Apples and Heroin

Back to the Garden

2009-08-16T21:56:00.015-06:00

"Yeah, I was there"

by, Maxwell Silverspoon

All the nostalgic articles in the Associated Press this weekend really bring me back. Ah, forty years flew by. Woodstock. The best weekend of my life.

I still remember the day my buddies said: “Let’s go to the garden.”

I was all: “Awesome.”

Jimmy slim, Slippery Richie, Captain Mike boners and I packed up a few lids of ganja, a saltshaker of coke, some doses and a bunch of roofies and hit the road. Don’t touch my bag if you please, Mr. Boner’s dad.

We smoked about 60 joints on the way to Woodstock from Oneida. We listened to a tape of Jefferson Starship like 100 times. Oh, wait, tape decks didn't exist at the time. We must’ve been so stoned.

When we got close, a huge traffic jam prevented us from entering Yasger’s Farm. I saw Arlo Guthrie and he said, “New York State Thruway is closed. Can you dig?”

He smoked us down and disappeared with a gypsy into the huge mass of stationary cars.

Eventually, I spotted a sign that read: “Free helicopter rides.” Rick left his car in the road and we followed the arrows to the whirly bird. A white dude with an afro waved us toward the helicopter. We threw our bags on board and set off toward Yaeger’s Farm.

As the chopper hovered over the concert site, Boners remarked: “We must be half a million strong down there.”

We looked over in the corner of the helicopter and this fat walrus-like fellow was scribbling something in his notepad. When I made eye contact with him, he asked us if we had any heroin. I was like, “Nah, man. That’s a beat trip. I’ve seen the needle and the damage done.”

The whirly bird landed between some dirty white trailer and a bunch of girls wearing flowers in their hair and beads over their bare tits. As soon as the helicopter blades stopped rotating, I heard this bald black dude with a beard singing the word “freedom” over and over again. Thinking about it reminds me of just how free we were at the time.

I really felt a sense of freedom and entitlement in the air throughout that weekend. It was an awesome vibe. We felt so free that you could literally do anything you wanted short of rape and murder. Of course, a sense of free love had infiltrated everyone’s psyche, so getting laid was easy, except for really ugly dudes and fat chicks. Some greasy older dudes with gnarled faces, beards and dirty feet managed to score a lot of tang, though.

I met my future wife at that show. We called her “Mountain Grill” because I was tripping balls and her face turned into a mountain.

My friend Arthur Schneiderman perfectly exemplified our freedom. He lacked the money to buy a car and failed to score a ride to the festival, so he stole a horse from a nearby farm and rode it down the freeway to the festival. The cops were like: “We can’t bust him. He’s just too free.” That’s how fucking free we were.

Anyway, that black dude’s set shook me to the core, not just because of the power of the words. I had never seen a black person live before. I saw, like, five of them that weekend: Sly Stone, Jimi Hendricks, the people in Sly Stone’s band and some guy at the burger stand. They seemed free, too.

We settled down on this hill and lit up a few fatties, taking in the sounds of Canned Tuna. At the time, that dude with glasses, Matt Valentine or something, still sang for the band. His falsetto put us at ease. When he soulfully sang: “Goin’ up the country. Where do you want to go?” It hit me: We were already in the country, man. Far fucking out.

During the set, this girl, Lindsay, came up to me and said: “Could I get in on this sesh?” I told her: “Sure.” She travelled to Woodstock from a commune in California or something. Later, we did it in front of everyone. I think she gave me crabs but seven other girls, one super sweet-looking dude and Arthur’s horse were also culprits in that mishap. Whatever. It ruled.

After I let my free love flow all over the place, some gnarly blond drunk chick started wailing on stage about taking her heart. Heavy, heavy stuff. Time to drop acid. Boner opened up our duffel bag and slowly turned pale. “I must’ve lost the acid,” he said. “I thought I loaded it into these squirt guns.”

“Fuck,” we all said simultaneously.

About an hour later, we started looking for doses and some freak got on the microphone and started announcing all kinds of shit about medicine and lost children. Somewhere in his babble, he mentioned the brown acid. I think he said it was half-off or free or something because everyone was trying to give it away. Someone ended up giving us a sheet of it for free.

We ate two…enty hits apiece and settled down on top of the hill for the Fantastic String Band’s set. Suddenly, it kicked in and the Irish dude on stage turned into a nymph and the rest of the band turned into fairies. It sounded like a music box, as they started singing about the Lord of the Rings or fucking in space or something.

I peaked when that mustached dude started babbling about an onion or painting or something. Everything totally melted and I saw a gorilla. He told me to kick my way through the jello mold of reality with my cowboy boots. I don’t remember much after that. I think some guys had a circle jerk on me.

The next morning, we realized that we forgot to bring food. Some fat, round-nosed dude with rosy cheeks squealed in a high voice onstage. He said something about breakfast in bed. Some people called the pig fuckers handed out nuts and berries. It tasted like gravel.

Joe Crocker ate some of the gravel, too. You could tell when he started singing that the music in his throat affected his vocals. He bellowed, “Waa-na-nee-wha-nah-nah.” And the backup band sang, “Have a little help from my friends.” I think they improvised it.

It started to rain and the place turned into a giant waterpark. People slid down the hill and screwed in the mud. One guy speared a pig, put it on a spit and just started roasting it right there. This point marked the freest part of the whole concert.

The fuzz started cracking down after that. I saw some dude get stuck on the fence while trying gain entry to the concert and two pigs grabbed his arms, picked him up and put him on the other side of the fence. “Fucking pigs,” I yelled.

At that point, we were protesting the war in Vietnam and pigs reminded us of the ideals that made us assemble as one in the first place: an unrealistic, utopian view of the world, an overwhelming sense of entitlement and unlimited resources provided by our rich liberal parents. Coppers bummed me out. Sure, they allowed us to smoke dope, publicly fornicate and spit on them without arresting or beating us. But their presence still felt creepy.

Speaking of ‘Nam, I like to think that Woodstock helped stop the war, although the troops left Vietnam five years after the festival. I mean, we smoked so much weed that the smoke probably drifted over to the Pentagon and everyone mellowed out. It also sent a message: Go out and get laid, man. If all the fat cats just got laid, we wouldn’t feel the need to start wars.

On the third day, we realized that we ran out of drugs. Also, the women folk started spreading a rumor that we all had crabs. We decided to hop on a helicopter after Jimi Hendricks ended the set with the National Anthem, a fitting ending to the perfect weekend of freedom.

The helicopter left Woodstock right before Limp Bizkit played and everyone started breaking things, making Indians cry and raping each other.

But I’ll never forget the parts of that weekend that I remember and the movie ruled, too. I still think about it from behind my desk at Goldman-Sachs.

Guest contributor Maxwell Silverspoon has written for Mother Jones, Family Circle and Forbes.

Footage from Woodstock

2009-05-25T19:39:00.002-06:00

The words failed to leak from my brain onto the page for the first three months that the new Country Teasers releases sat on my rotation stack near my turntable. So, I started to list the reasons I hold the Teasers’ with such a high regard. First and foremost, Ben Wallers’ vocals capture the mood alteration of the music perfectly. His ability to build a barrage of rage with a robotic English attack or deliver the most cutting lines in a lax voice stretches the limitations of his dry draw. Wallers also takes time aside to delve into the cow punk depths by accentuating slow, disjointed country songs with the elongated, off-center vocals akin to a drunken cowboy singing along to Hank Williams in a Knoxville watering hole.

Wallers’ lyrics match his delivery. One minute he reveals a harsh truth then he turns around to pepper it with surreal imagery—garnering the oft-written comparison to Mark E. Smith. The lyrics also feature juvenile jokes and crass, street corner cussing seamlessly inserted between profound thoughts. This kind of playfulness prevents the band from becoming a clever version of an early ’80s anarcho-punk act.

The vehicle that drives Wallers’ vocals and lyrics—a barrage of somewhat repetitive guitar riffs that can provide a straightforward militant stomp as well as a fractured, slanted pastiche of sound— is equally impressive. At times, so much happens within a particular riff that it becomes this moving whole that, when dissected, proves to be constructed by dissimilar parts—an off-beat art rock rhythm, a few cryptic notes and, at base, an ever-slightly changing riff.

In all, the Country Teasers remain exciting from album to album because their find a lot of leeway within their basic musical strategy. They teeter on the boundary between arty and pretentious without tipping. They nod to their predecessors without derivative structuring or outright stealing. With six full-length records and a plethora of singles in their backlog, they’ve constructed a body of work that exhibits a bit of experimentation—notably on their singles and the underappreciated Full Moon Empty Sportsbag. But they’ve cooked the perfect dish—a dinner that tastes delicious and fresh with every simple twist.

But even the world’s best taco can be improved. The band could explore terrain that borders their comfort zone without ruining their basic mojo. With their split with Ezee-Tiger, the Teasers fulfill their potential and hint at a bright, exciting future for the band’s sound. On the album, we get the drab, sing-slurred twang Wallers showcased on Destroy All Human Life and the strangely disconnected guitar lines. But the addition of spiraling piano lines, bouncy/jovial rhythms and off-kilter multi tracked vocals add a dose of psychedelica to the tried and true CT sound.

With 12 songs packed onto a single side, the record carries a somewhat pessimistic message of “no future to be found” but retains a wry delivery in line to the band’s trademark sound. Variations on the no future theme permeate the record, as the band trots out molasses-paced “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” instrumentation, Eastern rhythms and inserts the sounds of various household and toy store noisemakers.

The lyrics mimic the instrumental mood, as Wallers spouts out lines like: “Don’t be fooled by the sandwich board which says: ‘It’s the end of the world. Can I borrow ten pounds?’” On “Space,” the merry-go-round piano-and-guitar spiral is driven to the rubber room with Wallers shouting “I need a pony” in the middle of a song wherein the lines “Wanting to take drugs/Needing to take drugs” make up the majority of the lyrical content.

On tunes like “Open Country,” the listener gets to eavesdrop on the band as they flesh out a tune. Wallers slows down his delivery to a depressing drone and the band hikes up and down the fretboard. Wallers lists actions he took while in the woods in a droll voice, as the band looks around their confines to find a new wall to paint. Intergalactic keyboards and dreary, wavering guitar chords are chucked into the bridge in an attempt to see if they stick.

The Rebel’s Northern Rocks Bear Weird Vegetable, which features multiple members of the Teasers, showcases the looser sketchbook feel of “Open Country.” Recorded live on WFMU, the songs on the LP possess a tight framework with enough room to feel out the lyrics that best suit each track.

The relaxed album is more straightforward than the Ezee Tiger split, with many songs exhibiting simple instrumental platforms for Wallers’ diatribes. The band snatches driving guitar lines from classic rock sources. The instrumental introduction on Northern Rocks The rhythm guitar on “Turtle v. Octopus” contains echoes of the dark, forceful power chords that underlined the Kinks’ outrage on “Rats.” Strangely, the washed-out guitar behind “Arabian Nights” alternates between the wah-soaked eeriness of Midnight Oil and the fist-pumping sanded-down sonics of Billy Idol.

But the album is not without quirks. Robert McNeill’s synthesizer lines play a more prominent role on Northern Rocks, lending an odd cosmic feel to a few songs. Oldie-but-goodie “Life is a Rehearsal” gets new life from a cartoonish, skronk-rock game of follow-the-leader.

The uniform repetition of most of the songs on Northern Rocks heightens the thrill of the bits where the band breaks out of formation. A guitar line at the end of “Civilian Life” lends urgency to the allegory of a man who gives up his vices, extending the narrative with a dazzling spiderweb of fretboard interworking.

(After almost two months of trying to come up with a quirky final paragraph, I just decided to post it as is and move on to the next project, which should be out sometime next week)

Holy Mountain

Sacred Bones

More Stuff for sale

2009-05-06T22:33:00.001-06:00

Here

zap

2009-03-30T20:01:00.002-06:00

Reissues

Outside of a few ardent music fans, hipsters and record collectors, how many Americans ever heard of the Axemen before the Siltbreeze reissue campaign? I’m guessing not many of us had the pleasure and, yet, the band steadily released albums throughout the last two-and-a-half decades. At face value, it seems like the band just wishes to entertain themselves and devotees by performing and recording their take on the music they enjoy. These hermetic tribes usually end up being the most effective musical acts because their mission really cannot fail. If the mind’s creation gears continually turn and you possess the unique ability to, at once, channel and transform the music that inspires you, not much could go wrong. Such is the case with the Axemen.

So, TJ Lax provides the public with a vital service and a history lesson by releasing not one but two Axemen reissues in 2009. The first installment, 1984’s Big Cheap Motel, proves why this band deserves the reissue treatment and the attention it will likely receive by bearing the Siltbreeze tag. Like a more cohesive version of their UK brothers from other mothers on the Street Level Records roster, the Axemen kick grimy, postmodern, crooked punk-jazz sermons filtered through a boombox haze and serious subject matter that is littered with in-jokes. Milk, sexism and breasts all factor into a biting take on UK anarcho-punk lyrics soundtracked by a serious defacto homage to the aforementioned Street Level sounds.

In fact, the second tune on the album—billed as a rehash of album-opener “Big Fat ‘M’”— sounds like a looser a Good Missionaries outtake tracked on top of a Danny and the Dressmakers tune. A dense, plodding rhythm line lays the grounds for a strange, possible anti-sexism rant wherein the singer exhibits the same off-kilter, slurred sing-speak vocals as Mark Perry. Interrupted by chatter and greasy guitar-driven sound experimentation, the song detours into a shapeless pile of intersecting ideas before briefly rising back into its initial structure. The results of the expedition on the second rendition of “Big Fat ‘M’” could be disastrous and annoying if its slant on song construction continued for an entire album.

But the Axemen duck this possible pitfall and keep Big Cheap Motel fresh and exciting by providing a home base of sound to which they can return after their journey into a foreign territory commences. Songs like the title track and “The Pornographic Milk Drink” showcase this sound without sacrificing the variety of execution techniques that runs through the album. Pleasantly skewed junkyard Buddy Holly rhythm lines played atop walls of distorted uber-rock riffs that contain the weight and force of a Flipper-like death dirge and the occasional saxophone blurt frame the basic vehicle for the band’s Brautiganian lyrical worldview. “The Pornographic Milk Drink” contains rotating metal spoke on a ferris wheel guitar leading into a sludgy sewage drain of a riff. Lead guitar lays the groundwork for a boogie-infused take on the band’s sound, as big ‘70s hard rock sounds collide with the band’s surrealist take on Crass Records political sloganeering.

Built around a thick guitar line that is distorted until it becomes a fluid conveyer belt of sound, the title track reaps the benefits of its relative simplicity. The mantra of “Big cheap motel/ Big Tamla motel” pairs with the lava guitar flow to form a song that would work fine with guitar and vocals. But each time the Axemen run through things, a slight variation on the initial theme seems to arise on the next go-round—an off-rhythm guitar line, extra guitar fractures, a more minimal drum beat. The initial riff melts into small, blurry guitar bridges. A faux-Dick Dale guitar construction spackled in the cracks of “Big Cheap Motel” wanders to whatever rhythmic variation that the guitarist feels best compliments the tune. All the slight variations keep the sense of adventure that Big Cheap Motel showcases in tact.

Big Cheap Motel is one of those records where you can imagine the band’s thought process as they delve into any musical alleyway that pleases them. Though the names and age range of the band members are hard to discern from the liner notes (the insert contains poorly Xeroxed photos of the band and each band member’s name printed in black magic marker with an arrow pointed to his place in the photo), Big Cheap Motel contains the wide-eyed looseness of a bunch of kids in a garage trying to mimic the music they enjoy. Let’s do a hardcore tune. Let’s try inserting a drill sound on this one. The refreshing results vary wildly from the artists’ that may or may not have inspired the Axemen but the band’s affinity for the challenge and reward of artistic creation shines through.

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

Next up on the reissue circuit: A new release by Ecstatic Peace of an album that almost never made if off of the holding shelf—Menstruation Sisters’ Samantha, My Whack Panther. Originally slated as a multi-label 2004 release, it’s the album no one knew they were missing. Only three releases by this Australian duo (sometimes foursome) crawled onto my turntable but they all nullified all the distractions in the room and captured my imagination. In 2008, No Fun provided the much-needed service of reissuing MA, an abrasive and texturally –shifting release that found the band firing a manic guitar, drums and squeals attack out of its amps.

Acting as the polar opposite of MA while retaining strands of the band’s DNA, Samantha, My Whack Panther sounds like the DNA songs wherein Arto Lindsay starts speaking gibberish and, subsequently, the guitar attack becomes elastic, slacking and tightening with the vocal delivery. The Menstruation Sisters strip their sound to the bare basics on the album, leaving vast fields of negative space between guitar notes, nonsensical chattering and drum pats. To some, the sound on Samantha... may evoke a group of mentally handicapped youngsters trying to formulate a song by piecing together fractions of the elements that bond to create music. But the minimal, wiseass jazz delivery on Samantha… is cold, calculated and, well, fun.

In a documentary US Maple, Steve Albini talked about the confusion that resulted from the crowd at a US Maple concert attempting to slam dance only to hear the band disassemble the rhythm and refuse to glue its pieces back together. On Samantha…, the Menstruation Sisters achieve the same effect. Each time the band seems to gain steam and formulate a somewhat cohesive riff, production grinds to a halt and the band takes apart its product. But the parts splayed about the floor are in and of themselves a whole.

To Come:

More 7"s
Country Teasers
Nothing People
Lots of good stuff.
Drop me a line kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com

The Olsen Twins Nekkid

2009-03-09T19:54:00.002-06:00

Wormsblood “Mastery of Creation Demos” LP (Barbarian Records, 2009):

George Magers showed me this one a few summers ago. When I asked about the artist, George just said: “It’s the guys from Davenport doing black metal.” I hate to stereotype a band, but from my experiences listening to Davenport, I couldn’t fathom the pulverizing bleakness of Wormsblood. But Clay Ruby seems willing to tackle any musical niche he enjoys. Although I really don’t care for a lot of his projects, at least he has the gall to branch out and know he’s bound to win over most experimental music fans at some point with one of his creations. If his power electronics/ambient/haunted circuit incarnate Burial Hex proves anything, it’s that he possesses the ability to summon the darkness and construct the polar opposite of the Davenport stuff I’ve heard.

So, with the small amount of information I acquired about Clay Ruby since my initial Wormsblood listening session, the context of the black metal project. It also comes as no surprise that Ruby jumps around the boundaries of black metal with the second Wormsblood demo featured on this LP. It starts out with an attack that brings to mind the spastic assault of Japanese hardcore/metal warlords GISM. “Fragments of the Witch” revels in a dank dungeon wherein chain-bound slaves sleep in cowboy piss. Echoing wildman vocals from the stone torture basement collide with Nordic conquest guitars. The crew expands the song logically with triumphant guitar bridges and a battle worn collapse.

From there, Ruby’s warriors blaze a path through the typical black metal tunnels. Lightning fast distorted guitars, pained screams, nature sounds and mystical ambient electronic mists round out the band’s basic sound. “Sig Bind” thumps its chest with a psychotic drumbeat and the stream of guitar violence that typifies black metal crypts, as the singer belts out manic distress calls like a mother holding her recently deceased child after a suicide bombing. On “The First Dim Shinings (of those about to be Awakened),” the black mass turns to a mental asylum choir band’s rendition of a traditional folk ballad, minstrel spirit slogs through the Revolutionary War drumbeat tempo.

The Gravehill Demos, a 2004 collection and my first introduction to the band, sprawls out a rougher sound with vocals blending with the instrumental core like phantasms lurking in the corners of a dilapidated house. Jet fueled guitars burn through songs and the prototypical Animal from “The Muppets” drum beats help light the one-dimensional four-track blaze. The band throws spooky psychedelica into the breakdown on “A Wolf in the Night,” with wolves, distorted guitar and vagrants howling around a drum circle. The threatening whispering, dog barks and tape fuckery between songs sounds more like the creepy passages on We’re only in it for the Money than Darkthrone. Odder still, on “Of a Mourning Phase Unstirred,” the band slows the tempo and allows the singer (Zodiac Wyrdskull, The Lung or someone else with a funny name) perform a little Alice Cooper grandstanding, as he shouts indecipherable nonsense with the black metal fire beneath him.

Though I enjoy black metal music, my knowledge and taste in the genre tends to stray from that of the firmly entrenched black metal fans that I know. I still like the so-called “fake black metal” of bands like Xasthur and Leviathan. I like the fact that so many of black metal frontmen obscure their vocals by screaming, using horrid recording gear and piles of distortion and sometimes pushing their yelps further back into the mix so the vocals act as an instrument rather than a device for conveying lyrics. Seriously, I don’t want to know what these guys sing about. Haunted forests, demons, the occult and olden times fail to interest me and, if I possessed the ability to decipher the screams, it would put a damper on my listening experience. Luckily, Wormsblood overcome all of these possible pitfalls by sticking to the original formula.

News:

Scott Foust is bringing his film “Here’s to Love” around Europe. From the Swill Radio Web site: “We are very busy here at HQ. I am in the midst of arranging a long tour of Europe for my film, Here's To Love!, as well as a variety of other performances. I'll be doing music shows as a duo with Frans de Waard under the name The Tobacconists. Frans and I will have time to work out the material and I know we'll be superb. I'm really looking forward to working with Frans.

Besides those shows and the film screenings, I'll also be doing my performance piece The Four Accomplishments a few times and maybe a lecture or two. The first show is a World Premier screening of Here's To Love! at Extrapool in Nijmegen on March 28; the last show on the continent is a screening of HTL! at Bozar in Brussels April 24, followed by The Tobacconists at Divus Gallery in London on the 25, and a screening of HTL! and a performance of The Four Accomplishments on April 26. This is a very exciting adventure for me. I have to thanks my friends Jaason von Bannisseht, whose determination is the only thing that made this tour happen; and Frans who has worked like a rented mule to make it all work. Here's to you two!”

Scott needs to book gigs from April 6 to the 13^th. You can get in touch with him through the Swill site. Also, check out the great new comp on Pineapple Tapes called Lasting. It’s the final release for Foust’s vanity label. Two other fantastic Swill releases, also: the long awaited Ian Middleton LP and an IFCO live CDr.

Next:
The Country Teasers

7”s; lots of 7”s, good ones

The awesome new Axemen reissue.

Dance

2009-03-02T19:20:00.004-07:00

Spring training started in late February. So, this blog needs to get back in shape. Time for me to get back to Derek Jeter mode instead of an Andruw Jones slump.

Time to explore the mysterious Taboo—not the disgusting porn company but a shadowy crew out of the trdw/d-Asbestos on Ice collective. The other bands in this Maine-based crew exhibit this amazing ability to convert the raw sound of jam sessions into something tangible without the aimless meandering of today’s hippie road warriors.

I enjoy how the collective thinks. These guys act like hyperactive gifted children, somehow synthesizing all these seemingly polarized ideas into grainy but intoxicating homemade gin. Trdw/d albums showcase traits unique to each project and enough overlapping aesthetics to create a niche for the label. The majority of the records find the artists tooling around with drums, guitar and glue, seeing exactly how far they can fracture a rhythm or slow down the pace until the breakdown forces them to completely shed their rhythmic skin and collapse into a pile of muscles and blood.

It’s difficult to wrap a blanket around the trdw/d sound and describe it as one body. Multiple faces of a single act appear within one release. These guys jump from high to low culture without sacrificing any intrigue. The change of pace on a record on a dime, sawing the bottom from a tune and tossing industrial clatter, a decimated pop culture sample or another sonic device onto wax to fill in the gap in the grooves. The strangers from Belfast recently sent me a tape wherein Impractical Cockpit torches “White Light/White Heat,” soaking the chugging riff found at the tail end of the song in grime and giving the lyrics the circular quality and rough feel of a scratched LP. This take on the Velvet’s tune shows why the trdw/d dudes excel at their craft. Instead of worshiping and mimicking sacred cows, they dissect the creatures, take a look inside, decide which parts they enjoy and weld them into an unrecognizable creature.

One of these monsters sloughed onto my speakers from a primordial pit last year using an LP as its vehicle. Taboo, a hairy, wide-eyed group of nomads, cooks up a slow and slurry batch of homemade Oxycontin on Their Satanic Majesty’s Third and Final Request. Trudging through junk rock rubble like classic period Bunny Brains, Taboo splurge out rumbling, frayed, dirty psychedelic guitar crud backed by caveman rhythms. When they truly hone in on their target, the band sounds like a disjointed DNA, as withering guitar shrieks and free jazz drumming circle around echoing gruff vocals.

Like the inverse of the droll, pedestrian experimentation birthed from the anus Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, fluidity seems like an afterthought on the Their Satanic Majesty’s Third and Final Request. The album welcomes the listener into the weirdness with a doorbell ring, a knock and a dog bark. Instrumental passages brainstorm how to best recreate the sounds of monkeys floating in space while illustrating the interstellar scenery. Degenerate sound experiments fill the gaps between logical thoughts. At one point, the records seems to end and a lock groove kicks in. A half-minute later, the record’s grooves appear to be filtered through a dust-chocked needle. Oddly, these potentially pretentious moments fail to induce a headache. Instead, they provide a refreshing counterpart to the standard experimentation.

It's alive

Notes:

More on trdw/d coming in future posts. Grab some of their releases here.

Been trying to write about the two awesome new Country Teasers-related projects but the words just fail to manifest themselves in a new way. Check those records out and, until next time, I’ll keep plugging away.

Finally, my hatred for the Red Sox paid off. Check March 1 post on the super cool Yankee blog, No Maas

Also, no excuse for the lack of updates but this took me a while.

Year in Swill

2009-01-19T21:28:00.005-07:00

“Does anyone create a masterpiece anymore? I suppose there is no money in it”

-Scott Foust, the liners for the Island of Taste

Scott Foust, the Rodney Dangerfield of the underground, quietly released two of the year’s best LPs on his Swill Radio imprint in 2008. While a vast number of lesser artists quickly sold out of small, private pressings of their band practices, copies of Idea Fire Company’s The Island of Taste (#1 on my 2k8 list) and Asmus Tietchens’ Telis, Telis (#14) collect dust in Foust’s basement. World’s never been a fair place.

At a purely superficial level, packaging and inserts on The Island of Taste stand out. The sheer workmanship that goes into any IFCO release is unmatched and this record goes beyond the usual superb packaging and a philosophical treatise that the band gives the listener. The inserts featured in The Island of Taste lay the record’s vision on a collection of postcards. Furthering the vision, Karla Borecky’s painting of hearts (hot peppers?) growing on a thin gram cracker that hovers over the ocean sort of sums up the aural sense of the album—the industrial clashing with the natural and spawning the surreal.

Akin the Shadow Ring’s I’m Some Songs— the darker soulmate of The Island of Taste, the album is a lot to digest on the first, second and even third go-round. Borecky, Foust and co. construct an engrossing and multifaceted work of art in which new motifs, sounds and ways of interpreting the album emerge with each listen. It’s an album that halts all movement in of a room and serves as a torch welding the joint between natural and manmade beauty, beauty and dread.

Within the first few songs, a distinct vision emerges—that of the natural versus manmade. The album begins with a possible homage to Salmon Run, as footsteps and flat, conveyer belt synth take push a beautiful opera performance to the background and welcome the listener to a factory of sound. The title track focuses on natural beauty, as a slow, resonating piano and a crackling tape manipulation wind converge overtop bird chirps. The tape sounds wash over the composition like waves, adding a subtle short wave radio static undertone at times but mainly compliments the idyllic scenery. From there, “Like the Old Days” acts as the offspring of the two previous tunes, incorporating the spiral dissonance from “Land Ho” into the beach scenery found on “The Island of Taste.”

On the second side, IFCO focuses on the darker part of the album’s equation. A channel surfing on AM radio pairs with a few low lingering piano notes on “Lost Victories” to create a sense of dread. IFCO charts new territory in “Heroes of the Last Barracade.” The tune features haunting vocals conquering the rain and the rusted swingset funk of the New Blockaders. “Last Man…Last Round…” serves as the album’s death knell, as it marches the listener back into the material world with low piano strikes and a steady power drill drone.

To say that The Island of Taste is merely one of the year’s best records sells it short. I spent a year and a half absorbing The Island of Taste and the record still captures my imagination. I slept while the album played. I listened to it in the background. I listened to it lying down and standing up, overjoyed and depressed, drunk and sober. But I never listened to the album with another living soul in the room, with the exception of my dog. Both “the Heroic Chiseling Phase” and “The Island of Taste,” two of Foust’s written works, urge reader to eliminate distractions and focus on the matter at hand. The Island of Taste successfully clears away those distractions for the listener. IFCO creates a world wherein the listener could take an hour or so and loose himself in its confines. The record is an experience, not just a work of art.

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

Understated perfectly describes Asmus Tietchens’ Telis, Telis. Through command and restraint, Tietchens fashions quiet bits of static into an electric cattle fence soundtrack. The grooves of the record exemplify its sparse nature, as the analog signals are visible to the patient observer. These barbed wire-shaped analog signals also mirror the sound. Like an alternation between nicks and scratches on a dusty LP and the repeating grooves at the end of a record, Tietchens’ sonic construction at first sounds intrusive.

On “Teilmenge 20,” which comprises the first side, a blackened oscillating hum sound fills some of the negative space between each static twitch. However, small spirals of synth gradually emerge and poke through the crackling cobwebs. At first, the waves of drone feel light, relaxing and almost psychedelic but they develop into a shallow breath pattern. As the synth continues to flow between the cackles, bubbling computer moans probe the outer regions of the cackling and only to hibernate under the fog,

A high-frequency tone replaces the scratches at the beginning Side B. Somehow colder than the first side, “Teilmenge 44” feels like a trip through a steel sewage drain. The high-pitched pulse and electronic demon steam give the impression of an inanimate object trying to communicate with a living organism. Furthering this vibe, “Ein weiteres Leben geht zu Ende” features computerized breaths and a low-volume drone. The drone also rotates beneath the final song, “Teilmenge 33A.” Crawling data processing bugs serve as the vehicle for the final track, climbing up the drone and infesting the spare synth raindrops.

Telis, Telis requires undivided attention and achieves this through subliminal sonic patterns. The disruptive environment carved out at the forefront of the record’s layered sound serves as a demand for the listener’s focus. Tietchens’ compositions slowly manage to dominate the air in the room. The listener notices when even the slightest underlying drones and synth patterns emerge because Tietchen’s owns the room.

The Rest:

In addition to the two Swill LPs, Foust also wrote his philosophic musings on a series of postcards for Entr’acte. I can’t for the life of me find them around my house. Also, his years in the making feature film Here’s to Love was released on Swill (review forthcoming).

Idea Fire Company contributed both parts of “The Heroic Chiseling Phase” to a split LP with Felix Kubin that came with the second issue of Big Mag. The song harkens back to older IFCO releases. A throbbing synth that sounds like electronic jug band guitar swirls in discarded water fountain streams in both parts of the tune, carving out the hypnotic trajectory exemplified on Anti-Natural. It’s IFCO’s sound stripped of all ersatz but still effective.

Those jonsing for unadulterated synth drones straight out of a ‘70s sci-fi flick should check out Idea Fire Company “Postcard” 7” (Entr’atce). “Sunsports” feels like the first encounter with the half-man, half robot in a darkened drainage pipe.

Also a long overdue reissue of XX Committee’s “Network,” which will be prominently featured in a wrap up of the best reissues of 2008.

To Come:

Just what the hell is a trd/wd anyway? A look at Maine’s finest mindfuck

Year in Country Teasers

Albums I dug in 2008

File Under Forgotten Records

2008-12-14T17:53:00.002-07:00

NOTE: I always listen to the music readers send but sometimes it takes me a while to listen to the album. Here's some of the cream of the crop.

Mayyors “Marines Dot Com” 7” (MtStMtn, 2008): This single bounces around in the same threatening but goofy area that the Butthole Surfers once dominated. The tunes sway like a drunken elephant with forceful, shimmying vocals echoing amidst a barrage of guitar shrieks and corpse parade drumming. “Fatigue” morphs from a vaguely normal tune into this parallel universe of decaying Ford Pinto blues wherein the Buttholes commandeer the vehicle and drive into a cornfield. “Metro” blazes through an urban jungle of filth, catching cocaine speed as it builds. I think it scorched my turntable.

Francis Harold and the Holograms “The Eagle Can’t Fly with only One Right Wing” b/w “Two Faggots, One Cunt” (Going Underground Records, 2008): Nasty, crass hardcore played through an echo tube and fueled by cheap beer and hatred. The shouted vocals alternate between a drunken lecture and an impassioned cry from the depths of Gary Heidnik’s underground chamber. Guitars’ metallic edges thunder along with Mack truck power and pierce with white noise when parked at a rhythm rest stop. The bass keeps a steady, menacing thud along with the drums, underscoring the lingering danger. Explosive stuff in the Unabomber sense.

Cadaver in Drag “Raw Child” LP (Animal Disguise, 2007): How’d I never get to this one last year? Thick as a brick bass lines that rattle walls and a zombie march pace open this masterful death rock album. “Walking through the Gates of Hell” keeps the IV drip crawl of late-period Sleep and add throat-scraping howls and distorted voodoo guitar. As the tempo slows and speeds up again, splinters of slanted guitar blast from the rhythmic platform and explode into violent bursts of electricity. The opus ends with a barrage of dissonant guitars a la early Sonic Youth then a meditative void of krautrock synth. Side B begins with a tempo change but forsakes none of the gloom and fuzz with the crust punker “Fuck This Place.” During the song, the band’s electrified chemistry comes to light when they add a weird tone here and amp up the discordance there but stay in synch with one another. The riff on “Fuck this Place” eventually sucks the listener into a void and never loses his attention. The tune ekes out a motorix rhythm from some heavy bass and a whirlwind axe burn. The band veers into an epic metal slant with “Secession ‘61,” which apes the intensity of Neurosis’ Through Silver in Blood, albeit with a brown psychedelic curve. The songs warped synth lines coalesce with the doom metal bass and flickering flame of the dirty distort-strings to lead the soldiers back to the line and lend perfect symmetry to the experience.

Gasoline Gathers Hands, Gathers Friends “Our Hearts are on Fire” CDr (Unknown; maybe Cloud Valley?): I don’t know where this CD came from or how it landed on top of my stereo. Due to the beige-and-black ancient Japanese-style artwork, I figured the breeze guided some kind of Suishou No Fune album into the window. Instead a crooked soul/neo-folk album glided out of the speakers. The band mimics the psychedelic folk of mid-period Tower Recordings, painting the future-past mood with a late-20^th century-sounding recording captured on a scratchy 78. But, in this case, the imitative aspect of the band’s sound fails to sink into a mere soulless tribute to the aforementioned woodsmen. The band succeeds by sketching domestic dread through the projection of a fading sepia toned abandoned mansion image onto the mind’s eye. Guitarist Jag’s play captivates by evoking industrial scenery through constant movement. Early on, Track 2 trudges through the repetitive finesse required to affix hands to small custom clocks. Track 3 maps out a passenger’s thoughts as the train wheels chug beneath his compartment. Scott Johnson’s vocals alternately build off of PG Six’s creepy, breathy whisper and Thom Yorke’s wavering falsetto, a pairing that seems annoying and hipsterish on paper but works wonders for the dreary atmosphere contained on the album. His piano work falls from the upper portion of stereo speakers like lightly flowing droplets of rain. In all, a surprisingly refreshing nest of sorrow and ghosts.

Craft Bandits “zzz” CDr (Breakdance the Dawn, 2008): Continuting the poltergeist vibe, Craft Bandits lurk in an abandoned asylum, thrashing about in a dusty playpen of slanted murk riffs as the sound bounces off walls. The strained screams of abused former patients float around the dilapidated castle. Sounds like a chopped and screwed tape of space aliens with a backbeat of retard drums and broken guitar. All form together to make take the listener into the disturbed mind. What it must feel like to turn into a glass of orange juice after drinking massive quantities of bug spray.

Gonna start doing short reviews here and there to up my game. Peace

RIP Vic Mackey

2008-11-16T16:04:00.002-07:00

Neil Hagerty created a library filled with albums which barely resemble one another. From straight ‘70s dirty boogie rock to cut-up drug hazes, the band trekked through the angles of rock posturing. Hagerty’s career resembles Lou Reed’s insofar as Hagerty changed musical styles as often as Lou switched faces. Like Lou (and virtually every other veteran covered in this blog), listeners often misunderstand Hagerty’s best music, only to revisit it years down the road and praise it. Consistency is the difference between Lou and Neil. Whereas Lou stacks multiple albums on shelves before recording a slight gem, Hagerty’s inclusion on an album almost always denotes at least a solid effort and, at least with the Trux, often moving musical ideas forward. When Hagerty stumbles, as he did on Sweet Sixteen, he dusts himself off and finds some new jive to break down.

Earth Junk (Drag City) may signify Hagerty’s return to orbit after two subpar outing but the usual critical clichés fail to apply here. Hagerty always maintains his focus. He constantly explores new territory. He never strays far from his initial form or, rather, never mangles his sound beyond recognition. He never lost his sense of adventurousness, although sometimes that adventurousness seemed underdeveloped or, well, annoying as hell.

Night Version of the Eternal probes the edge of his last fans’ nerves with seven minute songs containing the same tempo, monotone vocals and masturbatory guitar solos. XI allotted a creative vent to the Howling Hexers hanging around the recording studio and, thus, features a scant three Hagerty tunes. The Hagerty tunes on the album sound sharp lyrically and instrumentally and a new he adds a pained, cracking dynamic voice to the songs. The rest of the songs on the album sound like the jumbled mess of an alt-rock battle of the bands night at a North Dakota college bar.

Somewhere between XI and Earth Junk, Hagerty regained a sense of excitement while retaining his explorative nature. The album doesn’t feature a back-to-the-basics formula so much as it strips out the extra ersatz. As with Hagerty’s solo debut, organ and guitar provide the shifting tapestry for the album and Hagerty spins a web of psychedelic country carnival tunes atop his backdrop.

Like the first two Howling Hex albums and the compilation 1-2-3, Earth Junk contains it fair share of weird lyrical scenarios (or, maybe, strange observations of common situations) and prominently features oddly juxtaposed riffs. “No Good Reason” features a sharp-toothed guitar line straight out of the bridge to a Thin Lizzy song cutting through a gentle nighttime organ melody. Opener “Big Chief Big Wheel” features a merry-go-round structure on the keys while Neil unloads hazy licks in the background. As an added bonus, Hagerty sings nonsensical early rock rhythm toss offs like “sha-la-la-la-la.” The tune features a ton of negative space between the vocal timing and the organ rhythm, lending a creepy atmosphere and a pedistal to Hagerty’s almighty guitar.

In many songs on the album, the space between highlights Hagerty’s virtuoso guitar playing. The minimal atmosphere allows Hagerty to flex his guitar skills and, at times, Hagerty uses this ability to let his ax to teeter on the edge of implosion before dragging it back into the riff. The most effective songs on the album use the hallucinogenic repetition of the organ as a launching pad into the heady riff battery of Hagerty’s Trux tenure. “Contraband and Betrayal” finds Hagerty playing around with some surf rhythm leads and a lot of reverb before he parlays his earnings into acid head guitar that warps into zombie dialogue. Our hero emerges victorious on “Blood and Dust,” wherein he lets go of any restraint he exhibited on the album. The song consists of ghost story keys and a speak-sing murder ballad. Hagerty fills in the blanks with fire. His distorted guitar solos shoot from the amp through the cracks of the organ, wrapping the tune in a scrambled haze akin to Keiji Haino.
And, vualla, the Hagerty we know and love emerges. He looks the same—not too far removed from traditionalists but post-modern enough to move musical dialogue forward. He’s still cocky, showing a fuck-all attitude to naysayers and continuing to do what he does best. Namely, creating records people will hate now and love in five years.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sitting, listening to the new Car Commercials LP (Soft Abuse), I thought: “This takes talent.” No, not the listening part but the musicianship, or lack thereof. I mean, Dom DiMaggio knows how to play guitar. Home Blitz showcases DiMaggio’s harmonic side, wherein guitars ring with a bit of dissonance but the melody stay aligned with the garage rock aesthetic. When moonlighting with the Car Commercials project, DiMaggio unlearns guitar. The band sounds like a chopped version of Home Blitz, complete with open gaps and post-modern instrumentation. Unlike Jandek, these guys never tune their guitars in overly-odd ways and strum amateurish, open-tuned mush. They retain some semblance of a rhythm and their guitar mumbles and shrieks often logically fit into the tunes.

But Car Commercials’ sound falls apart in the most glorious way. Each scrap the band throws into the wild fits into place like a giant scrap yard version of Tetris. The guitars fall into and out of the astral rhythm and warbling mid-throat vocals (think Jad Fair minus MAOI-inhibitors). Come to think of it, the closest comparison to the band would be an out-of-rhythm, psychotic Half Japanese.

On their second album in less than a year, Car Commercials add instrumentation other than the usual guitar-drum set up and create a more thematically solid effort. Not to say that the album drops the cacophonous discordant racket found on other releases. Keyboards underscore the discordance, giving it an eerie undertow at times. Pure, unadulterated feedback litters the wastelands of Car Commercials tunes, setting the tunes further apart from sanity.

Lyrically, the band mumbles about people looking at them, pain and other alienating themes to a soundtrack of minimal skronk blues and maximum despair. Fractured thoughts linger beneath scraps of percussion, circus melodies and frustrated guitar spasms.

In all, Eric’s Diary one-ups Judy’s Dust, the first Car Commercials album of the year, by exhibiting the band’s range. The chronic controlled chaos of Eric’s Diary supplements the initial album’s high, lonesome blues. One cannot just pick up a guitar and dream up this type of controlled chaos.

2008-10-27T23:29:00.002-06:00

New Blog in a few days. For now, check out Anthony Jeselnik- funniest comedian I've seen in a while (besides Doug Stanhope). Probably, since Mitch Hedberg died

Jimmy Kimmel Live

Late Night with Conan O'Brien

Your Wife is Licking my Strobe Light and Grinning

2008-09-29T20:37:00.004-06:00

This year moved along like diarrhea with a massive flow of thick, gushy gold in the beginning and a few spurts near the end. Nothing People and Sic Alps revamped rock and Car Commercials and the Hospitals reinvented it. Idea Fire Company and Graham Lambkin/Jason Lescalleet delved into new forms of sonic expression, each taking the piss out of the younger generation of space cowboys.

As much as I enjoyed listening to the vast amount of wonderful records that came out of the woodwork this year, I find myself running out of ways to describe sound. Sure, the music I review tends to contain brave new sonic templates that leave the music wide open for original interpretations. But I find myself working in circles, using the same tired metaphors and descriptions. While writer’s block does not exist, periods of bad ideas and limited lexicon command bog down productivity.

I often ignore the shape of sound. Whereas genre bounds music into a narrow corridor and leaves the interpretation up to the reader’s stereotypes, shape and color appeal to senses other than the auditory and may, in fact, mark a more accurate method of criticism. For instance, one could say Black Monk’s “Flowstone” exhibits a very circular rhythm then apply some sort of Hindenberg reference to color in the blank imagery space.

But shapes are kind of boring. There’s a finite number of geometric shapes and many of them fail to describe anything whatsoever. If one describes the motion of music with a spiel that resembles a Windows Media Player trippy vortex, the word virus spewed onto the page will recycle words and images over and over again, emulating its source material.

The problem lies in the fact that much of this music originates from a cut and dry base. Even some of the extended broheim jams from the likes of Sunburned or one of those Finnish psych collectives achieve essentially a variation of the same thing with some moaning here and some clanging there and the sudden emergence of a riff. It becomes difficult to conjure the shape of a tune with a repetitive rhythm or a disjointed tribal feeling.

On top of all that, I really disdain trying to express the philosophy behind most compositions. I find most philosophical interpretations of music boring and far fetched. People want to know what something sounds like. They don’t want to read your dissertation.

So, yeah, I have to find new ways to describe music in order to continue this blog and maintain a level of quality.

…but for now, here’s some tired-ass reviews:

Circuit Des Yeux “Symphone” LP (De Stijl; 2008): Here’s a weird one, even by my standards. The music centers around Haley Fohr, a one-woman-band, as she paints tone poems a la Inca Ore. With an apparent unwillingness to stay within a particular genre, Fohr examines a variety of musical motifs, stomping each apart and toying with the broken parts. Guitars, piano, organ and assorted sound effects build an eerie dungeon of lo-fi sound for Fohr to practice her witchcraft. The maestro sometimes yelps apart from the music surrounding her and the poor fidelity of the tape crinkles under the weight of her banshee accentuations. Other times she resorts to pixie jive, melding her mysterious voice with airy instrumentals. On “Folk,” the chameleon fiddles with a backdrop of urgent, gunslinger acoustic guitar and some distant mantra recitations pushed into the corner. Some critics compared her guitar playing to that of Jandek but Fohr posses the ability to strum disjointed loner skronk while remaining in a melodic realm a la early Shadow Ring. “Happy,” the album’s strongest track, shines with a laser slide guitar attack and an elastic vocal performance, both of which entangle and create a ball of sharp teeth and hair. With Symphone, Fohr constructs a wonderful addition to the duo of vocal-centered, femme sound fuckery, alongside US Girls’ Introducing… and Inca Ore’s Birthday of Bless You.

Social Junk “Concussion Summer” LP (Not Not Fun, 2008): Here’s an album I’d abstain from purchasing if left to my own devices. One of the guys from Hair Police produced it and a guy from Yellow Swans mastered it. Not that either band deserves scorn but I really want to stray from them. I thought the record would contain some bland electronics tweaking and a lot of moaning. Well, it contains a fair amount of moaning but the odd hums add to the spooky, fractured atmosphere. Social Junk transcends its peers by delving into a wholly different musical language. They share none of the electronic freak outs, zoned drones or bile with the Yellow Swans and Hair Police. The band crafts riffs from percussion and uses fragments of sound to solidify their frightening atmospherics. Each tune splinters into snippets of electronics, choppy vocals and cymbal smacks. These monsters exhibit the disjointed, robotic nihilism of early industrial with the impreciseness of no wave. To balance out the album, a few chill-out tunes drift through the vinyl like benzo dream. “House Fire (He’s Still Dead)” takes two layers of narcotic female vocals and surrounds them with sparse guitar, building to a blistering scream of an electronic buzz. A fascinating guitar riff appears within the laid-back “Depleted,” possibly the most Yellow Swans-esque tune on the album. The riff—a few bubbling finger taps and dragged-out tones—sounds almost Satanic in its threatening nature, with an added dose of futurism to balance out the hellfire. Can’t judge an album by its back cover, I guess.

Black Monk “Flowstone” 12" (Arbor, 2008): Originally two releases (one on Buried Valley, one on Maim & Disfigure), this 12” collects three volcanic guitar orgasms. “Murmur” moans and howls like a beast emerginig from the netherworld, as skittering percussion and what sounds like compressed drone moan snippets encase the axe growls. The spaceship hovers on “Untitled,” levitating the spirit with its vacuous whirl and creeping throughout the body with spiraling orbs of robo-whistles. “Flowstone” engulfs Side B with a thick, evil air and some George Hurley drum soloing. After a few minutes, the tune spirals into a sort of Satanic rites festival, as the guitar swarms around the dangerous drum circle. In all, a great title rescued from the junk heap of obscurity. Here’s an idea: All the people who bitch about Zac Davis allegedly ripping them off should be like Mr. Treetops and reissue out-of-print Maim and Disfigure shit like the Negative World cassette and the various classic releases by sub-swamp acts he culled from flop houses across the United States. Also, keep the profit. And spread the love (and the disease).

German “Bunker” CD (Killertree, 2008): Close your eyes. Wait, open them and keep reading this blog. Just imagine a Killertree Records release in your mind. What appears? Guitars, right? Grimy, fuzz drenched psych guitars? Maybe some understated vocals? Bongos? Certainly not jittering industrial percussion that sounds like an extension of the breakdown part on Pink Floyd’s “Bike.” Mystical twisting clicks and sparkling chimes infuse to birth some sort of African extraterrestrial tribal ceremony on the album opener “Damiscus.” To follow up the glitter, the shadowy musicians spread out ten minutes of gloom. “Road to Knowhere” pushes a dingy, whispering melodic hint into a darkened tunnel and light-but-thunderous percussion stomps around overhead, menacingly, until a few drawn-out strings moan. The brief, 17-minute disc ends symmetrically with a whirlwind of zoned keyboard and tapped percussion. The lumberjack at Killer Tree continues to pull deep roots from the underworld.

Rad XX Committee reissue, PussyGutt, Burnt Hills, Henry Kuntz and Tyr/d compilations reviews coming soon.

Check this out. Also buy the postcards Scott Foust just made. They have this cool "Smoking is Green" essay I was trying to find for this post.

The world needs a drunk but a drunk doesn't need the world.

Vote for Robinson Cano.

For Sale

2008-09-15T12:55:00.008-06:00

I need to make some space. I'm selling these items. E-mail me to reserve and for shipping prices (kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com) with the subject line "Apple Order." More to come, including movies, books, more music and assorted other stuff. GO BIG BLUE WRECKING CREW! Actual post to come today; nEW STUFF ADDED 9/26

CDs

Whitehouse “Dedicated to Peter Kurtin” $7
Whitehouse “Asceticists 2006” $7
Prurient “Fossil” $5
Prurient/Wolf Eyes “The Warriors” $5
Culturcide “Year One” $8
Sonic Youth “SYR 5” $3
Sonic Youth “SYR 1” $3Swell Maps "A trip to Marineville" $5
Can't "Prepares to Fail Again" $5
Wayne Rogers "Constant Displacement" $1
Hair Police "Our Minds Trouble Vol. 2" $8
Wolf Eyes "Uglied" $12
Crawlspace "Static from the Slowdown" $3
Slither "Rude Stew" $4
Darkthrone "Under a Funeral Moon" (no back cover; disc is scratched and skips in parts) $5
Eyes and Arms of Smoke "In Three Houses" $5
Temple of Bon Matin "Monkeys Straw Raincoat" $3
Hzmt "Collections and space" (Heresee) $4
Keith Fullerton Whitman/Greg Davis "Yearlong" $3
Twig Harper "Nervedamaged Maced" (rare) $5
Gate “Boston/NYC 1994” (Dead C side project, Michael Morley joined by Lee Ranaldo and Zeena Parkins) $6
Rod Cooper "Friction" (good drone) $2

Reel-To-Reel

Actual "Pink is the new Black" (tapeworm tapes) $3

Cassettes
Black Sabbath Blue Cheer (BSBC) “Funeral Rehearsal” $4
BSBC “The Sense of Violence/ Supremacy of Decay” $4
BSBC “Cruel Human, War Machine/Catacombs” $4
BSBC “For the Sickly Weaklings” $4
BSBC “Endless Blocade/Man is the Bastard” $4
Saints “Ubanda” $2
Lou Reed and John Cale “Songs for Drella” $3
Sharkswithwings “Let’s Kiss the King” $2
Fossils trio “Zoo Diaries” $4
Nevari Butchers “Arms and Everything Else” (Dilloway + Guests) $3
Spectre Folk “Papa Smurf Smiles Down on Us from Heaven” $5
The Mossy Throats “Wrong Way Tarot” 2xCS + Artbook $5

CDrs
Expo 70 “Mystical Amplification” $3
Sonic Youth “Master-Dik” $3
Culturcide “Live 1981” $2
MV & EE with Bummer Road “Plays Who Do You Love” $5
Eskimo King “Tooth Shaped Migration” (Mouthus side project) $3
Spectre Fone “Newsday Long Island” (Chocolate Monk) $4
Spectre Folk “s/t” (early stuff) $4
Sunburned Hand of the Man “Double Puberty” 2xCdr $5
Three Outpourings (Sunburned side project) $3
Evil Moisture/Macronympha (rrr) $3
Bludfart “Live in Outer Space” $2
No Neck Blues Band “Angelo Mai” $4
Jed Speare “1&2” 2xCdr $7
Bar and Throat “Vaije” (Magic Lantern related) $3
Super Minerals “Ancient Signal” (Magic Lantern related) $3
Eureka “Eureka” (Magic Lantern Related) $3
Hair Police “Our Minds Problems Vol. 1” $4
Bunny Brains “Live in New Haven” $3
Jack Rose “s/t” (Archive) $7
Reminguez “Stupid with Brains” (Chocolate Monk, Ex-Cocaine related) $3
Sharkswithwings $3
Oleta (Goslings side project) $2
World (rare JOMF side project) $3
Prick Decay “Mud Sound for Car Stereos” (rrr) $3
Sun Araw “Boat Trip” 3” $3
6majik9 “The Human Hand” $3
6majik9 “Sellin and Handy” $3
6majik9 “in mara’s glove” $3
Vanishing Voice “The Morning After” $3
Double Leopards “9/26/04 Chicago” $7
Tom Carter “Skyline Grinder” $4
Charalambides “Strangle the Wretched Heavens” $6
Charalambides “Glowing Raw” $6
Charalambides “Emerald Message” $6
Prurient “Live at the Bulb Clubhouse 8/4/01” $3
Slither “These Trails” (fag tapes) $3
Skullflower “Obsidian Shaking Codex” (rrr) $4
Various Artists “Zelphabet A” $3
Various Artists “Zelphabet B” $3

Books

Nick Hornby "Songbook" $3
Steve Earle "Doghouse Roses" $2
Don Heider "White News" (explores race and the media) $1

Video Tapes

Chinatown $2
Roger Dodger $2
Amores Perros $3
Ramones "Around the World" $2
This is not an Exit: The Fictional World of Brenton Easton Ellis $2
The Pledge (dir: Sean Penn; starring: Jack Nicholson)
Fear of a Black Hat $2
Auto Focus $2
Twin Falls Idaho $3
The Grifters $2
Humanite $2
Sick $3 (good doc about a terminally ill man who is into bdsm)
Permanent Midnight $2
Near Dark $3
Neil Young "Silver and Gold" $3

DVD
Monty Python and the meaning of life $3
Altered States $3
Aqua Teen Hunger force Vol. 1 $6
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Vol. 2 $5

2008-09-01T18:26:00.002-06:00

I can't think of anything new to say. Joe Girardi sucks. A-Rod can't hit in the clutch. For the first time since I was 13, the Yankees will be playing golf at the end of September while Dustin Perdroia has a circle jerk with Big Pappi and Youkadick on Francona's face. Sucks. Xavier Nady is going to be an awesome Yankee, though. Mets suck- Choke city

Listening to:
Dead Girls Party CDr
Squim LP
Pussygutt 2xLP
Royal trux 1st LP
Idea Fire Company "Island of Taste" LP
T. Rex "Unicorn"
Rolling Stones "Beggar's Banquet"
Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet CD
Icky Boyfriends 2xCD
US Girls LP

You're gonna make some plastic surgeon a rich man

2008-08-11T21:57:00.003-06:00

Listening to The Shadow Ring’s Hold on to I.D. as I drove home on I-95, I found myself questioning the context behind my enjoyment of the album. If I exhibited a brighter outlook on existence, would Hold on to I.D. still hold the same value to me? The album features an increasingly surreal, apocalyptic tone, as the band intertwines a tale of rising water and intrusive aqua vermin with their band’s history. The instrumentation is sparse and dark. Lambkin plucks jagged, eerie guitar lines alongside a steady drumbeat and occasional flashes of Casio-induced white noise. Harris reads the lyrics in a deadpan, adding a frightening delivery to the dark instrumentation. If abstract art failed to engage me, I doubt I would be as enthralled by Hold on to I.D.

I spun the Shadow Ring disc for some friends one night and someone told me it sounded “pretentious.” I fail to see how art that was created by amateurs who cannot properly play their instruments yet manage to extract valid, entrancing melodies and dense, dark atmospherics can be pretentious. The Shadow Ring achieves something very honest and endearing by maintaining the passion and conviction to create art despite the obvious setback of their inability to properly play instruments. It sounds as if they fashioned a dobro out of spare guitar strings and a porch leg and assembled a series of boxes to get their message across. Yet it works because the band puts effort into their craft and labors over the final product. I’ve always felt like certain artists have a path and, if they sway too far from that path, they fail. A band trying to distinguish itself from a cookie-cutter indie group could attempt something similar to the Shadow Ring and fail miserably. Their professionalism always shows through and their freak speak never appears to be authentic. If the band rapidly strums their out-of-tune instruments like Neanderthals, hits scrap metal for an abstract percussion effect and screams about gravy pie, then I could see calling it pretentious.

But I tried to put myself in my friend’s place. What characteristics does the Shadow Ring convey that make them targets of this type of criticism? To me, overblown execution, big-budget production and grandiose aspirations warrant the pretentious label. For instance, the Guns ‘n Roses video trilogy that ends as Axl swims with dolphins warrants this description. Somewhere along the line, the music-buying public confused amateurishness and/or abstractness with pretentiousness. It coincides with the beliefs that music artists must be proficient at their particular instruments and anything that breaks with tradition and challenges the listener must be made by pompous art fags.

Then again, sometimes a new sound shocks our senses and elicits a negative response before we fully comprehend the artistic statement at hand. The other day I was listening to the Damaged and I noticed all the fuzz encrusting the tunes. I always heard critics describe the act as “noisy” and but I failed to fathom what traits warranted this description. I knew they inspired a lot of bands that incorporated dissonance and atonalities into their musical regimens. I neglected to notice the feedback Greg Ginn integrates into his riffs because bands like Sonic Youth already desensitized me to it. With crust and power violence coming to fruition as I became aware of punk, some of Black Flag’s aggressive power was lost in translation on me. Coming from a different angle and hearing Black Flag with fresh ears, it would probably take me a while to adjust to the fuzz, subject matter and overall sense of “otherness.” I might label it as somehow foreign or alien.

I cannot say if my opinion is valid or not. If you harbor similar interests, then you might enjoy the way I assess things. I sometimes project my vision of humanity onto my reviews. I also reserve dispositions, wherein, if an album contains or lacks a certain combination of elements, I accept it as a great record. For instance, one of my favorite equations goes something like spooky poetry + blurs of fuzz + intensity + shitty recording techniques = awesome band crush.

If my surroundings, personal history and circumstances were different, my tastes would probably be different. This realization sparks the question of why my opinion even matters in the long run. Given that people voice different views about music, one critic cannot convey an ultimate truth about an album. If one ultimate voice does not exist, canonization becomes obsolete. I only fathomed two valid reasons for the existence of my writing—namely, I write about music that lacks coverage from most major outlets and I am pretty well versed in rock history and the evolution of certain niches of rock. Other than that, subjectivity kinda wins.

Whatever. Here’s some picks:

Orange In the Midst of Chaos CD (reissue De Stijl, 2008): I really lack enthusiasm about new jazz and unearthed free-jazz “gems.” I never grasped the plot and am still trying to bone up on the old stalwarts. I enjoy Paul Flaherty but just looking at his discography can be a daunting task, nevermind pondering where to start. Much of the free jazz movement running concurrently with the freak folk thing fails to spark any semblance of enjoyment within me. Sometimes I feel like these guys just honk their horns, to paraphrase the great philosopher Scott Foust, and reveal the same white squalls of shriek each time. So, I approached the Orange album with small expectations but the record overcomes a lot of the hang-ups I harbored. Bassist Bob Laramie, Percussionist Glen “Hobbit” Peterson, Guitarst/Trumpeter Barry Greika and Flaherty formed the band in the mid-‘70s. Per usual, the record exhibits Flaherty’s soulful wailing sax as it ascends from earthy blues grooves to stellar heights. However, Greika’s chameleon of a guitar style boosts the album beyond the Ayler rehashing that inevitably appears on a lot of free jazz records. The fluid, loose guitar lines evoke different disciplines in the same tune. Greika’s lightning fast fret work allows him to skirt the typical pentatonic jazz bozo guitar. During “Om Shanti” alone, Greika storms up the fretboard, cranking crooked skronk sounds like a crazed Sonny Sharrock. He switches gears halfway through, as Flaherty softly pipes in, and builds a crackling, minimal base to the bearded one’s excursions. A definite no wave feel flows through the album but ambient pieces hold the thematic thread together. “Peace,” a ghost ritual with vocals pushed as low as possible, and “Sunset Beyond Safety,” a chilly seven-minute dive into ambient electric sound with percussion up front and jazz beneath the sound glacier, give the listener reprieve from the lip snarl attitude. The record gets bogged down about two-thirds of the way through the album, as the band eats Ascension pie and farts out Ayler’s ghost. However, it ends on an extremely high note with the fluttering futurism of “Subway over the Rainbow,” a blast into the krautrock atmosphere. As In the Midst of Chaos comes to a clattering, cacophonous end, the band’s gravity pulls the listener towards the chaotic sound.

Sky Juice Hard to Kill LP (Olde English Spelling Bee, 2008): This record contains all the trademarks of another great-but-faceless Maim & Disfigure release: an effortless, pasted together album art aesthetic, crude magic marker cover art with lots of curvy lines, wicked guitar tantrums and a band name that evokes both drugs and sex. For the most part, Lambsbread axeman Zac Davis steers away from the psychedelic free-for-all guitar heroics of the Ohio-based three-piece. Hard to Kill is a schizophrenic look at the many music talents of Davis as he slogs through hardcore, layered psychedelica, creepy bedroom murk and acid washed noodlings. The album’s beginnings only hint at its contents, as Davis piles wild echoing guitar lines overtop one another until they cannot be separated. Quickly, the train derails as the alleged mail-stealing midget pounds out a thick doom trudge that devolves into a mentally damaged acoustic and electric guitar spasm. The first hint at Davis the songsmith follows, as a dope-addled, claustrophobic blues howl with a tantalizing Eastern riff. Although choppy and arguably incomplete, the tune sets the pace for the rest of the album, as it weaves in and out of moods and modes. The guitar regains the centerpiece when a towering instrumental ode to Vishnu suddenly squashes the serene scene. For the remainder of the album, Davis exhibits prime creative impulses when sprawling out a laid-back, somewhat restrained guitar workout. His virtuoso distorto-jams crop up occasionally, only to be sucked back into the black tar. The album’s apex comes after Davis’ second slurring blues retreat, as the slinger maps out a tight 4-track odyssey with bleak Oriental string movements overtop a simple set of axe chirps. Davis shows a penchant for pasting loose guitar scraps into a seemingly tight composition, only to smash them apart and continue to pound any semblance of the original form into fine dust. Ending the album is a mammoth ode to Twin Infinitives. Davis churns out a crunchy, repetitive riff and spreads wayward soloing and feedback overtop. Though it will likely garner Twin Infinitives comparisons, Hard to Kill belongs in the same fractured universe but it has its own voice. The album hints that, maybe someday, Davis will construct a work of art as massive as Royal Trux’s sprawling double LP. Until then, he’s content to sit back and give the world a sampler pack of his virtues. get it from oesbee[at]gmail[dot]com or go to Fusetron

Sic Alps Untitled 7” (Important, 2008): Colored vinyl sucks. It wears out quicker and the color makes it hard to find a single track on the disc. The label warns the consumer that the one-sided disc only contains one track. But that one track happens to be a cover of a Throbbing Gristle tune. And the band executing the cover is known for its quality control. So, I shelled out the $7 to get a copy of the record and patiently awaited its arrival. When it finally came and I threw it on the player, a well-controlled industrial racket welcomed me. From there, the Alps kick out warped, flowery hermetic love tune with eroding edges. The guitar sounds like a rusty electric junkyard dobro mapping out the soundtrack on a decaying 8mm ‘70s student film. Settling beneath the watery, echoing vocals, the guitar line creeps under the skin with the nostalgia of a Johnny Gosch milk carton photo. Well worth the extra dough.

Gonna go listen to this Dead Girls Party CDr. Have fun. Send nude photos and contact me about your records at kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com. Always willing to listen to new stuff.

my war

2008-07-21T21:27:00.002-06:00

Too much of a good thing always turns pleasure into some form of distress. We knew this from a very young age. When you chomped a big load of Halloween candy, your stomach throbbed with pain.

The same principal can be applied to art. The theory deviates slightly, producing similar, but not identical, results. Too much exposure to a given niche, genre, trend, style, etc. tends to water down or devalue the original musical intent. When something catches on, people usually try to capitalize on it until they grind it into maggot feed. The masses ripped punk to shreds and turned it into a traveling circus called the Warped Tour. Honestly, when did seeing a guy with a mohawk become commonplace? In the mid-'80s, when I was a child, scummy-looking dudes with red spiky hair and studded leather jackets scared me. Not a great look but it pulled off the trick. Now, the kids buy their rebellion at the mall and fail to even shock grandma.

Music wise, this sort of takeover starts with the "lite" version of the original flavor and grows into a cultural coup. Grunge, for lack of a better pigeonhole, thrived aesthetically in its small Petri dish until corporations co-opted it. The Stooges-inspired heavy guitar buffoonery of Mudhoney and the slow thunderous thud of the Melvins still sound fresh to these ears today. After the third, thud-lite generation of these Pacific Northwesterners hit it big, bands wandered out of the woods to grab their cash bag and the music is now synonymous with watered down stadium rock like Nickelback and Puddle of Mudd.

In the past eight years, the flurry of activity in the avant, noise, weirdo underworld served to somewhat devalued the uniqueness of the music it meant to enhance. Fly-by-night labels churned out band practice tapes from the latest prolific wunderkind. Everyone seemed to operate a label and every label seemed to release limited edition cassettes or CDrs by new artists. The capitalistic initiative inspired many musicians to solder together expensive machinery or purchase pedals and samplers. Somehow, quality control never entered the minds of the machinery operators, the product inspectors or the administrators and, as a result, mediocrity flows through “out” distro lists like corpses through the Mississippi River.

Capitalistic tendencies ruin music. Sure, music needs a means to reach audiences. Many labels provide invaluable resources to struggling audiences and ensure the artist will connect with like-minded folk. A lot of people saw an opportunity to cash in when Nu-Weird America and neo-noisers hit the indie consciousness. It takes very little effort to mimic the newspaper cutout collage, thrift store Jackson Pollack or children’s drawing that appears on certain album covers. All you have to do is splatter paint or glue newspaper cut outs on a CD slip or cassette cover. Pick a band, collective or collaboration of people from semi-well-known bands and ask them for a band practice tape. Release them in editions of 30 and keep five for eBay’s sake. When a label releases five to ten albums each month, my suspicion grows, as the law of averages dictates ten horrid ones exist for every solid effort. The business model works for certain labels, namely Breakdance the Dawn, Not Not Fun (most of the time) and a few others.

By flooding the market with mediocre product, you’re cruisin’ for a revolt from the music-buying populace. Consumers grow weary of the same quality standard and will eventually raise their expectations. Soon enough, mass production dulls the initial thrill of free, formless music. Bands stop attempting to refine their skills and, instead, try to meet a product quota. The audience loses track of the various side-projects, limited-run releases, art prints and the rest of the cavalry and quit buying the albums.

Long in the brewing, the backlash is finally taking hold. The economic recession (re: Great Depression v.2.0) on the loom is forcing people to cut back on expenses. Ten years from now, 20-somethings will probably reissue some of the gems and some of the stinkers from this era. Until then, you can sift through the dollar bin at your local record hole or get one of those 10 for the price of one deals on eBay.

I was trying to find a reason why, for the past few weeks, I could not bring my self to search for something new. I feel like I’ve gotten burned more times than I struck gold. Lately, I've taken some chances on things people send me (good stuff, btw) but, for the most part, I stick with the faithful stand-bys—artists who put the work in.

Sickness/Wolf Eyes “There is Part of Me You Will Never Know” LP (Hospital, 2008): Despite the big-name co-billing, this is Chris Goudreau’s show. He orchestrated it. He provides the general narrative outline and the Wolf pack fills in the blanks. Like a solid author, he controls language and the audience. For the album, Goudreau carved source material from Wolf Eyes into a compositional meditation on mortality and insanity. Like his 2008 No Fun appearance, Sickness shows remarkable restraint and a penchant for setting a dark mood. A lot of his (non-immediate) peers in the noise world expect their blasts of sound to automatically invigorate but fail to work at it (see above). Every pitch, echo, pause, repetition and rumble is deliberate on this album and most of the sounds achieve their goal. On album opener “A Diet of Speed and Beer,” Goudreau sets the pulse of Side A with a glistening high-pitch sound, echoing metallic wind gusts and creepy-crawl snake squelches. The side slithers like a night stalker in the brush alongside his prey. It climbs to a false peak and then bottoms out, leaving large bass rumbles to float across speakers. As sound fritters into and out of the auditory frame, the collab achieves a sort of disturbing ambience through harsh tones. The negative space appearing between sound movements suggests some sort of unsettling thought pattern. The calm lasts a few short minutes as a blitzkrieg of dissonance attacks the speakers to end the side. Side B starts with a similar mood and rhythm but builds into a horror stomp. In the final third of the side, Goudreau adds the spastic jolts of scraping metal to which he often builds in concert. The sound emerges as our protagonist unravels. The dark thoughts turn into a violent resolve. Sickness does not just insert a climatic violent peak. When the record reaches that point, it is well-earned.

Heavy Winged “Alive in My Mouth” (Three Lobed, 2008): Last year, this Brooklyn-based three-piece melted faces with a fine tapestry of psych guitar called We Grow. In between that LP and Alive in My Mouth, the band threw some limited run release our way. None of it lived up to the heavy dose of lysergic confusion found on We Grow. The band almost reaches the majesty of that album with Alive in My Mouth. Comprised of two side-long stunners, Alive in My Mouth shifts into multiple auditory modes without sounding forced or overly loose. “Gruesome Pillow Talk,” which trucks through Side A, features a flickering shoegaze guitar washing over jagged buzz-saw string scrapes. A steady, somewhat unchanging drumbeat lends the song a sort of ragged Neu quality. The mournful quality of the guitar eventually subsides for a full-on fuzz fest. The final quarter of the side features bursts of dissonant-yet-funky robot skronk being overtaken by an angelic choir of gray sound. As the song could feasibly morph into other fascinating shapes and hold the listener’s interest for an eternity, the band sucks it into a void, signaling its death knell with a drum attack. A heavily distorted stoner metal riff commences “Wounded Crystals,” a hazy, aggressive mind-warp. For a quarter of the song, the riff grows almost too repetitive and the song collapses under the weight of the guitar feedback smatterings. The band wanders into the self-indulgent bliss momentarily but it regains its focus with an introverted Van Halen riff blended with blurs of angelic falsetto vocals. A band exhibits its chops by moving as one through the improv swamp. For the most part, Heavy Winged’s tunes fail to sound improvised, as the band transition into different portions of their jam so effortlessly. The band coalesces in a manner that suggests they can pull something like Alive in My Mouth from the fog whenever they feel like it.

sooner rather than later will update and try to write better/ more coherent

2008-06-28T13:26:00.003-06:00

Anyone else hate Norman Mailer?

Tough guys don't beat their wives. Fucking dead hack

Lolz

2008-06-23T17:33:00.004-06:00

Sic Alps wandered into the consciousness of music lovers at the right time. The band released a slew of well-considered releases beginning in late 2006 and continuing into 2008, helping to dampen the shoddy, prolific output new weird American and neo-noise underground. Sic Alps songs tread a tightrope between pop song composition and deconstructive psych noise meltdowns. Not to say the band fits into some mathematical critic formula. Any given single from the band typifies their approach. The songs vary in length and execution. If Mike Donovan’s vocals were cropped out of the record, a new listener might believe the single is a compilation.

Their new collection A Long Way to a Shortcut (Animal Disguise) plays like one of those singles, mainly because, like those slabs of disorder, it contains a schizophrenic track listing. From song to song, Sic Alps travel from fast to slow, from clean to noisy and on down the turnpike. Every inch of the way, the band maintains the listener’s attention. Their songs contain an infectious base and they warrant the detours and layers of psych the band smears overtop.

On a personal note, I need a new soundtrack— something for my twenties. My age stopped paralleling Neil Yong protagonists two years ago, with “24 and there’s so much more.” After spending 20 at the noisy fair with all my friends there, I woke up at age 22, wondering what to do. I suppose I could have applied “Revolution Blues” to the spiritual wasteland of 23 but I cannot link it to this age. If I decided to mope around for the year, “Running Dry (Requiem for the Rockets)” would coalesce nicely with all the apologies I owe past acquaintances. If life happens to imitate art, I want somewhat happy, fun, exciting songs to soundtrack my late 20s. Also, who wants to spend the future dwelling on the past?

I once saw Liz Phair commenting about the Replacements’ Let It Be on one of those VH1 “Best List Ever” compilation shows. She said something akin to: “I remember when that album came out. I just walked around for a year being those songs.” I disagree with this code of conduct. I would never modify my lifestyle so it resembles a piece of art. I buy into that “Our band could be your life” mantra. Artists sometimes author musical works that intertwine with and parallel life in a way that transcends generalization. The general thoughts, feelings and emotions associated with the human condition are universal. However, different circumstances surrounding these aspects of the human condition make each experience unique. A good narrator exhibits the ability to become his character and transcend a simple assessment of the human condition. The emotions conveyed by this narrator pierce the skin and burrow inside of the subject.

Though Sic Alps never delve into long narrations, they cast a wide net, describing a wide variety of subjects, characters and emotions. The band punctuates its abstract, cryptic lyrical sense with a playful-but-tight instrumental delivery. The majority of their songs linger around the two-minute mark. Each song’s brevity perfectly captures a snapshot of a trade, attitude, situation or circumstance, a trait that becomes especially apparent on the Description of the Harbor 12”. The opener and title track, an interpretation of a Strapping Fieldhands gem, elongates a stream-of-conscious word sketch of a dock, its surrounding landscape and the thoughts they conjure. The mechanics of the song mimic the writing process. Donovan delivers the lyrics in a slow, dreamlike manner, paralleling the sluggish pace of inspiration. As inspiration hits, the song eventually bottoms out into a psychedelic free-for-all complete with guitar noise, horn blasts and echoing piano.

The band forsakes the Fieldhands’ surface descriptions and delves inside its characters for songs like “Message from the Law,” “The Drake” and “Speeds.” On “Speeds,” the audience receives a narrative of a brief time in a slacker’s life set to driving garage rock rhythm. After the song shatters into a wordless chorus, the listener learns the man is “back in denim,” a minimalist characteristic that maps an infinitude of possibilities. It functions like Thin Lizzy’s any-town subject matter in that the universality of the lyrics reach a wide audience. “Message…” moves with the locomotive wheels of a mid-‘60s British Invasion tune, as jangly guitars and two-part vocal harmonies transport the tune on a straight railroad track. Donovan portrays the man and snatches from the protagonist’s life in simple, evocative terms. Meanwhile, “The Drake” sketches out a doomsday getaway wherein a thick guitar line emulates the narrative movement’s rhythm. The protagonist seems caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare, as he sings “He’s got a master list of fakes/rents a room out to the drake” and connects it with “hold my hand/until we run/into the sun set.”

“The Drake” also exemplifies another of the band’s strengths, as the Alps wrap some of their oeuvre in a thick mystique, so as to obscure the character in the center of the tunes. “Brill Building” constructs an abstract tenement with reverb-blurred vocals and rusty guitars forming the foundation. Donovan sculpts some elusive feeling with lyrics like “I’ve been doubling/Split myself in two for you/Dripping honey/Bags of money, too.” The listener never quite grasps the subject matter but the band etches a bunch of vignettes into the brain.

Elsewhere, the band whips up straightforward rave-ups about singular actions and feelings. The jubilant exclamation: “There must be a story over there/There’s got to be one just about anywhere” frames “A Story Over There.” A clean, clunky riff spreads the joy, as the band merges mariachi sounds with early basement rock. “Making Plans” cakes on the distorto-dust and shimmies forth with a creepy, tantalizing vocal groove. Donovan croons “I’ve been making plans/For you and me,” as disembodied “la-la-las” and Matthew Hartman’s box top drumming linger in the background. The tunes could be about any number of things and the open-endedness of the subject matter lends the songs the ability to project themselves onto the listener’s life. For instance, I always think of “A Story Over There” as a soundtrack to my day job and the joy of finding a localized version of a national story.

Many songs project a distinct Alps flavor, but the boys seem to ghostwrite songs for the bands they listened to growing up. These songs contain a contagious shuffle rooted in the rhythm, variety and charm found on the a-sides of featured on the Nuggets collection. The band seasons most of their tunes with a pinch of dissonance and a smattering of the psych aura. Each tune presents a different face for the band and a new interpretation of the annals of rock history. Driven by a jangly guitar, a postmodern draft dodging throwback like “Message from the Law” would easily fit into Between the Buttons’ tracklist. With the jumpy, acoustic guitar-propelled British folk-pop of “Love is Strange,” the band compacts a simple meditation on courtship into a minute-and-a-half blast that would work great as a Donovan tune. The hissing feedback, sneering chorus and dangerous riff on “Strawberry Guillotine” contains hints of the sharp-edged guerilla R&B of Les Rallizes Denudes. The Alps retain their own voice, however, by working their snarl into each of the throwback tunes. Instead of merely imitating recipient of the homage, the Alps worm into the psyche of the said band and corrode it with a brown acid fog.

It also works quite well as a soundtrack to this year. I tested the album out and it plays well in a versatile array of situations. Its 26 tracks encompass a vast amount of song styles, lyrical themes and instrumental surprises akin to The Beatles’ White Album. It passes the car test, melting away the minutes as I make the mundane drive from Norwalk to New Haven County. The album defeats the boredom of a lazy Sunday. It fails to sit in the background when I attempt to engage myself with another activity while it plays. However, Sic Alps do not create background music by any means. They belong in the forefront, intertwining with life and opening eyes to the possibilities of music and poetry.

What else?

Factums “The Sistrum” (Sacred Bones): Man, the Factums evolved since their early CDrs (one of which Siltbreeze reissued) and currently take their sound into a dimension only touched upon in their initial releases. Not to underplay the value of their older releases but, in the few years that passed since their formation, the band transformed into a stronger beast with the same DNA. The band retains their affinity for Cabaret Voltaire and nihilistic, jagged, emotionless no wave. A fluid interstellar drift flows through the album, preserving continuity while developing a menacing, mechanical mood. Without forsaking the pace or bleak mood of the record, both sides exhibit a variety of textures, dynamics and approaches. “Mushrooms” is highlighted by a future-past guitar line that Roland Kirk would have murder for in 1979. The album also finds the band reaching out to their inner sense of chaos with a series of grounded instrumental detours. Right after “Mushrooms” ends, the title track blazes through meltdown dub, Amazonian bird sounds and synth squeaks. “De-Arranged,” the album’s final full song, cops a “Mushroomhead” rhythm and stuffs bouncy machine funk into the crevices. The song encapsulates the album’s inquisitive motif, as the band finds one more niche to survey before calling it a day.

Drop me a line. Brighten up my day. I'm always looking for something new to listen to or someone to meet. kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com

Upcoming: Sickness/Wolf Eyes collab, Lambkin/Lescalleet, Emeralds, etc.

time

2008-06-16T18:34:00.004-06:00

Nothing equals the feeling of finding a composition that resonates with you. Awkwardness and unfamiliarity mar the first sexual experience. Paranoia and inexperience sometime ruin the first high. Loser that I am, I can remember the first time I heard a song better than most of my early sexual experiences (quite possibly because the music maintained my interest more than sex. sad, I know). As I stated before, an effective work of art penetrates that thick security layer outside of your skin and begins to supplement or toy with your emotions

Fortunately, I encountered many of these pivotal musical moments in my lifetime. The first time I heard Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” on FM, top 40 radio, it affected my life change. The band connected with my fourth-grader mind on this primal level. The song and I were both outcasts, drifting around in a plain full of pop stars and pretty people. The rough beauty of Cobain’s scream contrasted so extremely with the tailor-made pop that the message of unrest and anger became clearer. The energetic blasts of heavy guitar and fast punker drumming heightened the dissatisfied mood.

Beyond the sound and empathy for the outsider conveyed in the lyrics, the music worked on a simple surface level. Listening to the band’s thick, bleak Pacific Northwest punk sparked the realization that more of these bands must exist. Cobain rattled off legions of artists who inspired him in his interviews. I eagerly checked out many of those bands throughout middle school. Nirvana’s influence on my life extended beyond the parameters of music. Cobain’s man crush on William S. Burroughs influenced me to read a book outside of the middle school cannon. Further research into Burroughs’ peers sparked a life-long love of post-World War II American writers. I also forged many friendships with persons who felt the same way about the band, some of which still exist today.

Lately, finding this feeling seems like an empty endeavor, both spiritually and physically. Plumbing through the depth of dollar and used record bins and continually searching for a new, fulfilling sound is kind of like chasing the dragon. Both involve energy and commitment and contain the potential to dominate one’s life. In both situations, the protagonist eventually realizes no experience will match the excitement of the first time.

As I climb farther into the black hole of underground music, I find myself becoming less surprised with new bands and less enthusiastic about music, in general. Nowadays, an ace can access certain new constellations of the musical galaxy but it’s hard to find a band or artist willing to reach for the outer edges of space. If I possess the ability to break a band down into its influences, it sucks the life right out of the listening experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love hearing new albums. A few times a month, the big payoff rears its head in the form of a new, exciting sound or series of sounds. I just question whether or not my work matters. I doubt most artists pay attention to critics, nevermind a lowly blogger. Now more than ever, I need an epiphany via song but I find more truth, soul and vision in older tunes than almost anything contemporary. Prove me wrong, reader. Prove me wrong.

That said, it’s time for this week’s picks:

Brutum Fulmen “1000 Suns” c-46 (Throne Heap): I meant to praise this one for a while but each time I listen to the tape, it transports me to another dimension. The cassette concerns newscasts and announcements during a nuclear blast (possibly Hiroshima). Brutum Fulmen exhibits a surprising amount of restraint while synthesizing the destruction at hand. Their gentle, detail-oriented evocations of distress and build to naturally unsettling mood. The band first launches harsh static missiles to commence the album then evolve into shiver-inducing atmospheric electronics. The band creates backdrops similar to the dark, lo-fi recreations of nature featured on many black metal albums. When Brutum Fulmen splays out cold, moving dronescapes, they hit their peak. The shimmering synth sounds compressed yet multi-faceted and bright, like a thing of beauty amidst the a-bomb rubble. At one point, a fluttering, decaying movie soundtrack emerges from the rubble, engulfing the composition in a moment of ragged glory. All the while, horrific narrations sprout from the void and the band tries to audibly recreate the stories featured therein. Side B showcases a corroded version of the sound world found on the first side.

Kim Salmon “Wall/paper” c-44 (Ecstatic Peace): I have to admit I’m a little under-versed on Australian bloozers The Scientists. The outback post-punk band received accolades from many writers that I respect but I never found a decent price on their albums domestically. Hell, after hearing this tape from Scientists’ guitarist Kim Salmon, I feel the need to jump into the band’s back catalog. The tape begins with a skeletal guitar line, which sounds like a loner psych guitar line recorded from an old ’78. Though played through a wah-wah pedal, it reverberates with this distant past feel, like one of those twelve-inches on Mississippi Records. As the waves of guitar spread out, some backup instrumentation emerges and snatches the déjà vu from the song. Salmon eventually lets his axe ring and the sound sprawls out like a giant outstretched Slinky. Oddly, this tune blossoms into slowly-progressing basement blues a la a gritty, four-track the Scientists stuff I’ve heard. Great stuff.

Drop me a line. Brighten up my day. I'm always looking for something new to listen to or someone to meet. kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com

Well, I used to be a folk singer
Keeping managers alive,
When you saw me on a corner
And told me I was jive.
So I unlocked your mind, you know
To see what I could see.
If you guarantee the postage,
I'll mail you back the key.
Well I woke up in the morning
With an arrow through my nose
There was an Indian in the corner
Tryin' on my clothes.

"Last Trip to Tulsa"
-Neil Young

sunshine and geeks

2008-06-09T17:13:00.004-06:00

Summer time arrives once again to enliven the bleak mood of my co-conspirators and yours truly. A heatwave fails to anger me, as it forces positive change. Life slows down, allowing me an afternoon of back-porch sitting and ice tea sippin’ to the sounds of John Sterling’s hyperbolic Yankees play-by-play. Summer love evolves to the tune of “Sunshine and Grease” by Royal Trux and every block hosts action.

When the heat radiates from the sidewalks and roadways, one becomes more efficient with movements. On a walk to the supermarket during a heat wave, one stops off at the Laundromat and the barber shop to save time and duck the heat. The thrift of maneuver leaks over into simple, everyday tasks. One might grab additional tools in anticipation of an event while traveling to an area for a main reason.

Similarly, thoughts come into focus with humidity. The fervor seems to purify the inner deliberation by pressurizing the brain and allowing one to squeeze out a single coherent rumination instead of an onslaught of scattered brain spew.

These seasonal changes affect the predominant musical acts in my rotation. In the summer, I cut down on lengthy compositions and focus on succinct works. Perennials for this time of year include Pere Ubu, Jim Shepherd, Thin Lizzy and the almighty, original Stooges. In other words, the craving switches from the grandiose to something written in a direct manner that meanders at the proper interval without wandering into the stratosphere.

Thus, Nothing People’s Anonymous (S-S) marks the year’s first perfect summer record. The anonymous band picked a fitting name, as they continue to metamorphose their sound throughout the record without altering their DNA. The record finds the band claiming and conquering various modes of slanted rock’n’roll. From the thunderous, creepy-crawl boogie of “Suspicious” to the feel good hit of the summer, “In the City,” Nothing People compile two perfect sides of warped rock.

As they continually blossom and shapeshift, Nothing People fail to fit perfectly into any one pigeonhole. Sure, they fit in well with fellow weird punkers like Blank Dogs, Psychedelic Horseshit and Eat Skull, sharing a knack for odd posturing, junkyard post-punk and invigorating and well-written songs.

But the genre casts a wide net and Nothing People, like their peers, deserve a classification unto themselves. Songs like “Outsiders Are” and “In the City” contain a distinct, dark groove but sound nothing alike. “In the City,” the album’s anthemic leadoff track, serves as a call-to-arms. Throughout the tune, the band embraces and tweaks rock tradition. The wailing guitar that guides the song fluctuates between feedback squalls and robotic new wave blurs, setting the scene for a classic art-as-arena-rock summer tune. On the chorus, the band enlivens the decades old “Spin me around” chorus, as the unnamed singer adds “Show me your town/The radio’s dead/But there’s songs in my head.” The band finds strength in sparse notes during the maniacal guitar solo that ends the song. Sounding like a circuit bent fire engine siren, the guitar line rings as a wash of crazed fret melting slides in, eventually overtaking the simple solo.

On the other end of the spectrum, “Outsiders Are” thuds through a wide open stretch of desolate post-punk boogie like an Americanized version of Scientists. The masked singer shouts faux-angrily as the band filters the blues through a post-industrial landscape. Helios Creed-style melting future guitar yowls hide underneath the four-dimensional shuffle. A psychotic supernova of guitar sound eventually overtakes the hoodoo and sucks it into a black hole.

The Chrome nods mark one of many post-punk touchstones that pop up throughout the record. Like any great band, they simply know the difference between borrowing a great sonic idea and stealing a band’s identity. At various times, the masked madmen evoke footnotes and cornerstones of the history of rock. “Corner’s For” steals a page from the Alice Donut fakebook, fade-in vocals repeating a single, haunting pair of lines (“That’s what the corners for/That’s what she said) with disturbing results. The unnamed singer even apes the snotty, squealing delivery of Donut throatman Tomas Antona, furthering bad trip psych-punk effects. The comparison stops there, however, as Nothing People, like Ed Gein, merely wear the skin of their subject but retain their soul. Chug-and-drone power chords and mammoth funeral procession keyboard heightens the morbidity. Instead of inserting a masturbatory guitar solo, the band segues into a sonic laser assault complete with acid rock guitar splinters and moans cuts in for about 30 seconds. The band effectively adds power to the statement by keeping their indulgences in check, ensuring the discordance adds to the song instead of overtaking it.

Elsewhere, on “Boccioni’s Mother,” the band cops a throbbing space shuffle out of the Silver Apples’ two classic albums but transforms it into a snarling portrait of a conflicted woman. The band strings together a warbling synth/axe trod and bursts of Moog and splintered guitar heroics. The anti-solo rears its head again in the form of an ambient, guitar-as-Asian-percussion-instrument breakdown. Again, the band reveals a great deal by stating a small-but-thought-provoking trait about the protagonist. Vocalist X wails: “There’s something missing/She’s anti-graceful,” while injecting his delivery with a claustrophobic intensity.

Thee Oh Sees fete another gunner for the summer stunner with The Master’s Bedroom is Worth Spending a Night In (tomlab). Whereas their breakthrough record Sucks Blood found the band jumping around with their sound and finding a comfort zone, The Master’s Bedroom… features a matured band penning perfectly twisted garage-pop. The opening boogie of “Block of Ice” renders the album in the same ass-shakin’, heart-breakin’ territory of Anonymous.

However, Jon Dwyer’s knack for kitsch rhythms elevates the fun meter a bit. He surprises the listener with a right hook of an experimental venture but he continually finds new pathways within the Oh Sees modest tract of land. The typical Oh Sees tune revolves around thumping rhythm guitar jive and an onslaught of space greaser attitude. Adding to and coloring the instrumentation, Dwyer and Brigid Dawson share vocal duties and float a Page/Krauss vibe throughout the record. Dawson proves the perfect foil for Dwyer, as the pair shimmy through the future past. With their intertwining vocals, the duo snake bizarre melodies around the rockabilly rhythms. The band could easily fit into one of those throwback rockabilly joints. That is, until the locals realize Dwyer slipped liquid acid into their Schlitz.

Both The Oh Sees and Nothing People squeeze single, coherent sounds out of a blistering hot formula. The albums promote the fluid movement of a summer heatwave. They’ll drive you to put the needle on the groove, grab yer old lady and shake yer fine ass in one swoop.

Free Band Names

2008-06-01T17:49:00.004-06:00

ass bandit 4
commie mcsnotface
moon burgle
squish tunnel
tuesday macwednesday
AIDS palace
child bride suicide
cornerstore twats
pipe toss
valtrex superstars
dimebag lick
menstrual chicken
(comma)
teenage pederasts
cocaine legs
fellatio fallout
liquid epiphany
bang bike
tears of blood
murder squiggles
miserable corpse sex
dragon punch
dirty time
mayor mcsleaze
fourteen pages
urban boysex
chalkboard porn
ninja sadness
razor mouth
private cancer
poop smear
earring rip
depressed call girls
drooping misery
mall hookers
big gay freedom
rocket pants
dry buttfuck
mugger olympics
lead crackers
the half-assed gloryhole
homeless twin cobras
steaming time
fencin' formula
orgasmic anthill
kittie kaoss
lazy peter
std factory
Guns 'n Shit
burgeritis
NBgAy
happy floor stain
winking anus
lifeitis
the minorities
dick burglar
chomp'n ludes
gargle monster
rescue ape
dan simons gang
kobe leg punch
the goodbye blowjob
rainbow rape
fattie eggroll
satanic pap smear
dickhole needle fuck
backseat jimmy and the unplanned pregnancies
dolphin slaughter
lude chute
vicious hug
warcrime disco
vaginal misfire
crowbar face smash
clinic looters
occult fish
jailhouse oxycontin
dead bride soufflé
mustard lube
autoerotic party
moist meat
stiff funk

(For a Guy Named Rex) Partyasaurus Rex

(Hanson Records collabo) michigan sandwich
Bonus Rapper Names:
gunsmoke johnson
MC Committin' Felonies
Pimp Cheese
MC Appliance
B Scared
Teethasaurus
Boost'n'Juice
Abe Ortion
Meta Phoric

if anyone puts out music under any of these names, please send me a recording.

Art of the Simple Song: Ressurection

2008-05-28T20:01:00.006-06:00

I’d love to review some great, under-appreciated albums this week but that may have to wait for another day. I fumbled with words for a few hours now before deciding to let that thought die. Good ideas visited but they all seemed fleeting. The moment I attempted to compile them, they drifted away. So, I decided to revive the “Art of the Simple Song” series.

And I returned to another source of inspiration: sad fucker music. When I use the phrase “sad fucker music,” I’m not referring to Bright Eyes, Death Cab for Cutie or any of that forced anguish. By now, most of you can discern between a true, anguished cracked vocal and that phony, whining falsetto that dunderheads like Damion Rice inject in their adult-contempo garbage. One could ignore temporary melancholy but a real hole in the soul pierces the consciousness of listeners. Artists with this affliction conjure a certain sadness through subject matter, vocal infliction and/or compositional atmosphere.

Of course, the songs I refer to as “sad fucker songs” may not, in fact, have been purposed as sad songs. George Harrison, the man who I consider the prince of the sad song, probably penned “Something” as a great love song. Instead, the song, and just about all of his songs, conveys an inner strife. As soon as he paints a portrait of the featured maiden, he begins to talk about her leaving. Plus, that soft, listless voice drives the feeling home. Even “My Sweet Lord,” his ode to Hare Krishna, is a thinly veiled plea for death wherein he complains about the length of life.

Like George Harrison, the Meat Puppets put on a happy front in public but some true pain lingers behind their barren rock. Whereas George’s sad fucker eyes gave away his front, Kirkwood, Kirkwood and Bostrom portray themselves as a pack of jolly, cartoonish critters who hail from some borough in the Arizona desert. A lot of truth lies in their public image. The golden sunshine and eerily beautiful landscape of the desert always finds its way into their memorable songs. As the best Meat Puppets tunes reveal innate human truths in an sharp, semi-surreal manner, sadness had to make an appearance in their travelogue at some point.

In their epic Meat Puppets II, the boys touched upon the subject of isolation twice, first with the hillbilly romp “Lost” then the serene closer “The Whistling Song.” While “The Whistling Song” summons the everyday alienation that slinks into the mind before slumber, “Lost” contains the type of emotional pain one wears on his back for decades. Whereas “The Whistling Song” utilizes empty rooms and shadows as a means of conveying existential longing, “Lost” jumps “out of the shallow and into the deep end.”

The song could be about any number of things: a disillusioned Vietnam vet, some loner on a barstool, a hitchhiker, a disenchanted hippie. At base, the tune sketches a Sisyphean man at the end of his patience, looking behind the visible world for a penultimate meaning he fails to grasp. In the opening verse, Curt Kirkwood sings, “Lost on the freeway again/lookin’ for means to an end,” lending the tune an air of desperation. While it's debatable whether the man is walking or driving, the form of travel marks his last act because the unpredictability of life wore him down.

The chorus reveals his fears. The man frets about the inevitable. Like the protagonist in Neil Young’s “On the Beach (Citizen Kane Junior Blues),” the Mups’ man dreads the world changing around him while he remains stagnant. He knows he possesses some trait that turns people against him. He has resorted to lending items to people so as to increase his chance of human interaction. His fears result in the common drunken complaint, “I know there’ll come a day/ when you say that you don’t know me/And I know they’ll come a time/When there’s nothing anybody owes me/anymore.”

The brothers Kirkwood dig deeper into the soul of the lost man with the second verse, as they give the listener a time frame and a definitive mental state. “Living Nixon’s mess” bore a gap into the man’s psyche and he continually searches for something beyond the natural world to fill the void. The band uses simple phrases to hone the man's desperation. The man searches "for something, my friend" a la "Ballad of a Thin Man" minus Dylan's penchant for ornate verbiage.

All the while, the wheels of the Meat Puppets’ tight instrumentation churn along with the man’s unraveling. The proto-Hank Williams hoe-down speeds up and splits open as the listener gains a better understanding of the protagonist. Curt Kirkwood lets his guitar cry as he sings the chorus but then straightens up as he veers into the next verse. His high, warbled singing voice begins to crack with each instrumental go-round.

The third verse reveals a metaphysical scar that will perpetuate the longing and despair featured in the song. Curt sings, “I’ve got a wound I know will never mend.” As the tune slinks into a repetition of the first verse and the final recitation of the chorus, Curt’s voice shatters. When he recites the final two lines of the chorus, he heightens his delivery and elongates the final “anymore” until it shatters. The outro to “Lost” features a high-lonesome guitar weep and a lonely howl sends the tune into the afterlife. The tune leaves the listener with the impression that the man will repeat his actions until he finally finds a "means to an end."

Coming soon: more frequent updates, reviews of new albums by Factums, Eat Skull, Pigeons, Emeralds, weirdo tapes and loner records. Drop me a line. I’m always looking for something new to listen to or someone to meet. kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com

Fuck the Beatles

2008-05-20T20:44:00.001-06:00

That's what's up

That's What's Up

2008-05-12T19:01:00.003-06:00

My record player bit the dust this past week. The Phillips GA 212 gave almost thirty loyal years of service. In its waning days, I turned the machine off and on a few times before power surged through the machine. Also, the turntable needed a little push before beginning to rotate. On Friday, it finally sputtered out of commission.

The time away from my turntable gave me a chance to comb through the nicotine-stained tape pile in front of my boom box. This week and next week, the quick picks will be comprised entirely of cassettes (maybe one or two CDrs). Without further ado, here’s what’s up.

Stefano Pilia “Haikustrings” c45 (Sloow Tapes, 2007): Haikustrings chronicles a series of ambient string movements as they glance through the looking glass of isolated domestic life. The lush-but-unsettling ambient often take a backseat to recordings of marbles clinking, metal scraping, water flowing and animals moaning eerily in the distance. Using sparse, creative percussion, Pilia accentuates string and synth swelling. Once the listener becomes fixated on a certain sound, Pilia tosses in a jarring blip and the atmosphere changes. A little girl screaming interrupts simple walk through the woods at dusk. A water jug (or piss) accentuates a bundled string swathe. Of course, there’s a great deal of theory and conceptualization behind the album. Somehow, Pilia glues 111 separate “sound miniatures” into three fluid ideas. But the main idea here is to let the composition, not the theory behind it, take you on a journey.

Arts & Crafts Series Vols. 1 & 2 (Fag Tapes, 2008): Heath Moreland constructs wondrous, low budget sound sculptures of intellectual concepts. Some of the cassettes Moreland releases contain themes and movements akin to junkyard approximations grand academia visions. The low-brow version of Haikustrings features the diseased llama walking around, sorting out dishes, fucking with his synth and talking to his cat through telekinesis. Certain moments in Vol. 2 recall the toolshed-spawned percussive glory of Changez Les Blockeurs. Static penetrates Vol. 1 while Heath recreates Twig Harper’s The Hitcher through 200 mg of lysergic electronics. Surprisingly, the strange recordings hold up and blur the line between composition and reality.

Taxi Driverz “Lunar Eclipse” c60 (Hermitage Tapes, 2008): Andrew Coltrane killed our wallets with a flurry of activity in the past year. Dude knows a thing or two about quality control, as he continues to release well thought-out chunks of gutter jazz, thrift store industrial and lo-fi musique concrete. His guitar works, however, provide thoroughly interesting netherworld yowls and psychedelic cotton field dins. Coltrane’s wild, versatile axe attacks cover the gamut from blues to death jazz. Pairing with a bassist dude named Matt for the Taxi Driverz project, Coltrane throws guitar, sax, tape loops and electronics into a free-flowing trashcan fire. When the flames climb the draperies, the album slaughters infrastructure like a Blue Humans guitar blob. The ensuing jagged chaos engulfs the room like melting no wave tape loops. As the fire settles, the band skronks through ragged cubist blues.

Uke of Space Corners “Maine Sketches Thermal Stresses Vol. II” cass (Trd, ?): People compared Uke of Space Corners’ 2007 LP So Far on the Way to Holy Modal Rounders and brown acid bluegrass. Though I enjoyed the record, I felt it lacked the spontaneity and warped humor of a band deserving of the holy Modal comparison. I dunno. This cassette, however, proves Uke to be much thicker than they appeared on So Far. The recording presents field recordings of silly, skilled Manson family types writing songs about their daily existence with a diverse sense of melody and odd percussive charms. The lo-fi production value adds a spooky resonance to the campfire songs. Uke’s sweet vision of the surrounding universe flows through the album. The band’s abstract instrumentals trap repetitive, crooked guitar lines within industrial voids and the tin-can production increases the bleakness. Uke exhibits a knack for dressing up slanted, no wave guitar lines to sound like they jumped out of the Anthology of American Folk Music. Another prize trd.

6789866 “Electric Basement Activity” c30 (self-released, 2008): Adam Payne, best known as the godhead behind Residual Echoes, seems like he jumped from the womb carrying a Strat and a copy of Spirit’s The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. In fact, as this tape shows, his beginnings were much more tripped out and grounded in the realm of Southern California noise. Looping Zappa’s “Flower Punk” and adding a series spiraling psychedelic zaps and phasers, Payne spews dub-infused tribal rhythms. Some tracks find him psychotically diddling around with his guitar strings before mellowing into a Sabbath dirge. Oh, wait, Payne also cranked fast, wailing psych rock that resembles Residual Echoes at their most primitive. Throughout the tape, one can see the psilocybin lunacy of Echoes emerging.

Drop me a line at kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com and tell me I’m worthless.

Gunk Rock

2008-04-27T20:03:00.006-06:00

For a few years now, a hyper-creative strain of lo-fi punk rock floated around the underground without a proper pigeonhole. Bands like Psychedelic Horseshit, TV Ghost and Times New Viking rock different but aesthetically similar maximum rock’n’roll and could fit neatly into a blanket sub-genre. The bands share a few distinct qualities, such as an affinity for post-punk and most record on primitive equipment. But why ruin a good thing? The bands are currently engaged in such a hyper-creative period in their career arches, a label would cheapen their recorded output. Once you slap a label on something it undermines the separate identity of the bands. Nevermind quirks like Kevin DeBroux’s multi-tracked, stern vocals or Psychedelic Horseshit’s use of spazz keyboard blasts and feedback blurs as a rhythm mechanism, since the artists all share a label, their identity becomes rooted in what they share, not what separates them from their peers.

Plus, it would invite other bands outside of that small, interconnected niche of bands to mimic and commercialize the sound. Remember what happened with grunge? Those guys had a small, incestuous group of artists highly concentrated in one geographic area. Most media outlets failed to describe what made the bands unique in the context of the times and, instead, took note of the thick, early heavy metal guitars and loud, fast punk ethos. Sure, Nirvana broke through with a somewhat commercial album but they sounded different than anything on the radio at that time. As soon as the media slapped the label on the music, bands outside of the small, incestuous scene sanded out the rough spots of the sound and readied it for a larger consumer demographic. If you turn on FM radio this moment, you can hear Nickelback waving the post-grunge banner and proudly sucking the life out of rock’n’roll.

This new label becomes inescapable, as the major magazines who once shunned the particular strand of music start to write about it. Now, a writer could potentially write an entire review of the new Little Claw album without describing the sound of the music contained therein. I’ve written about the trappings of the genre label somewhat and admitted that, at times, a label proves an inescapable descriptive form, especially when attempting to convey the sonics of a challenging record.

Enter “shitgaze,” the newest blanket genre description to enter the consciousness of indie music scribes. Dreamed up by Psychedelic Horseshit to describe their sound— a noisy, hook-ridden punk played through a filthy four track— the term was popularized by a recent NME article and used to label Pink Reason, Times New Viking, TV Ghost, Tyvek and PH. Although the new attention is well deserved, it may devalue their music. For instance a critic may call the new Hospitals album, “Hairdryer Peace,” a defining moment in the “shitgaze” movement, depicting the album as everything and nothing at all. The aforementioned relation hails the album as a classic of a genre that includes the word “shit,” relaying a “best of the worst” connotation. “Shitgaze” works fine for Psychedelic Horseshit, as the term utilizes part of their name and denotes ownership of an entire genre of music. The Hospitals deserve something equally grandeur to describe Hairdryer Peace but the perplexing nature of the album may cause many critics to result to the shitgaze stamp.

The perfect follow-up to their fragmented bad acid bash I’ve Visited the Island of Jocks and Jazz, the album finds Hospital-head Adam Stonehouse delving deeper into his psyche and pulling out fractured, surreal ideas. Furthering the splintered cut-up/collage song-structure method of I’ve Visited the Island, Hairdryer Peace garners many a Twin Infinitives comparisons, from its layered instrumental base to the off-kilter composition structure. Stonehouse’s songs deviate so far from traditional verse-chorus-verse tunes he sometimes looses himself in a lo-fidelity world of guitar manipulations, muddled speech and dissonance. The excursions prove engaging and fascinating and the listener willingly follows Stonehouse down the rabbit hole.

Stonehouse ignites the initial fire by shouting “I feel queer” to a backing barrage of dusty guitar noise and mechanical clangs. Slowly, a marching band riff emerges and Stonehouse sucks it back into a hazy black mist. When the riff finally overtakes the song, the guitarist ends it with a bluesy howling that feasibly coexists with the mangled noise. The riff remerges on “This Walls,” which smears acid guitar and industrial fuzz dressings atop more traditional Hospitals sandwich. Stonehouse warps the riff into a bee swarm with “Smeared Thinking.”

Stonehouse’s lyrics find him existentially struggling with reality and the claustrophobic, hallucinogenic atmosphere frames the album as sort of a brain-damaged Quadrophenia. Cresting waves of echoing dissonance introduce “Scan the Floor for Food.” Stonehouse colors the sound of madness with lyrics like “All I see is nothing real to me/It’s like nothing affects me.” The paranoia and dread also leaks over into his music, coating blessed out garage and psychedelica with black noise and schizophrenic instrumentals. “Rules of Being Alive” begins with a simple acoustic guitar strum and a talking blues rant. Specks of spacey dissonance a la Les Rallizes Denudes chime into the song before Stonehouse transforms the song into a futuristic nightmare with moldy, amphetamine synth lines and trickles of guitar feedback. “Ape Lost” pushes the listener into a similar angel dust jungle, beginning with a female voice amidst sparkling feedback before plunging into strung out garage and horrific acid yelps.

Throughout the album, Stonehouse pairs garage pop melodies and big classic rock radio riffs with demented black psychedelica and odd sound samples. Slide whistle accentuates the jangly acid riffs on “BPPV,” as amp quakes and a twisted, delay-soaked guitar solo round out the tune. Stonehouse’s lyrics mimic the controlled chaos, as he sings “I feel dizzy/I feel stoked.” “Getting Out of Bed” finds Stonehouse dabbling in surreal bubblegum rock, with lyrics like “I’m stressing out/I can’t control/the patterns on the tile floor.” Emerging horn overdubs, deep space dissonance and a powerful guitar bridge copped from someone in the annals of classic rock corrode an infectious but unintelligible chorus. Instead of ending the tune, Stonehouse sucks it into oblivion with a sound akin to a tape player eating a cassette.

Though the songs were allegedly culled from hundreds of hours of tapes, threads run through the album, making it a cohesive statement. The unifying riff continues onto Side B, sparking “Teams” with its newly morphed bee swarm power. The tune then takes on the same stripped-down, bedroom psychiatric evaluation of “Rules for Being Alive.” “Animals Act Natural” cops the same “I Feel Queer Chant” and a hardcore-injected version of the recurring riff.

Nothing on Hairdryer Peace lends the album to easy classification. One could place it under the “shit gaze” label by default, as Stonehouse has allegiances with many of the movers and shakers in the genre. The music is indebted to the past but it looks to the future, lending it the “post-“ prefix. Maybe post-post-punk would be a fitting description, as the music delves into artful crevices than the original post-punk revolutionaries. Hairdryer Peace could also be the cusp of a new revolution, denoting the “pre-“ prefix. The pre-and-post prefixes seeming cancel each other out, though, and leave the album in an orbit of its own.

Car Commercials’ debut full-length Judy’s Dust (Cenotaph) marks another album that exists outside of easy classification. Comprised of Home Blitz’s Dom DiMaggio and Friends and Family’s David Sutton, the band breezes through disembodied, hermetic insider visions of mental illness. Their sloppy, noisy instrumentation garners comparisons to a looser Shadow Ring but the overall feel on the album feels more like a male version of Suckdog’s Drugs are Nice. The album follows up the duo’s cassette trilogy with a cleaner but no less odd sound.

On Judy’s Dust, the band records things falling apart—clinking junkyard percussion mapping out nothing in particular, warped keyboard transmissions from a burned out basement, garbled, mentally ill vocals. The tunes snag elements from the Jandek handbook—abstract character sketches, drums from another astral plane—but, in all, the band’s rhythmic collapse proves more tuneful. Some of the album sounds like a child recording himself with his mouth too close to the microphone while one of his friends holds down keyboard keys and another bangs a cymbal. It may sound like any child could construct this album but Dimaggio and Sutton piece together the mess with an abstract artist’s keen sense of the line between inspiration and retardation.

Black 93, Car Commercials’ new cassette on Fuck It Tapes, maps equally disturbed, though not as instrumentally varied or spacey, territory. The tape harkens back to their early cassettes with a stripped-down guitar sound and the occasional keyboard or piano intervention. Oddly, “The Electric Mile,” the title of which has a Jandekian ring to it, sounds like a Home Blitz outtake with DiMaggio’s vocals pushed way back and Sutton’s drums a quarter beat off.

Both Judy’s Dust and Black 93 defy the need for a genre. They use abstract snatches from around the musical universe to create a disjointed, nightmarish painting of boredom. Like the Hospitals, the albums exhibit a debt to the past and a look to the future. Slapping the music with a label would cheapen the odd, delightful experience of listening to Car Commercials.

Tons of great records to review in the coming days, as IFCO officially released Island of Taste, Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet present the Breadwinner and a great Randy Holden reissue. Drop me a line at kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com and tell me I’m worthless.

Saves the Day

2008-04-07T18:54:00.002-06:00

The world works in cyclical ways. Things suck and the light evens them out. Spring seemed like a pretty drab season for a while there. The cold weather chills unclothed hands and your old lady drifts away with a heavy gust of wind. Or did the loss of love bring the cold weather? Then the doorbell rings and to Hell with pondering nature and love when the mailman a great record on your doorstep. Right? ‘Cause it’s all about death anyway.

Oooohhhh, a package from the Phillie Phanatic himself, Capt. Siltbreeze, with two attractive slabs of life-affirming junk rock. First up: Oper’azopne Nafta’s Caravu, a nasty bag of powder black angel dust carved out of magic markers. Where in Hades does this blast-a-burnin-spoon come from? Most times when I fail to draw a comparison between one record and a musical movement or a key group of artists, I glue the record to my turntable ‘cause it’s a force of nature. Oper’azopne Nafta brews a strange stew of spazz jazz/hardcore genre offshoots for an unforgettable apocalyptic party. On the mammoth “all’8 e ¼ alu Trianon,” they apply the same “no rules” technique as mid-period Boredoms with invigorating intensity. These guys craft strange, giant blobs of caveman jazz. Loud, fuzz-ridden guitar, a groovy honk machine and a tight-but-manic skin-slapper effortlessly shift between basement bad trip blues, third-world skronk and waves of spiritual trash jazz. “e” mellows things out a bit with a blubbering ambient noise texture surrounding those eerie guitar chord clusters that used to crop up in Charalambidies tunes. But, soon the sax starts conjuring an ass-shakin’ anarchy and the tune turns into Arto Lindsay’s drunken mariachi party.

Side B affirms this slab as the loudest, weirdest, most left-field album in the second-wave Siltbreeze cannon. The title track feature tortured monkey chants, a guitar part that resembles the sound of an airplane lift-off and its subsequent crash all held down by a drummer who could add a great beat to a drawn out bathtub suicide. Oper’azopne Nafta’s next album should be a pair of vignettes like “Cricchiu a lume,” which shanks the fat off most free-jazz sax jams and fast forwards straight to the explosion. Throughout the album, the band futzes with gutter blues guitar jams but never so beautifully as on “macello,oo,” wherein strung-out Jerry Garcia axe trinkets duet with audible breathing. The guitarist occasionally elongates his chords and lets them crest. The band concocts a roadside bomb to derail the jam but hippie dust still crops up throughout the dangerous bop in the form of a stoned blues vamp.

Oper’azopne Nafta navigates a curvy main road through skid with lots of detours and avenues to keep things interesting. The band constantly remains abstract, vital and energetic throughout their record while failing to detour into any uninspired territory. While the Boredoms decided long ago to cease their exploration of shit jazz, hardcore and noise, Oper’azopne Nafta summons a similar spirit in their basement and beat the hell from it.

From there, Siltbreeze releases another bonafide crowd pleaser with the American reissue of Naked on the Vague’s the Blood Sessions. The male/female duo constructs apocalyptic melodies from lingering keyboard strikes, mutant bass and disco drum machine. Their poetry consists of repeated phrases and bleeding wall paper. They fill the space between their delightful verses with blurs of pure sound and black, brown and grey keyboard drones. Blood Sessions’ call to arms, “Old Leader,” whips some licks out of the Live Skull fake book as they moan sexy vampire melodies. “The Horse, He’s Sick” fully exhibits the bands strength, as the drum machine sets up a void for the band to fill with various relics of new wave. Sci-fi keyboards, wavering guitar and whirlwind noise expand the vortex and the tune transforms into Nico’s reading of Equus or their version the Electric Prunes’ “Antique Doll.”

The hypnotic sound flows onto the second side with “Brown Sun/Sydney Land Rd”, where the band spreads out an organ drone and has a picnic with floating guitar rhythms and an industrial drum beat. Voices segue in and out of the mist and the brain-damaged intensity builds and sinks back into negative space. “Blood Pressure Drawing” paints a sparse desert landscape where Cliché’s voice acts as the scenery and Hop’s guitar portrays the vehicle. Keyboard slinks up like an evil rattler and its note patterns blend with the heat rays.

Naked on the Vague uses smeared noises and a steady beat to turn nightmarish lyrics into dance parties. I’m sure they sound vaguely like something in my record collection but nothing immediately comes to mind. Like the Southern woman who spotted Jesus on a pancake, you could squint your eyes and see a thousand post-punk influences but why make the effort? They change my dreary winter into a nihilistic spring

Tons of great records to review in the coming days, as IFCO officially released Island of Taste, Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet present the Breadwinner and The Hospitals blew up the world. Drop me a line at kobak77[at]yahoo[dot]com and tell me I’m worthless. Not a whole lot of time lately but posts should become more frequent.