that this is great. Armstrong's songs (he shares songwriting duty) are like Green Day pre-Dookie. Direct, maybe a little harder than the major-label stuff, but by and large the same. And the fact that he keeps putting out a Pinhead Gunpowder record on his own Adeline Records every couple of years with no hype speaks volumes about how grounded this guy must be, I guess. I'd be too busy in my fur-lined jet.

Now, on a less serious note, let's talk about The Network.

The Network hate Green Day. Members Fink, The Snoo, and Van Gough are a New Wave band that Green Day supported initially. Brought them to the States from wherever they're from, helped them get a deal, and suddenly The Network turned on them. According to Armstrong:

"I just wanted to talk about the rumors and the bullshit that has been going on lately. All I gotta say is fuck The Network. These guys are totally spreading rumors. I try to do those guys a favour by bringing them to this country and putting out their record and this is how I get repaid, by talking shit about my band. Unfortunately there is a contract and I have to put out their record. The only thing I can say is Fuck you, Network. Bring it on."

There's video of a Network press conference that devolves into chair-throwing once Green Day's name is brought up. The Network's lone album, Money Money 2020, is a dark, synth-heavy descendent of Devo and pre-chicks Human League. Catchy, but not something you'd want to catch. The closest it comes to a pop hit is a squelching cover of the Misfits' "Teenagers From Mars". Wait, what? That doesn't seem like your typical Depeche Mode cover fodder. Pretty punk for a futurist pop band, huh? Maybe things aren't as they seem?

Of course they aren't. This (obviously) is Green Day with some extra members (gross), and getting their Devo jones out. And it comes across well. If it weren't for the fact that these songs are catchy and it's clearly Armstrong singing, I would never have made the initial connection between the two. Now, as I said, there is other evidence (record label, etc.), but this is a GOOD new wave record, in that it doesn't feel put on, it feels natural. A bit smart-assed, but natural.

On the other side of the fence (stylistically, that is) is the more recent, and much more well-known, Foxboro Hot Tubs. There was apparently an attempt to keep this one under wraps too, but that lasted all of 5 minutes. In fact, it was known that this was Green Day when I got the record, which was about 3 weeks before it came out. Thanks, mysterious benefactor!

So this one's not New Wave, but garage rock. Now, I like Green Day, and I like garage rock, so this one should be a no-brainer for me, right? Well, it is. Less affected than Money Money 2020, but just as fun. However, the fact that garage and punk ain't that far removed, and Green Day ain't exactly a pure punk band to begin with, means that this one doesn't quite have the same shock as, say, Slayer doing a folk tune, but for those who've been bitching about Green Day's proper albums being a little overblown these days, this is a tonic for the soul. Much like Pinhead Gunpowder, this shit hearkens back to the Lookout! Records years without seeming like a retread - in fact, there's a lot less metal and a lot more soul here than on those early records. Surprisingly, this one was a minor hit (at least, I remember seeing it on display in Best Buy), once again proving that even the masses will occasionally fuck up and elevate something to a higher level that deserves to be there. [Please see: Battlestar Galactica 2.0, Prince, Twin Peaks, Lost, etc.] Worth getting, if not just in the hopes that they keep making more records under this name. I'm a garage revival nerd and this floored me as totally solid from beginning to end.

So that about does it. No fancy wrap-up, just the knowledge that there's a good band is talented enough to put out records on the side that most other bands would love to have as their main creative outlet. Bands that stay active because they want to, and stay catchy and relevant doing it. This is not The Power Station.

[NEXT TIME: Using Green Day as a flimsy framework for an unravelling of my psyche (this is the line for free therapy, right?), I'll discuss how Green Day unwittingly played a huge part in the development of my personality not once, not twice, but THREE different times! How was my young mind warped by modern rock radio? Log on to find out!]

Time To Face The Music: Green Day, Pt. 1

2009-05-21T14:34:00.001-07:00

I know that I had my Catholic confession just a few posts ago, exposing all my guilty pleasure and secret loves to the world at large, and I've only finally worked up the gusto to make what to some may be a startling confession...

I still like Green Day.

Even the new stuff.

Now, some people might not grasp the magnitude of this claim from someone in my position. An aging punk rocker who was there when Green Day threw Dookie at MTV. They acted as both my entrance into a punk rock world that completely shaped my worldview, as well as said world's representation of my chosen group. To this day, if someone from the straight world (i.e. not a total music nut) asks wheat type of music I like, and I'm naive enough to say "punk" (naive, in that most people usually cringe at that word, even in a post-Hot Topic landsape), I almost invariably get a "Oh, so you like Green Day then?" in return. However, this presence in the greater world came at the cost of credibility in the fiercely ethical and resolutely underground punk world. In my teen years, I even came to physical blows over this subject MULTIPLE TIMES having to defend my taste. Apparently, once Green Day is brought into the mix, fully authorized bands like Buzzcocks, The Undertones, and The Jam are inadmissable as evidence of "cred" (how's that for using a law metaphor for punk rock, Brent?)

Now, say what you will about Green Day's punk cred, but I'm bored with that whole topic. They were always a pop band at heart, but they were punk as fuck. Still are. Playing songs like "At The Library" and "Who Shot Holden Caulfield?" at Gilman St and not getting killed was their cred. Their never making a lazy album was their cred. If you're one of those people who list the Who and the Kinks as punk founders, you know that just by keeping integrity they're punk. Like those bands, once they've proven their "punk-ness" they can use a solid rep to go on to expand the template, so to speak. The Who Sell Out sure doesn't sound like "My Generation" or "I Can't Explain", but damn is it good, without the bloated excesses of late-70s Who. It's got a little excess, but it's just as much as it needs to float.

OK, so maybe I AM off track, but my point is that just cause something's a little excessive doesn't mean it's too much, and I say this cautiously, knowing that I'm on dangerous ground for a punk. But here's the thing... just because Green Day is huge, and I was into them the first go-round, doesn't mean that they weren't always headed this direction. People deride American Idiot saying that it's too big and populist and pandering... who were they pandering to? They were coming off Warning, their most Kinks/Costello like work, and it BOMBED. I remember it came out the same week as Radiohead's Kid A and I was mercilessly chided by the "serious rocker" dudes on my dorm floor. I stand by my choice. There was little-to-no demand for it, and such a strange concept would surely only market to hardcore fans who'd inevitably compare it to Quadrophenia and Zen Arcade and that would be that. But it got huge with the preteens... the very same people who hooked onto them last time.

It ain't the post-grunge '90s, no matter how much some of us sometimes wish it was (musically, at least...), and it's a different time. So the rock stars wear eyeliner now (again), and in post-emo pop there's a fair dose of bombast. Let's not forget that these boys almost invented mall emo... what were their hits except for lonely teens who were bored and pining for some punker chick?

Now I KNOW I'm rambling, but I'm following through with another Who comparision, and going so far as to say that Green Day are our generation's 70s Who. Soundwise, they owe a debt, but that's not what I mean. They can walk that line of populist blue collar fanbase for lofty, ambitious concept albums that are either loved or hated by critics. Their stuff stands out as being written by a really smart Regular Guy delivered by a bunch of Regular Guys. Kids love them, teen girls have pin-ups, older teens have great music that they can take on 2 levels, and old geezers like me have a band that they can listen to that they liked in their youth too.

Why all this? I just heard their latest album, 21st Century Breakdown, after a few months of mocking, references to how I USED to like them, dumbfounded stares when I talk about how I "liked them when I was your age". I was totally wrong. This is a great record. Passionate, hooky, and roaring. A step down from American Idiot, but only a little step, and they sure as hell had to come up with something good to even come close to that. I don't know what the hell the concept is supposed to be this time. But it's at least audible that we have characters and progression (which is more than can be said for most of it's type from the '70s). The playing is good, and it's tight, and it's forceful. This sounds VITAL, even if it's not. And I'm going to let myself fall for it.

This ain't their The Who Sell Out. This one is a bit more Quadrophenia. It's not Village Green, but it's certainly something like their Lola Vs. Powerman.... I'd be hard pressed to say that this is their peak, something that I feel is probably behind them. But seriously... have you LISTENED to Quadrophenia or Lola recently? They're great. Here's hoping I feel the same way about this album 30 years on.

[Tune in next week for my writeups of the Green Day side projects, now with more secret identities than you can shake a stick at! Shortly thereafter, we'll close out the series with a piece entitled "Why Am I Always This Way", delving deeper into my psyche than usual!]

Release The Bats!

2009-05-14T00:30:00.001-07:00

Despite my recent soul/funk kick, I just got the urge to listen to some Birthday Party, as I'm feeling pretty under the weather and it seems to fit. I'm at work, so I pull some old footage of them up on YouTube and as I notice Young Nicky Cave screaming and gyrating, I reach for the headphones, which are about 3 desks away and turned up loud (it's a long cord, stretched under the desks, plugged into my machine). I leave them like that, enjoying the idea that someone else might walk by and wonder what that noise is, pick them up, and find themselves very disturbed.

Since U Been Gone

2009-05-03T10:30:00.001-07:00

I've been off the map for a while, as I've been relocating to the Savin Hill area of Dorchester area of Boston. Sorry to keep you all holding your breath.

More to follow soon, once I remove my life from boxes and hopefully throw away about a third of it, but as I sit here, I'm watching the DVD extras to the Live Forever Britpop documentary, and Jon Savage, one of my very favorite rock writers, is expounding on the great Oasis/Blur competition. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but he's also coming off as an insufferable snob, which I find odd for a man who has been one of the finest chroniclers of the ultimate form of punk - the raw, everyman's rock form. Is it really so strange that he seems a bit like an overeducated snoot? Perhaps this is merely a bad moment for him, but I thought that he would certainly have a little more of a down-to-earth character. He doesn't seem like a bad person, nor a poor interview, just a bit highfalutin.

More on things later.

"Ouroboros" (look it up)

2009-04-18T08:19:00.000-07:00

There's something moebius-strip-like about posting this, as I think my only regular reader is the person who wrote it.

dogdoguwar.blogspot.com

So, in the case that I'm recommending something only to the person who created it, sorry dude.

If there's anyone else out there, you'll enjoy it. Read. Comment.

No Alarms And No Surprises, Please

2009-03-30T05:14:00.001-07:00

Yeah yeah... garage punk and stuff. Fuzzboxes and Fenders. My friends often think they have me all stitched up as far as "What Mike likes". So I wanna throw a wrench in that machine, and somehow fess up to myself, as well. In the interest of full disclosure, ladies and gentlemen, here's a list of unexpected favorites, guilty pleasures, and shameful secrets that I'm sick of hiding.

1. The guitar tone on Lenny Kravitz' "Are You Gonna Go My Way" is almost perfect, and I would love to figure out how I could replicate it. If I could, it would probably be the only tone I'd ever use again.

2. I own every Wu-Tang Clan album, and every solo album by the nine primary members. And a bunch of compilations of related tracks. And some mixtapes.

3. I like to relax to Mazzy Star more often than anyone this side of 1995.

4. Post-'95 Prince. 'Nuff said.

5. For all my talk of being born-again in the waters of punk rock in high school, my college years taught me that I'm probably never going to shake my affinity for Black Sabbath & Led Zeppelin (Sab more than Zeb, though).

6. Even though this is about loves, I still hate the Doors. Everything about them.

7. Kevin got me into Thin Lizzy and now I can't get out. And I don't wanna.

8. I used to go for power walks to the tune of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Outta My Head", which I'm still convinced is a perfect pop song, whatever it's other merits may or may not be.

9. While it was a gift, I do in fact own that Eiffel 65 album. Remember them? That "Blue" song?

10. I know the Spin Doctors' Pocket Full Of Kryptonite album so well that I do that "wooow, deedle diddle wooooowwwww" sing-along thing to the guitar solos, cause I know how all of them go. And I still think that's a pretty good pop album.

11. Oasis.

12. It's been long enough since I've listened to them that my feelings may have changed, but I used to own multiple albums by the Verve Pipe. What are the cosmic repercussions of that?

13. There is nothing wrong with my loving the first five Cheap Trick albums, which are stone-cold power pop classics. There is, however, something wrong with my loving the next five as well.

14. Is Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" far enough removed from the charts for it to be considered a guilty pleasure? I mean, that Goldfrapp song that it ripped off is, so I'm gonna list it.

15. When packing up my CD collection when we were last moving, there were two different CD copies of Bell Biv DeVoe's Poison. That's a GOOD album!

16. My love for mid-90's alterna-rock is well established, so let's just get the ones that I couldn't really argue in favor of out of the way: Veruca Salt, the first Bush album, Mother Love Bone, Silverchair, Filter, Soup Dragons, Imperial Drag. These among many others have been played, willingly, in my home within the bast 6 months. [The Gin Blossoms, Presidents of the USA, Urge Overkill, and The Figgs are all safe, as I can objectively say that they're really good albums.]

17. When I moved to Boston, I had to leave about 90% of my very large CD collection at my folks' place, taking only "the essentials", i.e., the CDs that I felt I really needed the physical copy of, for which high-quality MP3s would not suffice. I had 4 albums and a six-disc box set by The Cult among those 300 CDs.

18. I like David Bowie. No, no, you misunderstand. Of course I like Ziggy & Berlin-era Bowie, but I'm talking about post-Scary Monsters, pre-Outside David Bowie.

19. Sometimes, when I'm doing dishes, I like to dance and sing along to Kraftwerk's The Man Machine.

20. Madonna's first two albums. I'm not ashamed, but I do feel guilty about it.

21. I will always love The Prodigy Experience, and to a lesser degree, their next three albums.

21st Century Putdown

2009-03-26T00:36:00.001-07:00

-- Green Day's latest bloated concept piece, 21st Century Breakdown, now has a release date. It's due May 15 via Reprise. Get, uh, excited.

So let me get this straight, Pitchfork...

Green Day puts out a Who-influenced double-album mix of fuck-you politics (thanks, punk rock) and teenage angst (will the real Husker Du please stand up?), which is a huge success. Depsite some of the singles being the maudlin ballads, it puts big loud rock songs back on the charts for like two years. They follow it up with a sixties-styled garage-punk record under an assumed name which rocks and is also a success. Why in the HELL would you possibly be all snarky about their upcoming album? Sure, the cover art is bad, to say the least, but c'mon jerks... why you gotta be hatin'? Is this really going to be any worse than the tripe that's clogging up the charts right now? U2's latest abortion is the only rock album in the top 5, and unless you count Nickelback and Chris Cornell* (I don't), the charts are almost devoid of any rock music. Kelly Clarkson is at number one, and that's fine. She's not evil. Not my style, but not dangerously manipulative like U2 and thier ilk. And this has nothing to do with my teenage love of thier first four records. I did love them, but it took me a while to come around to American Idiot... once I finally picked it up though, I wasn't disappointed.

So chill out, Pitchfork. Just because there's a pretty good chance that this new album will be a reachout to Green Day's "bread and butter" demographic (under-17 Hot Topic Shoppers), it still gonna be better than most of the rest of what's on the radio.

[*I was on allmusic.com yesterday, and saw a banner ad for Chris Cornell's new album, with a big "Produced by Timbaland" graphic over the lower half of the album art. Does that just seem totally messed up to anyone else?]

Was It Really That Bad?

2009-03-15T14:35:00.001-07:00

I was a grunge fan.

From '89-'92 I lived in Vienna, Austria. I was 7-10 years old during that period. Due to a lack of English language media, I often found myself flipping through the movies section of my parents' copies of Newsweek and Time, because those had pictures of the big upcoming blockbusters (Batman, Dick Tracy, etc.). However, once you read those movie sections enough, and I was a pretty smart kid, you start reading other parts. So I'd read the music section. Around that time, I was taken to a concert at a local rec center by a friend's high school age brother when I was in the third grade, and when I saw one of the bands I had seen at the rec center talked about in Newsweek, I thought it sounded cool and I saved my Christmas money and went out and bought the big album everyone was talking about as a "new youth movement". It was Nevermind, and it was awesome. So I was rocking some Nirvana at age nine, and I didn't get the fact that this was a complete sea change in youth culture, or that it was revolutionizing both contemporary rock music or fashion. I just knew it was loud and fuzzy and catchy and I sorta liked how ANGRY it was and I didn't know why.

Over the years, I kept my faith to the loud and fuzzy. I mean, I've broadened my pallette, but I've never gotten rid of my grunge CDs, and Mudhoney might still be one of my Top 5 bands of all time. Which brings me to my point. There was far more variety in the grunge movement than a lot of people realize. There was a metal faction (Alice In Chains, early Soundgarden), there was a garagey punk faction (Mudhoney, parts of The Melvins), there was a psychedelic group (Love Battery, Screaming Trees), and there was, most abundantly, the "Classic Rock" faction that was epitomized by Pearl Jam.

In the interest of Full Disclosure (TM), I'm not a big PJ fan. They were funkier than I preferred my "real serious rock" to be, and they were often just too serious for their own good. I applauded their fight against Ticketmaster when that seemed like it meant something, and their hearts were in the right place, but they had that U2 vibe about them of wanting to fight "The Man", not really being sure who he was, and swinging blindly in all directions. As the years rolled on, the fact that there were essentially two mentalities at work in the band became known, and that was very telling. Frontman Eddie Vedder was revealed to be the Punk Academy graduate with the sellout/deity dillema, while bassist Jeff Ament was unabashed in his desire to be the biggest band on the planet at nearly any cost. And that's OK I guess. Their recent albums have been perfectly acceptable, but I just have no real interest in picking them up, and we could have worse things than another ethical rock band making workmanlike records... sort of like Tom Petty for My Generation (TM).

But what about then? Some critics and fans on my side of the fence (grunge-that-comes-from-punk) labelled Pearl Jam mere classic rock revivalists and derided their presence on the radio at the expense of real important artists like Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, and The Melvins. Now? I would KILL to hear a band like early Pearl Jam ruling the airwaves. Who cares if the rage and Big Important Issues (TM) were misguided stabs by guys in their early 20s? I just went back and listened to their greatest hits collection and these guys were fantasic for their first two albums at least. Messy? Yeah. Inconsistient? You betcha. But I would love a band that would take that kind of risk in public, something that we're sorely missing. While the Information Age may have changed the way that things work, it sure seems like we didn't know how good we had it. Remember how irritating the Presidents Of The United States Of America seemed? I DARE you to go listen to their album again. The two-string bass concept was developed with Mark Sandman of Morphine, and as the Trouser Press guide puts it, "[They] could not be more intrinsically indie if they had the PopLlama logo tattooed on their foreheads." And yet America embraced them with open arms. I heard fucking HARVEY DANGER on the radio the other day, and suddenly "Flagpole Sitta" didn't sound too bad. And yet we complained.

I've been attempting to make a case for years about the New Pop Age of the post-grunge mid-90s, where the marketplace was open to almost anything as long as it was catchy and grunge (i.e. punk) influenced. Unfortunately, at the tail end of this age, Dave Matthews swooped in to ruin things, but even in this age, his first album was almost just another one in the crowd. Sure, one-hit wonders abounded, but there were some excellent albums that never got their due to to the wonderfully disposable nature of the times. Remember when you could buy any Flaming Lips CD for three bucks because they were a past-their-prime flash-in-the-pan after playing "She Don't Use Jelly" on 90210? But alas, that's a rant for another day. Remind me, though and I'll tell you young 'uns all about it.

Classic rock is still kinda lame, and no matter what happens, Rolling Stone will remain a bastion of late-60s heirarchy and close-minded Boomer-ness, but I'll be damned if those early Pearl Jam singles don't sound great. Sure, you can't understand what Vedder's singing, and the bass playing is too funky, and Mike McCready's lead lines are all too busy, but for a brief moment in time, meaning NOW, those songs are sounding pretty good. And I don't know whether that's a reflection on the state of radio and culture today, or if it's just that Pearl Jam has aged like fine wine.

I think it's the former.

Oh, and I really like that song "Dissident" on Vs..

Walkin' On Down The Road (or, What Happened To The Red Hot Chili Peppers)

2009-03-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

"Rob, top five musical crimes perpetuated by Stevie Wonder in the '80s and '90s. Go. Sub-question: is it in fact unfair to criticize a formerly great artist for his latter day sins, is it better to burn out or fade away?" - Barry, "High Fidelity"

Not Stevie Wonder, but some of his illegitimate progeny. Let's talk about the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Once every year and a half or so, I tend to start listening to the Chili Peppers, as one influence or another tends to lead me to them naturally. I think last time it was that I was reading the Jane's Addiction book and there was a lot of intermingling and the L.A. scene and blah blah blah. Last night, I was talking to my friend Brent and when I offhandedly mentioned that I really liked their early stuff and thought it was really underrated, he mentioned that it might be becuase their later stuff is so overrated. Which is a pretty good point. Unfortunately, on paper, they're certinaly one of the better rock bands around these days, and it's only old coots like me who long for the days when they were less-than-first-rate. But more on that later.

Coming of age in the early '90s, it's easy to forget how weird these guys must have seemed in the mid-to-late '80s. Colorful, grit-teeth manic, hyperactive funk that was so fast it sounds like thrash. Seriously, I've tried this... play some of their early hardest stuff at a slower speed and it starts to sound like a tight funk jam. It's just that the energy level was SO intense it comes across as spring-loaded. The first three albums... man. Nobody but me likes the first one, and I don't even love it, but after the remastering job it got a few years ago, it's biggest crime is underwritten material and weak production by Andy Gill. Yeah, Gang Of Four Andy Gill. Freaky Styley is way better beacuse of the return of O.P. (original Pepper) guitarist Hillel Slovak (truly gifted weirdo) and the production talents of Mr. George "Funk Yo Ass Up" Clinton. The Uplift Mofo Party Plan is a bit of a step back, but not bad, and then Slovak succumbed to a nasty heroin addiction. The rest of the band recruits whiz-kid 18-year-old John Frusciante, gets a little more serious (in ambition, if not musically) and puts out their real bid for mainstream acceptance, Mother's Milk.

Surprisingly, it worked. They got huge, riding the wave of their cover of "Higher Ground" (see how this all ties in to Stevie?), and were finally big business. They geared up to make the biggest record of their career (arguably) and in 1991, they were everywhere... selling millions of records and scaring the CRAP out of my parents, who were sure that they were trying to corrupt the youth. Blood Sugar Sex Magik is a great album. Like, a really and truly great album. Even it's stupider parts add to the whole of it, toning down the day-glo excesses and punky thrash of the early years and amping up a much more realistic party vibe that feels like a trip through Hollywood.

So why do I think that they haven't done anything great since?

Before they followed it up, they lost Frusciante to a smack habit, and struggled to find a replacement for their next record. When it came out, as a big Jane's Addiction fan, I LOVED the presence of Dave Navarro, but One Hot Minute is a case of "the less said the better". When he left, I thought that they were done. And when Californication came out, it was a really nice return to form, despite the fact that it didn't sound like anything they'd done before. Frusciante was back, maybe better than ever in his tasteful playing, but there were plenty of ballads to keep the "Under The Bridge" fans happy. But even the harder songs were tempered with a lot more melody than in the past. Now, while this makes them a much better band (emphasis in that sentence is on "band", not "better"), it does make them feel a little more homogenous. I can't expect these people to be the same band they were 25 years ago, and I don't. However, the mingling of the two styles makes for some middle-of-the-road moments. I didn't buy By The Way, and I only gave a couple of listens to Stadium Arcadium.

So why don't I like them? Frusciante is a masterful guitarist in the true artistic sense (even if he is still a little crazy). He plays in a way that I can only use "jazz words" to describe - tasteful, exploratory, adventurous. But he still rocks. Flea is, despite my aversion to modern-day slap-bass (and the cult that this style has attracted), one of the great bassists of the past 40 years, and the under-mentioned Chad Smith hits his HARD exactly when he's supposed to. Maybe it's Kiedis' undercooked poetic prose I don't like, maybe the yelping rap and warbly croon he uses, but I can deal with those. The lyrics can be a bit sophomoric, but they're not bad.

I have a theory...

During their height, the Peppers were part of the alternative rock vanguard that changed pop culture, but unlike their grunge contemporaries and the alt-rock singer-songwriter contingent, they were unabashedly MEN. Shirtless men, who liked to perform wearing one sock each and sing nasty, filty songs about women who they did nasty, filthy things with. They were like a four-piece walking libido. Grunge was sexless and self-loathing, with maybe the exception of Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, and the R.E.M. crowd was too into sex as an idea. But the Chili Peppers were young, shirtless, played funk and rock (the two most debauched musical styles), and were there to sex you up. As a boy, that kind of thing left an impact, and while at the time I thought they were dirty verging on ridiculous, as an amateur pop-culture sociologist, it was kind of important for someone to represent the sexual side of a youth movement. All of this has happened before and will happen again. Early rock'n'roll had Elvis to offset Buddy Holly. Psychedelia had Jimi Hendrix to offset Donovan. Alt rock had the Chili Peppers to offset Nirvana.

After falling apart after '92 and being on life support until '98, they came back knowing that their biggest hit was the ballad "Under The Bridge". They made sure that the follow-up had a clone in "My Friends", and sure enough, their big comeback hit was a ballad - "Scar Tissue". They realized that they had to castrate themselves to stay successful. Or maybe they didn't realize, maybe it's just that a sexless Chili Peppers is what the public wanted. Do they know it? Maybe not. They're older, they've slowed down, and they're one of the biggest bands in the world since Californication, so they don't have that youthful sex drive anymore, and that's OK. But maybe they should have hung it up after that, or maybe they'll surprise me again.

None of it matters, of course, cause they'll sell millions of records and be huge stars forever. And good for them. They deserved it back when they made Freaky Styley.

Cracks In The Cement (Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Just Go Ahead And Not Like Pavement)

2009-03-15T14:33:00.001-07:00

What started as a quick trip ended up as something else altogether...

In my excitement to dash off to a favorite writing location, hoping eagerly to squirrel myself away in a corner and bang out the current thing that's swirling around in my head, I hopped on the southbound train instead of the northbound. Not a big problem, as I just had to go south 3 stops to avoid paying another entrance fee, switch to the other side of the platform, and head north four stops, and I'm where I was going in the first place. Of course, once I hit the turnaround, I hear that there are a track delays on the northbound. Ugh... more time lost, and I was hoping to make this somewhat fast. It takes forever to get to my ultimate destination, even though it's maybe a half-mile from my apartment. My own fault, but c'est la vie.

But, you see, with the past year giving me a newly optimistic outlook, I take the opportunity, stuck on the rush-hour subway, to dial up some Pavement on my iPod, as they're my intended subject for this piece. Until now, I've never been a big fan of Pavement. But they've just re-released Brighten The Corners, which, as much as any, could be my favorite Pavement album. As "Shady Lane" turns into "Transport Is Arranged", the subway lurches foreward as the sun goes down west over the Charles River, and I feel, well...

[Pause Part I]

[Begin Part II]

When you're learning how to write in the more advanced stages of schooling, they teach you to open up long-form journalistic articles in a number of ways. One of the more"creative" is to use your storytelling powers in miniature, and since all good stories have a setup, a conflict, a climax, and a resolution, you can use this miniature framework to then put the larger piece in perspective. "He's stuck on a subway", "he doesn't like Pavement". "He puts on Pavement, has a moment with the sunset, the train clacking..."

"He still doesn't really like Pavement."

Now, boys and girls, I've lost some serious cred with friends, co-workers, and bandmates over the years, who just claim that I don't get it, or I haven't listened to it enough, or that I've heard too much of what's come after to understand how good it is ("Big Star Syndrome"). For years, in certain circles, I've been ashamed to admit my sort of ambivalent dislike of them, for fear of sudden hipper-than-thou cold-shouldering and cracks about how I should go back to the basics. I've finally realized that I can stand up and say with definition that I just don't care for them. No real ill will, I can think of dozens of other so-called canonical bands that I like less, but I'm sick of pretending that I really dig 'em.

Do I get it? Yeah, I do. I don't think my understanding of indie rock is really a question here. Although I hate the "slacker" tag, it's music by highly-educated graduates who sharpened their teeth on the pre-grunge college rock scene, taking equally from the American underground of rock like Dinosaur Jr, arty British post-punk like Gang Of Four and (sorry, guys) The Fall, and scratched-vinyl avant-garde underground stuff like Royal Trux. Smart enough to understand the lineage, they put these elements in a blender and made sure to come at it with a smirk, as though it was a thrown-together term paper to get a good enough grade, but have enough stuff in it that was over the professor's head that the joke's on him. Like referring to the masterful bass playing of Dale Nixon in the U.S. underground rock scene of the '80s (look it up, see what I mean?). And no matter how these guys deny it, this is "slacker-rock" to the core. A melange of it's influences, delivered with an ironic detachment, back in a time when irony meant something.

Have I given it a chance? Sure I have. In fact, I own the deluxe reissues of their first three records. Why? Because I periodically think that I do like Pavement. They have a decently-sized discography that's weird enough to be interesting, smart enough to be layered, and the reissues are without a doubt some of the best I've ever come across. Two discs, tons of liner notes, packed with extras, and usually for less than a single-disc album costs at Best Buy. Now that's a deal. But maybe I'm buying them more as a record collector than a Pavement fan. After reading about them, I'm always HOPING that I'll like the records more and more, and just in case, I picked up the deluxe versions, cause since they're so cheap, and since I used to work in a record store they were even cheaper, and why not have them so that "when I finally hear Pavement click for me", I can just wallow in their awesomeness. But no matter how many times I listen, that click hasn't happened yet. Maybe it never will, but just in case, I'm not selling those reissues anytime soon.

That article I once mentioned about Radiohead and Springsteen was going to be along the same lines... I wish I liked each of them as much as people who really like them like them. I realize that part of the appeal is supposed to be Steve Malkmus' tossed-off vocals, but those really do grate sometimes, and I like angular and lo-fi, but something about a lot of this stuff just seems disingenious. But maybe since I wasn' t really rocking the 7" vinyl in 1989, the idea of disingeniousness among a sea of lameass hair-metal was refreshing.

I have a lot of friends who love this band, or at least like them a whole lot, and I have no problem with that, but there are some who hold their love of this band like a badge, not just because they have a connection with the records, but because they think it guarantees them a certain safety credibility in a world of very snooty people. For example, just about any critic who likes them applies a comparison to them in even the least likely places. A friend of mine just sent me a couple albums by Butterglory, a band I'd never heard of until he sent them my way. To his ears, and mine, they sound like a band on Merge in the early '90s, which is to say that they sound a lot like Superchunk. While that could sound damning, as though they don't have an identity, I mean it more as a compliment to the band and label at a time when label identity made sense. If you said to me, "here's a band on Dischord", I'd have some idea where they might be coming from. There are always exceptions to the rule, but Dischord, Merge, Sub Pop, Matador, etc... they all had a sort of sound that made their groups familial. Yet somehow, several reviews I've read compare Butterglory to Pavement. That's just lazy criticism. Laconic vocals over slightly jarred guitars, singing clear pop melodies? Sure could describe Pavement, but as my friend Brent put it, people like to apply the "sounds like Pavement" tag to underground bands that play pop, which as I can tell, was a rather slight side of Pavement. My favorite moments of theirs, to be sure, but "Summer Babe" is not the song I would use to sum up their sound. Yet somehow, indie rockers play a pop song with out-of-tune Lou Reed speak-sing, and suddenly it's Pavement-esque. Is that fair to anyone? Nope. I understand that you really like this band, but don't tell me that every band that comes within a hundred miles of them sound like them. It'll just make me not want to listen to a score of bands that I might otherwise love. How would you like it if every time you asked me about a band I told you it sounded like the Butthole Surfers? Might scare you off of some things. Although I stand by my assertion that Sloan's Navy Blues is the spiritual follow-up to Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac. And don't even get me started on how the last Okkervil River single just totally lifted the melody and arrangement from "I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas." It's not fair to Pavement, though, to bitch about the fans. Although it does seem that punk rock finally had it's victory with them - there truly seems to be little definition between the band and the fans. The kind of people who listen to Pavement are the kind of people Pavement are. The divide between performer and audience is truly crumbled.

So rock on Pavement. You made good albums that I just don't really like. A far lesser offense than many, and you're never going to hear me say that they sucked. Just don't expect me to be first in line for the reunion shows.

[End Part II]

[Resume Part I]

...bored. I turn off the Pavement album, realizing that I've got about a hundred other albums on this iPod. I briefly think about some Prince bootleg, but end up going with The Telescopes instead.

Lunch Break At The Dream Factory

2009-03-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in the previous post, the plan this week was to write a piece on the relative authenticity and merits of Bruce Springsteen, as well as the interesting fanaticism of Radiohead fans. However, that would probably turn to my usual Andy Rooney-esque griping about one thing or another, and anyway, I found something much more interesting...

Thanks to the wonders of technology, I am now the proud owner of a copy of some unreleased Prince albums. Now, while this would be cause for happiness in any situation, it's the particular albums that have me so worked up, so first, a little backstory...

Prince made Parade. Like all of his other albums, it sold more than I ever hope to, but it was by no means a success on the level of Purple Rain. So he goes back into the studio to come up with a new album with the Revolution, which he calls Dream Factory. Things get a bit tense with the Revolution (please see the Purple Rain movie for a fictionalized version of what this might have been like), and they end up getting fired. Prince keeps plugging away at Dream Factory. He eventually records a song called "Housequake", which features pitched-up vocals, which the Purple One likes so much that he decides to record a whole album this way, planning on releasing it under the name Camille. More recording ensues, and since the Revolution folded, he decides to combine the two albums (with a few new songs) into a 3-LP set called Crystal Ball (which has no real relation to the late-'90s set of the same name). He presents Crystal Ball to Warner Bros., who balk at the idea of releasing an extravagant 3-LP set after the relative failure of Parade. They convince him to whittle it down to 2 LPs worth of material, which is then released as Sign 'O' The Times.

SOTT is my favorite Prince album for a number of reasons, the least of which is that it's a critical fave. It's after he discovered new drum machine technology, making it funkier and harder-hitting than the synth-y drum sounds on the previous stuff. It's darker, weirder and more insular. And it's 2 discs, and more prime Prince is good Prince, right?

Well, after discovering it in high school, and finally finding some online info about Prince, I discovered the whole Dream Factory / Camille / Crystal Ball backstory and from then on, every time I read anything about Sign, it was more about what it wasn't, rather than what it was. And what it was was a near-perfect album.

So what's the deal with these unreleased records? Well, I don't quite know what to call it, but the collected recordings from this era, I feel, put the definitive stamp on the fact that this is surely Prince's finest era, a point when he was famous enough to have reign to do what he wanted, hungry enough not to repeat himself, and weird enough to ensure that this was truly a distinctive presence. This is it, arguably the last gasp of greatness before descending into a perfectly interesting and enjoyable, but relatively unexciting, pop music standard-bearer.

So where does that leave a music fanatic who must categorize and compartmentalize his listening into easily-defineable categories to make offhand references to among his fellow music snobs? It doesn't really leave me anywhere. But we have this body of work by a pretty radical artist, a pretty good portion of which is unreleased. Sure, plenty of songs from the Dream Factory recordings made it through every iteration, relatively unchanged, to emerge on Sign, but there are at least 2 LPs worth (maybe not full 45 minute ones, but still 2 LPs) of songs that never came out, except for a few strays appearing on b-sides and promo ephemera.

The question is, has this happened since? When was the last time a major recording artist was given carte blanche to suirrel away and create a sweaty paranoid psychedelic funk psychosis suite, funded by big label money, and having it ultimately remain unreleased? Sure, there have been examples of endless recording sessions ultimately resulting in little to nothing (Chinese Democracy, anyone?), but when was the last time that a record label forked over money for fantastic music only to bury it later? Juliana Hatfield's God's Foot might fit the bill, but as good as it may or may not be, it's hardly on the same level as Prince circa '86. Has the record industry consolidated to the point that it's only spending on things that it knows how to define and sell? Of course it does, that's no news. But it seems that over the past 20 years, their rare willingness to gamble is being lost.

For the life of me, I will never understand how Prince became such a pop culture sensation. Of course, he wrote amazing pop hooks and was a genius musician. But there are plenty of those out there, and a tiny sex-crazed one that appeared on his breakthrough record wearing a trench coat and bikini briefs in the puritan Reagan '80s, writing songs about threesomes and incest and being young and sexy is not the kind of thing that I imagine could blow up, even with the idea of it capturing the public's repressed naughty side. How in the world did some of his lyrics make the airwaves? I mean, there's obviously the racy-if-not-filthy ones, but I'm talking about the freaky, weird psychedelic ones. Not only was he sexually assaultive, but he was subversive, and people just let it go, culminating in the whole collection we're talking about. Most of the "dangerous" mainstream music since then has been at the very least label-sanctioned... run past the bigwigs to make sure it was "acceptably" dangerous, where my man Prince represented a real danger, even if he was too weird to be a widespread threat. People were happy to get a glimpse of the weirdo, but probably didn't want to get too close.

Would you want to sit next to Prince on the bus?

So I realize that this has been rambling, but ultimately, my point is this: there is often dispute about what the best Prince album is. Kevin Smith told me his was Purple Rain, and I told him mine was Sign 'O' The Times (I have a couple hundred witnesses, but didn't make the DVD - ask me some other time). There is nary a bum note on Purple Rain, it was designed to make the Purple One a superstar and it worked. But Sign is the sound of an mad genius reaching his fervent peak. And with the relatively recent electronic availability of the surrounding context (the three albums of unreleased material), it becomes both astounding that he was able to create this, amazing that the label was willing to bankroll something so bizarre, and unfortunate that he was never able to scale these heights again.

R.I.P. Lux Interior, 1946-2009

2009-03-15T14:31:00.002-07:00

I just found out upon getting to work that Lux Interior (a.k.a. Erick Purkhiser), lead singer for the Cramps and allegedly all-around good guy, passed away at age 60. Unlike most of his rock'n'roll-to-the-core bretheren, it was a pre-existing heart condition that did him in.

I was planning on writing something about Radiohead and Bruce Springsteen today, but somehow, none of that seems to really matter, 'cause I'm so bummed that Lux has moved on to the Great Go-Go Club In The Sky. Honestly, if it weren't for the Cramps, Shake would probably never have existed, and I wouldn't have had the opportunity to play some of the best shows of my brief career.

So go get 'em, Lux. Something tells me you're freaking them out already.

Whatever Happened To My Rock 'N' Roll

2009-03-15T14:31:00.001-07:00

Dear Judd Apatow... I'm very glad you've moved on and had a bucket full of success in Hollywood. You're a funny guy, and you deserve it. Please keep the funny coming.

Thanks,
Mike

--------------

Now for the rest of you: can you please shut up about what a travesty it is that Freaks And Geeks was cancelled? It was a terribly funny show that was ahead of the curve, but never found an audience and got axed. Your bellyaching will not bring it back. Especially since most of the cast is now edging on their 30s, and is way past believable as high-schoolers.

You see, I was a little late on the show. But I did start watching it not long before it went off the air. And I enjoyed it. When it was cancelled, I was sad. It may seem like sacriliege, but I think I may have even enjoyed Undeclared, Apatow's follow-up show even more. And when that, too, got cancelled, I was, again, saddened.

I was reading the allmovie.com review of one of his more recent production successes, The Pineapple Express, this morning, and F&G is mentioned twice. Once, I could understand - to let the reader know that Seth Rogen and James Franco starred together in the show, which was directed by the producer of the current film. But there's the usual lip service to how the TV show was "one of the most honest and hilariously endearing shows about teenagers ever to air on network television" (gag). Really? Is that necessary? We can all bemoan the loss of good things that weren't given the chance to develop (Arrested Development, The Ben Stiller Show, The Dana Carvey Show, Dead Like Me, Men Behaving Badly...), but after nine years, somebody needs to put an end to the whining in places that aren't appropriate for it.

The time has come to let that rotting, bloated corpse that we all love LIE. It's been almost a decade since it was cancelled, and I think we can all get on with our lives. All the featured players have moved on to something else, and Apatow's writing/directing/producing has probably given us more laughs SINCE that show went off the air than the entire run had in it. And it was a funny, funny show. That said, I have never laughed as hard in a movie theater as I laughed at The 40 Year Old Virgin. Let's not forget the fact that Anchorman, Knocked Up, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Step Brothers, and, once again, The Pineapple Express have all been solid-to-great (despite the fact that Jonah Hill usually rubs me the wrong way), and while Apatow hasn't directed them all, he's certainly created enough moments to not be defined as "The Guy That Did Freaks And Geeks", right?

My only complaint at the time about Freaks And Geeks was the early '80s setting. And nowadays, I completely understand the choice to do that, given Apatow's age and the way that era lent itself to the overarching tone of the show. Back then, however, it didn't connect with me, maybe because I didn't get the fact that the whole "Morning In America" era was a perfect foil for the confusion and insecurity of high school awakening. I think that may have been lost on a lot of people my age as well, many of whom only "found" it after the DVD release, becuase while the stories and themes were universal (if you were a loser in high school), the setting was not. It felt, at the time, like a little bit of hip posturing for a time that, at the time, wasn't particularly hip. A lot has changed in 9 years, and now that era is super-bad once again, what with new wave haircuts and synth-pop hitting the boutiques again. But I'm finding myself wondering if the fawning devotion to something that didn't have enough viewers in the first place isn't just a case of catching up on a good thing, or maybe even idealizing an object/time of your formative years, just like the setting of the show must have been for the creators. Call me crazy. Maybe I'm reading too far into it, but don't us mid-20-somethings love to make ourselves feel better about ourselves by rewriting our own adolescent history? The dudes that call Pinkerton Weezer's finest moment were the same kids that told me it sucked and I should be listening to Rage Against The Machine instead back in '97.

Judd, you're a-OK in my book, and I dig your stuff. Can you just please tell your fans to get over it, a la William Shatner in that SNL clip where he tells a Star Trek Convention to get a life?

You know how I know YOU'RE like Coldplay? You're fine and dandy, but your fans can be the worst. I think Sloan said that.

I Don't Give A Damn About My Reputation

2009-03-15T14:30:00.003-07:00