Cacophony And Coffee

May The Lines Sag Heavy and Deep Tonight

2006-10-06T00:35:00.000-07:00

The Decemberists - The Crane Wife 3
Blood Brothers - Laser Life

So it's just ticked past midnight; it still feels like Thursday night to me but I guess technically it is Friday morning. Which means that right now it's my birthday. Honestly I wasn't expecting to feel any monumental change, but now I can officially confirm - 24 does not feel any different than 23. 21 was certainly an exciting year - I could finally legally drink and gamble and took full advantage of both in a boozy Vegas weekend vacation. And 25 seems like an important age. I think that's the age by which I'm supposed to have made some kinds of accomplishments in life. But 22, 23, 24, these don't feel like significant ages. I mean, I guess there are things to be depressed about if you look for them - Bob Dylan wrote "Like A Rolling Stone" when he was 24; when Kobe Bryant was my age he had just captured his third NBA Championship.

But really things like that don't bother me much. There's always going to be somebody accomplishing more than you and doing it better and doing it at a younger age (and I long ago made peace with the fact that I am not going to write like Bob Dylan or play basketball like Kobe Bryant). A different (saner?) person might look at my life at 24 and be pretty disappointed. But there are certain small pleasures in life that keep me from dwelling on the negatives for any extended period of time. Things like the new Decemberists' new album.

I brought up this album, The Crane Wife, last night in a discussion with a friend who said she wouldn't want to bring a child into this world. Things are fucked up, sure: the Bush presidency, global warming, poverty, disease, racism and all that. But seriously - can a world where this album exists be all that bad? Like that scene in Manhattan where Woody Allen rattles off into a tape recorder all the things that makes life worth living, if I made a similar list it would mostly consist of music.

I don't know if "Potato Head Blues" would be enough to get me out of bed in the morning but there's plenty of music that seems to do the trick. In this year alone The Decemberists, The Thermals, TV On the Radio, Lupe Fiasco, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bob Dylan, Lily Allen, Rah Bras, Aloe Blacc, Figurines, NOMO, Outkast, Love Is All, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake and just the slightest rumor of a Jay-Z comeback album (oh my god. You know how they say men think about sex like every six seconds? That's about how often I think about the new Jay-Z album); all these artists have been enough to make my world a little brighter.

Just listen to "The Crane Wife 3", the first song off The Crane Wife, and be depressed. Just try. See, it's impossible. This is as close to perfect as pop music gets. It's ironic of course considering how utterly depressing the story of the Crane Wife is, but this song is so beautiful it's subject hardly matters. I think people focus too much on the "hyperliteracy" of Colin Meloy's lyrics. What makes the Decemberists great is not the lyrics. Who would read a novel that repeated the words "I will hang my head, hang my head low" over and over? But in a song, atop the Decemberists' sublime instrumentation and sold by Meloy's delicate but impassioned delivery, these words soar. Read off a page it may fall flat, but sung I could listen to this refrain forever.

But still, I see how people get fixated on the words. It's not often you come across snowy shrouds and boughs unbound in a catchy little folksy pop song. OK shit, it's not ever. And the fact that this is on a major label just makes it so much weirder. Two songs over 10 minutes long, obscure Japanese fables, northern Irish terrorists, watery graves, civil war soldiers? Is this stuff gonna fly on TRL? Probably not. But hopefully with a major label's backing these sermons will reach some people outside the choir. And luckily, for the uninitiated, they'll get to start a love affair with the Decemberists at their most bizarre, most ambitious and most astonishing album yet.

And speaking of boundary-pushing bands that are inexplicably on major labels, have you heard any of the new Blood Brothers yet? Here's the video of the "single"(?), courtesy of YouTube:

Um, yeah. Brilliant. How many albums do the Blood Brothers get to sneak out of V2 before somebody realizes that these guys are probably not gonna break into the mainstream? But thank god somebody is paying them to do this. Could you imagine if Johnny Whitney had to have a day job? Anybody who's heard him sing would probably tell him not to quit it. And yet he makes a living off that insane nails on a blackboard screech. Sometimes life works out strangely wonderful like that.

The first two leaked tracks I've heard off of the Blood Brothers upcoming album Young Machetes (thank you Idolator), sound a lot more like Whitney's side project Neon Blonde than the more hardcore inclined Blood Brothers albums. Which, at least for me, can only be a good thing;Chandeliers in the Savannah was one of my favorite records of last year. And, coincidentally, I got that album last year as a birthday present.

So, not much has changed since then. I live in the same place, in the same dead end boring county, with a different but similarily uninteresting and unimportant job. I still don't have a girlfriend (another Woody Allen moment comes to mind, a joke from the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors, but unfortunately I've never been to the Statue of Liberty), I still wouldn't be making anybody jealous at a high school reunion. But goddamn is my iTunes Music folder impressive.

Life is pretty good.

(Click here to buy The Crane Wife on Amazon.)

(Click here to pre-order Young Machetes on Amazon.)

Wake Up it's Time for Work

2006-09-26T06:47:00.000-07:00

Cursive - Dorothy Dreams of Tornados
Cursive - Rise Up! Rise Up!

Date> 25 September 2006
To> patrickkilpatrick@gmail.com
Subject> Wake Up it's Time for Work

Hey there, Patrick...

I was thinking about a few things on the way home from work today; one of them being the power that words have to clue us in to new music. In particular I'm reminded of My Morning Jacket who had never interested either of us until "Z" came out. Even though they had other records out (and we've listened to some since) there was never anything in any of their reviews that prompted either of us to check them out. But "Z" was something different. Out of the My Morning Jacket CDs, it sounds the most like one we'd be into. So thank goodness somebody reviewed that record with enough sense to fill in the appropriate Jeff-and-Patrick buzzwords.

I was also thinking about how sometimes even a "bad" review will use strange terms and phrases that will pique our interests as well. The quickest example I can think of is the "Castlevania guitar tones" on the latest Mars Volta record. Even if the reviewer is using the term negatively, it evokes something positive for us.

So here I am, on day 7 of a nearly incessant Cursive binge and I want to write the review for the latest album, "Happy Hollow," that makes you want to check it out... that lends a pair of fresh ears and new pair of specs. (One's that don't earn the ire of your supervisors, perhaps?) Because beyond if you even end up liking the record, let alone the band, I think this record explores a lot of ideas that you and I have talked about before (and even written songs about.) And maybe it's just me, but I love it when someone 'established' has similar ideas as I do... especially if those ideas are relevant and important. And beyond the lyrical and meta-meanings of the record, I think it sounds absolutely brilliant. (More on that later.)

I try pretty hard not to be a typical art-rocker or a closed-minded rockist, as you know. So concept albums are almost always hit-or-miss for me. I have no love affair for "Tommy" or "In Search of the Lost Chord," but if a good album comes along labeled as "concept," I'll admit it. (Note: my closet love affair with Coheed and Cambra.)

But Cursive's "Happy Hollow" is a concept record unlike all others. There's some more typical demarkations like the bookending musical themes on the record and repeated lyrics and melodies throughout the songs, but most of it feels like a good dramatic play or movie. Rather than forcing Cursive songs into some conceptual mold in order to make them fit on the record, the band finds fertile and plentiful material in their own self-imposed set-up.

I'm not sure if it's because I was forced to read and watch it so many times, but for some reason I hate "Our Town." So it pains me to compare "Happy Hollow" to it, but it's the best I can do... maybe "Our Town" crossed with some French New Wave director who focuses on a few characters in depth rather that telling the story of one archetypal hero... (Can you think of a good example?) But like a genius director, the stories of all these characters combine to form a meaning, a message, a story, bigger than the individual pieces themselves.

The cover art is the first clue. Referencing old postcards, the art depicts an anywhere-town that is desolate, boring and completely run-of-the-mill. At first I wasn't sure I'd be able to get into this record as much as "The Ugly Organ" because I can relate to playing in a band, but I wasn't sure about relating to small town life.

But "Happy Hollow" is more about the delusions and games that people play in this small town in order to keep going on. (And I've found them relatable to the point of obsession.) I suppose I can relate especially to the struggle of growing up with certain religious truths presented as solutions and never having the chance to objectively see them as diversions.

In a lot of ways, this record is about the "culture war" between the Red and Blue states... between the University and the Church, Science and Religion. It's about "Normal Life" and the meaning of existence. There are tales of alienated priests so human and well-rendered... beyond charicature of simple black-and-white. All the characters in Happy Hollow are complex and dimensional. There are tales of girls who's boyfriends are off at war, grown men doubting their faith, and head on confrontation with "intelligent design." (And the Wizard of Oz flourishes actually work rather well...) And while there isn't a real story arc, listening to the album in its entirety feels complete... like you're ready for a cigarette, a sigh, and muttering, "Well, that was a good flick."

You know, maybe it's not a concept album after all. Maybe it's just a good album. Maybe albums are supposed to be more than a collection of singles... maybe they should be more like a "body of work"... but "Happy Hollow" feels more like a city-sized mural than a portfolio or gallery show. The ambition and scope are breath-taking.

And what really brings it all together is the music itself. While I was bummed at first that there would be no cello on this record, (Cello! You have a bass!) I soon found myself at home in the almost free-jazz horn arrangements. Cursive has this thing where they load up the beats with like 10 guitars, a bass and snare hit, and now, bizarre horn arrangements. If for nothing else, check out "Happy Hollow" just for the way the songs sound. There really isn't anyone else out there doing this... and if there's anything close I want to know all about it. And the songs on this record have this off-kilter gospel vibe that I can't quite place. The only thing that comes close is Lord Have Mercy On Us. It's loud and powerful and full of angst, but it feels like gospel. It's like the flip-side of gospel... post-apocalyptic gospel as I like to say.

But there's also some slide guitar that brings out the real Americana elements to the music. And of course that only adds to further the concept of small town life. But then of course there's the lyrical content atop those familiar tones... and the songs never sound like period pieces or revivalism... they feel painfully like now. (And now I think I might be repeating myself...)

So I know there are segments of our musical-taste Venn diagrams that don't cross, but I'd like to move Cursive out of that section and into the intersection... at least "Happy Hollow." I wouldn't go to all this trouble for nothing; I think you'd be missing out if you didn't at least give it a listen... maybe look up some lyrics online...

"Rocking chairs of disenchantment, green grass of envy and malice - our salad days, living in Happy Hollow."

Jeff

This Might Be Satire

2006-09-14T02:15:00.000-07:00

Jews and Mexicans - Fk Song

Remember Icy Hot Stuntaz, the trio of ridiculous white rappers who became an internet phenomenon?

This is funnier.

Remember the macho homophobic misogynistic alpha male motherfucker who called you a "fag" in high school? The fratboy jock asshole who watches Bumfights and lights his farts on fire? The one with the backwards baseball cap and the life-size hot wheel car with the GINORMOUS tires?

This is his band.

If this was a parody it would be at Johann Goethe levels of genius. But I can assure you, this is unfortunately not a joke. This is a real band. And they really are called Jews and Mexicans. This song really is called "Fk Song" (it comes from a burned CD-R entitled "The Fuck Demo"). And yes. Yes, he really did just sing "I popped a boner".

Their "manager" gave me the sales pitch over the phone: Imagine Jim Morrison fronting the Stooges, with Robert Plant's swagger, and something about "lyrical decadence and debauchery". I forget the rest. The only reason I remember that much is that I had to hear the same memorized speech about 8 more times after he showed up at the venue I volunteer at trying to get his band a show. He told it to whoever would listen. Obviously he'd spent a lot of time crafting this perfect quote, dreaming of somebody at Rock City News reading it in the band's press kit, and he was proud of himself.

A while after he left I found myself bored enough to pop in the CD and find out just how bad it was going to be. I'll admit, I was curious: Would it be laughably bad or just mediocrely boring? I mean, I knew it wasn't going to be good. But honestly I never dreamed it would be as hilariously bad as it is. This is like Right Said Fred kind of so-bad-it's-fucking-amazing.

But at first I was ready to turn it off after the first couple seconds. It's basically just a complete rip off of "L.A. Woman" with a guy who wants to sound like Jim Morrison just as bad as any guy working at Guitar Center in West Hollywood and playing at the Whisky-a-Go-Go on Tuesday nights. But then it starts to get a little interesting. Just before the one-minute mark there's a particular vocal phrasing that kept me from hitting stop. It's the two lines that end in "all day" and "your way". The way the singer slurs those words he sounds exactly like Mr. Mackey on South Park. All day, your way, mmmm kay? It made me hesitate for a moment - maybe this is going to get funny. And thank god I hesitated because I was rewarded with a musical moment that was just plain fucking magical:

One day I saw you naked and then
I popped a boner
So hard that it made me shiver

Oh my god. I rewound that part fourty times before I even got to the rest of the song. I'm listening to it now and I'm still laughing. Will this ever get old? But wait, that's not the only great part of the song. Right after the shiver inducing erection we get into the chorus, which is "I just wanna fu fu fu fuck you. Fu fu fu fu fuck you. I can't wait to fuck you all day and night. Fu fu fu fuck fuck you" repeated over and over. Is this the best stuttering in a song since "My Generation" or what?

The next verse after the chorus is also killer. The first line is "Down on your knees so you can suck my cock" and I can't really decipher what he's saying in the second line but suffice it to say, it ends with "we're gonna rock". And as brilliant a lyricist as this guy is (and maybe now would be a good time to mention that according to the band's myspace page the lead singer's name is Baby Rapest [sic] ) he is as equally adept at improvised yelping noises as he is at clever couplets. This song is punctuated by the strangest set of "oh"s, "ah"s, "uh"s, "ooh"s and "yeah"s I've ever heard. After one particularly absurdly strange cracked-voice squeal Baby Rapest tells us that "that's the noise you're going to make baby". If I was ever with a girl who made that noise I think I would be scared.

But, actually, I'm not so sure this song is being sung to a girl at all. At one point the singer says "Come on Shane." Granted this is right before a ripping guitar solo (a solo that also features some pretty rocking handclaps) so maybe he's just calling out a musical cue. But I'd like to think that possibly "Shane" has been the object of lust all along. Especially when you consider that their website is so full of homophobic slurs it's like Fred Phelps-style offensive. I think thou doth protesteth too much, know what I'm sayin?

I'm not going to link to their website though, because I really don't want to give this band any more promotion then I already have. But I had to post the song because, well... it's not every day that you luck into finding the song with the worst lyrics ever written. But now that I've got this song in my iTunes folder I'm just gonna throw this CD away (I skimmed through the rest of "The Fuck Demo" and nothing else comes close to being as funny. It just sucks.) And I certainly don't want these guys to play at our venue. If their manager calls back to book a show I think I'll just tell him:

"Fu fu fu fu fu fuck fuck you"

The Ashes Are Already About Us

2006-09-12T23:43:00.000-07:00

Justin Timberlake - LoveStoned

In the ongoing music nerd debate between rockism and uh, anti-rockism (is it anti-rockism or popism? Either way, if you follow our blog at all it should be clear that this is the side of line we tend to fall on), today marked a huge blow to the rockist's argument. Or, if you don't give a shit about splitting hairs over what music critics think (which let's face it, if you're sane you probably shouldn't) just think of today as a great day for pop music. Today the new Justin Timberlake album came out.

Two years after Kalefah Sanneh's "The Rap Against Rockism" article in The New York Times (re)ignited the debate, people are still talking about it. Or at least the kind of people who talk about this kind of thing are still talking about it. And more and more I think it's becoming apparent that, authenticity and rock and roll paradigms be damned, pop music is really fucking good lately. And I mean pop music in the literal sense: popular music. The music that's on the radio, on MTV, in the clubs. The music that normal people listen to. The music that sells millions of records. My inner rock snob doesn't want to admit this, the 13 year old me who sold his entire CD collection because he decided all the bands he liked were sell-outs would probably hate the 23 year old unabashed Justin fan me, but the fact remains - this music is just as good, just as important, just as boundary pushing and sonically interesting as any underground hipster band du jour.

Undoubtedly there's still a lot of popular music that sucks. While watching MTV's VMAs this year, I was slapped in the face with the reality of how much a lot of popular music really sucks. Black Eyed Peas, All American Rejects, Panic! at the Disco - these bands are fucking atrocious. I have a co-worker who assures me that Fall Out Boy are a great band. Today a guy at work was blasting this stomach churning dancehall cover of "I Will Survive" (sung by a dude. I think it was Sean Paul) and this motherfucker was rocking out like this was his jam. Yes this makes me die a little inside. Yes I wish more people would buy The Thermals record than the Nickelback record. But when your Billboard chart features albums like Outkast's Idlewild, Gnarls Barkley's St. Elsewhere and Beyonce's B'Day, there is at least some glimmer of hope on the musical horizon.

Those albums I mentioned have already been blogged to death so I don't really think I need to write about those. (Fluxblog in particular had a great post on a track from the Beyonce album a couple days ago). Anybody who wanted them would probably have them by now. (And if you didn't, get them - they're all worth it). But I guess I'm hoping that Future Sex / Love Sounds may still be fresh enough that I can catch some people on the fence and push them into buying it.

I honestly could write entire posts off each song on the record. But I had to pick one so I figured I might as well let you dive right into the center piece of the record. "Love Stoned" is both one of the best pop songs in recent memory and one of the most completely bizarre. It's a seven and a half minute beatboxing, ass shaking, bloody dancefloor, spage age synthesized orchestral funk/hip hop... thing. And then at some point it morphs into some kind of electro pop gospel R&B ballad. This shit is epic. If Justin was ugly and signed to an indie label he would be so critically acclaimed he'd make Sufjan Stevens look like Fred Durst.

I remember just before Justin's first record came out I was reading an interview with The Neptunes where Pharrell said that he and Justin had a lot in common and got along really well. It seemed like a funny comment at the time. I just couldn't picture Skateboard P and the curly haired guy from NSync hanging out together. Now obviously I don't know anything about Justin personally, but listening to this record I think I'm starting to see what Pharrell meant. I think that I could get along with Justin too, at least get along on one fundamental level... I think he's got great taste in music. It's impossible to put a finger on one influence but the album is reminiscent of the best of artists like Prince, Michael Jackson, Al Green, Marvin Gaye. There's a quality and a depth in his voice that you just don't hear in most watery white pop singers. It feels like he's absorbed his musical predecessors, but at the same time it's not simple imitation or even homage. This is the kind of music you imagine those great artists would be making if they were in their prime in 2006.

I know a lot of people want to dismiss Justin's creative involvement in his songs. Even I originally wanted to just write about Timbaland's beats on this record. Before I heard the record I was ready to immediately assign all credit to his production over Justin's vocals. But a curious question arises when listening though the album. Timbaland's been doing his thing for awhile now, and he's pretty prolific. He makes a lot of beats for a lot of people. So how come EVERY one of his beats on Future Sex / Love Sounds is mind blowingly good?

Mere coincidence seems statistically improbable. Justin is making these songs sound this good. He's been brilliant without Timbaland before (most of the best songs on Justified were the Neptunes tracks) and obviously Timbaland was making hip hop interesting when Justin was still on the Mickey Mouse Club. But together, it's like if John had met Paul after they were both already famous. Justin and Timbaland have crafted something truly unique here. Dance music that's fun and funky but intelligent and inventive. It's compelling and weird and catchy. These sound like hit songs but don't follow hit song rules.

So forget the notion that pop music is inauthentic or inherently disposable or not cool. In fact, forget the rockism debate at all, because Justin isn't just on both sides of the line -he's obliterating the line. He's redefining those notions. And he's redefining what popular music sounds like.

(Click here to buy Future Sex/Love Sounds on Amazon.)

I Gots To Get Paid

2006-08-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

Alexi Murdoch - Orange Sky

The idea of an mp3 blog, from what I can gather, is to post songs that are good. Or at least songs that you like. Or maybe just songs you think other people should hear. But what about a song you think people should hear (if they haven't already, which would probably be unlikely for reasons we'll get to in a moment) but you don't necessarily think is good? I'm not sure if Alexi Murdoch's "Orange Sky" is a "good" song or not, I'm on the fence as to whether I can say I like it or not without adding a caveat, but there's something intriguing about it, something that makes me think it's worth posting.

In last Sunday's LA Times Calendar section there was an article about the recent phenomenon of DVD TV binging, and I must admit that I seem to fit the profile of a TV binger. Naturally possessing something of an obsessive personality, if I find a TV show that I like (which is becoming less rare lately; either I'm getting dumber or television is getting better) I tend to consume everything I can about it in a short period of time. The first time I saw an episode of Oz I devoured four seasons in as many weeks. It took a couple weeks to get through the first season of Numb3rs, mostly because I kept each disc longer than usual as I tried to convince friends to watch the episodes with me and get on board with how fucking brilliant and subversive the show is. I watched the entire British Office series in a few days, watched the first American season in one day and then spent another reading every season 2 script online (the DVD release date just seemed too far away at the time). Currently I'm 3 discs into the first season of Lost. And recently I just finished season 1 of Prison Break, which if I wasn't desperately trying to get out of this television digression and back to the subject of music I would tell you is the best show on TV and then I would get into all the reasons why. It was in an episode of Prison Break that I first came across the song "Orange Sky".

But like I said before I can't tell you if I like the song or not, or even if I liked it that first time I heard it. Obviously I was interested enough to find out what the name of the song was, but I think that had more to do with my interest in songs used on television than in that particular song. I've always been fascinated by what's going on behind the curtain. I'm not just obsessed with pop songs themselves, I'm obsessed with everything about them: how they're written, how they're recorded, how they're used. I love learning the intricacies of copyright law, the finer points of publishing deals, everything that encompasses Industry Rule Number 4080. And perhaps at the heart of this fascination are the ethical dilemmas that inevitably arise when we're talking about a multi-billion dollar industry that revolves around an art form. What grabbed me about Alexi Murdoch's song wasn't the lyrics or the vocals or the chord progression - it was why was I even hearing this song? Why did the producers of Prison Break decide to use this particular song? And why did Alexi Murdoch agree to give permission?

Just in case anyone is unclear, music used in film or television is licensed differently than music on record. To oversimplify it: I could record a cover of "Orange Sky" if I wanted to and I don't need anyone's permission. I'm issued a compulsory mechanical license and I can legally record and release a cover of any song I want as long as I pay the set license fee (currently 9.1 cents per record if the song is under 5 minutes long). But to use a song for film, television, video games or any other medium where music is synchronized with images, a different license, called a synchronization license, is required. And unlike a mechanical license, there is no set fee for a synch license - it's entirely negotiable. And it requires permission. So when you hear some horrific cover on the radio, say for example that Used/My Chemical Romance cover of "Under Pressure" from awhile back, you can sleep well at night knowing that David Bowie and the Freddie Mercury estate had no control over that. But if you heard that same song in a car commercial, when you hear Bloc Party shilling for Target, when you see The Spinto Band jumping from the pages of blogs to selling diamond rings in the blink of an eye, when you hear the latest cool "indie" band in an episode of The OC, it means that somebody made a choice. Somebody said yes.

The OC is actually a perfect example to use when talking about the ethical choice of bands issuing synch licenses. It was an interview with The OC's Josh Schwartz in Billboard that launched a heated debate in my Music Publishing class about the responsibility of an artist letting their music be used on television. In the interview Schwartz revealed that the only band to ever say no to him was the Arcade Fire. I loved the Arcade Fire already, but this revelation shot my respect for them through the roof. However my teacher, a lawyer in his mid 60's who gave us constant lectures about how file-sharing was really file-stealing, immediately dismissed the band's decision as "stupid". He was of the opinion that the lucrative nature of licensing your songs for film and television was enough to completely dispel any notions of artistic integrity. He even admitted that as a lawyer for publishing companies he would frequently try to get songwriters to sign away they're rights of refusal and to let the publisher worry about when to give license permission. The only point that he would concede was that if an artist had a moral objection to the products being advertised - like tobacco or alcohol - then it was OK to say no. But what if the artist's moral objection is to the very idea of their art being used to sell products? When I asked this question he looked at me like I was Bill Maher and I'd just commented on the bravery of suicide bombers.

So let's talk about Alexi Murdoch. Here's an artist who appears to have absolutely no qualms about selling his songs to film and television. And he's selling to whoever's buying. Looking the song up after seeing it on Prison Break, I found out that this is far from the first time it's been used. It was featured in the films Garden State and Ladder 49. It was used in the trailer for Paradise Now. Besides Prison Break it's been used on Dawson's Creek, House and the aforementioned OC. It's been used in commercials for Honda and Hallmark. This is a new kind of hit song. It's been used so ubiquitously that I'm sure Murdoch has made as much money off of it as any pop hit, and yet I've never heard it on the radio, I've never seen his name on any kind of pop chart. He retains the low profile of an indie artist but gets the royalty checks of a superstar. His Wikipedia page, despite rattling off the instances of "Orange Sky"'s appearance onscreen, stresses his indie pedigree with this story:

"... when he took his music to a record company... the record company guy popped the disc into his computer rather than a stereo and then proceeded to stare at the counter on the screen waiting to see how long it took to get to the chorus, et cetera. This is when he supposedly knew he had to go the indie route."

It's a nice anecdote, but a little too perfect I think. Sounds more like something from a press savvy one-sheet on some Sprite "Image is Nothing" shit. The indie artist battling the big bad record company used as a marketing strategy. But maybe I'm just cynical, and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Murdoch is a struggling independent artist who is a sparkling example of DIY spirit but just happens to drive a Honda and uses Hallmark greeting cards. He's simply a huge fan of all those movies and TV shows. And maybe that makes it OK. That was Bloc Party's excuse for being the center of the Target campaign. And even the bands who have said no to the OC promotional behemoth have popped up elsewhere around the dial- Arcade Fire on Six Feet Under, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on The Office. But there's something about "Orange Sky" that just doesn't sit right with me.

I think I've overanalyzed the song way too much to speak objectively about it now, but I want to at least attempt to decipher whether it's actually a good song or not. I have to confess that I was motivated enough to pay for and download it (albeit from allofmp3 so it only cost a few cents) and I have listened to it dozens of times now. But is it because I genuinely like it or because I knew I wanted to write about it? Observer bias like a motherfucker. I can say at least that I don't hate the song. It's not like I could ever write about something like "My Humps", because I wouldn't be able to bear listening to it over and over. But I can listen to "Orange Sky". Apparently, I've been able to listen to it 19 times over the last week or so. And that might be part of the problem. It's so completely unoffending that I can just tune it right out. It's a softly strummed acoustic song, with a mildly catchy refrain, Murdoch's voice is soothingly bland, and the lyrics are just meaningless enough that I can hang whatever importance I want on them. The lyrics in particular seem to be what makes the song so appropriate for cinematic moments. The song scores a scene in Prison Break when it seems like all hope is lost for the series' protagonist, it appears he's not going to be able to save his brother's life after all, and Murdoch's hushed "Brother you know it's a long road we've been walking on" is given emotional weight. But taken out of context (or I guess, put back in it's original context) this line doesn't really mean anything, it doesn't go anywhere. In the next couplet he's singing about his sister and then about how weary and heartbroken he is and then at some point he finds salvation in somebody's love, although it's never quite clear whose love he's talking about. But it must be important since this is the chorus.

And in a way, this is what a good song is supposed to do. An old industry maxim is that no one cares what you have to say, they only care about how what you have to say relates to them. And I think this is true, the songs I really connect with are ones that I find my own meaning in. I've never been in love with anyone with pale blue eyes and yet when I listen to the Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" I somehow find it completely relatable. But the difference is, I would rather invest my own meaning into lyrics as unique and complex and personal as "If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see/I'd put you in the mirror I put in front of me." than the milque toast "My salvation lies in your love." "Orange Sky" is like the musical equivelant of the weekly horoscope. So vague and general that you can be tricked into thinking it was written just for you.

All this of course still doesn't answer the question of whether it's a good song or not. But to define exactly what makes a song good is probably beyond the scope of any mp3 blog, even one as wordy as ours. Does the fact that "Orange Sky" has been recycled for so many commercials and trailers and TV shows make it bad? Does it make Alexi Murdoch a bad person, or an unethical artist? Going back to the question I posed to my professor - should you have moral objections to other people using your art for commercial purposes? I don't have answers to any of these questions and I don't think it matters. But I do think, especially as artists and record companies trying to fight the onslaught of digital downloading are scrambling to make a buck wherever they can, in a time when it's no longer a shock to hear one of your favorite songs in a TV commercial, when 'sell out' no longer seems to be a dirty word... what is important is that, even if the answers don't come easily, we still ask the questions.

(Click here to buy Alexi Murdoch's Time Without Consequence on Amazon.)

(Watch the second season of Prison Break, Monday nights on Fox.)

Surf Will Tear Us Apart (Again)

2006-08-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

Mister Loveless - Family Jewels
Mister Loveless - A Prison Break

First off - Hi, How are you? It's been a while. These blogs can be so strangely surreal and completely awesome at the same time. Getting email from some of my musical heros and other artists I've covered is one of the coolest perks I could have asked for. And beyond that, sometimes you get to hear from voices thought long in the past. When I made a passing remark about my first kiss, the other guilty partner in our middle school rite of passage actually found the post and wrote me a little email... and even posted a comment on the blog. (Which I'm about to hyperlink in one sentence.)

Back in May, I mentioned briefly my first musical phase involving the Beach Boys. I'm still a little unclear why I sought out Surf music or even more specifically the Beach Boys but surfing was definitely cool and I'm thinking one of my friends must have had a Beach Boys tape. And in thinking long and hard about the subject, I'm pretty sure I convinced Aaron to let me stay the night at his house just so I could listen to his tape some more. (And I think he said he had one more tape at home too... and maybe I could listen to that as well!)

Like most kids, he had a greatest hits compilation album. But some time later, I convinced my mom to let me buy a tape from the local Alpha-Beta. Tell a friend. (If that means nothing to you, it's because Ralph's later bought Alpha Beta and I never saw thier Richard Simmons-like spokesman again.)

I remember my dad taking exception to the little note on the cassette's cover: Due to time constraints, some songs from the original album may not be contained on this cassette. I remember he said, "I wonder what songs you don't get to hear." Or something to that effect. But I was a kid and didn't really have any clue about what an 'album' really was, in fact, I don't think I was really clear on the concept of what a band was either. In the fourth grade, at the peak of my Beach Boys infatuation I got to see them play live. You would think I would have been totally excited and amazed to get to see my idols live, but I remember being sort of bored. (Especially when Chicago was playing first.) I remember being more excited about seeing an Oldies cover band at the Pear Fair in Walnut Grove. I mostly recall being totally pissed that we had to walk around the fair and couldn't just stay and watch the band. I really remember that...I was super pissed. I don't think there's any way a 10 year old can rationally express that kind of resentment.

So a few weeks ago, I went ahead and bought the Beach Boy's first three albums. I think I have a fairly solid grasp on 'albums' and 'bands' now and I'd like to re-listen to these songs without having to resort to old, well-loved cassettes.

I may sound like a total moron here, but I had no idea the Beach Boys actually played surf-rock. I guess I always just thought they came up with their folk-inspired and surf-inspired music naturally in Southern California. But apparently the aging county fair mainstays started out recording versions of "Miserlou" and "Let's Go Tripping." I think maybe all the instrumentals got cut from the cassette versions. Somehow my whole vision of the band's early days has shifted. I started to wonder if the real surfers listened to instrumental stuff like Dick Dale and thought adding vocals was a mainstream, sell-out move.

Don't get me wrong, I think the Beach Boys vocal arrangements are true genius and no doubt molded my impressions beyond repair. (It's an easy segue from Beach Boys to The Queers, Screeching Weasel and all that pop-punk I love and have loved... and even to Essex Green or Mates of State.) But I was amazed how much the music had affected me as well. I didn't know in the fourth grade who played guitar or bass, or even who the lead vocals were on which song, but somehow the music still got through. After hearing "Surfin' Safari" and "Help Me Rhonda" thousands of times since, I actually listened to them. I'm still a sucker for that classic surf beat on "Surfin Safari" and that catchy little riff on "Help Me Rhonda."

So where does that leave me? Do I start attending touristy beach festivals and rocking out with a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts? Thankfully, there's some folks out there who might just love surf music as much as I do but approach from a contemporary, underground-y perspective. Indebted as much to Fugazi and Joy Division as much as anything Southern California produced in the 60s, Mister Loveless, create a an amalgamation of sounds that just sounds ridiculous on paper. At first I was wary of a band claiming to be the missing link between surf-rock and post-punk. I didn't think there was such a link... nor really any need for one. But then I heard the music.

The X meets Y formula is such a shallow short-form, but it's hard to explain a band in terms everyone will understand and quick enough so you don't lose their attention. So maybe it's a perfect explanation for potential fans (and bloggers), but the music is much richer and sincere than a quick tagline description.

While more and more bands attempt to pull off some sort of Ian Curtis delivery with less and less sincerity and more and more empty style, Mister Loveless manage to capture what has endured Curtis for generations: the palpable desperation. That's a fellow human being delivering those vocals. I can relate to that isolation. And I'm not sure if I'm a good enough writer to explain how even the guitar tone and melodies manage to espouse some sentiment of alienation and anxiety. It doesn't sound like those dark, minor chords ala Nick Cave; the melodies are almost poppy. But there's a dark corner to even the most pleasing major scale, and Mister Loveless finds it, and dwells in it. And when they are working with a minor chord, dude, it gets dark and tense.

I may be doing the band a disservice making them seem so completely bleak. Don't forget the lingering elements of surf-rock I told you about earlier. The beats never leave you bored and shift from that classic 2-4 surf rhythm to a 16th note hi-hat disco attack to straight-ahead four-on-the-floor... and they never get showy, and never merely 'serve the song.' The unexpected beats elevate the band's sound into a new territory. Atop these drums strides languorous, desperate and oddly comforting guitar lines. And where so much surf gets mired in technicallity and reverb, Loveless remains human and accessible.

Beyond mimicking their favorite bands, or sounding like a band out of their time, or retro, Mister Loveless combines all the wrong elements in just the right way. The burn of isolation smells like today; the fumes are all too familiar. There is no second-degree emotion here, no sillouette of the dead past. Unfortunately this angst is all too 'of today.' Nowadays we can be isolated despite being connected to millions. It doesn't ache any less no matter how many friends I can add to MySpace. Looming on the horizon the big city beckons to a nation of centerless suburbanites. And how do we handle the day-to-day when a perfect tomorrow is only a freeway or interstate away?

That feels different than anything anyone could have felt ten, twenty, thirty years ago. We don't need anymore emotional rehashes of days gone by.

Mister Loveless Web Site
Mister Loveless MySpace

Crass Crass Revolution

2006-07-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

Chris Robinson - Bata Motel

Crass was the band that changed everything for me. The Sex Pistols were the first punk band I ever heard, a barely audible radio station in Berkeley played "Anarchy In The U.K." when I was sitting at the train station on a family vacation and I took note that this sounded like something I needed to own. The Clash were the first punk band that I really really loved, where I bought their T-shirt and wore it nearly every day. A friend in junior high supplied me with tapes pilfered from his neighbor across the street - Black Flag, the Misfits, Minor Threat. These bands were important to me, the first time hearing each one of them ("Nervous Breakdown", "Bullet", "Filler" in that order) are moments crystal clear in my memory. But if I'm going to level a compliment as heavy as "life changing" I don't think I can honestly say any of those bands fit the criteria. But the first time I heard Crass it was more than just the sound, it was more than the lyrics, it was more than the imagery. A lot of bands sounded great, or had interesting things to say, or looked really cool, but Crass managed to single handedly make me feel less alone in the world.

Back in the summer after 8th grade a lot of things were changing for me. I was a couple months shy of my thirteenth birthday, about to become a teenager, music was becoming a lot more important to me, I was drifting away from the straight laced A students that I shared honors classes with and hanging out more with the "bad" kids who smoked cigarettes after school and went to punk rock shows at hockey rinks. It was a very awkward, corny time in my life. (It was the time in my life when, to borrow a phrase, everybody in my suburb was a sellout.) And it was the first time I started to think that I wasn't quite normal. Kids in my class would talk about sports and pussy and cars and MTV and I couldn't fucking relate to any of them. People would talk to me about religion and tell me about Jesus, people I thought were my friends would try to get me to go to church with them and I thought they were completely insane. In class I would learn about government and economics and it all seemed stupid to me. I wanted really badly to fit in, I tried going to church with those friends and I wanted to believe because I didn't want to go to Hell, I told myself I wanted to be good at sports, I tried to pretend that I liked normal things... but still deep down inside I really just wished I could find someone who was weird like me. And then I got a Crass record. It was the first time I'd ever heard anyone saying anything bad about Jesus. And they did it repeatedly. And I thought, "finally."

Back then I picked out records based on the number of T-shirts and patches I'd seen. A lot of people seemed to have Crass shirts so I thought they must be pretty good. Little did I know The Feeding of the 5000 was going to have every thought that I had been trying to suppress in my head, screamed out in words squished together to fit over manic punk rock beats. It was music that sounded as angry and confused and naive and anti-social as I felt. And it was comforting. Someone else on the planet was thinking these same things, even if we were seperated by 20 years and an entire continent.

I can't say that I still listen to Crass that much anymore. That copy of Feeding is sitting in my parents garage somewhere, but I still love them. Just for different reasons now. A lot of people overlook the fact that Crass had a sense of humor, or the fact that their music was actually really good (listen to how awesome some of those bass lines were. Jeff and I have talked for years now about starting a funk Crass tribute band where we only played the danciest Crass songs. We're thinking of calling it Crass Crass Revolution), or the fact that some of their ideas are still resonant. "Jesus sucks" may not sound as ground breaking as it did to me 10 years ago, but songs like "Bata Motel" are still pretty potent. In fact, even though Feeding of the 5000 will always have a special place in my memory, Penis Envy is probably my favorite Crass album. Subtlety seems to stand the test of time better.

I have no idea when Chris Robinson first heard Crass, I don't know if they changed his life like they changed mine, but I bet he's got a story that's fairly similar. I always liked Chris, he's a local singer/songwriter who I first met when he was playing in a punk rock band. Now he's focusing on solo acoustic material with a knack for being brutally honest and emotionally wrought but incredibly catchy and well crafted. His original stuff is really good (so after you download this one for free, you should check out his Myspace page and buy his record) and I easily could have written about some of those songs. But when I heard his cover of Crass' "Bata Motel" I felt an instant connection. I guess no matter what age you are, or what stage of your life you're in, it's still nice to hear someone sing a song and feel a little less alone.

(Click here for Chris Robinson on Myspace.)

How Much Art Can You Take? (Or There's Something About That Blue)

2006-07-11T21:58:00.000-07:00

The Thermals - No Culture Icons
Cursive - Art is Hard
Art Brut - Modern Art

As I'm sure you've realized by now, I place a tremendous importance on music in my life. I gain strength through solidarity, learn lessons vicariously and internalize and empathize with the similar ideas and emotions. My first google after being released from a two week stay in the hospital and discovering I had diabetes was "diabetic punk." There had to be some sort of anthem out there from a garage band sans working pancreas. I mean, Keith Morris, what are you doing nowadays anyhow? But I never found one and had to write it myself. ["(Who Put) The Beat (In Diabetes)"]

So when I hear a new song that is about or references something I'm into, my ears prick up and sometimes I fall in love. And while I've never heard a song about Graphic Design, I get excited when I hear Maximo Park reference A4 paper because I'm a big design nerd and know that's the equivalent of Letter size, or 8 1/2 x 11, in the UK. Perhaps I'm easy to please or am totally willing to admit that I enjoy a self-serve ego stroke time and again.

But when a band manages to write a great song about something I'm thoroughly passionate about, like Art, I usually have to change pants. Luckily, I have Cacophony and Coffee as an outlet or I would have to make sneak appearances to my art school alum and hand out mixtapes with accompanying essays. There could probably be scores of more posts from me in the future about art school bands, or even just RISD bands, but I'm not talking about artists making music or music as art, or anything like that. I'm talking about songs discussing art in the same way there are countless songs about love or being in love or being loved or the one that you love. Sure there are some classics like "Pablo Picasso" by The Modern Lovers, or maybe "Good Sculptures" by The Rezillos, but those don't really address the subject like I had in mind.

I discovered The Thermals "No Culture Icons" via Yahoo! Messenger when a friend of mine back in NYC (whose blog was recently condemned by AP official policy) recommended, neigh implored, that I go out and at least get the No Culture Icons EP. Well, since she's responsible for me and my Black Eyes (on a few levels?) I had to take her recommendation seriously and even shelled out the four or five bucks and the hours of download time to get the EP from iTunes that night. And I wasn't disappointed; I was even more impressed than she probably anticipated.

Not only does "No Culture Icons" possess a priceless 4-track-D.I.Y. warmth and charisma, it has some of the sharpest, layered and clever lyrics of all of The Thermals material. Subtle changes in phrasing create new meanings and often phrases mean two things at once. It's like taking all your art professor's rhetoric, all the post-modern academic buzz, and distilling into a perfect melody. But The Thermals don't just regurgitate their critique-speak professors; they offer commentary on the whole experience and question the whole notion. What is art besides "more stained paper"? And half of the song is dedicated to Thou Shalt Nots; it's hard to know where the sarcasm ends and where the artist's voice begins. The message is far from stable and open to the viewer just like good art. Maybe I've become too entrenched with academic art to realize how much of this song needs explanation to those outside our little niche, but I'm pretty sure you can at least recognize the word play if not grasp the full level of art references. And who knows, maybe I'm totally reading it wrong, but it's a catchy little number full of lo-fi charm even for you MBAs out there.

Cursive's "Art is Hard" doesn't neatly fit into my narrow category I specified earlier. It's pretty close to being the thesis of Cursive's The Ugly Organ, a self-referencing album about a tragic 'emo' singer. But the idea of sacrificing one's own happiness and hurting those near and dear in the wake for the sake of some "art" or "success," is a fascinating and important theme. The mythical iconoclastic artist with his black t-shirt and jeans, maybe even a beret, knows that HE must suffer for his art in some stoic pity party. And even in this age of "pluralism" the artist myth continues to thrive. How many times have you heard that you must suffer for your art? It's a cliché now, right? And yet, these tragic figures manage to find success in not only the mainstream-emo scene or TRL but also in the hallowed halls of the white cube: the art gallery.

Can you detect a note of personal bitterness? Maybe that's why I'm able to stretch Cursive's tale of a singer who sabotages his own life for some notion of success. Sure, I fall under the lure of the masculine-art-hero and think, 'oh I can't do that, normal people do that,' or 'nobody understands what's like to be an artist,’ But I have to wonder what I'm missing out on... and remember to be grateful for what I'm getting instead. I love how Cursive calls bullshit on the whole game. And I can sing it to my self in bitter protest and strange reassurance about all those 'successful' artists who just keep playing the same song over and over.

And in my opinion, Cursive (and The Thermals really) deserve their own post to really elaborate on their instrumentation and strange use of sounds. I first heard Cursive when a friend and I were exchanging mass numbers of CDs. He brought over his laptop to rip my collection and I rifled through his 100+ booklet with complete glee. What's Cursive like, I asked. Of course I got the obligatory, "You haven't heard Cursive?!", but then he said, "It's sort of like hardcore... but the have a cello." I grabbed the CD instantly.

Maybe strings are the go-to for musicians to feel more established or complex, but Cursive doesn’t arrange their songs in any typical fashion. The cello isn't simply tacked on; it's an integral part of the composition. And in the case of "Art is Hard" the strings are used as a pretty dissonant texture creating some serious tension. (Critique-speak: "Push-and-Pull;" "Melody/Dissonance" "Order/Entropy")

And finally, "Modern Art" from Art Brut. I encountered Art Brut somewhere in the blogosphere a few semesters back. I can remember distinctly because we were coincidentally covering the Art Brut movement in my Contemporary Art History class that week. This early modernist movement advocated the use of children's drawings, art by the mentally ill, and 'amateur' art as inspiration and insisted that every person was able to create art. What a great reference point for a band name. Of course most people just think it's a clever juxtaposition of disparate terms, like a soft explosion or hard water. But if you wikipedia 'Art Brut' you'll get a whole new level to the band's name. (Okay, Art Brut doesn't have it's own proper page, but read up on Outsider Art, Dubuffet or even Breton if you're interested.)

And this quote from the Art Brut Movement's founder, Dubuffet, might just change your mind about the band. They could be a lot smarter than you thought:

"Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses - where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere - are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professions. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade." - Jean Dubuffet.

Art Brut is a strange band and I'm not even sure if I really 'enjoy' them so much as they interest me. Their songs are hard to pull out of context because the album sort of sums up the band as a manifesto. Again, we have tons of self-reference... but taken to a new extreme. Art Brut is aware of being a band, an entertainment product, a potential cash cow for a music conglomerate, like Modern Art is aware of being paint on a surface. Without the need to recreate reality through paint and canvas, Modern Art is allowed to explore a huge range of subject matter, including itself. The Abstract Expressionists, like Jackson Pollock, were championed by the art scene and media, and most notably Clement Greenberg who managed to dictate the flat, pure color and 'contentless' work done by AbExers and Neo-AbExers. The reason we have to add the "Modern" instead of just calling it "Art," is mainly due to this distinction of art being 'allowed' to be paint-on-a-canvas, to reject tradition.

Is Art Brut that important? Probably not, but the way they carry the all-too-self-aware bit clear through the entire album, from lyrics to delivery to instrumentation, is quite impressive, if not revolutionary. And perhaps their song "Modern Art" is the only one in music history to sing about getting SO excited about Hockney of any art in general, but it has got to be the only one about reacting so viscerally that one dashes themselves into a Matisse. Modern art makes me rock out, too.

(Buy The Thermals No Culture Icons EP at Amazon.)
(Buy Cursive The Ugly Organ at Amazon.)
(Buy Art Brut Bang Bang Rock and Roll at Amazon.)

A Real Motherfucker Of A Gentleman

2006-07-06T22:39:00.000-07:00

GoGoGo Airheart - Death On Two Legs
The Blood Brothers - Under Pressure
Melt Banana - We Will Rock You

The other day at about 11 in the morning (which is pretty damn early for me) I woke up to the bombastic sounds of Queen leaking up through the floorboards from the stereo of my downstairs roommates. It’s not a bad way to wake up. It was deep into side two of the Greatest Hits record by the time I got dressed and stumbled down to inquire why my roommates were up so early (if 11 is early for me, it’s practically unheard of for them) and why they chose to wake up and immediately turn on Queen at full blast. Richard’s explanation didn’t really answer either of these questions but it kind of made perfect sense: “these guys” he yelled over the stomping of “We Will Rock You”, “were fucking geniuses.”

A few years ago San Diego’s Three One G released a compilation of Queen covers that served to pay tribute to that genius. These types of records are usually destined straight for the bargain bin; cheaply assembled gimmicks to market a label’s roster and tap directly into an already existing demographic. But Three One G’s Dynamite With A Laserbeam is different. The problem with most tribute records is an over reverence to the originals. We understand that these are great songs and that you like them. That’s why you recorded a cover. Take a fucking chance and do something different. That was especially important in this case. The last thing the world needs is another Queen cover by someone who will never ever sing as well as Freddie Mercury. Anyone who’s accidentally stumbled across American Idol on Queen night, or heard the abomination that is “Queen with Paul Rodgers” can attest to that.

The artists on Dynamite With A Laserbeam seem to grasp this. A lot of the singers here can’t sing at all in the conventional sense, let alone sing like Freddie Mercury. But all the bands have no reservations about deconstructing and disassembling these classic songs and reforming them in their own image. The albums sub header “Queen As Heard Through The Meat Grinder of Three One G” is a pretty accurate description. Some of the results are throwaway listens, funny the first time or two as hilariously bad karaoke, but some of the tracks manage to attain a greatness of their own distinct from how great the original songs were.

The recently defunct GoGoGo Airheart’s “Death On Two Legs”, my favorite track on the album, is fascinating in that it is definitely one of the songs that stands on its own, but it also illuminates how interesting Freddie Mercury’s songwriting was. Doesn’t this song sound like it was written specifically to be a slightly off-kilter arty indie rock song? If I didn’t know this was Queen I would never guess, it doesn’t sound like a Queen song, it sounds tailor fit for GoGoGo Airheart. And yet, if you listen carefully, not much is really changed. The singer is obviously very different but structurally and instrumentally the song remains untouched. I was always impressed by how Queen could adapt to various styles – “Another One Bites The Dust” was a funky dance song, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” was passable rockabilly. But who knew they could master a song in a genre that hadn’t even been invented yet?
(Check out You Tube for a scathing live Queen performance of this song in 1977.)

One of the other great things about Queen is that not only do these songs stand the test of time so remarkably, but they have withstood more than their fare share of embarrassing misappropriations. No matter how many times I hear “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the radio or watch Wayne’s World, I still love it. “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You” both still kick ass despite their being played in sports arenas around the world. And a lesser song would crumble in your collection after being sampled by Vanilla Ice and being covered by My Chemical Romance and The Used. But not “Under Pressure”. Listen to how the Blood Brothers rip the shit out of this song; speeding it up incomprehensibly, Johnny Whitney’s inhuman screaming shredding the melody. This shouldn’t work – Queen should not translate into hardcore this easily – but it does.

And finally, even though you should be about half way through listening to “Death On Two Legs” right now and immediately scrambling to order this CD, I’m going to throw on one more track. To tide you over until your Dynamite With A Laserbeam comes in the mail. What can you say about Melt Banana? They can do no wrong, and there was plenty of ways to go wrong with this one. A stadium rock anthem that consists almost entirely of one simple drum beat, dumb lyrics and an extended guitar solo coda? How are you going to re-imagine that Melt Banana? How about a glitchy, cut and paste, broken English computer rap with some weird synthesizer scratching solo. Shit. Yeah that’ll do it. Have you ordered this album yet?

And, just in case there might be a soul out there who doesn’t have a Queen album, let me underestimate the audience for a moment and point out – you should buy some of their records too. It’s easy to forget about a band like Queen. We’re so familiar with their hits, so comfortable with their place in the pop culture landscape, that sometimes you just need to sit back, listen to “Under Pressure” or “Somebody to Love” or “Killer Queen” at top volume and let it soak in how incredible this band was. Even if it’s early Saturday morning and you have to wake up your roommate to do it.

(Click here to buy Dynamite With A Laserbeam on Amazon.)

The Discreet Charm of My Boy Jay-Z

2006-06-29T14:10:00.000-07:00

Jay-Z - Friend or Foe
Jay-Z - Friend of Foe '98
Dr. Dre - The Watcher
Jay-Z - The Watcher 2

Sequels, according to Oscar winning screenwriting guru William Goldman, are always about the money. It's not about further character development or exploring things you didn't get to in the first one, it's about milking as much money out of the same idea as you can. And while I can think of at least a couple films I think are exceptions to this rule, these words of wisdom generally seems to ring pretty true in Hollywood. But of course, this is a music blog, so what's the comparison to movie sequels in pop music? Sequel songs used to be popular in the early days of rock and roll. Hank Ballard and The Midnighters' "Work With Me Annie" spawned both sequels and at least one major hit answer song. Chubby Checker seemed to build his whole career on singing sequels to "The Twist". (Which, coincidentally was also written by Hank Ballard.) But in modern times song sequels come in a broader sense of the word. Half the pop songs on the radio sound like sequels, the same formulas rehashed, with slightly different lyrics and a few notes rearranged. A producer like Lil John may as well be the musical equivalent of the Friday the 13th series. So today I want to talk about Jay-Z, an artist who for his 10 year career managed to avoid the pitfalls of writing carbon copy regurgitations of his hits, but also knew his way around writing a great sequel song.

The genius of Jay-Z, and one of the reasons he has managed to become an icon in a genre notorious for the short shelf life of its artists, is that he hardly ever retraces the same steps twice. How easy would it have been after his breakthrough single "Hard Knock Life" to have tried that Broadway-sample trick a couple more times hoping for another hit? But "Hard Knock Life" doesn't sound like anything else, neither does "I Just Wanna Luv U", "Izzo", "Bonnie and Clyde", "Excuse Me Miss", "99 Problems". There's no "Izzo 2", no "100 Problems"; when Jay does write a sequel song, it's not what you'd expect.

"Friend of Foe" is one of my favorite songs on Reasonable Doubt. Even though it's the shortest song on the record, and not usually one of the tracks mentioned on an album full of classics, I think it's the point on the record when you realize that Sean Carter is something special. No one can touch Jay when it comes to switching up their flow. On "Friend or Foe" he spits in short, stunted lines, funny and menacing at the same time, sounding completely different than he does on the rest of the album. The song contains some of his best lines: although a little dated now "Chances slimmer than that chick in Calvin Klein pantses" still makes me laugh every time; the delivery of "Don't do that/You're makin' me nervous/My crew, well they do pack/Them dudes is murderers" is perfect. And in 1 minute 50 seconds (at least 20 seconds of which is an opening skit) he creates a story and characters more captivating than a lot of 2 hour films I've seen.

Despite my personal affections for "Friend or Foe" it seemed like an unlikely candidate for Jay to revisit on his next album. "Ain't No Nigga" was the hit, "Can't Knock the Hustle", "Dead Presidents", "Politics as Usual" were the instant classics. But it's "Friend or Foe" that gets the "motion picture shit" treatment. Jay abandons the unique sputtering style of the original and opts for a more conventional flow, but the cinematic storytelling and humor remain and the beat is another killer. "Friend of Foe '98" suffers a little bit from the law of diminishing returns, but as far as it's place in the small canon of sequel songs it's at least better than "Twistin' U.S.A." or "Twistin' Around the World".

"The Watcher 2" from Blueprint Vol. 2 is more succesful as a sequel. Technically it might be better categorized as an answer song since Jay wasn't credited as the artist of the first "Watcher", but he did so much ghostwriting on Dr Dre's Chronic 2001 that for all I know he very well could have written the original. And either way, Dr Dre is back for the sequel, providing a very similar sounding beat (I had to listen closely just to discern that it was actually different), a decent verse and a couple artists from his circa 2002 stable: Truth Hurts and Rakim. Rakim's verse is good but he's about 15 years past his prime here and it shows, and Truth Hurts is an unnecessary addition on the hook. But the reason "The Watcher 2" is better than the first is simple: Jay-Z's in it. He's like Robert DeNiro in the second Godfather. And if you're not one of those people that thinks Godfather Part II was better than Part I, well then there's just no comparison. It's like if Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino had shown up in Duece Bigalow 2.

"The Watcher", like "Friend or Foe", wasn't a hit. Which may be why Jay sounds so fearless on it. He doesn't have to worry about messing anything up and can have free reign to experiment with style and inflection; a tricky rhyme scheme, an effortless lesson on consonance and assonance. If you're not a Jay-Z fan, and think everything is Cristal poppin and Big Pimpin, just listen to his verse here and keep in mind: this is a filler track. This is about the 20th best track on a 25 song double album. A song on one of the weakest records of Jay-Z's career. If you don't have the records I've linked to below in your collection, you're missing out. It's like you've never even seen Godfather 2, like you've seen Star Wars but not Empire Strikes Back. Sequels may usually be all about the money, but there are always exceptions. It may seem like every rapper in the modern Bling Era of hip-hop is all about the money, all style and no substance, all big budget special effects and no artistic credibility; Jay-Z is one of the exceptions.

(Click here to buy Reasonable Doubt on Amazon)

(Click here to buy In My Lifetime Vol. 1)

(Click here to buy Chronic 2001)

(Click here to buy Blueprint 2: The Gift and The Curse)

It Takes Time To Get It Together

2006-06-26T13:01:00.000-07:00

The Figurines - The Wonder (Video)

Hey Everybody. Be sure to swing over to Pitchfork Media today and check out their interview with The Figurines. Remember you heard them at Cacophony and Coffee first!

Don't you wish your band could be state-sponsored as Cultural Ambassadors!

And enjoy this great video that mixes parts Un Chein Andalou and Michel Gondry. Classic!

Pitchfork Interview: The Figurines

Bastard Pop Will Eat Itself

2006-06-23T14:02:00.000-07:00

The Silence Xperiment - ~~Wannabe My Badd Bitch~~

The Best Mashups In The World Ever Are From San Francisco.

I don't think it's necessarily true, but it's a helluva name for a compilation. Mashups are something we haven't really touched on at Cacophony and Coffee, but Jeff and I are both big fans of the genre. If you too like to get your bootleg on, The Best Mashups In The World Ever Are From San Francisco 2 is a pretty solid release. Unfortunately I couldn't really point you in a direction to buy it since the only information on the CD other than the tracklisting is "2006. no label. for promotional use only."
The legal issues surrounding the bastard pop movement are part of what makes it so intriguing. It ensures that embarrasing mainstream appropriation of the genre (see Jay-Z and Linkin Park) is kept to a minimum and the fledgling movement has a chance to grow and thrive underground. And mashups have come a long way since the simple A+B equation that I first heard on Freelance Hellraiser's "A Stroke of Genius" a few years ago; pioneers like Go Home Productions are stretching the limitations of working exclusively with pre-existing songs. Several of the artists on TBMITWEAFSF2 weave together multiple songs in complicated beat and tempo matching arrangements that should bury the notion that it doesn't take any talent to be a mashup DJ. But I must confess that my favorite mashups are still the ones that keep it simple, and the stand out track for me on TBMITWEAFSF2 is The Silence Xperiment's "Wannabe My Badd Bitch".

You may already be familiar with the Silence Xperiment; they were the DJs responsible for Q-Unit, the Queen/50 Cent mashup experiment. "Wannabe My Badd Bitch" is proof that Q-Unit was no fluke, and these are two DJs to watch. Continuing with the idea of taking two artists as disparate as possible and squishing them together, Silence Xperiment taking the backing track and a few vocal snippets from the Spice Girls' "Wannabe" and marry them seamlessly with the acapella of Mike Jones and Ying Yang Twins' "Badd". It's easy to take two good songs and put them together, and "A Stroke Of Genius" was the template for taking one good song and putting it over a crappy pop song - but how about taking two songs that I don't like and morphing them into one perfectly danceable gem? That takes some skill. "Wannabe" was a song that haunted me in my sleep in 1996; it was horrible, nonsensical and annoyingly inescapable. And "Badd" is substandard even for the Ying Yang Twins (which is saying a lot). Although Mike Jones is always great, this is a pretty weak verse for him, lacking most of the sense of humor that makes him so listenable. He doesn't even give out his cell phone number.

And yet somehow The Silence Xperiment make it work, and it works beautifully. Keeping with my tradition of listening to a song on repeat while I'm writing about it, I've listened to this song over a dozen times now and my foot is still tapping furiously against my desk. If I could stand and type I'd probably be dancing my ass off right now. Maybe I was missing something in the Spice Girls all these years because this mashup has me thinking this track is actually kind of awesome. And that of course is the sign of a good bootleg. Not only making both songs sound better but bringing out qualities you didn't even know existed in those songs. In "Wannabe My Badd Bitch" it sounds like these songs were meant to be together. Mike Jones may have been laying his verse down over Mr. Collipark's boring-by-numbers crunk beat but I think he might have had "Wannabe" in mind all along.

(If you're in the Bay Area look for The Best Mashups In The World Ever Are From San Francisco 2 at your local independent record store.)

I Keep the One I Love in the Freezer

2006-06-22T20:43:00.001-07:00

Love Is All - ~~Aging Had Never Been His Friend~~
Love Is All - ~~Busy Doing Nothing~~

I'm not sure why we do it, but whenever a band comes from someplace other than our hometown, we feel the need to draw comparisons with that locale's major exports. Perhaps it's a holdover from Elementary School reports about some country and we'd just grab whatever we could from the Encyclopedia. (I wonder if that's different now that we have the internet?) Maybe after writing so many reviews and blogs about music, we latch onto anything that sets this band apart. I could see that being the case for mainstream magazines, and blogs where the music covered never strays too far from one genre, but I don't think we should be able to get away with that here at Cacophony and Coffee. If Patrick had made some link between Chicago's famous architecture and Dwayne Wade... or even worse, some far-fetched comparison with Mrs. O'Leary's cow, I would have called him on that shit. (Not in a public forum... but he'd know.)

Lots of great stuff comes out of Sweden like Volvos and Muppet Chefs and Gummi Fish candy and my family-name. Lots of reviewers mention these things whenever they're discussing a band from Sweden. If they're lucky, the band warrants an Abba comparison, and then the writer can call it a day.

But I have a genuine comparison. Love Is All is Ikea in reverse.

Ikea provides affordable (read: cheap) furniture for those of us who have a little taste and just a little money as well. Ikea looks pretty nice and well-designed, but that's all on the surface. Closer inspection (and the fact that you put it all together with hex-bolts and Allen wrenches) reveals that this not investible, classic furnishing; it's a cheaper simulation.

Love Is All give it to us backwards. The recording is lo-fi and full of warmth and good old overdrive distortion. But the "cheap" veneer does not immediately reveal the intricate layers or musical complexity LIA is putting down. Their debut full-length could have been recorded with all the sound perfectly mastered and balanced in the vein of Yngwie or countless Praise bands, but I'm sure I wouldn't be as into it. The lo-fi quality is far from a pandering-to-the-crowd maneuver akin to Smashing Pumpkins "indie debut" either. It's the proper production for these songs. (And I'm already curious to hear how further records will be produced as well as how LIA might sound live with "professional engineering.")

Love Is All profess a strong affinity for Eno-era Roxy Music and the comparison is apt. Beautifully written pop songs are given an airy, experimental, almost atmospheric treatment that remains tight, nearly claustrophobic at times. The brilliant melody remains intact but the typical pop song clichés are avoided by throwing in a dash of distortion and 'skronky' saxophones. (And, of course, the production itself.) Every chance to take a wrong turn is missed; every decision seems to be the right one. Love Is All has all the right stuff to be a perfect band: punk veracity, pop hooks and melodies, an avant-garde edge, and an exotic foreign origin.

Of course, if you read Pitchfork daily, you've probably been after this record since their glowing review when the record wasn't even available in the States. But those of you who aren't obsessed with being hip or don't have some time to kill at work on a computer to keep up with the latest, take a listen to Love Is All. It's definitely been one of my most-played in the weeks since we've on hiatus. Maybe it'll be one of yours too.

(Buy Love Is All Nine Times the Same Song at Amazon.)

Chi-Town Stand Up

2006-06-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

~~Kanye West - Soulful~~

Guess who's bizack? I'm not smelling any blow in my clothes but I am back nonetheless after an inadvertent hiatus. The main reason, in case you were wondering, that I've been disconnected (literally and figuratively) from the internet lately is I've been working six days a week on a constantly fluctuating schedule that usually leaves me too tired to have any inspiration left for writing. But I got some inspiration tonight, from a most unlikely place. In tribute to Chicago native Dwyane Wade (if you don't follow basketball let me be the first to prepare you: get ready to hear that name a lot) who a couple hours ago just wrapped up one of the most incredible performances in NBA Finals history, here's a song from another Chi-town native with a strikingly similar will to win. Apologies again for being gone for a minute, but you can go ahead and start checking back regularly again. And thank you if you if you're reading this right now; thanks for keeping the faith.

My Baby Does the Water Damage

2006-06-05T22:46:00.000-07:00

Rah Bras - ~~"Poisson"~~
Rah Bras - ~~"Bus Stop"~~
Rah Bras - ~~"The Fifth Allen"~~
Rah Bras - ~~"Skin=Chronized"~~

One of the things I used to do in between bands at shows was try to count up all the shows I'd been to. I can still remember the show when I realized I could no longer count them up. I had started going to shows pretty regularly and I just lost track somewhere along the way. I remember the band playing was called fLUF and they were just about the worst thing I had ever heard. Maybe they aren't so bad, but I certainly never gave them a second chance. I stepped outside to the patio at Old World and started to mentally go over the shows I'd been too. (I think it was partly because some of the first shows I ever went to were at Old World and it put me in a contemplative mood.) I felt slightly proud of myself for getting out so much and by the time I was done reminiscing it was time to try and grab a spot close to the stage for the next band, Jawbreaker.

It's hard to narrow it down to a favorite show ever, but that came pretty close. Despite fLUF's awful contribution, I can remember the other opening was called Blacktop Special or something like that (not Blacktop Cadence) and they had a rootsy sound and garage bin lids for cymbals. Goddamn... Blacktop something or other. At any rate, flash forward a few years and I'm discussing memorable shows with a co-worker and he brings up his first show ever: Jawbreaker at Old World. I reply with the standard, no, really? But deep down inside I want to say, "Aha, bitch! That was the show when I couldn't count up how many shows I'd been to... condescending asshole." But I don't say a word about it.... instead I soak in my own self-gratification like one-man reach-around. And like Colbert said, "That's a difficult thing to do, but worth it." (About the one-man reach-around, mind you.)

But what even trumps Jawbreaker for me was the time I saw Rah Bras at Che Cafe. Che's at least an hour and half away from where I live, but sometimes, when the bands were important enough, my friends and I (or sometimes just me) would head down to the UCSD campus for some 'intimate live music.' Back then the Che was really chill and there weren't any Security or professional booking agents; volunteers ran it all and they did a phenomenal job. I never had or saw any trouble at the Che.

When the Rah Bras played at Che, The Locust opened (or headlined) so some of my 'other' friends were there too. See, Locust is hard enough to balance out the 'weird' for these folks. They were more interested in Zeke's favorite Taco Bell items than what time signature or vintage synth The Locust were using. So when these squares were actually impressed with the Rah Bras, I knew they had something special. (Rah Bras, that is.) I think my friends were most impressed with the band's closing number, a cover of Ginuine's "My Pony." Whether or not my friends knew it was a cover is unclear, but they did enjoy the ridiculous lyrics and the way the drummer acted out the song.

Most impressive for me was the fact that the Rah Bras could completely pull off their insanely arranged songs. The layered and strange sounds all made their way to the stage that night. It was like having their songs spelled out for you and you're still in utter disbelief. They made all that sound with their mouths, a bass, keyboard and drums? And even more phenomenal, the drummer recreates his off-kilter beats with the technical precision of a fine craftsman. He totally rocked "Poisson" live like you couldn't believe. To this day I have no idea what he was playing on "Water Damage," but he managed to reach down to the floor, pick up this washboard-type-thing, and give it one hit, put it back down, and never miss a beat. Now if you've been reading for a while, or know me, technical proficiency is not really all that important to me, but when you witness something this incredible being created in front of you, and when you are familiar enough with the work to recognize the complexity, well, you just can't forget something like that.

Rah Bras have been, since Concentrate to Listen to Rondo We Christen King Speed came out so many years ago, one of my favorite bands. And their newest album is almost good enough to make me drop the "one of." I've never been able to commit to a favorite band, but Rah Bras just may be it. (Now admitting this opens me up to a lot... what if you HATE this band? Can we still be friends?) Perhaps it's because Rah Bras manages to embody just about everything I love about art and music. Yes, they have the skills but they also have a ton of ideas. Yes, they have a sound but they manage to progress with each release. And while I don't like Ruy Blas as much as the earlier EPs, this makes me like the band even more. Who else would attempt to create some kind of Medieval Sex Jam record? There's all the art but none of the artifice (unless it's sort of silly.) The keyboardist/vocalist sold used bras after the show rather than merch. And she even gave consultations on the best size. I think I would have called it 'performance' if I knew what that was at the time.

After a good friend and I attempted to discern the lyrics from the bridge on "The Fifth Allen," we sent what we had figured out to the Rah Bras. They even wrote me back with the 'correct' lyrics, but said that they liked our version better, I doubt that I could explain any better than this series of sound bites and anecdotes, but their latest record which came out late 2005, Whohm, surpasses all the esteem I already held for this band.

Their early efforts always had an epic, operatic underscore to them that sometimes worked well with their bizarre post-rock arrangements and sometimes took to the forefront. Whohm finds the same grandiose sound and vision but with such a refined focus it thumps you in the chest. And I could be mistaken, but I believe this album introduces to the Rah Bras with the Blast Beat, which is more potent than that most brutal cacophony of all time from "Bus Stop." Yes the double bass pedal can be used effectively.... or shit; maybe this guy just hits one that fast. I honestly wouldn't be surprised. Rah Bras also make use of the almost as hard as the whammy bar to use well, the synth pitch bender. Have you heard a better riff in your life than "Skin=Chronized?" How about one with bended notes? Ever?

The rest of the album is just as mind-blowing. (Did I really just use mind-blowing?) The rest of the album continues along the trajectory set by "Skin=Chronized," the second track, and builds from there. Each song contains so many details that are easy to miss for the big hooks and grooves. The sound is even fuller as Rah Bras uses the production to near its full effect in capturing and creating a gale force of timbre, textures and textbook music terms. I don't know what time they're playing in most of the time, but I know I'd be hard pressed to ever write a song so difficult. Once in a music class I thought to myself, like the Beatles were groundbreaking in digging the foreign American blues records, maybe Rah Bras have records from Atlantis or some indigenous culture as yet undisturbed by the Western world.

I don't think you'll like Rah Bras as much as I do, but I do hope you'll find something you've never heard in there. And hey, you might be really into them like me and start your own blog. And the entire catalog is great as far as I'm concerned and you'd do well to find it all. (Though even I don't have the tour seven-inch with "Bus Stop" live in Japan.)

Here are the lyrics to that bridge from "The Fifth Allen:"

"When there's time / there's a place with poison gates / I bitterly eat the bars on my plate / And all those wires / They made my mouth all tired / An optical exception with an illusion of mire."

You can listen to "No Furture," "No Lime" and "As She Rah" on Whohm's MySpace.

(But Rah Bras Whohm at Amazon.)

The Girls All Say You're A Wornout Star

2006-06-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan - ~~Summer Days~~

The first official day of summer may not be until June 21st but here in southern California it's so miserably hot I'm already dreaming of the fall. I don't deal well with hot weather, I guess it's the Minnesota in my blood. I hate summer clothes, shorts and tanktops and sandals, I hate the beach, I hate sweaty and sticky and smoggy. The only thing I do like about summer is the songs. Summer always inspires great music, or maybe summer just makes certain songs better. There's something about 90 degree weather and driving with the windows down and the AC up that elevates songs like "Hot In Herre" by Nelly or "Summertime" by Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff (two artists I don't exactly regularly listen to) into blissful territory. I'm already anxiously anticipating what the summer anthem will be this year. Will Jay-Z step out of retirement again to hold us down for another summer? But while I'm waiting for that song to drop, here's one of my favorite summer songs from another guy with Minnesota roots.

I felt a little weird in my last post, talking about Bob Dylan and not posting a song by the man himself, so here's an attempt to rectify that. "Summer Days", in addition to being my favorite track off Dylan's last studio album Love and Theft, perfectly captures a wonderful muggy July rockabilly barbeque vibe. Love and Theft was given generally positive reviews when it was released in 2001 but perhaps the fact that it came out on September 11 of that year led to it not really getting the critical analysis that it deserved. The basic consensus seemed to be that it was another decent Dylan album, fun to listen to but not as good as Time Out Of Mind, and of course not as good as his 60s output. But music critics are mostly idiots, so while the rest of the world is waiting for Dylan to write another "Like A Rolling Stone" I'd prefer to focus on what he's doing now, because I find it just as exciting and important as any other point in his career.

Dylan left plenty of clues for the critics to understand what he was doing, the album is called Love and Theft after all, but I don't think most people got it. While any of his contemporaries that are still alive are putting out crap albums and then touring on the coattails of hits written decades ago, Dylan is still trying new things and still writing great songs. Love and Theft is a postmodern tour of American music, stealing bits of blues, folk, gospel, rock and roll and fusing it together with Dylan's ever cantankerous wit. People that think Dylan doesn't write as well as he used to because he's not writing about political issues or psychedelic drug metaphors aren't paying attention. The lyrics of "Summer Days" appear simple and direct but each line is drenched in subtext. And the delivery of course is key. Dylan wasn't exactly blessed with the prettiest voice in the world, and years of smoking have ravaged an already rough tone into a weird Muppet-ish scratch, but he knows how to use what he's got. He can't do any melismatic runs, but he can sneer a clever line better than anybody. Listen to the winking "She said you can't repeat the past/I said you can't?/what do you mean you can't?/Of course you can" and tell me this man is not still a genius.

That line in particular was plucked out in a lot of reviews, but the point was always missed. Dylan's repeating the past alright, but not his past. He's never going to repeat his past no matter how badly old hippies and baby boomers want him to. He continues to do whatever he wants and he could care less what the rest of the world's expectations of him are. And maybe I can get down with Dylan's newer work because I sense his kindred music nerdness. (Check out the playlists of Dylan's radio show on XM satellite radio, it's amazing.) Here he's repeating the past of Charlie Patton, Leadbelly, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie; an entire century's worth of musical visionaries, and filtering it through his unique lyrical eye. The result is something different and new that feels familiar. "Summer Days" sounds like a swinging rockabilly song that could have been written in the 50s (credit the production, by Dylan himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost, for that) but it's got lyrics that you'd never hear Carl Perkins singing. Kind of like how this song feels like summer for me, but it's a summer that only exists in my imagination. And I kind of like it better that way.

(Click here to buy Love and Theft on Amazon.)

1998 Looked Great On Plain White Paper

2006-05-30T15:15:00.000-07:00

Braid - ~~The New Nathan Detroits~~
Texas Is The Reason - ~~The Magic Bullet Theory~~
One Hundred Words For Snow - ~~Collide~~

I don't think 'dissatisfied' is the right word; maybe I was just bored with the same old psuedo-political discussion in the punk I was listening to. Maybe I was getting over the boy-meets-girl, boy-losing-girl anthems of my favorite pop punk records. Maybe I was through with high school and trying to assemble a soundtrack to the larger campus with ashtrays known as Junior College. And while I must credit Dr. Frank of Mr. T Experience and Joey from The Vindicitives for starting the fire, I started looking for clever lyrics that weren't just about the same old stuff. I started getting more into, gasp, Boris the Sprinkler because say what you will, his lyrics and delivery are unlike anything else. But dude, how many songs can I listen to about Pabst Blue Ribbon while I'm reading Buckminster Fuller and Kierkegaard?

And while the bands that I gradually discovered certainly aren't on academic levels of T.S. Elliot or Walt Whitman, they seemed to encapsulate that same sense of being an American. It seems like saying anything about being an American is loaded nowadays. But I simply use the term as a means to reflect a common experience or culture. (While there exists MANY American Experiences, doubtlessly, I refer to some romantically vague notions of collected consciousness.) The concerns and values of 'mainstream culture' are radically different than they were 10, 20, or 100 years ago, but when we encounter artifacts that capture their time, we react. Some say that the history of art is simply each generation improving upon the last, taking what they like, and damning the rest. Each generation has its voice.

And for me these were the Ginsbergs and Kerouacs of my time. As much as I Iove to read Beat work, it feels like I'm engaging in fantasy; these bands were talking about me, right now. Their lyrics were challenging and poetic; and after listening to an entire album I felt like I knew what it was really like in Kansas or Chicago. And far from being preachy or straightforward, I found myself attempting to unpack and decipher the meaning in the lyrics like I was still in English class.

Eventually, a few of these bands ended up on a compilation called "The Emo Diaries." I wish I could say where I first heard the term emo, but I'm pretty sure it was a friend of mine making fun of another friend's new boyfriend. "Yeah, he's emo," Alan said," That means he listens to Jawbreaker and smokes Chesterfields." I took a mental snapshot of this emo-stranger's dress and pins and patches in an attempt to find out more. (Besides, I really liked Jawbreaker... where did that leave me?)

But the next time I encountered the emo-beast was at a One Hundred Words For Snow show at Koo's cafe. Redwood Records put on a veritable emo-fest spanning two-nights, and apparently 100 Words, another band I really liked, fit the bill. Guests could even purchase limited pressings of records with an "Emo Inside" cover that parodied Intel's most likely forgotten identity campaign. That night I took in all the t-shirts and stickers on guitar cases feeling like I'd entered a whole new world. I felt like I was alive and a part of something that was happening now. Luckily, I met some cool folks at work who clued me in to Moss Icon and Rites of Spring before I got too heady over this new 'emo' stuff.

And the more I thought about it (and the more clues I was given), I began to see similarities with artists who were on comps with Born Against. (Let's face it, I never would have bought an Ebullition record if it didn't have that Born Against entry point.) At this point, you could still sort of feel the 'hardcore' element in the music. (Like you could still hear the hardcore through the metal from Integrity.)

I'm not sure if I'm summing it up well, but it wasn't an embarrassing thing to listen to emo records. My punk friends didn't get why a band who's named after a classic Misfits lyric could sound so mellow, but they didn't make fun of me or call me 'emo' because I listened to Texas is the Reason.

But nowadays labeling a band, "Emo," is like a kiss of death. Too many bland and homogenous bands have emerged under the banner of Emo to willing mainstream audience. Same old story. When I mentioned the beats earlier, did you picture Doby Gillis or one of Fred Flintstone's amnesia induced personas? Every event in youth culture is co opted and sold for a profit. I think maybe it just happens faster now.

(Buy Braid Frame and Canvas at Amazon)

(Buy Texas is the Reason Do You Know Who You Areat Amazon)

I Disappear A Lot

2006-05-27T00:55:00.000-07:00

~~Nico - I'll Keep It With Mine~~

~~Rainer Maria - I'll Keep It With Mine~~

~~Page France - I'll Keep It With Mine~~

I've always been impressed with people who can write songs, and especially those songwriters who seem to just have songs flowing out of them constantly; those two-album-a-year kind of songwriters. And the kind of prolific songwriters who have such an abundance of great songs that even their outtake throway songs become classics? Well that seems to be a category where Bob Dylan stands alone. "I'll Keep It With Mine" is a nice little tune, written by Dylan around the Another Side period where the personal was starting to outweigh the political in his work. It would have fit nice and snug on that album, next to something like "To Ramona", but unfortunately he didn't bother to record it until the Bringing It All Back Home sessions and obviously by that time he was about a million miles and a trip on a magic swirling ship beyond such a simple and straightforward song.

But, according to legend (and to Wikipedia) he never really wrote it for himself anyway, it was intended for Nico. But Nico wasn't a recording artist in 1964 so first dibs on the song slipped through her fingers. (Although, whether Nico ever really became a recording "artist" is debatable. But, hey, while I'm in the parenthesis here - how excited are you to see Anakin Skywalker play Bob Dylan in that Factory Girl movie?) Judy "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" Collins ended up being the first person to commercially release the song; her version is pretty forgettable, but somehow the song went on to attain cool-unknown-Dylan song status and seems like the song you cover if you're a hip indie band who wants to let people know that you still think Dylan is god and everything, but you're not a fat ad exec with a ponytail and a minivan who once wrote a paper in college about the transcendental message behind "Just Like A Woman". By covering "I'll Keep It With Mine" you're basically letting people know that your Bob Dylan is better than their Bob Dylan.

What can I say about the Nico version, from 1967's Chelsea Girl? You know what she sounds like, there's no surprises here: she sings like a tone deaf, transexual, German horse. You either hate that or you find it so odd that it's kind of endearing. If you're of the latter persuasion and you're not familiar with her "I'll Keep It With Mine" it's definitely worth a listen. I don't usually give a shit about things like guitar tone, but I wish I could make my guitar sound exactly like this record. And the violins are killing it on this track.

If you're looking for a similarily Velvety but less braying version of "I'll Keep It With Mine", the Rainer Maria cover practically out-Velvets the Velvet Underground in the best possible way. Their whole new record, Catastrophe Keeps Us Together, captures that hypnotic chanteuse vibe perfectly but with a shimmering pop sense that keeps it from getting boring. I think I was misinformed somewhere along the way that this band was "emo". Whoever told me that was an asshole. Props to Jeff for burning this for me.

"I'll Keep It With Mine" has been covered by a lot more bands than I'm covering in this post, everyone from Fairport Convention to a late-80s throat-cancer-voice Marianne Faithfull. (80s as in the decade, not her age. She was about a thousand years old when she recorded it.) But, other than the actual Dylan outtake, the one on the Bootleg Series not the one on Biograph, my favorite version of the song is an semi-unreleased bedroom recording by Page France. After the lush instrumentation of the Nico and Rainer Maria versions, it's nice to hear just a guy and a softly strummed acoustic strip the song down to its barest essentials. You can forget all the hipster cool points, all the unreleased outtake mystique; all Page France cares about is that this is a great fucking song. Saying things like someone's got more talent in his pinkie finger than you've got in you whole body is a lame cliche, but it's a fitting one here. Bob Dylan's got better dinner table scraps of songs than a lot of bands' entire catalogues.

(Click here to buy Chelsea Girl on Amazon.)

(Click here to buy Catastrophe Keeps Us Together on Amazon.)

(Click here to check out Page France on Myspace.)

How to Fix Oldies Radio

2006-05-26T22:06:00.000-07:00

Junior Walker - ~~Cleo's Mood~~
Booker T & the MG's - ~~Boot-Leg~~
Link Wray - ~~Rumble~~

Tomorrow is my College Graduation so I went out and got a haircut. Maybe some day in the future I'll do a whole post on just haircut songs, like Smoking Popes "Brand New Haircut," Brent's TV "Hairdoo," Mars' "Hairwaves," The (international) Noise Conspiracy's "United by Haircuts," or Pavement's "Cut Your Hair," but today I want to talk a little about mods.

While I was downloading pics of The Jam for Wednesday's post I realized just how cool these lads looked. I can admit to a certain affinity for that clean and tidy Carnaby Street look for a good few years now and it just seemed like the appropriate move to make. College, which was a near decade long excursion for me, is coming to an end and I have a new job. Just seemed like I needed to make a clean break and so I cut off a good 6 or 7 inches of hair. Maybe nobody else out there puts as much symbolic significance on his or her haircut, but for me it says a lot.

Generally my rule for a good haircut is to take a style from the repertoire of The Beatles. There's a lot to choose from. I sometimes go for the Abbey Road era longer hair, sometimes I'll bring back the Cavern rock-and-roll look, but I seem to go back to the Ed Sullivan mod cut. I first cut my hair that way after a life-changing live show by The Makers the summer after I graduated high school. To a big music geek like me, having a 1960s garage haircut, or even British Invasion coif, seemed to draw a line of continuity to my little pop punk band through rock-and-roll history. Then The Locust came around and it seemed like everyone was into the longer bowl cut. It was bizarre when Justin Pearson finally razor cut his locks and suddenly ever person in front of you at their shows now had a palmade bird's nest protruding off the back of their heads.

So I sit down in the stylist's chair and she says, "Let's figure out what we're doing." I think my keywords were "clean cut but not too clean cut," "still long on the top but short in the back," and "mod." She showed me some pictures and I picked out the one that looked closest to what I wanted. And since I'm already writing an entire blog about it, I don't mind telling you, she did an excellent. In fact, I almost went into a post-art-school diatribe about the need for contrast in order/randomness and how the shears represent order and clean lines, where the razor shears really make it all work with their element of randomness. But I just said, "Wow that razor thing really makes a big difference."

So on the way to and from work today I listened to my Live Jam album I had out from the other day. It was great to sing along to their classic originals and even more fun to hear their versions of classic 'mod' pieces like "Move on Up" (maybe you know it as the sample from "Touch the Sky,") and "David Watts." So I felt like maybe I'd give the blog a sort of mini-soundtrack for my new haircut.

So, if you consider the mod movement an outgrowth of the International Style or modern art or design, there are some certain tenants that prevail. In keeping with the idea of internationalism, a lot of best tracks are instrumental. Without lyrics adding a level of cultural meaning, a great floor stomper can get feet moving in Osaka and Oxford. And there's something very anti-nationalist about middle-class UK kids recreating or replaying the soul records produced in the impoverished (read: soulful) parts of the US. (Maybe it's like how kids today latch onto those strange card-game-based anime.)

But beyond all that, what the mods did was dig dancable soul music. And some of it fetches prices of over $2,000 and some of it can be picked up cheap at thrift stores and used record shops. And like Patrick said in yesterday's blog, we need a new oldies playlist. Sure I love most of the Motown artists that everybody loves and get played 5 times an hour on K-Earth, but you're lucky to hear Jr. Walker's "Shotgun" between all the Aretha and Monkees. Where's is "Cleo's Mood" on that playlist? Do they just have those Motown gas station comps over there? I'm not the most avid crate digger ever but even I found a copy of Walker's greatest hits on vinyl... and I don't have a new music accrual budget like they do. (Or maybe that's how they make their profit... by never having to buy any more music.)

Also, Booker T and the MGs need to be rescued from simple movie soundtrack fodder. Yeah, "Green Onions" is a great instrumental track... but this was a real band here. Most folks will recognize the tune but have no idea the name of the track or the band who recorded it. And for all you Clash fans out there, Mick, Paul, Joe and Topper cut a great version of The MG's "Time is Tight," which I believe was a song on their infamous jukebox of classic soul, ska and just generally rude music. (Note: though I'll take Grandmaster Flash's version of "Hang 'Em High" over Booker T's.)

And Link Wray's "Rumble" should be as well known as The Troggs... even if few people know the name of either. Those reverb soaked fuzz guitars were groundbreaking and should instantly recognizable. But I doubt even among the aging Boomer demographic if Link Wray is remembered. Seems I'd more luck with the racist misogynists at the annual Hootenanny. And, dude, that's just sad. (Especially since Wray was part Shawnee.)

And besides all that, my life would be near meaningless if it hadn't been for Wray's most significant contribution to the guitar wielding adolescent: the power chord.

(Buy Jr. Walker at Amazon.)

(Buy Link Wray at Amazon.)

(Buy Booker T and the MG's at Amazon.)

(PS... If there's anyone out there who can school me on mods or Northern Soul... or clue me into some less surface level acts than The Who or Small Faces, I'd absolutely love it. PPS... I heard the Royal Air Force actually copyrighted the mod target?! True? Does Ben Sherman pay the RAF a small royalty?)

My Clothes Are Black But My Bread Is Brown

2006-05-24T03:11:00.000-07:00

~~Gloria Jones - Tainted Love~~

~~Gloria Jones - Come Go With Me~~

~~Gloria Jones - Heartbeat~~

While Rihanna's brilliant, "Tainted Love"-interpolating, early pop song of the year contender (definitely best pop song since "1 Thing") "S.O.S." is still topping the charts, and with such a perfect set up mention of Northern Soul yesterday, now seems like a good time to talk about Gloria Jones. As you may already know, Gloria Jones was the first artist to record "Tainted Love" for Motown back in 1964, even though she didn't achieve nearly the level of success that Soft Cell had with their synth heavy new wave cover in the 80s. But if you never bothered to look further than her one non-hit classic, or if you've never even heard that song, her catalogue is definitely worth paying attention to.

There was an episode of The Simpsons I caught on a rerun a couple weeks ago, the one where Homer gets his own show to replace Krusty's and he has a discussion group with Moe and Barney and some of the other Springfield regulars. At one point one of the guys in the group complains about oldies. His complaint is "where are the new oldies?" The joke is that it's supposed to be an oxymoron, but I kind of see his point. Can we get an updated playlist on the oldies stations already? I love "My Girl" as much as the next guy, but there were more than five artists on Motown you know. And it seems that obscurer artists like Gloria Jones never get their time to shine.

Because it's not just being obscure that makes Gloria Jones cool, it's not just that music nerd one-upsmanship where you pretend to like someone just because the average person has never heard of them. Gloria Jones is just as good as any other Motown artist and it's a travesty that her singles can't be found on most generic Motown compilations. She's a little rawer than what some Motown fans might be used to though, maybe that's why she's not as nationally beloved, but to me it's what makes her so exciting to listen to. She seems to bridge a gap between two of my favorite 60s genres, Motor City soul and garage rock.

It makes a lot more sense when you take in to account that "Tainted Love" was written by Ed Cobb, who went on to produce L.A. garage legends The Standells. The singles from her classic mid-60s period like "Tainted Love", "Come Go With Me", "Heartbeat" share plenty of DNA with those suburban kids banging out "Louie Louie" in their parents garages; three chord guitar figures, simple driving drum beats, swirling organs, fuzzy strained vocals. If Gloria Jones had been a white boy who played guitar she could have been on Nuggets.

Then the musical degrees of seperation game gets even weirder, after being dropped from Motown she married Marc Bolan from T. Rex and actually joined the band for several years in the mid 70s, singing back up vocals. They had a son together, Rolan Bolan, and she was driving the car when she got into the accident that killed Marc Bolan in 1977.

Insert your own "tainted love" joke here.

I Feel This Burning Pain

2006-05-23T21:50:00.000-07:00

Martha Reeves and the Vandellas - ~~(Love is Like a) Heatwave~~
The Jam - ~~(Love is Like a) Heatwave (Live)~~

Unlike Patrick, I remember just about everything (aside, of course, from when my passive aggressive tendencies tend to rear their ugly heads.) The first girl I kissed was Laura Welzig on May 5, 1991 in the IMAX theatre at The National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Maybe I forced myself to remember or maybe it’s just easy because it’s Cinco de Mayo. But a lot like Patrick, if a song or band is tied to a moment, the two are inseparable and unforgettable. One bad example comes from the summer a few years after that first kiss. I can distinctly remember lying on a cot during our summer family vacation with my new portable CD player and the few CDs I had. One of my newer CDs was U2's Zooropa. Now maybe you can make a case for Joshua Tree or Rattle and Hum but you can't really say anything redeeming about Zooropa can you? I know a buddy of mine who I really looked up to was way into U2 and I wanted so desperately to like that CD. (Plus the $16 price tag was like a fortune to me then... wait, how much was a CD in 1993?) But there I am, on that cot with the hot smell of Northern California Summer in the air, realizing that I really didn't like this album. Then I can remember getting upset because I knew that whenever I thought back on this summer vacation I would remember that insipid, 'don't think, don't drink, don't drive, don't stink,' song that the guitar player spoke/sang. (Yes, I know his name is Edge, but I thought I'd sound cooler if I feigned ignorance.)

The very first song I can remember ever is "Let's Hear It For The Boy," by Deneice Williams, made popular by (and played on the radio a lot due to) the Footloose Soundtrack. I'm not sure exactly why that song stuck in my fragile little head, but I can remember a little story about my dad and me. (Which actually might sum up where my twisted sense of humor and music come from, as well as point out that I was always little 'different from the other boys.') When I finally got the Red Butler doll from Rainbow Brite I had pined after for what seemed like years, I was very excited to show my dad when he got home from work. Maybe I was conscious of the fact that this was a girl's toy or maybe I just couldn't communicate through all the excitement, but I ran up to my dad and said, "I got the boy! I got the boy!" I can remember his smile on a face that seems foreignly young now, as he replied, "Oh really. Like, 'Let's hear it for boyyy' ?" and sang out the melody.

Flash forward about half a decade and one day at recess my three friends and I decide that The Beach Boys are cool. Not based on the music, I don't think, I'm pretty sure that this was what we thought the surfers listened to, and we sure did think those surfers were cool. Now my dad didn't have any Beach Boys tapes so I borrowed his gas station compilation entitled Summer Surf. It had an orange and blue cover and a lot of great songs. It was definitely the coolest thing my parents owned. (The Sgt. Pepper vinyl hadn't entered in yet.) Needless to say I played that tape until it wore thin.

One of the songs on Summer Surf was "Heatwave" by Martha Reeves and The Vandellas. It's also, as you might know, one of the hand full of songs played on the Los Angeles oldies station. So I definitely got more than enough chance to learn all the words, and according to my mother, attempt to sing the lead parts and backing parts at the same time, resulting in a mish-mash of lyrics.

Flash forward yet again. My Jimmy-Z button up and Bugle Boy slacks are replaced with a Clash t-shirt and thrift store pants with patches. My friends and I liked a lot of the same bands from Devo to Crucifix, but none of them ever loved The Jam the way I did. It wasn't until years later that a little research and contemplation cleared things up. Apparently I couldn't hear it through my thick punk skull at the time, but The Jam were heavily influenced by Motown. (And it wasn't for a few more years that I knew what Northern Soul was.) In fact, their live record even includes a cover of the Martha Reeves track I fell in love with so many years ago.

(Buy The Jam Live Jam at Amazon.)

(Buy Martha Reeves and The Vandellas at Amazon.)

Don't Know What A Slide Ruler's For

2006-05-22T16:19:00.000-07:00

~~Otis Redding - Wonderful World~~

I was running late for work yesterday, and I'm the kind of person that doesn't like to be late. So I was a little frustrated, nervously fidgeting and staring at the time on my cell phone, cursing every driver on the road who was going the speed limit. I was all set for my running behind to set the precedent for a bad day. And then "Wonderful World" came on the radio. And in three glorious minutes it reassured me that everything was going to be alright.

For those of us who are in love with songs, it can be difficult to articulate just how much power they hold in our lives. I'm not talking about people who like songs, I think everybody likes songs, most people enjoy music on some level. I'm talking about people who love songs, whose pivotal moments in life are remembered with a soundtrack, who can write pages of words every week day about why a song is great. I can't for the life of me recall the name of the first girl I ever kissed when I was a freshman in high school, but I can remember in every detail the exhiliration I felt the first time I heard the Misfits, which incidentally happened on the same day. Strange (or sad) as it may sound, hearing a warbly cassette tape copy of Walk Among Us seems, in retrospect, like the more earth shattering event.

I can't exactly remember the first time I heard "Wonderful World", it's one of those songs that was always on the oldies station growing up, but I always liked it. The first time I ever bothered to learn who sang the version I was most familiar with, the Sam Cooke version, was when a history teacher in high school played it while handing back our first test. ("Don't know much about history..." get it?) While the other students in class were worried about their test grade, I was more curious about the song. I talked with my teacher about it after class and after that the War of 1812 seemed pretty unimportant compared to the copy of Sam Cooke's Greatest Hits that he let me borrow.

I don't think normal people have memories so vibrant about things like this. But I think I'm glad I'm not like normal people. I'm glad music can be such a trasformative experience for me, I'm glad it can make bad days seem a little brighter. I'm probably going to be running late again today, since I'm sitting here writing and leisurely enjoying my afternoon coffee instead of getting ready for work. But I'm listening to Otis Redding's take on "Wonderful World" (after years of discerning listening I must confess a preference for Otis) and, yeah it's a little corny, but I'm telling you, the world really does seem kind of wonderful when I hear this song.

(Click here to buy Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul on Amazon.)

Take a Bow

2006-05-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

Run!!! - Two Songs
Run!!! - Bendy (Can't Wait)

I can admit to certain advantages to 'going out' to see a band. Some are taken for granted, like being to able to watch to your favorite musicians belt it out right in front of you, like experiencing the music with a group as it is created, or simply being able to finally hear the songs as loud as you'd ever hope for. Then when the music is over you get to go home and someone else cleans up after you. On the other hand, of course, is the trauma of trying to find parking, the drama of asymmetrical haircut cliques, and the barf-o-rama (sorry) of overheard conversations.

I can remember a letter written to Profane Existence that said something to the effect of, "I no longer hope to achieve a complete social revolution; now I focus my efforts on carving out a space for myself and people like me to exist." And while that certainly has a shadow-side sentiment of elitism or isolationism, the idea of creating a sort of 'safe space,' was something that resonated with me. A few years later I found AAA Electra 99 in a strange office complex right next to John Wayne Airport. An artist co-op/museum/gallery that seemed to literally be a space carved out of a landscape littered with office buildings, Electra offered space to whoever wanted it and was willing to pay a small lease every month. That location has since been turned into a parking lot and Electra was forcibly removed and relocated to Anaheim. (Trust me, that's the short version.) The new location allowed Electra to focus more on bands than they had before and it became the only venue I'd ever really go to. Nowadays I usually stop by at least one night every weekend.

Over the course of the five or six years Electra has been in Anaheim I've seen a lot bands come and go. I've seen a lot of terrible bands and a lot of really strange bands and a few really good bands. There's some bands who build up their chops on Electra's homemade 'stage,' (created out of discarded shipping palettes and recycled carpet) and then move on to be 'too big' to play a 55-occupancy warehouse next to the dump. But, seriously, good for them. Some end up in films by your favorite director and some trudge along endlessly without ever finding that big break. Some bands disappear as quickly as they came.

Run!!! was the greatest band that nobody got to hear. Consisting of two bassists, a drummer and a singer, Run!!! consistently kicked the shit out me every time they played. Fronted by an enigmatic singer who sounded like a schizophrenic evil Elvis or overly anxious Glenn Danzig, Run!!! delivered hard-hitting music with a strong arty bend. One bass player would typically lay out the melody or chords and the other would completely go off with the best use of effect pedals I have ever witnessed. I can't describe what it was like to see the straight-laced, white button-up, short-cropped-hair young main, affectionately dubbed "The Mormon" by the front-room crowd at Electra, open up his suitcase full of pedals and completely annihilate everything I thought about how a bass could be played. He kept a second set of strings already strung on his bass, but duct taped to the back, for a quick and easy string change at a moment's notice. Yeah, he played that hard. When you listen back to their recorded work, it's almost impossible to figure out the instrumentation used, but most often that strange sound you can't quite pinpoint is coming from his bass. And it never sounds like Guitar Center employee wanking... it always serves the song. The beats are constantly strong and innovative and loud. While I picture the rest of the band rocking out to Lightning Bolt or Black Dice, the drummer always struck me as more into Venom or maybe just Zeppelin... but definitely coming from a Hessian line of rhythm. But the thing about Run!!!'s music was that it works for both these sensibilities.

Run!!! used to drive three hours or more from Ojai to Anaheim to play for a room of 10 people, and they always gave more than their all... they took all the crowd had and served it back to them. Their sets were always loud, tight, blistering conscious altering experiences. And then they were gone.

I'd like to post all three songs from their final self-released CD-R EP, but I'd rather save some for Patrick, cus I'd love to hear his version of why Run!!! was so epic. (And I think I left some open spaces...right?) And the thing is I could write a whole week's worth of blogs about bands that came out of Electra or that I saw play there... Run!!! is the just the saddest travesty of what can happen to great bands. I have thirteen tracks from Run!!! and they are all worthy of posting, and as I listened to them as I write this, they seem even better a few years later. But we need bands like that for the Nuggets of the future. Maybe Rhino will even release an Electra 99 Anthology.

Makin' Me Hella Randy And Shit

2006-05-18T19:45:00.000-07:00

Gravy Train!!!! - ~~Hella Nervous~~

I should have posted something about Gravy Train!!!! right after my Rappers Delight Club and Bratmobile posts. It would have made a neat little thematic thread. Little girls rapping + riot grrrl = Gravy Train? Something like that. I would have had a more eloquent essay to make the connection, but I kind of messed the order up and now I'm rushing through this as it is. I trust you guys are smart enough to fill in the blanks.

I first saw Gravy Train at a Bratmobile show and despite having a very different approach to feminist politics, the things that made me love Gravy Train are the same things that drew me to Bratmobile. The political bands that I like, the ones that I still find myself listening to well past my crusty punk phase, seem to all have one thing in common - a sense of humor. Fronted by a full figured Mexican girl ordering guys to suck her "muff like a vaccuum cleaner", kicking rhymes about sex and eating (and sometimes both at the same time) in simple but clever couplets, Gravy Train may push the humor to the forefront but the ideas are still there.

And even if you can't get down with the vulgar in-your-face lyrics, you're gonna find it hard to resist the beats. I defy even the most prudish of listeners to not want to shake their ass to "Hella Nervous". It's glitchy and homemade on cheap Casios and drum machines but it's ridiculously catchy. I've seen Gravy Train live a couple times and it's basically a non-stop dance party. I haven't seen them in years but I bet when they play this song, shit still gets out of control.

Not only haven't I seen Gravy Train in a couple years, but I haven't really kept up on their releases much either. A few months after I saw them open for Bratmobile, and bought their self-released four-song EP with "Hella Nervous" on it, they got signed to Kill Rock Stars and put out a record called Hello Doctor. "Hella Nervous" was still the best song on it. I think they've got a few more releases now and I heard somewhere that they went through a line up change or two, but I'm still content to keep replaying this song. The drawback to Gravy Train is that they're kind of a one-trick pony; there's only so many songs about burgers and bouncing titties you can listen to before the novelty wears off. But if you haven't heard them before, download this song because the one trick is fucking brilliant here.

(Click here to order Hello Doctor from Kill Rock Stars.)

I Should Be So Lucky

2006-05-17T20:06:00.000-07:00

Maritime - ~~Tearing Up the Oxygen~~

Let's dispense with the obligatory statements right up front. 1) Maritime consists of Davey von Bohlen and Dan Didier (formerly of The Promise Ring), and Eric Axelson (formerly of The Dismemberment Plan). 2) We, The Vehicles is a more focused and successfully rendered album than their debut, Glass Floor. 3) The majority of indie-kids and punk-rockers really don't want to be called "emo."

You can get any one of those points (and often, all three) from just about any review of Maritime; all three can be disputed or rebuked.

While Maritime was founded by two members of Promise Ring, this fact is just about as useful as knowing Davey was also in Cap'n Jazz. I suppose to a degree, if you are a fan of his writing, or just curious to see how he turned out, you might want to know that Davey is writing lyrics and music for this new project. But the vocal delivery is so developed and refined on We, The Vehicles, that one might have a hard time even believing this the same singer. It gives hope to those of us who cut our teeth with shredded vocal chords.

And sadly, Eric Axelson, well regarded as one of the best bass players in the indie scene today, has left Maritime. He cited a longing to stay home rather than tour and didn't want to hold the band back. Whether or not he'll appear on future records is anyone's guess, but it does make We, The Vehicles more essential. Axelson's basslines manage to be both humbled and humbling; they are neither showy nor simplistic. They add another layer of melody while laying the foundation for von Bohlen's sharp counterpoints and stripped-down-to-necessity arrangements.

Now I can't really weigh in on the first album versus this one; I haven't heard Glass Floor. I'm only writing about Maritime now because Patrick shared "Parade of Punk Rock T-Shirts" with me a few months back. (I believe the blog he downloaded it from has slipped our collective memory.) Seems a good number of internet trolls point to Wood/Water as an indicator of We, The Vehicles and deride the lazy reviewers' attempts to suggest the The Vehicles is a quantum leap from anything any of the band members have done before. (But other folks think Wood/Water was an experimental mistake akin to Glass Floor.) You'll have to make up your own mind... just wanted to let you know.

Finally, if 'emo' means Rites of Spring or even Promise Ring, hell yeah, I listen to emo. (I don't think I'd say I AM 'emo,' but that's ridiculous high school stuff and mostly semantics.) I suppose somewhere between genuine, sincere expression and hardcore kids growing up, emo became another fashion and ultimately ended up another mold to fill. That doesn't mean I won't sing out "Oh Amy! Don't hate me!" or "I don't know Billy Ocean. I don't know the ocean floor," driving down the freeway or alone in my apartment. Busted. I'm emo.

But Maritime really has nothing in common with 'emo,' unless you use too broad a definition. It's cheap way out of really reviewing a song. Next thing you know, the writer has told you all about the people in the band and their history without giving you much description of the actual music. Sort of like I just did.

(Buy We, The Vehicles at Amazon.)

She Gets Confused

2006-05-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

~~X - Turn My Head~~

~~X - Police~~

Reading Jeff’s post on Supernova yesterday, it’s amazing to me that in this internet age bands are still picking names that are already taken. How hard is it to do a Google search to find out if there’s already a band called Supernova? And I’m sure the Fox lawyers have more thorough tools than Google to do copyright checks. But I guess if you’re an Orange County punk band nobody respects your band name (see also M.I.A.). And I’m sure it just adds insult to injury to Supernova that the band stealing their name is, in all likelihood, going to totally suck. (It has Dave Navarro in it after all.) It makes me think of the great 70s funk band Poison, who either weren’t around or didn’t have the money for legal bills to stop a cheesy 80s hair metal band from stealing their name. I’m not sure if it makes it better of worse for the band X from Los Angeles that the less famous band with the same name as them is not an aging rock and roll footnote supergroup or an awful power ballad band. The band X from Australia, the band whose songs I’ve posted above, may be less well known than X from L.A., but once you’ve heard them you will forever stop associating the letter X with John Doe and company.

Ian Rilen, Stephen Lucas, Steve Cafiero and Ian Krahe formed X in the late 70s, by all indications completely oblivious that a poetry-loving couple, a rockabilly guitarist who never smiled and a drummer who no one ever remembers were calling themselves X around the same time but on the other side of the world. But aside from the name and a general categorization as a “punk” band, Australia’s X has little in common with their American counterparts. Their entire first album, Aspirations, recorded in 5 hours at a studio in Sydney in 1979 and self-released a year later, is classic but “Turn My Head” and “Police” are my two favorite songs.

Original guitarist Krahe died of a heroin overdose just before the release of Aspirations, which meant a line-up shift for the band. Lucas picked up guitar in addition to his vocal duties and X became a leaner, meaner three piece with more focus on rhythm. (The picture above is the original line-up, from 1978). As sad as Krahe’s passing was, it solidified the uniqueness of X’s sound. While Lucas’ harsh, scratchy singing, great screaming indiscriminately or belting out a poppy chorus, was the immediate draw, Rilen on bass and Cafiero on drums formed a ferocious rhythm section, equally capable of stomping hardcore and droning post punk syncopation.

“Police”, the fourth song on the record, is a perfect example of their trademark hypnotic dub beat. The guitar pattern and the lyrics (basically just “Police in the streets UH, police in the streets UH” repeated over and over) show more than a little debt to the Clash’s cover of “Police and Thieves”, but in the context of what could have been an otherwise generic blistering early hardcore album, “Police” is a welcome breather. By the time you get to “Turn My Head” a couple tracks later it should be clear that the second-hand reggae influence is just one of many inspirations that X meld together. “Turn My Head”, has the same driving rhythms and sparse guitar stabs, but in the guise of a 2 minute punk rock song is funky, soulful and unbelievably catchy.

X have had a lengthy career since Aspirations, putting out several more studio and live records, breaking up and reforming and breaking up again, but this first record is the one that has stood the test of time. It has since been reissued a number of times on various small labels, my vinyl copy was put out in the U.S. by Rocknroll Blitzkrieg in 2001, the CD copy available on Amazon is from Amphetamine Reptile. But your local independent music store should have a copy. I got mine at Vinyl Solution in Huntington Beach and when I bought it I got an approving look from the guy behind the counter. I think he knew I was about to fall in love with X from Australia and forget all about that Los Angeles band. Like the liner notes that came with the record said: "I’m sure someone out there who, after hearing both the Los Angeles band and the Australian band, still prefers the Los Angeles band.

Somewhere, maybe..."

(Click here to buy Aspirations on Amazon.)

Punk Rock Just Won't Bring Home the Bacon

2006-05-15T21:46:00.000-07:00

Supernova - ~~Calling Hong Kong~~
Supernova - ~~Long Hair and Tattoos~~

Maybe I'm starting to understand all those folks who get so into St. Patrick's Day. I suppose I just never got into it 'cus I'm not Irish, but now that a part of my 'culture' is being threatened I can sort of relate to those folks who have one day a year of cultural celebration. Most folks will recognize Orange County punk as a claustrophobic version of melodic hardcore and rattle off names like Agent Orange or The Adolescents, but like all scenes there is a lot more to it. Of course there are certainly seminal bands to the 'scene,' but those weren't the bands I was going out to see or recording onto mixtapes for friends.

Supernova stood out as an anomaly among the bro-core from the Beach Cities, the retro-77 striped shirt crowd, and the black-clad anarchists. Wearing homemade outfits constructed of tinfoil, Art, Jo and Dave sang songs about Wookies (which you may remember from the Clerks soundtrack), space travel and haircuts. It's no wonder they were apt to write a tune called, "Costa Mesa Hates Me." More Godzuki than Godzilla, they were about as aggressive and hardcore as low budget Hanna-Barbara cartoon from the 1970s.

As I write this, Supernova is in the midst of a giant legal mess. Seems the folks producing the second season of Rock Star for CBS have opted to compile an 'all-star' band this time around rather than resurrect a singer-less blast from the past. With Tommy Lee, Jason Newsted, Gilby Clarke and Dave Navarro signed on to play "The Band," the vocalist could be anyone... Hey, it could even be you! But where this program goes from just bad TV to an unethical assault on the icons of my culture is in naming the band.

Despite Costa Mesa's Supernova releasing a few albums and doing a few national tours (including a much hoped for appearance at SXSW a few years back), CBS has decided to call this amalgamation of bad-hair-metal Supernova as well. And according to Newsted on his Camp Freddie show, “That’s all been worked out, and we are the one and only Supernova.”

Of course, Supernova is not going to simply take this in a hyperbolic compression chamber. No, they have returned to our spheroid-home from the deep recesses of space to fight the case and engage in as much "legal neener neenering" as is required.

So download these tracks and then go out and support the one true Supernova by purchasing one of their records or go see them play at the El Rey, this Friday, May 19. Or at least leave them a message on MySpace and let them know you care.

(Supernova's MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/supernova_army)

(Buy Pop As A Weapon from Amazon.)

(This posts relied heavily on Ziegler's piece from this week's OC Weekly. And the photo is from a fan on Supernova's MySpace.)

Why Can't We Get A Change of Pace?

2006-05-12T03:07:00.000-07:00

~~Bratmobile - Gimme Brains~~

Meeting people is easy, but meeting anybody worth talking to seems to be nearly impossible. Every time I start talking to someone who seems like they might be interesting, inevitably at some point in the conversation they drop some kind of massive deal breaking bomb on me, like their favorite band is Cold or they have a tattoo of Tinkerbell on their shoulder. And I’m referring to girls here but I don’t mean it in any kind of misogynistic way, its just I don’t spend much time trying to talk to other dudes. I just tend to get along with girls better than guys, if only because girls seem less inclined to drive Hummers or wear sideways trucker hats. But seriously, my frustration is mounting on a daily basis here: where are all the intelligent girls in the world? Why aren’t more girls like Allison Wolfe?

I was a little too young to get in on Riot Grrrl on the ground floor; when Allison Wolfe’s Bratmobile broke up in 1994 after releasing a handful of 7 inches and one full length (1993’s Pottymouth) I was just barely starting to figure out that punk rock might have existed before Green Day. But luckily for me, Allison, Erin Smith and Molly Neuman reunited in 2000, right about the time I was caught up and ready for them, and they toured like crazy. I’m not sure exactly what their itinerary was but they seemed to play in my hometown a lot, and I went to see them every chance I could. I had always enjoyed Bratmobile on record, their smart lyrics, unique minimal poppy punk and catchy bouncing melodies always spoke more to me than any of their scene peers, but seeing them live (even if it was past their prime) made me appreciate them even more.

My favorite thing about Bratmobile’s songs has always been their perfect balance between politics and humor. Their live show always captured that same balance: there was a message to be heard and you could make out the ideas over the music, but the band was still putting on a show, full of energy and having fun. It was never preachy but it was never flippant. And of course, being a teenage boy at the time, Allison was always particularly captivating for me. I’m not talking about just being attracted to her physical appearance (although I am a sucker for girls with glasses) but I was attracted to her creativity, her talent, her intellect. When she pogo-ed around the stage and looked into the audience taunting “gimme brains... a girl could starve on a boy like you” I always fantasized that if only she would come talk to me after the show, maybe I could prove to her that not all boys were stupid.

Bratmobile broke up again in 2004 and the members have since moved on to various other projects. Molly is the co-owner of Lookout! Records and also manages several bands including the Donnas and the Locust, Erin works with Lookout, and Allison has lent her vocal and songwriting talents to a slew of new bands. Her latest, Partyline, has a record out now on Retard Disco. Bratmobile may never get the props that other Riot Grrrl bands like Bikini Kill do, but I can’t remember the last time I pulled out a Bikini Kill album – I still listen to Bratmobile all the time. In fact, I hum a lyric or two from them almost every day. Every time I’m talking to someone at work who I think may have half a brain and something interesting to say, I secretly hope to myself: gimme brains for breakfast baby.

(Click here to buy Bratmobile's Ladies, Women and Girls on Amazon.)

There's Nothing Left to Believe We Haven't Already Forgotten

2006-05-11T23:08:00.000-07:00

~~Electric President - Metal Fingers~~

I was having dinner with a friend at Red Robin, enjoying one of my favorite salads, when something different came over the PA. It was some poppy electronic stuff with a fair share of glitches, synths and video-gamey sounds. Maybe it only sounded so great in the context of the generally bad piped-in music, but it was enough to get me to ask if my friend knew who the band was. "I think this is Postal Service," she said.

And like the painter who thought he created a whole new art movement by splattering paint on his canvas because he had never encountered Pollock or the Ab.Ex'ers, my jaw didn't quite drop far enough for me to pull my foot out of it. (And I told the waiter no crow on this salad!)

So maybe I'm only half a hipster. I might let a band's reputation and fanbase keep me from actually checking them out, but if given a chance I will honestly assess how much I actually do like them. (And I could list off a ton of "lame" bands that I actually love... bands I'm "not supposed to like." And in full disclosure I often feel just as guilty for liking bands I'm actually supposed to like.)

I got the second hand details of conversation two friends of mine were having the other night. Essentially it was one of those uber-music-nerd debates over Jenny Lewis versus Neko Case. Now I don't think either of my friends would say that these two singers are mutually exclusive, but to sum up one end of the argument, "Why would I listen to Lewis when I could listen to Case?" And I'm not sure I have an answer. I know that I would, given the choice, go for Jenny before Neko... but hey, that's just me.

But it seems to bring to light some other issues, especially considering my Postal Service story. When I was bit younger I read a review for Zoinks! which described their music as "what Green Day would be playing if they had remained punk." In hindsight, that's probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard, but my 15-year-old self thought that sounded like the perfect band. I might secretly like this "sell out" band Green Day but if I say I like Zoinks!, I am that much more punk... that much cooler. (But then I actually ended up really liking Zoinks! but never forgetting that silly review.)

So on the way to work this morning I was listening to my new Electric President CD and I thought to myself, 'You know, this sort of has a Postal Service vibe going on.' But of course, Electric President's self titled release is on Morr Records based out of Germany, so I'm still cool. (And if someone in another car overhears what I'm listening to I don't look bad... c'mon, you know you think about this too!) And then I start to think about how ridiculous all that is. I start to think about what it is about Electric President that I like, rather than what he sort of sounds like.

Linda Rondstadt sort of sounds like Carol King and maybe Neko Case sounds something like Jenny Lewis, but that really doesn't mean all that much. A lot of oil paintings look like other oil paintings, doesn't mean that I don't respond to one artist over another. I think that you can like Picasso and Braque. It's just a shame really that more people know Picasso.

You can like Postal Service and Electric President. It's just a shame that any mall rat knows about Postal Service but Electric President, who are from Florida, have to have their record released by a German imprint. And like every artist's hand is different, every artist's view of the world is unique and every artist has something to say, I won't respond to everyone's work. Some bands work for some people.

The beauty of this current re-invention of the singer/songwriter with Pro Tools is that more and more folks like you and me can create quality, challenging and expressive music. I'm not going to be into every post-emo kid with a computer who puts out a record...but if it's good, I just might be. So don't hate on Bob Motherwell for Franz Kline; you can be down for both... and you don't have to be down for either. But don't suggest that everyone should pack up their paint cus Bob and Franz, Pablo and George, Electric and Postal, did it all before.

(Buy Electric President at Amazon.)

PS... I had my very last painting critique this week which means that I have now lost my outlet for artist, art movement, and obscure critical theory references... so expect a whole lot more to follow in the coming days. Bear with me as I adjust to a more concrete reality.

[Ed. Note - After writing and posting this I discovered this band has been featured in a Fox television series named after the place I'm from... which I think casts my argument in a whole new light.]

All You Cuckoo Boys Are Dumb

2006-05-10T17:24:00.000-07:00

~~Rappers Delight Club - First Ladies Anthem~~

It’s about time somebody took the concept of The Langley Schools Music Project and updated it for the hip hop generation. There have been plenty of children’s chorus records since Langley and I’m sure this isn’t the first time somebody’s recorded kids rapping, but I’m not talking about Kidz Bop or Lil’ Bow Wow here. What distinguished Hans Fenger’s Beach Boys and Beatles covers as essential outsider music classics is the same thing that puts Rappers Delight Club ahead of its Disney Channel peers – it’s actually good.

The idea of rapping 12 year olds doesn’t seem so strange when you remember that double dutch, little girls skipping rope and rhyming to the beat of plastic clicking on concrete, was basically an early form of hip hop. And the girls (and one boy) of the Rappers Delight Club definitely keep it old school like that. They stick to that earliest of rap subjects – takin’ out sucka MCs. It’s almost a lost art nowadays; rappers still talk about being a better rapper than everybody else but nobody does it with the style of original legends like Rakim and Run-DMC. “First Ladies Anthem” is filled with plenty of golden age flavored one-liners and clever, quotable disses. Well, clever for a little kid. You can be cynical if you want, but I know when I was in elementary school I never came up with anything as funny or as good as “I know everything and you know this/I can even say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious/I’m ferocious/All you bad MCs need some coaches”.

And it’s not just the witty wordplay or female-empowerment message of “First Ladies Anthem” that makes it enjoyable; some of these girls really can flow. Listen to the girl who rips into “what up man/my name is Miss Thang/when I get on the mic/oh it’s like damn” with perfect dirty south inflection. Sure there are a couple weak verses but that’s bound to happen when you have like 20 kids taking only a handful of bars each. The ratio of quality MCs to lackluster ones is still higher than your average G Unit posse track. And where stuff like Kidz Bop always leaves me with a kind of cold, exploited feeling, like a bunch of wanna-be child actors blew the Annie auditions so they took the Modest-Mouse-covers gig instead, Rappers Delight Club feels genuine. It sounds like kids that grew up with and love hip hop music, and it sounds like they’re having a lot of fun making their own.

The beat of “First Ladies Anthem” is unfortunately the weakest part, but when you’re working with elementary school kids there’s probably not a lot of money around for expensive production software. (Which is a shame because as few female MCs as there are, there are even less female producers in hip hop). The song they’re rapping over is Sufjan Stevens’ “They Are Night Zombies” (also used in a hip hop context in Two Faced John McCartney’s “Zombies Walk” mash up) and I mention it only because if nothing else convinced you to download “First Ladies Anthem” maybe that will. It’s what first drew me to Rappers Delight Club, from a bulletin posted by Sufjan on Myspace that said “pssst” in the subject line. So thanks to Sufjan (or more likely, the person who runs Sufjan’s Myspace page), but although you may come for the sample, you’ll stay for a group of girls that rock the mic. "But girls aren’t supposed to rap... psych."

(Click here to check out Rappers Delight Club on Myspace.)

Some Tunes Will Never Die

2006-05-09T22:56:00.000-07:00

Figurines - ~~The Wonder~~
Figurines - ~~Wrong Way All The Way~~

Figurines could have been my new favorite band a whole year ago if I paid a little more attention to the indie scene in Denmark. Maybe I need a subscription to NME to keep up with all the new music coming out of Europe. Or maybe there's some uber-hip journal out of Germany that clues overseas readers into the latest from the old country.

And you know, Diesel jeans used to be those hideously fitting colored denim numbers oft accompanied by the ubiquitous fanny pack... nearly as fobby as liederhosen. But things shifted at some point. Diesel is totally hip and The Strokes can pull a Jimi Hendrix by making it across the pond first. Could Europe really be hip again? I mean, Prague, Paris and London have always held their bohemian chic, but what about the other counties that American students can't find on the map?

Certainly the history of rock music has been a dialog across the Atlantic, but in this era of globalization and borderless commerce, I don't think I should have to wait a year to hear the best new music from Luxemburg or Switzerland. (I suppose I should be grateful to The Control Group for eventually releasing Figurines Skeleton album here in the States.) "Silver Ponds" has already made an appearance on the Danish charts but for me they're a breaking new band... and it's not fair!

Now how do I even begin to address the music contained on Skeleton. Pitchfork went on and on about the indeterminent meaning of "catchiness" and used the word "signifier" three times...and gave them an 8.3. Rolling Stone had a difficult time listening through their thick rectal wall but said, "-like Franz Ferdinand but much closer to a first-album Strokes with Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue yelping at the helm." (And, goddamn, Rolling Stone heard this record before I did!?!)

The first song I heard was "Continuous Songs." It's one of those quieter songs where the vocal melody is doubled by the guitar... so the songs feels sparse, minimal. But what got me to scrawl down "Figurines - Continuous Songs" on my notepad at work was the genius chords at 1:05. The next song I encountered was "Rivalry," which is more representative of the album, but still restrained and mellow. I was expecting Figurines to be more like your typical indie pop but with their 'imperfect,' quirky vocals and musical moments. And that was enough to make we want to hear more... to buy the album.

Skeleton opens with "Race You," a disarming ballad. I didn't expect Figurines would go that route based on what I had heard and was prepared to be disappointed. But as soon as "The Wonder" kicked in I knew I was hooked. From the opening pick-scraping guitar lines when the drums kick in, you're in for a ride. There's a sense of urgency reminiscent of punk, a strange pre-chorus from the best of the indie rock annuls complete with voice cracking white-boy-melisma melody, and the strongest hook of a chorus since Cheap Trick. (There's those darn signifiers!) I defy you not to sing along with the Ahhhh-ah on that chorus... just try. And Skeleton is brilliant hook after brilliant hook with lots of genre-mutations and plenty of arty moments.

Besides the beautifully jangly guitars and bizarre arrangements, what I love about Figurines is vocalist Christian Hjelm's melodies. It seems he always manages to slip in the most unexpected note or two and make it work beautifully. It's like he's doing it accidently, effortlessly. But it feels so sincere... like the antithesis to The Strokes bedroom-luring coos. It's so anti-sexy; it's sexy. (And as a not-so-closet Neil Young fan and avid Talking Heads/David Byrne fanboy... these vocals are just about as close to perfect as you can get.)

So do your part to bring down the border and check out the "most hard working Danish indie bands at the moment."

Figurines official website (http://www.figurines.dk/)

Figurines MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/figurinesdk)

Buy Figurines Skeleton from Amazon... there's some used ones for $7)

Whitey Sings the Blues

2006-05-08T01:49:00.000-07:00

~~Blind Willie McTell - Broke Down Engine~~

Is there any genre of music that has been more corrupted and ruined than the blues? Whatever you may think of the movie Ghost World, you gotta admit that when Steve Buscemi goes to the bar and sees the band Blues Hammer, it's a pretty spot-on depiction of what white people have done to the blues. A couple nights ago I was in L.A. to see a show and, for whatever reason, squeezed on to the bill was a guy who was a real life version of that band. Now, I’m not saying you can’t like the blues. I’m not even saying fat bald white guys can’t be influenced by the blues, but there’s a thin line between tribute and insulting parody. And this guy definitely fell into the latter category.

I think a couple mandatory rules have to apply if you’re a middle aged white guy playing the blues. First of all, if you’re going to use a bottleneck to play slide, do it as part of a song, don’t just do it in between songs to show off. Second, pick some better covers. Don’t cover “All Along the Watchtower”. (This actually applies to all bands, regardless of genre. You cannot do a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”. Ever.) Covering Bill Withers is OK (although I would have picked something less obvious than “Ain’t No Sunshine”) but don’t insult the audience by snidely asking if anyone has even heard of Bill Withers, especially if your cover is going to be so godawful that it prompts me to wonder if you’ve ever heard of Bill Withers. Third, don’t talk in a stereotypical black accent between songs and say things like “I’ma play some blues fo y’all now.” You might as well have walked out on stage with burnt cork on your face you racist fuck. And lastly, perhaps most importantly, stop singing like that.

I’m not sure if I can describe what “like that” sounds like, but if you’d heard this guy sing you’d know what I was talking about. It seems to be the standard voice that white guys trying to sound like black blues singers use. It’s a kind of growling guttural yelp, a ridiculous shouting that apparently requires contorting your face into pained, constipated expressions to pull off. The aforementioned fictitious Blues Hammer, or if anyone remembers him, Johnny Lang, are pretty good examples of “like that”. My problem with this singing style is - who exactly are you imitating? What blues singer sounds like that? I may not have the most extensive blues record collection in the world, but I’ve got my fair share and I can’t think of anybody who sings like they’re trying really hard to squeeze out a shit.

My sneaking suspicion is that the guy I saw play on Saturday might be a bigger fan of Johnny Lang than of an artist like Blind Willie McTell. If more contemporary blues players were trying to imitate McTell’s haunting, androgynous wail instead of the simulacrum of stereotypes that seem to constitute what they think a blues singer sounds like, we might actually get something new and interesting in the genre. But as it stands now if you wanna hear the blues you’re gonna have to pull out records from 80 years ago, a song like “Broke Down Engine.” All the revivalists, movie stars with sunglasses and harmonicas, bar band minstrels and fat bald white guys in the world will never touch this song.

(Click here to buy The Definitive Blind Willie McTell on Amazon.)

Everything was always about being funky.

2006-05-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

Nightmares on Wax - ~~Flip Ya Lid~~
Nightmares on Wax - ~~Pudpots~~

I hope I don't get too conceptual on this one, but I want to mention something about the communicative power of music. I'm not talking about lyrical content or 'the way a song makes you feel;' this is about ideas.

I was asked in a job interview once, what's the difference between good design and bad design. I paused for an appropriate amount of time to think and then said, "Design" just means that someone has thought about the problem to be solved. A good design actually solves the problem; a bad design doesn't. (I'm sure my pitch actually went up towards the end, like I was asking if that was the right answer.)

A lot of art and design get so tangled up in the concept, they forget all about the problem. Now, I have my fair share of noise records, art-rock and glitch-core, but more often then not, their records fall into the 'sounds like a modem in a garbage disposal' critique so prevalent of avant garde music. But as some sort of artist-designer-musician hybrid, I can't always get into that.

When I first heard Nightmares on Wax, the musical brainchild of DJ EASE (aka. George Evelyn), I thought to myself, "NOW is going for the same thing I am with music." That's a loaded thought if ever there was one. What's NOW going for? What am I going for? How can I tell this just by the music? What's in the music that makes me think that? What am I responding to? Of course, I don't unpack the thought; I just keep grooving and wait till I have to blog about it for careful introspection.

So as I research NOW, I come across a lot of the ideas we have in common. I realize that we have similar concerns in music production and having attempted to solve similar problems, I can recognize them when they appear.

George Evelyn grew up in Leeds listening to his father and sister's soul tapes. He's a bit older than me, so when the b-boy crossed the pond, Evelyn was there for early hiphop records and breaking crews. Though I can still remember buying MC Hammer and Kid and Play tapes, and having my mom drive me to the BEST Grand Opening to see Sam the Olympic Eagle and a break dancing performance in the parking lot, I don't think it's quite the same. In fact, my true appreciation of hiphop didn't come from the streets or MTV, it came from a graduate's thesis released as a book, Making Beats: The Art of Sample Based Hip Hop. So when I launch Garageband to make a beat today, I'm thinking some of the same thoughts as NOW when they recorded their 1991 album, A Word of Science: The First and Final Chapter. "The album had to be something that identified with the b-boys," says Evelyn, "We wanted to do tracks that had hiphop beats but experimented with ideas."

NOW didn't release anything else for the next five years. George spent his time compiling his own personal collection of dusty records out of carboots, obscure vinyl and soul samples into his own version of Ultimate Breaks and Beats on two-inch tape. And the result was Smoker's Delight; an album that proved NOW was a contemporary reinterpretation of soul/hiphop rather than a techno group. And this next quote reaffirms my own attempts with blips and deconstructed sounds, "Although a lot of people labeled NOW as an early techno group or bleep group, we never did," says George. "As far as A Word Of Science went, there were so many different elements of music in there. It's an evolution from that album to this album. Everything was always about being funky. That's why the idea for Smoker's Delight is nothing new. I just wanted to do something with hiphop."

You'll notice NOW (and myself) never claim to be making hiphop, just recognizing how important, influential, and fun the music can be. And recognizing that we are outsiders to the culture, but that we do have something to say, something to bring to the table. It isn't about exploiting the soul classics laid down on vinyl before I was born. It isn't about re-treading the same ground as soul, funk or hiphop.

"Today's music is inspired by whatever has gone on before. That's what fascinates me. Soul music is the earliest form of hiphop. That's why I want to create it. It might seem like recreating what was done in the past, but what I want to do is merge soul and hip hop together. That's why I'll bring in the live aspect of what happened back then into current hiphop trends. That's the angle I'm arriving at."

But one key element NOW retains even with live musicians is the drum machine. It's not because NOW couldn't find a good enough live drummer, it's the sound of the beats that makes NOW. And George is very conscious of that. It's a far cry from The Roots being heralded as more legitimate because they play instruments; it's attempting to bring the entire history of hiphop into focus. It's about recognizing the disaffected youth music continuum. It's bringing the soul into hiphop and the hiphop into soul... and not forgetting the funk in-between.

Goddamn, Nightmares on Wax have some good ideas... and it's what I could hear through all the layers of "Flip Ya Lid." Maybe a simple way of saying it is, "This guy loves hiphop but isn't just making more of the same." (You can also hear a lot of dub influence on this particular track, which is another genre I feel is misunderstood.) It's downtempo but still chock full of soul and defies you not to at least bob your head if not scrunch up your face.

"Pudpots" seems to better encapsulate the ideas addressed in this blog. You have a beat that is totally hiphop, but not an unoriginal old school nostalgia or Timbo knock-off. Featuring a great horn-line and progressive structure, you can almost see men in all-black Blues suits, funky soul brothers in afros, and b-boys with shell toes all getting down to the same beat.

The rest of NOW's latest album, "In A Space Outta Sound," explores even more musical material. Referencing Vocal Jazz on "Damn,” more Eno-esque atmospheres on "Passion," a smidge of Motown on "Chime Out," and 'exotic' tribal polyrhythms on "Deepdown" and "African Pirates." None of the songs sound the same, but they all offer up alternative solutions to the same problem, how to take hiphop forward as an outsider.

(Buy In A Space Outta Sound from Amazon.)

Poison Are the Eagles of Death Metal

2006-05-04T00:56:00.000-07:00

Eagles of Death Metal - ~~Chase the Devil~~

Jeff getting a new job has basically been the best thing that’s ever happened to my record collection. Every week now I’ve been getting an mp3 CD packed to the breaking point with new music. Some of it stuff I’ve wanted to buy but haven’t been able to afford and some of it stuff I never would have bought but am grateful I now have. I never had much more than a passing interest in Eagles of Death Metal’s new album Death By Sexy; I’d skimmed through a couple of articles and some generally positive reviews, but it just didn’t sound like something I’d be excited about.

Now I can’t stop listening to it.

I’ve never had a harder time singling out a track to post from an album, because every song on Death By Sexy is my new favorite song. Josh Homme and Jesse Hughes have somehow taken all the bands that I love and mixed them into one cohesive rock and roll monster. Led Zeppelin, T. Rex, The Damned, The Sonics, The Cramps; all would be appropriate reference points, but even if you don’t like any of those bands (and definitely even if you don’t like Homme’s other band Queens of the Stone Age, because I don’t really either) you will find something to enjoy on this record.

It’s amazing to me how Eagles of Death Metal are able to avoid every wrong turn. This band could have so easily devolved into a lame narcissistic ego-fest to earn Josh Homme some money in between Queens records. Their commitment to a decidedly retro 70s rock sound could have sounded like a corny Spinal Tap-esque joke. But Eagles of Death Metal are too smart and too innovative to fall into those traps. “I Want You So Hard” is a hyper frenzied deconstruction of “Summertime Blues”, “Solid Gold” is the best song Marc Bolan never wrote and, the track posted above, “Chase the Devil” is a frantic rockabilly stomper (with a couple steel guitar breaks that allow you to catch your breath before the rollicking beat erupts again) that sounds something like the Misfits’ “American Nightmare” on a heavy dose of methamphetamine. “Chase the Devil” doesn’t really sound like anything else on the record, but it’s an adequate demonstration of the fun and ferociousness that the Eagles manage to summon on every track.

The only thing harder than narrowing it down to just one track today (and yeah I could have posted more, but I think one is all the incentive you’re going to need to just go out and buy the album right away) is going to be what I’m going to post next Monday. I seriously doubt that anything else but Death By Sexy will have found much time in my CD player by then. No mere rock star side project or vanity jam session, I’m pretty sure this is a record that’s going to endure for a long time to come.

(Click here to buy Death By Sexy on Amazon.)

I'm Not in a Hurry; I'm Just Moving Fast

2006-05-03T20:18:00.000-07:00

The PC's Ltd. - ~~Fast Man~~
The 'Great' Deltas - ~~Tra La La~~

I'm sure this will come as no surprise to our loyal Cacophony readers, but independent record labels didn't start with punk or even the first wave of garage-rock. It's hard to imagine but there was a time most of the labels were 'independent,' and often generated regional hits and geographical stars. I'm sure Patrick could tell you more about this than I, but my point is simply that there is a ton of great music hidden away in obscurity. Sometimes 45s only had 1,000 copies pressed and once they were gone, they were gone. And while the collector's mystique still lingers on dusty records, the internet and the CD format has changed our relationship to these rare records. Before eBay, Google and Rhino Records, collectors visited thrift stores in every town, the swap meet on weekends and read the obits for hot tips. Now a simple keyword search can get you just about anything.

Will "Quantic" Holland is one of those record collectors and a notorious musician with his band the Quantic Soul Orchestra. But lucky for the rest of us, Quantic is generous enough to share. He's compiled some of the rarest and best deep funk sides onto one party-strarting disk, Quantic Presents: The World's Rarest Funk 45s.

I've posted two tracks for you to sample, and it was pretty hard to narrow it down. "Fast Man" comes to us from 1969/1970 in Carolina and serves up deep, heavy funk with lip-smacking grooves and the oft coveted and allusive party-vibe. "Tra La La" opens with a strange, funhouse beat but moves into a howling Hammond, perfected bass-horn interplay, and some of the most pathogen-like grooves ever captured on wax. And I definately have a soft spot for tracks were the band breaks down to just the drums and then reintroduces the instruments individually.

Unfortunately, it seems this album was only released in Europe, so you'll have to pay import prices or find the mp3s. (Like at, let's say, allofmp3.com). But here's some links anyway.

(Buy Quantic Presents: The World's Rarest Funk 45s at Vibrantsounds.)

(Buy Quantic Presents: The World's Rarest Funk 45s at Jazz Man Records.)

You Don't Even Know What The Half Is

2006-05-02T12:15:00.000-07:00

~~Morgan - No Diggity~~

~~Blackstreet - No Diggity~~

~~Bill Withers - Grandma's Hands~~

I knew I liked John Albert, the lone member of Morgan, as soon as I heard him say “thank you” to the venue he was playing at. I’ve been a volunteer at this venue for several years and bands that show any kind of gratitude are unfortunately a rare commodity. You’d be surprised how many bands who can’t draw 10 people to a 49 person capacity art gallery think they’re giant rock stars. So it was so refreshing to hear someone with manners who then doubly surprised me by also being extremely talented.

Early in John’s acoustic set he announced the title of a song called “Young And In Love”. I was bracing myself for some kind of sappy emo cliché, but instead was treated to a smart and affecting tale of a violent relationship, with the title words taking on a painful irony. Morgan proved to be a band full of delights like that, constantly subverting my expectations, and weaving through material that was personal and intimate but also maintained an affable sense of humor. By the time John pulled out his show highlight, a tour de force cover of Blackstreet’s “No Diggity”, I was officially blown away.

As a general rule I am skeptical about hip hop covers. (Although technically, as I pointed out to John after the show, “No Diggity” would be better classified as New Jack Swing.) There’s just something that makes me uneasy about songs like Dynamite Hack’s mellow acoustic take on Eazy E’s “Boyz-N-Da-Hood”. They sound disrespectful to me, like they are mocking these songs rather than paying tribute. I’m not sure if this is their intention, but it makes me uncomfortable none the less. But I had no such reservations about Morgan’s lovingly faithful rendition of “No Diggity”.

Morgan wisely sings instead of trying to rap Dr. Dre’s opening verse (and cuts Queen Pen altogether) and focuses on the main (borrowed) melody. It quickly becomes apparent that this is not parody but recognition of a great pop hit. “No Diggity” was the last distinguished single of the New Jack Swing era, written and produced by New Jack godfather Teddy Riley, whose group Guy defined the hip-hop/R&B hybrid genre (and who passed on the baton of his legacy to two fledgling producers called the Neptunes when he took them under his wing and gave them their first gold plaque for Wrex-N-Efx’s “Rump Shaker”). New Jack Swing seems to be mostly discarded as a musical genre now, clinging on by only a few cultural touchstones; New Jack City, Bobby Brown's Behind the Music, Nelson George books; but its importance in both the history of R&B and hip-hop shouldn’t be overlooked.

Now it’s a given, but when Teddy Riley first started layering buttery smooth R&B vocals over rugged hip hop beats it was damn near revolutionary. The rapping guest verse is now a staple of any major R&B hit, same with the incorporation of hip hop vernacular (I suppose you could make the argument that Curtis Mayfield was kind of doing the same thing in the 70s with the Superfly soundtrack, but still, I never heard Curtis singing about "eargasms") and “No Diggity” perfectly illustrates perhaps New Jack Swing’s most obvious contribution: introducing R&B to sampling,

I’ve included “Grandma’s Hands” by Bill Withers for those of you who like to hear the original material being sampled. It may be cooler to prefer an obscure 70’s tune to a massive 90’s pop success, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think “No Diggity” was vastly superior to “Grandma’s Hands”. I love Bill Withers, but this song is a pretty minor work. And that of course is what makes it rife for sampling. Teddy Riley finds a mostly forgotten song, salvages a great beat and a vocal snippet, and then covers it with rapping, harmonies, a catchy bridge and one of the best nonsensical choruses of all time. Some people might be inclined to write “No Diggity” off as a novelty-esque one-hit-wonder, but John Albert and I know better.

(Click here to check out Morgan on Myspace.)

(Click here to buy The Best of Blackstreet on Amazon.)

(Click here to buy Lean On Me - The Best of Bill Withers on Amazon.)

Please Mess With Greatness

2006-05-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

Bix Beiderbicke - ~~Why Do I Love You?~~
Miles Davis - ~~Why Do I Love You?~~

I believe it's been well established just how much I love cover songs. And it may belie more than a pre-adolescent obsession with Weird Al, maybe it represents how I look at everything, maybe it's easier to recognize innovation in the form of a cover. Perhaps it's a symptom of my generation to long simultaneously for nostalgia and novelty, but the cover-song fills that void with ease.

While it's become passé now, there was a time when nearly every skate company and band had some sort of parody logo. The free fonts websites still have tons of these famous logo-mimicking typefaces as evidence. The phenomena became more widespread and I'm sure we've all seen the Marlboro box converted to read Marijuana, or Coca-Cola to Cocaine. Maybe it all goes back to Mad Magazine or Honoré Daumier... but simply mimicking a song doesn't a good cover make. I still have my Weird Al tape collection and I'm not looking to adding more to my Parody collection.

When a song is no longer played note-for-note or with minor changes for comedic effects, when a known song is used primarily as a structure or guide, and when new musical aesthetics are advanced by means of reinterpretation, you have more than a cover or parody. As each generation attempts to reinvent musical history for themselves, the cover songs are often encountered with varying degrees of success. It's difficult enough understanding how we get from The Untouchables covering "Stepping Stone" to any of the Fugazi records, let alone where are right now and where we might be headed. It's much easier to draw an analog from the past.

In the late 1940s Miles Davis began to tire of the limitations set by the conventional small jazz groups of the day. He was playing with Charlie Parker's quintet and began organizing live sessions with more players on the side. Eventually, he organized live performances of his nonet (nine-piece band) but they made no money so the group broke up. About a year later Miles reformed the nonet in order to record some 78s for Capitol, as he was contractually obliged. The twelve 78 sides were later collected and named, "The Birth of Cool." Besides the expanded instrumentation, what these songs demonstrate is Miles interest in retaining the vivacity and vigor of bop, but expand its range and possibility. And though these songs represent a more restrained, toned-down, and less aggressive style of playing, they don't get quite as intimate or romantic as their cool jazz progeny. (Which I'm really not that into.)

Wikipedia labels Birth of the Cool as "Hard Bop," so I'm not about to tell you it's a good example of "Cool Jazz." It's laid back departure from bebop, prevalent at the time, are what marks its place in history.

Nowadays you can buy THE COMPLETE Birth of the Cool, which includes some bonus live tracks recorded by nonet around the same time as the 78 sides. (Unfortunately, it also features a revision of the cover art which was a bad idea.) One of the songs features Kenny Hagood on vocals, a rendition of the DeSylva/Gershwins tune "Why Do I Love You?" As a manifesto for cool jazz, the nonet's approach to this classic tune, which their audiences must have been familiar with, surely comes close.

And since time will make the contrast stronger, I've also posted Bix Beiderbecke's ragtime version. Of course I wasn't there at the time, but Bix seems to be to jazz what Green Day is to punk. A wider audience was into Bix and listened to his work, but he was taking a lot from the underbelly of New Orleans. All this to say, Bix's version represents a popular tune in a populist genre. People liked it. (Even Miles was fascinated with him... and hey, I like Green Day too.)

A few decades later Miles reinvents the tune. What he changes and what he keeps speak not only about what Miles is interested in, but just how much the art form of jazz has evolved over such a short time.

(Buy The Complete Birth of the Cool at Amazon.)

(Buy Bix Beiderbecke, Vol. 2: At the Jazz Band Ball at Amazon.)

She Wears a Wire that Runs All the Way to Stockholm

2006-04-27T23:14:00.000-07:00

The Essex Green - ~~This Isn't Farmlife~~
The Essex Green - ~~Cardinal Points~~

Prior to actually sitting down to pound out a blog from this worn keyboard, I generally obsess mentally over what I'm going to say, how I'm going to approach a piece of music or a band. Rarely I discover that I really needed to write about something else entirely. Sometimes the finished piece is better than what I imagined. Often over the course of research I find that some of my points are completely unoriginal.

I was going to talk all about how Essex Green manages to walk that fine line between nostaglia and admiration, how they manage to exist in timeless space—creating songs as indebted to the pop of the past as entrenched in contemporary mires, and how Brooklyn hipsters and scuzzy garage-rockers could both find common ground on the Essex Green, but the Merge Records blurb sums it all up much more efficiently: "timeless pop that is classic without being retro."

Another interesting point is that Cannibal Sea, The Essex Green's latest album was actually recorded in both Brooklyn and Ohio. So maybe there is something to my somewhat pejorative reduction of geographies and genres. Moving beyond bi-coastal, Essex Green manages to be both Red and Blue, and neither.

In full disclosure, Cannibal Sea is the first Essex Green record I ever bought. But that infernal Radio Io Edge... Everytime "This Isn't Farmlife" came on I thought to myself, what a great song, stopped working, and clicked on iTunes to see who it was. And "Cardinal Points" seemed to capture a lot of what I love about Caribou and my Nuggets box set. And hopefully someone is burning me some of their earlier stuff too... So there may be more Essex Green in Cacophony's future.

The Essex Green is making their way out to LA on Sunday, May 7 at Spaceland. And have about 10 shows after that as they make there way back to New York on May 18.

(Buy Cannibal Sea from Merge.)

In With The Out Crowd

2006-04-26T23:18:00.000-07:00

~~Ramsey Lewis - Hang On Sloopy~~

The great thing about listening to music that basically no one else your age cares about is that you can be into some fairly dorky shit and there’s no one around to make fun of you. I can proudly tell people I like Ramsey Lewis and most people (not you guys, but you know, normal people) won’t even know who I’m talking about. Actually, I’d like to meet some people who could ridicule me for loving this song, but I’m not sure where jazz purists hang out. I think they just sit in their basements dusting off vinyl and taking occasional breaks to be talking heads on PBS specials. I’m pretty sure they don’t read mp3 blogs.

Ramsey Lewis may be regarded by many to be the antithesis of jazz purism, his reinvention of contemporary pop hits were usually attached with discrediting prefixes - soul-jazz, blues-jazz, pop-jazz. But the meanings of those distinctions have pretty much faded over time; to my untrained ear his music just sounds good. His piano playing is simple and elegant and I’m sure that before he had a massive hit in 1965 with his cover of “The ‘In” Crowd” he was a fine hard bop player. He’s no Thelonious Monk or anything, but not every jazz musician can be a tortured genius. Sometimes you’re just an average player who has to make up for it with enthusiasm.

And Lewis has got enthusiasm to spare. After the success of “The ‘In’ Crowd” he spent the rest of his career essentially repeating the same ideas: take a pop song, give it a swinging beat, play out the melody on piano with occasional flights of improvisation, let the audience sing the words if they want. His version of "Hang On Sloopy”, recorded in 1973 at the legendary Lighthouse Club in Hermosa Beach, doesn’t stray far from this formula, but it’s so much fun it’s hard to care. I hesitate to use the word infectious, because it’s a cliché and it’s a cliché I think I just used last week, but short of inappropriate thesaurus-provided synonyms (transferable? Communicable?) I can’t think of a better way to describe the charm of Lewis’ work.

You know how in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray learns how to play the piano and then impresses everybody by playing Mozart or something? Ramsey Lewis’ “Hang On Sloopy” is the song I would play if I could play piano. Whenever I listen to it, that’s the fantasy I envision. I’m at some stuffy cocktail party where everybody’s bored out of their mind and I saddle up to the piano and start picking out the melody. Pretty soon people start moving a little bit, then the drums and bass kick in (I’m not sure how that happens. Movie magic I guess.) and people really start dancing. The fervor keeps building until I get to the chorus and then the crowd just goes ape shit: they’re up on the tables, standing on top of the piano, smashing champagne bottles, old ladies are gettin down, and they all spontaneously scream along “haaaaaang on Sloopy, Sloopy hang on.” After it’s all over, I take a bow and everybody cheers. And then Andie McDowell falls in love with me.

Hopefully she’s not a jazz purist.

(Click here to buy Ramsey Lewis' Finest Hour on Amazon.)

(For more information on "Hang On Sloopy", the official rock song of Ohio, click here.)

And in unrelated news, if you haven't gone over to Stereogum yet to get the new Sufjan Stevens track, do it now.

The Fourth Best Band in Kingston Upon Hull

2006-04-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

The Housemartins - ~~Sheep~~
The Housemartins - ~~Hopelessly Devoted to Them~~

If the jangley pop topped with layers of harmony isn't enough to get you interested in The Housemartins, maybe these keywords from their Wikipedia page will:

Marxist politics; born-again Christianity; attacking his business partner with an axe; the future Fatboy Slim

The Housemartins spanned from 1983 to 1986, going through a few members in the process. (And yet, I'm just now discovering them.) The band's image changed throughout the years from an exciting live band with quirky songs to a more serious, Marxists-in-cardigans look but the lyrical content seems to stay consistantly focused. Curiously enough, none of the "Christian" tinged work made it onto the "Best of" album, but the Marxist influence is easy to find. What keeps this material from sounding trite or dated is great songwriting and musicianship. For me at least, it wouldn't matter much what they were singing about, the unabashedly poppy and soul-inspired songs could do it. And regardless of the lyrics' meaning, the style and phrasing is brilliant at times. There's a "coy, self-deprecation" that spreads across their work that keeps the Das Kapital references in check, too.

The best description comes perhaps as a metaphor from an anonymous messageboard: The Housemartins are the UK's Credence Clearwater Revival.

1) Associated with unpopular forms of 'root' rock. Like CCR played rootsy American tunes in an age of psychedlics, Housemartins played their 'skiffle' influenced tunes in an age of hair metal.

2) Their clothing was plain and simple. CCR: flannels. Housemartins: Cardigans

3) While their clothing perhaps made them out to seem conservative, their views were exactly the opposite. Take CCR's "Fortunate Son" and Housemartins "Sheep."

4) Both bands come from the backwoods: Northern California and Northern England. And both bands took swipes at the city folk.

5) People who might otherwise be embarrassed about liking American roots or Skiffle will admit to liking CCR or The Housemartins.

Curiously enough, their final bass player, Norman Cook, later changed his name to Fatboy Slim and made some good music videos.

And apparently the car dealer/partner-gone-bad had it coming when Hugh Whittaker attacked him with an axe.

(Buy The Best of The Housemartins at Amazon.)

It Was A Funny, Funny Little Thing

2006-04-24T23:20:00.000-07:00

Joanna Newsom - ~~Bridges and Balloons~~

Joanna Newsom - ~~The Sprout and the Bean~~

There always seems to be one new band or artist floating around in the world of pop culture that seems specifically manufactured to piss me off. Every time I crack open a Rolling Stone I find some band topping the charts that is so horrible it brings on an overall drop in my level of faith in humanity. Recently I have moved on from bitterly ranting to anyone who would listen about She Wants Revenge, and have found a new band to hate.

Panic! At The Disco, aside from having an awful, generic, train hopping name and playing a sickening brand of emo mall pop with cutesy Nightmare Before Hot Topic pseudo-goth undertones (and not to mention lyrics seemingly ripped from the worst livejournal ever written), are made up of mind numbingly stupid band members. I understood as I was reading the interview with their guitarist-lyricist that he was only 19, but I know plenty of 19 year olds in bands and I’m pretty sure none of them would cite Blink 182 as their biggest influence. Or refer to MXPX, Third Eye Blind and Counting Crows as some of their favorite bands. Or have “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer as their ringtone. Or count a literary hoax as one of their favorite authors. And I’m pretty sure the kids that I know that are 19 or younger, if they happened to like Joanna Newsom would not say “I just got into this girl who plays harp and sings really strange.”

Just the tone of that comment got so under my skin, the dripping of hipster cool, like he was letting me in on some underground secret or something. But then I thought about it, and I guess for a lot of people reading Rolling Stone… Joanna Newsom probably is a secret. So maybe my anger doesn’t really stem from anything Panic! At The Disco has said or done, but more the fact that a boy band with guitars is being profiled in Rolling Stone in the first place, while someone as talented as Joanna Newsom toils in semi-obscurity.

They say in film that the greatest critique is to not say anything, but to just make a better movie. So I’ll end my diatribe now and just abruptly shift into how wonderful Joanna Newsom is. I’m sure a lot of people already have these two songs; they’re both from her 2004 album The Milk-Eyed Mender, but hopefully some of you haven’t had the pleasure and I can pass on to you one of the most unique musical treasures of the last couple years.

“Bridges and Balloons” is a song that seems to have reached that instant standard status Jeff wrote about last week. It’s already been covered by a number of bands, including the Decemberists, and it’s easy to see why. I might not be smart enough to keep up with a lot of her lyrics, but my lack of literacy doesn’t dull the emotional connection she’s able to create in both “Bridges” and Milk-Eyed Mender 's single “The Sprout and the Bean”.

A lot of writers and reviewers tend to try to define Joanna by her quirkiness. Yes, she plays the harp and assorted other unconventional instruments; yes, her lyrics can be bizarre; and yes, she possesses a distinctly odd singing voice, untrained and childlike (and, I think, kind of sexy. But maybe I’m just sick.) but all of these things are inconsequential. What makes Joanna special, what sets her apart from her avant/anti/psych-folk peers and light years ahead of flavor of the month bands like Panic! At The Disco is that she simply writes great songs. Enchanting, magical songs, that will feel timeless for years to come, even if it’s not her “really strange” voice that’s singing them.

(Click here to buy The Milk-Eyed Mender on Amazon.)

Father Loose Fur, You Never Looked So Sane (Sorry.)

2006-04-21T20:25:00.000-07:00

Loose Fur - ~~The Ruling Class~~
Loose Fur - ~~Stupid as the Sun~~

I've got your sunshine weekend right here at 128 kbps.

Sitting in front of a computer for over eight hours a day might not be your favorite way to spend a day, especially when that computer is at the office. And although I have to listen quietly, the internet radio helps make my days go by much easier. At first I tuned into Indie 103.1 just to drown out the KOST that was infiltrating my ears from across the office, but as I discovered more and more strictly online stations I became a discerning listener searching out the best mix I could find.

Enter Radio Io's Edge program. "Playing the best of twenty-years of college rock and alternative... as well as today's best indie acts," Edge manages to play the perfect mix of songs I know and love as well as new stuff that I really dig. I listened for about a week to the free 128 kpbs stream via iTunes before I got totally sick of the same commercials over and over and fell totally in love with the mix of tunes. Five dollars a month seemed like a reasonable amount for 160 hours a month of good music, so I subscribed.

And it was worth it. Not only do I get the music at a CD quality stream, I get this great pop up window that refreshes each time a new song comes on. The window displays the last ten songs played as well as icon links to find out more about each song played. One click and I can buy the album online or read all about the artist. (So then I jot down the album title and label and look it up later.)

On one occasion my coworker (and drummer) asked what I was listening to. When I said Radio Io Edge, she replied, "Oh, does Sean dj that?" And yes, he does. Apparently Sean Ziebarth is a bit of a local boy who used to (still does?) dj at KUCI. He had found a copy of a Former Friend CD (our drummer and keyboardist's other band) a few months back and contacted them for his own copy.

Dude. I love this guy even more.

So thanks to Sean, this 'free' radio stream has given me a list of new CDs to buy and will most likely end up costing me a whole lot more than if I had just settled for "Steady as She Goes" nine times a day. (Though thanks to allofmp3.com I was able to get a few of those records checked off all for under $10.)

And this Loose Fur album, Born Again in the USA, did not disappoint. It moves between the glamorous discordant pop of Aladdin Sane-era Bowie, restrained, open-ended post-punk and as "The Ruling Class" shows, heavy does of The Velvet Underground.

The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know. And I'm not too proud or elitist to admit that I know virtually nothing about Wilco. Maybe if I did, I would have been clued in to this Loose Fur side-project. Maybe having a knowledge of the Wilco catalog gives a better (or worse?) context for understanding Born Again in the USA, but if so, I wouldn't know it. Someone (anyone?) out there who's into Wilco, let me know what you think. (You can leave a comment by clicking the number next to the blog's title.)

Have a whistling weekend.

(Buy Loose Fur Born Again in the USA at Amazon.)

(Check out Radio Io, and their Edge program, here.)

Boy I Can Make You Smile

2006-04-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

Exploding Hearts - ~~Throwaway Style~~

I love lists. There’s something very psychologically satisfying about having information arranged in a numbered pattern; 100 Greatest Album Covers, Top 5 Records, 50 Worst Songs, I eat that shit up. So naturally, I spend a lot of time checking my Top 25 Most Played folder on iTunes. For a music nerd who loves lists, what’s more fun than reading your own involuntary list of the songs you listen to most? Currently my list is a little bit biased though because when I’m writing for this blog I tend to listen to the song I’m writing about on repeat ad nauseum. So right now my Top 25 reads like my half of the blog, with the overwhelming number one most played song being “Thinning Air” by Ante-Meridiem. But the question remains - do I really love the song that much, or was it just the post that took me the longest to write? So the songs that are most interesting to me on the list are the ones that aren’t from the blog, and higher than any other in that minority is “Throwaway Style” by the Exploding Hearts.

As much as I enjoy this song, I never really considered writing about “Throwaway Style”. Posting it means breaking one of the cardinal rules Jeff and I imposed on ourselves because I first discovered it from another blog. But at the same time it perfectly fits our self-imposed criteria for what kind of songs to post: it’s a song I think people should hear.

It took me a long time to give the Exploding Hearts a chance. I had read the heartbreaking story about them in the summer of 2003, about how three of the four members had died in a van crash, but I had also seen the pictures that accompanied the articles. Spiky hair and skinny ties, leather jackets and bondage pants. When I was in high school, a band that looked like this (and with a Dirtnap Records pedigree no less) would have been right up my alley. But at the time their sole album Guitar Romantic was released I had all the Briefs 7 inches I needed, thank you very much, and I had little interest in another snotty new wave punk band.

Then a couple months ago (November 28, 2005 to be exact. It’s weird how a quick Google search can shape vague memories into solid dates.) I was reading Said the Gramophone (which for my money is the best written mp3 blog around) and came across this track. I still wasn’t that intrigued, but StG had never steered me wrong in the past and I happened to be at work with a superfast DSL connection so I downloaded it. I didn’t get what I was expecting to say the least.

Aside from a debt to the poppiest of early British punk bands and a healthy coat of lo-fi fuzz, Exploding Hearts have little in common with the kind of bands I had superficially lumped them in with. Bands like The Briefs and The Epoxies always felt a little gimmicky to me, coasting on (pardon the wording) throwaway style over substance, but Exploding Hearts could be Brill Building songwriters underneath their layers of eyeliner and Aquanet. “Throwaway Style” captures that elusive quality of feeling unique and fresh but at the same time instantly familiar. It’s so catchy it’ll stick in your brain after just one listen, you’ll be singing along by the second chorus.

It’s so full of energy, so overflowing with enthusiasm, it’s the kind of song you could imagine being used in a cheesy movie montage. Probably cut to images of a teenage girl jumping up and down on her bed. Hell, it makes me want to jump on my bed. It makes me want to turn the volume up full blast and dance around my living room and pray my roommate doesn’t walk in on me. There aren’t many songs that evoke feelings like that, but of songs that make me so happy I want to dance around like an idiot, “Throwaway Style” is number one on the list.

(Click here to buy Guitar Romantic from Amazon.)

I've Got A Clan of Gingerbread Men

2006-04-19T00:14:00.000-07:00

The Vindictives - ~~Bike~~
Pink Floyd - ~~Bike~~

(Too many covers? Too soon for more Vindictives?)

Did you ever like a band because you were supposed to? When I was first getting into music, my entry way was 'classic rock' mostly via KLSX and their annual Labor Day Top 100 Countdown. One year I taped the top 25 or so and tried desperately to take note of who sang which song. There were a few tracks by Pink Floyd, who up until that point were purely a band I had seen t-shirts for. They seemed good enough and seemed to mentioned in the same breath as The Doors, Zepplin or The Who. So eventually I decided I needed to own at least Dark Side of the Moon. I listened to it a bit (since it was probably among the 6 CDs I owned) but could never totally get into it and let my interest in Pink Floyd fade away.

The story could end there. Or I could have been completely turned off to the band after I discovered just who really listened to Pink Floyd and wore those t-shirts. But whenever "Comfortably Numb" or "Money" came on the radio throughout the years, I'd at least listen for a little while before changing the station.

Harsh Segue.

The Vindictives released a double-10" of all cover songs in the mid-nineties, Partytime for Assholes, which was intended to be a tribute to the various bands but comes closer to a Dickies tribute. One of my first music-geek projects was to compile all of the original songs. This was before the days of the internet and I spent a lot of time listening to friends and digging through bargain 45 bins. I compiled most of the songs but there were a few that always alluded me.

On a random spur, I decided to get out my old CD copy of Partytime where all of the songs are combined into one long track. With my new computer skills, I realized I could finally break up that CD into a listenable version. Then I realized, why don't I just google some of these lyrics for which I never discovered the original artist.

One of the strangest songs covered is "Bike." I always wondered who could sing a song about mouse who hasn't got a house. (I don't why I call him Gerald.) The lyrics seemed almost a perfect for the Vindictives who once sang, "Everything I've got has certain places to go: a self for that thing and a drawer for that thing." And the stripped down punk version leaves a lot to the imagination as to the original music.

Google wasn't exactly straight with me. But I did find a post on someone's MySpace page with the complete lyrics attributed to S. Barrett. A little cross referencing and sure enough, "Bike" is a Pink Floyd tune. Closing out Pink Floyd's debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the deceptively simplistic structure and lyrics at the opening of the track mark a harsh contrast to the open orchestrated-noise given a minute-and-a-half in the song's finale. And keep in mind this was released within months of Sgt. Pepper's... There must have been something in the water; I think it was LSD.

(Buy Piper at the Gates of Dawn at Amazon.)
(Buy Partytime for Assholes at Amazon.)

Poetry That's A Part Of Me

2006-04-18T23:42:00.000-07:00

Nas - ~~Memory Lane (Sittin' In Da Park)~~

Queensbridge Houses, in Queens, N.Y., is the largest public housing project in America, providing government funded “affordable” housing to over 3,000 families. In the 1980’s these projects were one of the most important neighborhoods in the growth of hip-hop. MC Shan, Roxanne Shante, Marley Marl and many other prominent hip-hop musicians all called “The Bridge” home. But it wouldn't be until the mid-90s, after hip-hop had already flowed out of the projects and into the suburbs and West Coast “gangsta” rap was selling millions of records, that Queensbridge would see the emergence of its most influential resident and, according to himself, its most dangerous emcee.

On April 19, 1994, Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones (or just Nas to you and me) released his debut album, Illmatic. Many cite Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready To Die (released a few months later) as the album that revitalized East Coast hip-hop, but Nas’ debut redefined East Coast hip-hop. When Nas burst on the scene he was hailed as the second coming of Rakim but, while certainly Rakim paved the way, Nas took Rakim’s innovations and elevated emceeing to a higher level. No rapper had ever been as complex, no hip-hop lyricist so profound. Over a series of laid-back, jazz-inflected beats (provided by New York legends DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip and fellow Bridge alumni Large Professor) the 20 year old rapper spun tales of drugs, crime, poverty and violence with an unprecedented poetic proficiency.

“Memory Lane (Sittin’ In Da Park)” is one of the most lyrically perfect songs ever written, capturing the gritty details of New York City street life as seen through the window of an intelligent, introspective emcee with a pen and paper as his only escape. Nas stares out of his window onto the streets below, watches drug overdoses and shoot outs, “murderous nighttimes” where “knife fights invite crimes” and writes his “retardedly bop” poetry. DJ Premier carefully crafts a lazy summer vibe for Nas to reminisce over; a head bopping beat with snapping snare drum, tinkling piano, purring background vocals, and old school scratches and vocal samples that bring back the feeling of the park jams both the producer and the rapper grew up with. For all its grimy and bloody memories, there’s something sweetly nostalgic about the song.

Upon its release Illmatic didn’t sell very well and subsequently Nas has spent the rest of his career trying to get a taste of the commercial success his peers have received. Occasionally he still exhibits flashes of the brilliance that characterized his first record, but he’s never equaled it. And maybe he couldn’t if he tried. Illmatic is such a towering masterpiece that even in the midst of Nas' much hyped fued with Jay-Z, Jay had to admit it was a great record. (Although he did point out the inconsistency – “that’s a one-hot-album-every-ten-year average”. ) As critic Hartley Goldstein put it: “Illmatic is the meticulously crafted essence of everything that makes hip-hop music great; it's practically a sonic strand of the genre's DNA.”

(Click here for the "Memory Lane" lyrics on the Online Hip-Hop Lyric Archive.)

(Click here to buy Illmatic on Amazon.)

The Gas is Leaking Since 1996 You Motherfuckers!

2006-04-17T19:30:00.000-07:00

Milemarker - ~~Landlord~~
Milemarker - ~~Cryogenic Sleep~~

The best and worst thing about working at a copy shop is that everyone asks you for favors. It worked out well a few times as I hooked up various local bands with demo or seven-inch covers or the locals art co-op with some new signage and flyers. And then sometimes friends of friends would want the hook up and things got more complicated. It's one thing to put my job on the line for something I support; it's something else entirely if someone who I don't even hang out with wants free stuff.

So a friend of a friend had some photos of a band and wanted to make them into posters. There were about 5 different pics and if I made an 18"x24" digital print of each I'd be ripping off Paul Orfella for around $180. I wasn't prepared to do that for someone I had barely even met once. (Though she did convince me to buy Le Tigre's first record the one and only time I met her at Noise Noise Noise.)

So I decided to make the posters on the blueprint copier (called an Óce by those in the biz). I scanned in the photos, half-toned them and everything, just to get the best possible results from the line-art reproducer. And while I'm scanning in the photos I think, wow, these guys look really cool (read: these guys dress like me and have similar haircuts.) When my friend came to pick up the posters (and was disappointed they weren't in color), I made to ask who this band was. Milemarker.

Coincidences generally occur in three and are rarely a happenstance. Soon after I was reading whatever the hip magazine of the day was, either Punk Planet or Skyskraper and came across a review of Milemarker's Anesthetic. The review only fueled my interest in this new band and informed me that Al Burian, who regularly writes columns for Punk Planet, was a founding member of Milemarker. Oh, I had to get this record.

But apparently it wasn't as important as getting the new Zeke record because I took my 'lunch' break at OCC to drive up to Vinyl Solution on Zeke mission. But after a B-line to the Z-section, my mission was a failure. And like all music junkies I decided to just look around and pick up something else to get my fix.

A CD packaged in all pink with a pegasus gracing it's cover caught my eye in the M's. Worth purchasing on the appeal of the cover art alone, it was the new Milemarker album I had read about.

And I didn't really like it.

Maybe six months later I decided to give the Milemarker disc another try. I can distinctly remember pulling into the Home Depot parking lot to buy art project materials and not wanting to stop the CD. This time something was different; I was ready for this. I'm not sure why "Shrink to Fit" (Anesthetic's opening track) didn't catch me right away on first listen, maybe I didn't it up loud enough. But on this occasion all the elements were in place and when "A Quick Trip to the Clinic" blared out of my stereo speakers as I pulled into that Home Depot I knew I was hooked.

I've kept up with Milemarker throughout their releases and collected some of the albums which came out before Anesthetic. (Including Frigid Forms Sell You Warmth, which is one of the greatest album titles of all time, and contains what I'd call my 'favorite' Milemarker song, "Sex Jam Two: Insect Incest," and its close runner-up, "Cryogenic Sleep.")

"Landlord" makes it way to your ear from Milemarker's fifth and latest album, Ominosity. Released back in October of 2005, I was only recently able to pick up a copy of this disk. Normally I can't stand psuedo-journalistic text in band's promotional schpeals, but this time all the hype hits the mark. Ominosity really does sounds like the album Milemarker has been trying to make all along... and I loved the earlier work. This is some twisted news for new listeners because if you don't like this album you most likely won't like the other ones, and if you go out and buy this album first it's may seem all down hill from there. But, I'm going to post "Cryogenic Sleep" just for some sort of context and perhaps even if you fall in love with Ominosity you can still find the gems on the other records.

You can download two other tracks from Ominosity here.

(Buy Ominosity at Insound.)
(Buy Frigid Forms Sell You Warmth at Insound.)

Beatles Covers Week Part Five: Friday Night Arrives Without A Suitcase

2006-04-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

Allotria Jazzband - ~~Lady Madonna~~

This week has been fun, we’ve gotten to geek out pretty exhaustively and we’ve gotten to share some really great songs, but I’m about to put the nail in the coffin. This is my Beatles covers trump card. This is the greatest Beatles cover song of all time, possibly the greatest cover song of all time period, and definitely the best record I ever bought for a dollar at a thrift store.

I was considering a number of different approaches for writing about this. Do I try to verbalize what makes this song so awesome, pinpointing the moment (probably about when the heavily accented vocals come in) that it transcends novelty and enters the realm of unadulterated genius? Or do I do a straight research based post, informing you that the Allotria Jazzband formed in 1969 and are still around today and have put out dozens of records on the Bellaphon label? Do I try to tie this song in to a grander point about the Beatles’ worldwide influence, the power of their songs and their ability to be translated into different genres and appreciated by all different cultures?

In the end I decided that none of these approaches were really necessary. It’s a cover of “Lady Madonna” by a German ragtime band. If ever there was a song that speaks for itself, this is it.

(The record this is on, Jubilee, is out of print. But for other Allotria Jazzband LPs, and probably your best bet at finding Jubilee, check out JazzLPs.com)

Beatles Covers Week Part Four: I Wanna Hold Your Standard or And I Cover

2006-04-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Sufjan Stevens - ~~What Goes On~~
The Skatalites - ~~Independent Anniversary Ska~~
Paul Weller - ~~Sexy Sadie~~

Do you know that song "Chicken Reel" or "Turkey in the Straw?" Your first answer might be 'no,' but if I hummed a few bars you'd most likely reply, 'Oh, that's what that song is called.' Through Looney Toons and commercial jingles, you've most likely been exposed to these songs; they have entered the collective unconscious.

And while I'm deathly afraid of the folks who think "Surf City" is a Beach Boys song, I have a feeling they are growing in number. As music becomes "ubiquitous as water" in our culture, it stands a chance of becoming just as bland and rote. If you were forced to listen to your local Oldies station daily, you'd probably get completely sick of their 20-song playlist. You might not care to remember that Them sang "Gloria," like you might not have bothered to find out that Caplinger's Cumberland Mountain Entertainers do a killer version of the Chicken Reel. Or that name of the song played in every cartoon when an assembly line is featured is "Powerhouse" by Raymond Scott.

But there is something potent and relevant in approaching a song that everyone knows, that hold a place in the collective unconscious. The main reason you have tunes that are considered 'standards' in a genre like Jazz, is the heavy reliance on improvisation within that genre. There was a time when most people knew the melody to "Misty" or "Take the A Train," so when they heard an avant garde arrangement they could recognize where it was being altered, improved or broken down. A standard could also be an opportunity for showmanship and impressaro performance. When the listener has a context for the tune, the musician can play with the listener's expectations.

Maybe that's why I'm a sucker for tracks like Ted Leo covering Kelly Clarkson or Arcade Fire playing Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Maybe these are today's 'standards' and maybe their life-span is growing increasingly shorter. (Or backwards as with Iron and Wine and Postal Service.)

These three tracks all start with a Beatles song and treat like a standard. There is no rock-god reverence, just using a song in the pop music vernacular to launch their own creativity. The beauty in these tracks in how much they reinvent these songs, like a good cover should.

When I listen to Rubber Soul, I usually skip "What Goes On." I've never really been able to get into the Ringo songs, but Sufjan's version completely flips the script. And I don't usually go for much pre-Rubber Soul material but this ska version of "I Should Have Known Better" (dubbed "Independent Anniversary Ska") by The Skatalites makes perfect sense to me. And Paul Weller brings it all together with his blue-eyed soul rendition of "Sexy Sadie." And while Mr. Weller doesn't push the original nearly as far as Stevens or the Skatalites, maybe there's just enough of a difference in arrangement to hear what he's going for... taking a shot at recreating one of the most beautiful songs ever written. You can hear his respect for the original maybe just a little more than you can hear his desire to remain fresh. So as a "standard cover" goes, I think Sufjan just left The Jam man in the dust. (But it should be noted that I believe Weller is honoring the song, not deifying it, nor trying to pass it off as his own a la Quiet Riot covering "C'mon Feel the Noise.")

But if you never paid attention to the Beatles, then maybe these are just some more pop songs floating about in the ether. If you never thought it was important to remember just who sang "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," then you probably aren't even reading this, but I think we all know people like this. Maybe it's someone at your job, at school, or maybe even a relative, but surely we all know people who just don't care. I think I just feel sorry for all they miss out on. And I shudder when I imagine a future where listeners relate to "Love Me Do" like we relate to "Turkey in the Straw."

"Ignorance of your culture is not considered cool."

(Buy This Bird Has Flown at Amazon.)

(Buy The Skatalites at Amazon.)

(Buy Paul Weller at Amazon.)

Beatles Covers Week Part Three: Some Drop Science, I'm Droppin' English

2006-04-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

Knoc-turn'al - ~~Muzik~~

Paul McCartney - ~~Old Siam Sir~~

A Tribe Called Quest - ~~Luck of Lucien~~

When Jeff first had the idea to do a Beatles cover collaboration I immediately knew I wanted to do something with the Beatles and hip-hop. The Beatles, believe it or not, have been part of hip-hop since the beginning. The drum break from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is one of the classic breaks of early hip-hop, a perennial favorite of Afrika Bambaataa and other New York DJs in the 1970’s, spun alongside “Apache” and “Scorpio” to equal b-boy enthusiasm. But while those songs, along with artists like James Brown and Parliament/Funkadelic, and at this point at least a song or two from almost every major rock and roll band, have been absorbed into the hip-hop musicscape, the Beatles never have. In the 80’s the Beatles were sampled as rampantly as any other artist for hip-hop beats, but once copyright law changed to finally catch up with rap music (as usual the music business was about 10 years behind. See also: digital downloading.) the Beatles faded out of the canon. To understand why this is, it helps to know a little about publishing.

The Beatles catalogue is generally accepted to be one of the most valuable in the music business, worth an estimated $500 million and showing no signs of wavering in popularity. The owner of the vast majority of this catalogue (basically anything written after 1963) is, as I think most people know, Michael Jackson. But what I think a lot of people misunderstand is that what Michael Jackson owns (actually now, thanks to a spiraling debt problem, half-owns along with Sony) is the Beatles publishing; their songs as intellectual property. To put it in slightly oversimplified terms: if you want to cover a Beatles song, quote a Beatles song, play it on the radio or play it in a public place – the money goes to Michael and Sony. But if you want to use a Beatles recording, the money goes to Paul, Ringo and the widows of John and George. (The Beatles are one of the few bands who do actually own their own masters. Normally your record company owns your recordings and you are paid an artist royalty.) This difference between publishing and recording becomes key when we’re talking about sampling because U.S. copyright law requires you to have both a mechanical license (Michael/Sony) and a master use license (John, Paul, George, Ringo) to use a sample. Both of these licenses require a large sum of money, a relinquishing of some portion of the copyright, and permission. And if you pay enough attention to hip-hop you will notice - the Beatles don’t give permission.

The reason the Beatles pop up on several seminal early hip-hop recordings is that in those days the music business wasn’t paying much attention to sampling, or to rap music in general. It was considered a passing fad. And although sampling had existed for years (The Beatles of course ironically being pioneers of sampling in pop music via songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Revolution #9”), there was never much money to be made in it. Hip-hop changed that. It changed everything people knew about sampling. Producers began to use sampling not just as a studio novelty but as the backbone of their compositions; they forged a new artistic aesthetic, invented new rules that didn’t give a fuck about the musical conventions of the western world. In these days before the regulation of sampling, if artists did object to their songs being pillaged for beats, they received a one time fee for use of their composition. But once the industry realized that, not only was this rap music thing here to stay but it had turned into a multi-million dollar industry under their noses, laws regarding sampling changed and a new era of hip-hop was ushered in.

Some people don’t get the difference; a lot of people in my class when I studied this in school couldn’t comprehend why owning part of the copyright of a song was more substantial than receiving a one-time fee, even one for hundreds of thousands of dollars. A one-time fee can be spent up over a weekend, but owning the publishing of a hit song can keep you rich for the rest of your life. One of my teachers used the example of two songwriting friends of hers who wrote a song in 1980 that they were trying to pitch to Rod Stewart. Before Rod could even hear the song his record company gave it instead to another artist on their roster. The songwriters at first were disappointed that the considerably less successful Olivia Newton-John was going to record their song. Now they never have to work again. They can live comfortably for the rest of their lives off the royalties generated by the ridiculous refrain “Let’s Get Physical”.

But despite the financial gain to be made by sharing copyright of a potential hit song, The Beatles have never officially licensed a sample for a hip-hop recording. Paul McCartney is especially notorious for not clearing samples. But, to be fair, he’s spent decades since the Beatles split fighting court battles over copyrights, ownership and royalties, with both record companies and band members and then suffered the heartbreaking blow in 1985 of being outbid by Michael Jackson for the publishing to his own songs. So I understand him being a little wary about giving permission for someone to fuck with his music. One of the rare exceptions where Paul granted sample clearance wasn’t even for the Beatles, it was for a relatively obscure Wings track from the 1979 album Back To The Egg.

It may seem a little like cheating in a Beatles covers week to talk about sampling, and then to further depart from the theme by posting a song that samples a post-Beatles Paul McCartney, but “Muzik” is just too good not to post. The song, by west coast rapper Knoc-Turn’Al, was a modest radio hit a couple years ago and was produced (pre explosive fame) by none other than Kanye West. Although most heralded for his sped-up soul technique, Kanye knows a killer rock and roll hook when he hears it (see also Jay-Z’s “Takeover”) and the beat in “Old Siam Sir” is absolutely vicious. Knoc-Turn’Al is an emcee who’s not the most technically skillful; his flow and vocabulary are basic and he’s not particularly clever, but what he lacks in these areas he more than makes up for in pure hunger. He rips into the beat with such energy it doesn’t matter that he’s more ranting than rapping. (I saw him in concert around the time this song was garnering radio play and he was just as electrifying on stage.) The song also boasts an incredible swaggering falsetto chorus. It doesn’t sound like Kanye or Knoc-Turn’Al, and whoever it is isn’t credited in the album’s liner notes, but it’s the best part of the song for me.

I had a tough time narrowing it down to just one hip-hop song that samples the actual Beatles. A couple Boogie Down Productions tracks were in the running, as was the Beatles-sampling medley “The Sounds of Science” from the Beastie Boys' Paul’s Boutique album, but I was only going to post that if I could find an instrumental version of it. But I think the song that best illustrates the ideas of today’s post is “Luck of Lucien” from A Tribe Called Quest’s stellar debut album People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. Listen carefully. No, not that cracking snare drum beat. Not the softly thumping bass line. Not even the prominent horn pattern. It’s the couple of brass notes under the main horn melody and, even I'm not positive but I think, the echoing two-chord guitar pattern. Sound familiar? Of course not, that’s why I picked it. It’s a sample from “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles.

It’s a concept that doesn’t exist today; you rarely hear multiple samples in the same song, let alone a hint of a sample so subtle as to be unrecognizable. This kind of sampling is financially inconceivable now. Now if you are going to go to the trouble of clearing and paying for a sample, and then get lucky enough to get permission, you’re going to use it as much as possible. Maybe add your own drums and bass line, maybe adjust the tempo, but otherwise these expensive acquisitions remain intact. “Luck of Lucien” is a song that couldn’t be recorded in this modern era of hip hop. Gone are the Prince Paul and Bomb Squad days of collage-sample production where you would lift a single kick drum from a James Brown record, or a few stray brass stabs from a Beatles song, just because you liked the way they sounded. And it’s not a coincidence that time in hip-hop is referred to as “The Golden Age.”

(Click here to buy the Knoc-turn'al EP L.A. Confidential Presents on Amazon.)

(Click here to buy Back To The Egg on Amazon.)

(Click here to buy People's Instinctive Travels on Amazon.)

Beatles Covers Week Part Two: When I'm (Commodore) 64

2006-04-11T20:45:00.000-07:00

~~Merman/Ozone - With a Little Help from my Friends~~
~~Merman/Ozone - I Am the Walrus~~
~~Merman/Ozone - The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill~~
~~Merman/Ozone - Happiness is a Warm Gun~~
~~I Feel So Pixelated - When I'm C64~~

I had a few SID tunes that were Beatles covers and researched them to death... Only to stumble upon Merman/Ozone's demo site. See, the beauty of an old system like Commodore 64 is the "ease" with which one can create their own games or music, often called 'demos.' I used to create little text-based games for my Commodore by copying in the Basic code from my monthly 3-2-1 Contact Magazine. But in the hands of a true musician/composer, the SID chip can astound you. Merman takes on the daunting task of recomposing some of the Beatles later work on his The Beatles Anthology v.II. I'm sorry to give you so many songs, but it was hard enough narrowing it down to these four.

One of my favorite things about chip music, SID tunes in particular, is the limitations of the technology. Like The Beatles were able to produce Sgt. Pepper... with 'simply' a four-track, SID composers face the challenge of composing using only three-voices. Breaking a song down into elemental units, down to the necessties, often allows the listener the ability to realize how truly intricate these compositions are.

Generally, Merman attempts to remain true to the original tunes note-for-note; it's the medium that's important. But his sped-up rendering of "Happiness is a Warm Gun," is my latest jam. I love it when those drums kick in. Of course, that's probably my gun-to-my-head favorite Beatles song... so it doesn't hurt to start with something I already love. (Though that could be dangerous too, as in his rendition of "Flying.")

And imagine trying to recreate the studio magic of "I Am the Walrus," yet somehow his SID version captures the spirit of the original in a completely new context.

Merman (Andrew Fisher) also has some Spice Girls and Blur demos and some Mr. Men and Pokemon slideshows for your C64 emulator. If you'd like to check them out...(Click Here.)

I've also posted "When I'm C64," by my entree into the remix/home-electronica forum, I Feel So Pixelated. I'm pretty sure the lyrics were inspired by Jan Lund Thomsen's podcast, The C64 Take-Away, but I could have totally dreamt that up too. I had a 30-second sample of "When I'm 64" and wanted to add something to it... so I added a drum track, bass line and some vocals. It may possibly be the geekiest thing I've ever done. (Even topping the Patrik Remix by A.M.)

(Download The C64 Take-Away Podcast)

(Download more from Merman. {Emulator Req.})

Beatles Covers Week Part One: I Know You Got (Rubber) Soul

2006-04-10T15:56:00.000-07:00

~~Al Green - I Want To Hold Your Hand~~

~~Aretha Franklin - The Long and Winding Road~~

~~The Supremes - A Hard Day's Night~~

So here’s our first crack at a themed week on Cacophony. It’s kind of a weird theme to start off with because, as a general rule, I hate Beatles covers. It’s a tricky proposition to cover a song by the Beatles because you know your cover is never going to be better than the original. The worst offenders are television commercials; you hear a lot of horrible bar band bargain bin versions of classic Beatles songs in commercials because it’s cheaper to just license the song and not use the master. There was an especially awful “Got To Get You In To My Life” in some ad for flat screen TVs awhile ago that was so vomit-inducing I would have to change the channel whenever it came on. But the Beatles aren’t untouchable, it is possible to do a Beatles song and avoid the pitfalls of paling in comparison by making it your own and adding something fresh to something timeless.

The great thing about Al Green’s take on “I Want To Hold Your Hand” is that he lets you know right from the beginning that he’s not taking this too seriously. After a couple seconds of joking around with the band, Green whispers “alright man, goddamn” and then tears into a reinterpretation of the Beatles’ first American hit that’s so loose and swinging it sails along on charm alone. It sounds like a couple of guys just jamming in their garage (if their garage had a full soul horn section in it) and its sense of fun is infectious. Green plays around with not just the melody but the lyrics as well, adding his own inflections and slyly changing the refrain “I can’t hide” to the often misheard “I get high”. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was originally left off his second album, 1970’s Green Is Blue, in favor of a more straightforward cover of “Get Back” (it has since been included as a bonus track on the CD reissue), but foregoing the usual reverence in Beatles covers is the key to what makes this track work.

Similarly irreverent, and equally sublime, is Aretha Franklin’s version of “The Long and Winding Road”. Readers who’ve been down since day one may recall that my very first post was an Aretha song; this song is from the same record, Young, Gifted and Black, and almost everything I had to say about that song holds true for “The Long and Winding Road”. Her voice is like a natural wonder of the world, the musicians she assembled for this record are a who’s who roster of soul giants, and her ability to deconstruct and reinvigorate someone else’s song is unparalleled. Also, in her choice to take on Let It Be's sappiest McCartney composition, Aretha recognizes that a good way to pull off covering the Beatles is to pick a song that wasn’t that great to begin with. Her version retains little of the schmaltzy balladry of the original; it finds the gospel heart of the song, adding a swirling church organ, a backup choir, and a touch of funk on the galloping call and response outro.

And rounding out today’s selections are the Supremes, because you couldn’t do a soul-themed Beatles covers post without talking about Motown. The Beatles covered a number of Motown songs in their early years, and the love appeared to be mutual as virtually every major Motown act covered a Beatles tune at one point or another. But what’s most interesting about Diana Ross and company doing “A Hard Day’s Night” is that it totally demolishes the idea that you can’t do a faithful rendition of a Beatles song. The only difference between the two versions is the vocals. Everything else, down to the copied note for note guitar solo, is performed as scripted. But at the same time it still sounds like a Supremes song, it's got the indelibly catchy chorus, it's filled to the brim with hooks, and has that unmistakable Detroit dance beat. It shows how indebted the Beatles were, even long past their cover band clubbing days, to Berry Gordy, girl groups and the “sound of young America.”

Be sure to stay tuned for the rest of the week, both Jeff and I have plenty more great Beatles covers in the vaults.

(Click here to buy Green Is Blue on Amazon.)

(If you didn't buy Young, Gifted and Black the first time I recommended it, click here to buy it on Amazon.)

(Click here to buy Motown Meets the Beatles on Amazon.)

Plotting Probing my Rear Opening

2006-04-07T12:55:00.001-07:00

The Vindictives - ~~Assembly Line~~
The Vindictives - ~~...and the world isn't flat anymore~~

I haven't had a 'real,' full-time job since January 2002. I worked at Kinko's for over four years prior to that, from when I was 18 to 22. Perhaps numerically that's not a whole lot of time but anyone who's made it past twenty-five can attest to how hard those years really are. Some pop psychologists have coined the term, "Quarter Life Crisis," because the same general symptoms seem to be widespread. At some point after leaving high school, or college, most people have to confront the fact that they will now be working at a job for their rest of their lives. Reality kicks in and it leaves an ever-growing bruise.

For those of you who met me recently, it may be hard to envision me in this period. I don't think Patrick believed me when I first told him about how I'd spike the free coffee with Drain-o, but I was so full of rage and depression then. Let's face it, the prospect of basically wasting away your life at a stupid job is horrendously depressing and dealing with the public daily is enough to instill rage in Tibetan monks.

But the quarter-life crisis was not something that we actually talked about in Psych 100 so I thought I was just losing my mind. It seemed like everyone was completely capable and complicit with this daily grind. I thought maybe I had some kind of Persecution Complex or Oppositional Authority Disorder. I was forced to read a Dr. Dobson book to Prepare for Adolescence, but nobody told me that 'real life' was so absolutely shitty. The Vindictives helped me out immensely. Singing along to Joey's lyrics as I collected my two-dollars in change for the toll road from OCC to my Kinko's was really what kept me going. Belting out "you can't control me" over a wall of backing vocals, doubling Joey on "don't let them make you think you're weird" or "you look at me and shake your head and say that I'm not sane / While watching sitcom reruns is the highpoint of your day," seemed the closest thing to reassurance I could find. Punk is filled with disaffected voices but something in The Vindictives lyrics and sound resonated with me. I'd heard all about why I should hate my job and the cops and that I should burn the church, the cross and the money that makes us hate, but I never heard a lyric and said, 'that song's written for me,' until I heard 'Assembly Line.'

Like I said earlier, I was working at Kinko's, so I photocopied the lyrics and thumbtacked them to my bedroom wall. I tacked them up right by my closet so every morning as I cinched up my tie or packed my book bag I could remember that it was okay not to be one of them. I could remind myself that their 'vulgar anecdotes won't lure me into an assembly-line life.' And there's something more than the sum of the words there, an unspoken hopefulness to the self-deprecating anthem. Of course there's the not-so-subtle mocking of the square culture too, but the closing line became my mantra: It's my intention to defend my volition.

"...and the world isn't flat anymore," had to be posted in this context as well. First of all, just take the title (and repeated ad nauseum outro), the phrase is packed with meaning. Considering the second and third lines of the song, "And if I change my mind about things / I know that I will change it again" this song touched on something I'd been thinking about a lot lately. As we laugh at Columbus' neigh-sayers with our contemporary knowledge that world is indeed round, what are we wrong about today? What will the future being laughing at us about? "...and the world" closes out The Many Moods of the Vindictives and seems to offer Joey's summation of everything addressed previously. Yeah, this life is pretty shitty and it will most likely make you crazy and it's full of emptiness... but we do have a chance at a better future. It's a far cry from a political song but as I became more jaded against my own political ideals, the idea of long-term evolution rather than a drastic revolution seemed more and more realistic. And it empowered me. I couldn't start Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat but I could live my life in a way that didn't embrace our culture's answers to our current problems. I could live a good life and hope that it would catch on, inspire mutation. Maybe if I treated everyone I encounter in life like a human being then my customers might not treat me like shit... and the world isn't flat anymore. You're a living time bomb.

('Assembly Line' Lyrics)
('...and the world isn't flat anymore' Lyrics)

(Buy The Vindictives The Many Moods of the Vindictives at Amazon.)

Would You Let A City Boy Hold Hands With You?

2006-04-06T18:00:00.000-07:00

~~The Real Kids - All Kindsa Girls~~

I was the character department manager, Dave was the atmosphere department manager. I won’t bore you with the details of what these job titles meant, the only real distinction I could see since I had been promoted from shift supervisor was that the higher up in this company I went the less work I did. Dave and I shared an office and we basically spent most of our days hiding from the photographers we were supposed to be managing, occasionally fixing a camera or two, but mostly listening to and talking about music.

Even when Dave had been my boss, we had a special rapport. When I wanted to go home for the day he would force me to answer music trivia questions. Sometimes they were easy, like what’s Iggy Pop’s real name, but sometimes they were impossible, completely biased questions of taste. Once he asked me what my favorite David Bowie song was. I answered “Sorrow”. He made me work overtime. When we started sharing an office he would bring in a stack of CD’s every morning that would be our playlist for the day. The stack was always different, they were always bands I had never heard of, and they were always really fucking good.

One day I tried to show off by bringing in my own stack of CDs, a musical selection I had deliberated on and agonized over for weeks, bands I knew Dave couldn’t possibly be familiar with. The first CD I put on was Le Shok’s We Are Electrocution. I was sitting there listening to Hot Rodd Todd sneer “fucking’s only fucking when you’re only 16” (a line that seemed a lot more brilliant to me at the time, when I was just a couple years past 16 myself), feeling very proud of my musical knowledge, when Dave cut right through my self-satisfaction and muttered casually, “these guys really love the Fall.” Shit. Who the fuck were the Fall?

Dave always had the answer for bands that I liked; I’d play him the carbon copies and he’d open my eyes to the originals. My exposure to the Real Kids, and to 70’s power pop in general, first came from him after I made the mistake of admitting that I was a big Teenage Fanclub fan. “Here,” he told me the next day as he pushed a freshly recorded cassette tape copy of the Real Kids’ eponymous 1976 album into my hands, “they’re from Boston. You’ll like them.”

“All Kindsa Girls” may not be the best song on the record, but it’s definitely my favorite. Maybe because it’s the first song, so it was the first thing I heard, but when the drums started after that false intro, this was the song that kick-started a love affair that took me from the Real Kids to bands like the Raspberries, Big Star and the Nerves. (The Nerves post seems to have gotten a lot of positive feedback, hence this trip down power pop memory lane). This song has been on a ton of compilations so it’s kind of an obvious choice, one I’m not sure Dave would approve of. (I should have gone with something more obscure, something that’s not even off the self-titled record. Everybody has that one.) But hopefully he will count it as a personal triumph that if somebody ever played Teenage Fanclub for me now, I could say “these guys must really love the Real Kids.”

(Click here to buy it on Amazon.)

These Are the Days that I Will Remember

2006-04-05T19:09:00.000-07:00

~~ESL - Bellevue Mental Hospital~~
~~ESL - Come Home~~
~~Tales from the Birdbath - Baron Von Birdbath~~
~~Sicko- Indie Rock Daydream~~

Sicko played their final show in Seattle, Summer of 1998. It was the same Summer my grandfather passed away. And while that might seem like a harsh segue, I opted to stay in Southern California for funeral services rather than join my friends on their pilgrimage north to see Sicko's last show. Of course, I heard all about it and Dave even wrote a song for our band ESL immortalizing the experience. (I even got to do my best Ean impression/tribute on the backing vocals.)

But my memories of Washington are much more complex and almost bipolar... and of course they too involve Sicko. When ESL 'toured' up the West Coast we had a nice long stay in Olympia that culminated with a show not far in Bellevue. Our tour was totally D.I.Y. which meant we were booked at an all-ages Boys and Girls club. But it also meant that we were responsible for setting it up in advance. As a shot in the dark, Dave suggested we ask Ean's new band, Tales from the Birdbath, to play with us. After informing us that Birdbath didn't quite have the same following as Sicko (read: no one will come), Ean agreed to play the show.

Similarly to Sicko getting to record their debut seven-inch with Kurt Block, playing with Ean, even if it wasn't with Sicko, was like a dream come true. And even though nobody came except for two kids and the guy whose house we were staying at in Olympia, I can still remember knowing that I was playing for Ean. That dude from Sicko was listening to my band. I was so far from home yet I felt so at ease and so 'successful.' It's hard to sum it all up.

But as we were packing up our gear something happened. The best I can piece together is that Matt, our drummer for the tour, called Dave's mom a 'fat, Catholic bitch,' and the next thing I knew Matt was chasing Dave down the streets of Bellevue pleading, "Just talk to me." And Dave was insistent that he'd just kick Matt's ass if he didn't just give him some space. End result: Matt was at the SeaTac Airport in a matter of hours and our at-home drummer was on the Greyhound bound for Vegas, our next stop.

I can't remember being as elated and fulfilled as I was playing for/with Ean. I can't remember ever being as angry and full of rage as when I saw the whole thing seem to fall apart.

Of course Dave wrote a song about that night too. There's some geographical inconsistency but I think Dave says "Seattle" just because Bellevue was too obscure. I'm pretty sure that I came up with the title for the song because I honestly believed that Bellevue Mental Hospital was in the town we played. (I can still remember when Dr. Kinsman informed me that Bellevue was actually in New York...but whatever, that makes it a more clever play on words.)

So I've posted 'Bellevue Mental Hospital' so you can get Dave's take on the whole situation with a bit of salt. While it's not my favorite song that we ever recorded, I'm glad that there is a documentation of the event beyond my own memory. (And I still like my Buggles-esque backing vocals.)

I've also posted 'Come Home' from ESL's seven-inch, M.I.O.K., because I think it shows best how much ESL was indebted to Sicko. I'm not sure if any of my songs sound anything like Sicko, but Dave certainly had an affinity for those jangle-y guitars and big hooks. It's not a pure tribute; there's a heavy serving of Orange County punk in the mix and it's a lot faster. But I still think you can hear it. This actually is one of my favorite ESL songs and curiously enough Dave wrote it about someone he and I both ended up dating. (And having our hearts broken by... Dr. Kinsman's daughter actually.)

You lucky readers also get the opportunity to download 'Olympia' by Tales from the Birdbath. You can definitely hear the end result of the Sicko trajectory in Birdbath. It's a stripped-down pop song with a winking sense of humor. My favorite lines are "It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to stay / O-L-Y-M-P-A / That's Olympa. Olympa!" Birdbath played 'Olympia' that night and it was just perfect. Our host even apologized afterwards for booing when the song was introduced. "I live there though," Ben said. Ean replied calmly from under his sweat-drenched t-shirt labeled "" on front and "" on the back, "No, that's exactly what someone from Olympia is supposed to do." Even if you've never been to Olympia you can get a kick out a sugary-sweet pop song glorifying the K and Kill Rock Stars uber-hipsters up north. (Though I did actually see Sun Moon's little brother working at the local record store.) And if you did go to Evergreen (or ever dreamed of it) then you can get a knowing laugh about going "to a college where you don't get grades."

And to sum it all up, to bring this three-day thread to a close, is Ean's beautifully written 'Indie Rock Daydream' from Sicko's final album, You're not the Boss of Me. As if knowing the end was imminent, Ean pens a touching rendering of the experiences of playing with Sicko, encapsulating their entire career in under two minutes. It's the details that make it: playing at the YMCA, pretty girls leaving with someone else, and sleeping on the floors of the world. It's not the same story as Motley Crue or even Black Flag but it's the story of countless bands in the D.I.Y. culture. And soon enough, this will all be gone.

(Buy Sicko You're Not the Boss of Me from Amazon.)

(Buy Tales from the Birdbath Baron Von Birdbath from Amazon.)

(Buy ESL Horseshoes and Handgrenades from me, bitches)

The Typewriter's Rattling All Through The Night

2006-04-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

Elvis Costello & The Attractions - ~~Battered Old Bird (album version)~~

Elvis Costello & The Attractions - ~~Battered Old Bird (alternate version)~~

Alternate versions of songs, unless we’re talking about Coltrane or something, are predominately fan-only affairs. In jazz, where improvisation is essential and there’s no such thing as a “definitive” version of a song, hearing an alternate take can be revelatory. But in rock and roll? The exceptions where an alternate take adds anything new to the experience of the original are few and far between. Elvis Costello’s “Battered Old Bird”, from his 1986 album Blood & Chocolate, is unique in that the album version of the song (itself sewn together from two different takes) and the alternate version are considerably different but equally good.

For the last couple years Rhino has been releasing sets of Elvis Costello albums, packaged as double discs with the original album remastered on one and a collection of alternate takes, live tracks and B-sides on the other. Mostly these bonus discs only serve to make apparent why the album versions were used or why the B-sides were considered throw aways. (The most recent Rhino reissue, of 1993’s The Juliet Letters, is particularly curious in it’s scraping of the bottom of the Costello catalogue. How big a market could there possibly be for outtakes of a poor-selling and mostly forgotten foray into string quartet classical music?) But if you decide to start investing in any Elvis reissues, Blood & Chocolate is a wise place to start.

Don’t let the release date scare you, despite dropping in the same year as the atrocious roots-rock mess King Of America, Blood & Chocolate is an Attractions-era masterpiece on par with the best (My Aim Is True through Get Happy) of early Elvis. As it appears on the album “Battered Old Bird” is a classic Costello song, similar to trademark anti-love songs like “Alison” – it’s slow but it’s too angry to be classified as a ballad. The instruments in the background are incidental; a slight tapping of drums, a few quiet guitar chords, hints of piano. But Costello, his voice and his lyrics are all that matter. It could have been a cappella and been just as gut wrenching.

He is the perfect songwriter, able to put common situations into words that few could articulate. Here he unravels a story of a house, a landlady, her pill-popping husband and their French-cursing son. But the mundane details are transformed through Costello’s pen into a vividly surreal scene; the house becomes a place “where time stands still”, the husband swallows “sleeping pills like dreams” and tells the son to have a “dream that goes beyond four walls". Keeping a fir tree in a closet becomes a place where “it is always Christmas at the top of the stairs.” Each line is painstakingly stretched, instruments routinely drop out to add emphasis to certain phrases, Costello’s voice quivers in places as he pushes it to its breaking point. The song is deliberate but not sluggish, and necessarily so. Or so I thought.

On the Blood & Chocolate bonus disc’s alternate version, “Battered Old Bird” is warped into a full speed ahead rave up. The emotional resonance of the album version is left in the dust of a breakneck-paced 12 bar blues, the bitterness gives away to humor, the dark and disturbing images become comical. Elvis and his soon-to-be-disbanded Attractions choose the most serious piece on their album and sound like they’re having a great time tearing it apart. You can understand why it was left off the album that Costello described as a “pissed-off, 32-year-old divorcé's version of This Year's Model”, but it’s hard to think of either as a definitive version. I love them both, in different ways, for different reasons. Right now, gun to my head, I would have to say that I prefer the faster take. But it might be different tomorrow. Either way, at least one of the disc’s of Blood & Chocolate is never gone from my CD player for long.

(Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

There're Seeds of Hope in a Cigarette Butt

2006-04-03T23:12:00.000-07:00

Sicko - ~~Sprinkler~~
Sicko - ~~Bad Situation~~
Sicko - ~~80 Dollars~~

In the Spring of 1992, Sicko recorded their demo cassette in a basement somewhere in Washington. Of the songs which made their way to be rerecorded for the debut seven-inch was a little ditty called "fB Song." Named after the infamous Washington icons, Fastbacks, Sicko's tune about not 'necessarily hat(ing) the establishment," must have touched a nerve in Fastback's guitar hero, Kurt Bloch. For some reason or another, Bloch was persuaded to record the session for Sicko's debut seven-inch on eMpTy Records.

Imagine doing your first 'real' recording as a band with one of your heros. Imagine getting to record your tribute song with the man who helped inspire it. I suppose it would be a lot like George Martin producing Oasis' demo tape or Prince laying down tracks with Justin Timberlake before he ever stole our hearts with 'N Sync.

Growing up I always thought Sicko was among the pantheon of 90s pop-punk bands like Screeching Weasel, The Queers and The Mr. T Experience. Nowadays I rarely find anyone who recognizes even these bands, let alone Sicko. (My heart skipped a beat when a barely-18-years-old lanky drummer said he was really into Crimpshrine a few months back.) In my mind and among my circle of friends, Sicko was just as important as Dead Kennedys and The Dead Milkmen: full iconic, canonized status.

I've posted three tracks that Sicko recorded with Kurt Bloch over the years. "Sprinkler," from You Can Feel the Love in This Room, 1994, Sicko's first album, features Denny on the vocals keeping it real for the kids who grew up in suburbia. A nostaglic ode to times gone by could be totally cheesy but somehow manages to stay "cute" and remain "poignant." This is one of a group of Sicko songs that really immortalize Denny as a songwriter for me. (And as a sidenote, the clean-guitar/distorted-guitar in this song essentially set the template for the pop punk I played in.)

"Bad Situation" is probably the fastest that Ean ever sings on any of the Sicko records, this track coming from their third album, Chef Boy 'R' U Dumb, 1995. Ean and Denny switched-off with lead vocal duties and even between bass and guitar, but there's some general differences to their song writing approach. Ean is generally more narrative and fanciful and playful, where Denny is generally more introspective and poetic. The beauty of the band was having both parts together, alternating between tracks.

"80 Dollars" features a brilliant use of the dual-vocal setup where Denny sings the verses about Ean, who gets to bring the hook, "It cost me eighty-dollars!" This track was recorded in 1992 (released as a split seven-inch with The Mr. T Experience) and remains to be the best song about a guitar tuner ever written and features the most rhythmically complex solo bridge in the pop punk annuls.

(Buy You Can Feel the Love in This Room from Amazon.)

(Buy Chef Boy 'R' U Dumb from Amazon.)

Game. Blouses.

2006-03-31T16:21:00.000-08:00

Prince - ~~The Word~~

There was a commercial a few years ago that featured a montage of Michael Jordan, shooting a series of those last-second buzzer-beating jump shots that he was famous for. But the twist was that the commercial showed him taking shot after shot, over and over again... and missing. The point was a little corny but significant nonetheless: the key to what made Jordan so great was that he may have missed plenty but he had no fear in taking the shot. A sports metaphor may seem like an odd place to go in an mp3 blog, but you virtually have to look outside of the music world to find a comparison for Prince. The man is peerless. Not just in sheer output but, as his newest album 3121 demonstrates, in quality as well.

Prince is at a stage in his career now where the only person reviewers will ever compare him to is himself. Instead of discussing the album on its own merits or even comparing it to any contemporary pop or R&B albums, they feel the need to load down their blurbs with bullshit qualifiers like “his best since...” The vast majority of these reviews seem to have been written on auto-pilot, running through the same tired points – he once changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, he released several disappointing albums in the 90’s, he has a confusing and often contradictory relationship with spirituality and sexuality, 2004’s Musicology was a “return to form”, he will never make another Purple Rain. I’m inclined to question the veracity, and especially the relevance, of most of these issues, but I’m not going to take the time to debunk them one by one. I’ll just tell you straight out – fuck what ya heard; the new Prince album is incredible.

3121 doesn’t sound like any other Prince record, but it sounds undeniably like Prince. Jeff and I saw him about a year ago on his Musicology tour and all the things that make him an unstoppable live performer (far and above the best I’ve ever seen) are apparent on this record. It’s funky, sexy, effortlessly cool. His current New Power Generation line up (principally: drummer John Blackwell, bassist Rhonda Smith, keyboard player Renato Neto and legendary saxophone player Maceo Parker) is stop-on-a-dime tight and Prince, nearly half a century old now, is still in fine form writing, producing, playing and showing off his inhuman virtuosic vocal range. I was torn between at least six different tracks to post today; the single “Black Sweat” is an otherworldly funk jam that I’m sure is going to be absolutely killer live and album closer “Get On The Bus” mashes soulful horn stabs, gospel shouts, Latin piano, old school break beats, and a dazzling Maceo solo into one barn-storming kitchen-sink party anthem. But, more than any other, the song I can’t stop listening to is “The Word”

Although it’s sequenced as the ninth track out of 12 on 3121, “The Word” feels like the centerpiece of the album. All the recurring lyrical themes and musical motifs are summed up smartly in its four minutes. Silky R&B sexuality with spiritual (but never preachy or heavy handed) lyrics and a laid back but danceable groove. Prince’s graceful songwriting expertise provides for a neat and tidy pop structure but his tendencies for eccentricity scatter the song with free form jazz improvisations, vintage conga funk breaks and moments of weird electro spazz outs. “The Word” alone should be enough to silence any insipid rhetoric that Prince is “stuck in another era” or somehow not contemporary sounding. The track is just as exciting, unconventional and sonically intriguing as any other pop star’s half-million dollar Neptunes or Timbaland beat.

Chris Rock recently made the assertion that in the old playground debate between who was better, Prince or Michael Jackson, Prince had won. But I think he was victorious in that conjecture a long time ago. Never content to rest on his laurels, Prince has always pushed forward, resisting trends and fads, making exactly the music he wants with little regard for what record labels or record reviewers have told him to do. He may have never made an album as big as Thriller, but he’s taken more shots and subsequently he’s hit more. 3121 is another game-winning swish that proves once again Prince, like Jordan, stands alone as simply the best at what he does.

(Click here to buy 3121 on Amazon.)

Lunar Missions in a Pontiac Grand Prix

2006-03-30T08:54:00.000-08:00

Fastbacks - ~~Gone to the Moon~~

Fastbacks formed in 1979, broke up in 2001, and went through over a dozen drummers along the way. Near the middle of their lifespan, in 1993, Kurt Bloch, Lulu Gargiulo and Kim Warnick, released "Gone to the Moon" as an EP single off their album, Zucker. I can't recall exactly, but I'm pretty sure I picked up the single in a bargain bin at Vinyl Solution.

While it was only a limited exposure to the sprawling career of these Seattle stalwarts, it was enough to make me look cool by including it on a mixtape or two. The great thing about Fastbacks is their uncanny ability to write a perfectly crafted pop song but still maintain an edge. And their influence on contemporary music cannot be stressed enough. While they may not be a household name in the States, at least outside of Seattle, Fastbacks is huge in Japan. And after their twenty-year run, it's hard to find any J-pop that isn't at least somewhat indebted to Fastbacks.

I saw an interview once with Nirvana and one of them described "Smells like Teen Spirit" as the "song the Pixies should have written." And while the Pixies certainly inspired cult-of-the-individualist lyrics, silly, strange, dark yet still poppy sounds, I prefer to think of Fastbacks as the major musical force that shaped the 90s rock scene. While the 'grunge' movement seemed to be pushed on us pretty hard by the record companies eager to find the next Nirvana, none of it stood the test of time (for me at least) except Nirvana. And Fastbacks is why.

Like Fastbacks' music, Kurt Cobain's musical taste was unabashedly eclectic and nearly entirely ignorant or apathetic about outside opinions. Here we find the middle ground between The Meatmen's harsh baked-in-the-desert-sun delivery, the songwriting skill of David Bowie, the contemporary application of the sacred American pop song, and the marginalized 'guilty-pleasure' of Shocking Blue.

It's a shame there won't be world-wide mourning when Kurt Bloch passes away... but maybe in Japan.

(Buy Zucker at Amazon)

(Photo by Charles Peterson from his book, Screaming Life)

Getting His Second Wind, Pimp: The Spectacular Vernacular of E-40

2006-03-29T16:45:00.000-08:00

E-40 - ~~Automatic (ft. Fabolous)~~

According to KRS-One there are nine elements of hip hop: besides the essential four, MCing, DJing, Graffiti and B-Boying (break dancing), and the commonly accepted fifth, Beatboxing, The Teacha added street fashion, street knowledge, street entrepreneurialism and street language. And nobody better exemplifies that last element than Vallejo, CA rapper E-40. Earl Stevens is the linguistic ambassador of hip hop, the Bay Area legend the average listener has never heard of, responsible for a million white kids saying “Fo Shizzle” and “Fo Sheezy” and feeling “Hella” good so they can keep on dancing. Off his tongue hip hop slang is elevated to an art form.

A couple years ago E-40 helped out an unknown rapper/producer named Lil’ Jon by throwing him on a posse cut on his insta-classic album Grit N Grind, but sometime between then and now a song with Usher plus a series of skits on Chappelle’s Show equaled massive success for Lil’ Jon and now he’s returning the favor by signing E-40 to his Warner Brothers imprint label and executive producing his newest record, My Ghetto Report Card.

At first it’s a little disconcerting; E-40 has always flirted with the fringes of the mainstream, but has been running his own independent label Sick Wid It for over a decade, so it’s strange to hear him shouting out Warner Brothers on “Yay Area”, the opening track on his latest album. But I’ve never been one of these people to cry sell out when an artist I like makes the move to a major, so I’m not going to hate on E-40 for trying to get that scrilla. (After all, he invented that word too.) But I will say that although My Ghetto Report Card is good, for sure the best hip hop record of the year so far, nothing on it comes close to touching Grit N Grind. Especially that record’s shoulda-been hit single, “Automatic”.

Aside from his patented slangcabulary, E-40 is also famous for a ridiculously complicated tongue twisiting flow, and even though on “Automatic” he assured us he was going to slow down his spit so us squares could understand it, he still possesses one of the most unique voices in hip hop. Riding a bouncing future-funk Rick Rock beat with a cleverly interpolated nod to the Jacksons’ “Dancing Machine”, E-40 and young underrated pretty boy Fabolous put on a rhyming clinic. 40 manages to sound intelligent, funny and menacing all at the same time, dropping clever lines and hilarious slang with ease and, unlike a lot of underground rappers, with an uncanny skill for crafting hooks. And Fabolous shines bright enough that the impression you might have had of him from his R&B-hooked hip pop singles should be totally wiped clean. He’s still not saying much, but listen to the way he says it.

“I'm gettin' ticked off again/Ya'll must like ridin' in long black caddy's that they stick coffins in/The Click often been/Blowin' sticky that come in the same jars that they stick coffee in/I got chicks offerin'/But I play hard to get unless they suck me 'til my dick soft again.”

How many MCs could flow so casually in a rhyme scheme that complex and still manage to be funny?

And if I had to find a complaint with E-40’s latest record, it would be just that: it’s not very funny. All the other elements that I love about E-40 are present: the production is top-notch (and forget Lil Jon, it’s longtime producer Rick Rock that laces the album with its best beats), the flow is impeccable, the hooks are catchy and there’s plenty of new slang for the rest of the world to try to catch up with. But my favorite thing about E-40 has always been that, while working with traditional gangsta rap themes of drugs, sex and money, he always managed to infuse songs with a distinct sense of humor.

In his latest (and most successful, My Ghetto Report Card debuted at Number 3 on the Billboard chart) bid for mainstream appreciation, E-40 seems content in riding the newfound interest in the Bay Area hyphy movement he helped pioneer, and the pure fun and wit of tracks like “Automatic” gets left by the wayside. But E-40’s tenth full length album is still an impressive effort, and after you buy Grit N Grind I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend My Ghetto Report Card. To borrow another, albeit since discarded, phrase originated by E-40: “It’s all good.”

(Click here to buy Grit N Grind on Amazon.)

“Hey Mr. T! Are you trying to be punk rock?"

2006-03-28T21:39:00.000-08:00

Roland Alphonso - ~~El Pussy Cat~~
Roland Kirk - ~~Roland's Theme~~
Roland Kirk - ~~Triple Threat~~

Patrick's Jelly Roll Morton post got me thinking about my first jazz records and experiences and it's nearly impossible to pin it down to any one defining moment or album.

I used to listen the Ska Parade religiously every Saturday from noon to two while I did my weekly chores. Third-wave was just about to break and Tazy had yet to become infamous for 'discovering' Sublime's 'Date Rape.' I can remember responding to Roland Alphonso much more than Monique Powell. (Though I must admit playing 'Date Rape' for my Boy Scout buddies and loving it... At 14 you're at the perfect age for lyrics like "Even though he now takes it in the behind.")

So when the Jazz Band at my high school played during lunch in the middle of my Freshman year, I had no aversion to the horns or syncopated rhythms. And what's more, I thought these guys were the coolest. Perhaps it was an early indicator of my shifted notion of 'cool,' but somewhere between Band Geek and A.S.B. President the social strata of Butt-Rocker Music Nerd seemed like the place I wanted to be. Besides, Mr. Maddux, whom I had for Geometry at the time, was the teacher and I had seen him exchanging tapes with those longhairs in class and knew he was at least into Fishbone.

So over the summer I picked up the bass guitar and signed up for Jazz Band the following year. Maddux moved back to Seattle (I think it was Seattle, but that may have just been the mystical city of that era) and instead we got an already-spread-thin Marching Band instructor. (I'm pretty sure he ran every music program at our school.) It seemed like everyday he was on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown and for a while he rode us pretty hard. We played standards like Night Train, Harlem Nocturne, Misty and Take the 'A' Train. It was then I started to develop tastes for what I did and didn't like about certain songs and styles and realized that CSU Long Beach had a much better jazz station just a little ways down the dial from Saddleback College's pathetic soft jazz format that probably kept me away from the genre for years too long.

Jazz Band played at a few festivals and I had another buddy in the group who was also actually interested in seeing the other jazz bands play. But back in the bus he put on his walkman with The Doors or Morphine in the deck and I'd kick back to Naked Aggression or Aus-Rotten. I suppose I was a closet jazz fan with a Resist and Exist exterior and I can still remember the conversation with my girlfriend that changed everything. "It's okay," she assured me from beneath her Chelsea haircut, "You just really like music."

Then I saved up my lunch money for John Coltrane's Giant Steps because some music magazine said it was good jazz record.

But rather than posting 'Mr. PC' or 'Cousin Mary,' my two favorite tracks on Giant Steps, I thought I'd sum things up with a pair of Rolands. (Insert synth joke here.) If Roland Alphonso got me tuned in and turned on to saxophones, Roland Kirk kept me a believer. While Alphonso seems to float on a haze of ganja with a syncopated populism, Kirk (at least on this 'early roots' record from 1956) provides a sort of jazz history lesson without resorting to imitation. Kirk was invoking the greats from the jazz shrine long before there were any college courses on Jazz History or African-American Music Appreciation. So while you get to hear the history of jazz—a little New Orleans, a heavy dose of Bop, and a bit of the blues—in Roland Kirk's early work, you can also trace my personal music history to the point of being proud to own records like this and gloating to Patrick (and you blog-readers) about this record rather than hiding it.

It should also be noted that Roland is playing three different types of saxophone simultaneously on 'Triple Threat.' Find out more about Roland Kirk.

(Buy Roland Kirk Early Roots: The Bethlehem Years at Amazon.)

(Buy Roland Alphonso Something Special at Amazon.)

[Mr. T: Again, you don't know my M.O. If you know my M.O. I was punk rock before punk rock came in!! Dig?!]

Let Me See That Jelly Roll

2006-03-27T03:18:00.000-08:00

~~Jelly Roll Morton - I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say~~

Usually I hate it when people write on their records. It’s a phenomenon you see a lot when you get used records at thrift stores and libraries; apparently a lot of people felt the need to put their name on their Barbara Streisand and Jerry Vale and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass records, as if the records that the Salvation Army can barely sell for fifty cents were at some point in danger of being stolen from their collection. The only exception to this general rule that I’ve ever come across was a message scrawled on a copy of Jelly Roll Morton’s I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say that I found at a discount record store in Buena Park. Written in a sloppy handwritten scribble across the back of the sleeve, it advertised: “What black New Orleans did for all you ignorant assholes.” I’m not sure who exactly this note was intended for or why this previous owner was so hostile, but the message was clear to me – if I didn’t buy this record I was an asshole. And an ignorant asshole at that.

If I were ever to organize my records autobiographically, a la Rob Gordon, my route to Jelly Roll would be a convoluted one. I can’t point to any one artist that led me back to him, or even any kind of six degrees of musical separation. It was a combination of new friends with new musical tastes, developing an older and more open-minded ear, a television documentary, a giant plastic chart of jazz musicians and a book, named after a Jelly Roll song, called Black Bottom Stomp. Before ever hearing a note of Morton's music, before finding the vandalized vinyl that finally convinced me to buy one of his records, I was enthralled with his story told in that book. As a kid raised during the hip hop generation, Yo! MTV Raps my most consistent afterschool baby sitter, the closest I got to jazz appreciation was Pete Rock beats. I thought of all jazz as boring Kenny G smooth jazz. Even the good jazz I had been exposed to, the requisite Miles Davis albums in my stoner friends’ CD players, never really captured my interest. But Jelly Roll was different.

Jelly Roll Morton, born Ferdinand Lamothe, was a former pimp from the Durty South who got his start playing piano in the parlors of brothels in New Orleans’ infamous Storyville District. He had a taste for expensive clothes, fine tailored suits and gold teeth. He would battle other piano players on stage, write anthems about himself (“The Original Jelly-Roll Blues”, “Mister Jelly Lord”) and frequently engaged in a level of braggadocio that would rival the most self-referential rapper, not only claiming to be the best jazz piano player of all time but insisting that he was solely responsible for inventing jazz. His songs were filled with sexual suggestions (his early Storyville lyrics being especially explicit) and even his nicknames “Jelly Roll” and “Winin’ Boy” were references to his own sexual prowess. At one point late in his career, when his popularity had faded and he was reduced to playing in seedy bars, he was stabbed in the head.

This was a jazz musician I could get down with.

“I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say”, recorded in 1939 by Jelly Roll and one of the many incarnations of his Red Hot Peppers, is considered by many to be the first jazz tribute song. The title is nicked from a line from Buddy Bolden himself and pays respect to one of New Orleans’ earliest jazz legends. (Although Morton, in order not to contradict his claim as the “Originator of Jazz”, said he considered Bolden to be a ragtime player.) Most of Morton’s biggest hits, “Grandpa’s Spells”, “Wolverine Blues”, “Black Bottom Stomp”, and the now standard “King Porter Stomp”, are instrumental. “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say” is one of the few commercially released recordings that feature him singing, and his voice is an all-too-rare treat.

When I first discovered Jelly Roll it opened a whole new world of jazz to me, it gave me a benchmark of quality to look for. Since then I’ve tried to catch up with a genre that I’ve found to be just as exciting and relevant as the popular music I grew up with. The record store I bought I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say at has since closed down (the fact that it was right next to a giant Tower Records might have had something to do with it) so I don’t know how good the chances are of me ever running into the person that wrote on the back of my record. But I’d like to find them, and thank them, and tell them all about what Jelly Roll Morton did for an ignorant asshole like me.

Filling in Counters = Punk Aesthetics

2006-03-24T17:51:00.000-08:00

~~The Futureheads - First Day~~

~~The Futureheads - Decent Days and Nights (Max Tundra Remix)~~

It was a big week for me. I had one of my last painting crits at school and I started a new job. I've started a few new jobs at this point in my life, but never the first-job-outta-school. It's the mythological transitional period you'll tell your grandkids or future students about. These stories seem to go two ways: Either the big pay off for working so hard in College or the most depressing, College-was-a-waste tales of misery and torment. Quite frankly, after nearly a decade in 'higher education' I am totally sick and tired of these stories. I don't want to hear about your post-art-school blues or your $100,000/year job straight outta school. And yeah, we all have loans and debts to pay off but wasn't the whole point of paying for that degree to ensure no further minimum wage jobs? It wasn't a noble sacrifice; it was an investment.

And with all that baggage I show up for my first day as real-life, all growed-up Graphic Designer. One thing I learned from punk rock was the importance of a uniform, so I arrive in my Steve Madden shoes, messenger bag in tow, and gray cords from Modern Amusement. And actually, getting out of the apartment/studio, dealing with people new, different and completely opposite of myself, and learning the systems and idiosyncrasies of a whole new environment, is pretty invigorating. I'm certainly not the most gregarious person but there's something about a 'team effort' that motivates me. So after a whole week at my new job, I'll relish this weekend, but not entirely dread going back on Monday. And all that work and money that went into college is worth it just to not feel that dread and anxiety. Maybe I'm really lucky to have found a line of work that I can be passionate about and get paid decently.

And of course, before I left on Monday I burned a CD of The Futureheads because like it or not I knew this song would be playing in my brain all day long. And how often can you mutter-sing "You are so lucky on your first day...First Day!" and really feel it?

The Futureheads might just be one of a select cadre of bands that represent most of the things that Patrick and I look for in music: unique vocals with lots of harmonies, genre-staddling, punk aesthetics, and just damn well-written tunes. Just to give my blog partner some ups, he showed this to me on imported vinyl way before the US release date. And because I feel a little guilty just giving you a readily available mp3, I've also posted this remix from the Decent Days and Nights Pt. 2 import single by Max Tundra.

(Buy The Futureheads from Amazon)

(Buy Decent Days and Nights Pt. 2 featuring Decent Days and Nights (Max Tundra Remix) from Amazon)

Gleaming the (White) Cube

2006-03-23T15:52:00.000-08:00

King Brothers - ~~Oh Shit!~~

In Brian O’Doherty’s influential 1976 essay "Inside the White Cube" he documented the ideology of modern "white wall" art galleries, where each work is completely isolated from its surroundings and thereby from anything that would detract from evaluating the art on its own. O’Doherty makes the point that the archetypal image of 20th Century art is not any one painting, photograph or sculpture but the "white, ideal space" behind them: the white cube. It’s a concept that’s interesting to me but, as with most things in life, I only really care about how I can relate it to pop music.

How important is the context of a song? Is Radiohead not allowing single songs to be (legally) downloaded on the internet to preserve the integrity of their albums completely absurd and pretentious? I think most of the meaning I attach to songs has to do with those foreign intangibles that infiltrate the white cube and redefine the song - hearing it in a certain place, with a certain person or at a particular time in your life. And that’s part of the fun of music; taking songs out of context, jumping through genres, criss-crossing between eras, putting a song on an mp3 blog or putting together that perennial mp3 blog predecessor, the mixtape.

I had a whole post ready to go for today, but listening to the Penpals track Jeff posted yesterday brought on a whole flood of memories and sent me scrambling back through my record collection to dig out my King Brothers album. I first heard both of these Japanese bands on a mixtape Jeff made me a few years ago. I had known Jeff for a little while; we were in an Anthropology class together at community college and had stayed in touch, mostly due to a fanboy crush I had on a band he was in at the time. Later he started dating my roommate and we hung out more, talking about music in the early hours of the morning over coffee and cigarettes on my front porch. Back in those days, and for probably longer than a lot of people, we shared a staunchly old school passion for mixtape making; recorded on cassette tapes only, with hand-written track listings folded inside. On the first tape Jeff ever made for me the Penpals’ thirty seconds of pop perfection was buried towards the end of the first side and I used to listen to that song over and over again (back when over and over again meant actually getting up and hitting the rewind button after every listen, not just setting iTunes on repeat). There was also the Moon and Sixpence, a band I’m sure will be up on our blog at some point; Chisel, a band that’s been on the blog already; and I’m not positive but probably that Starvations song that Jeff has admitted to putting on every mixtape. And then there was the King Brothers.

Kicking off side two in a sweet hum of feedback, when the King Brothers started playing it was so deafening I had to turn down the stereo. They weren’t exactly doing anything new, but they were doing exactly what I happened to be looking for. And itt wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before – I’d just never heard it done that well. I guess you could call them a garage band, they have that kind of sloppy 60’s lo-fi feel, but they’re a power trio in the best sense of the phrase, more Blue Cheer than Blues Magoo. Enormous, loud and brutal but melodic and with enough catchy harmony and stomping groove thrown in to keep it from getting monotonous. "Oh Shit!" was the song that introduced me to the King Brothers and it’s also the lead track on their self-titled 2001 record on In The Red, which I bought almost immediately after hearing them. The song is a pretty good representation of the band, but they’ve got more tricks up their sleeve that keep the whole album interesting and definitely worth buying.

It’s also a really good song to put on a mixtape.

(Click here to buy it on Amazon.)

This is officially our 25th post on Cacophony and Coffee, which might not seem like much, but considering Jeff and I talked about doing an mp3 blog for months before we ever got off our asses and actually did one, it certainly feels like an accomplishment. It’s a lot of fun sharing our record collections and it saves our non-music-obsessed friends from having to hear us rant about how good the Silver Surfer song is. So, thanks for reading, and please feel free to leave us comments (click on the number next to the title of the post) or email us. All I’m getting in my inbox right now is spam in foreign languages.

Feel No Shame About Shape

2006-03-22T01:44:00.000-08:00

Penpals - ~~Tell Me Why~~

Sometimes dating someone can make you ten times cooler, ten times geekier, and very rarely it can do both at the same time. Certainly the upside to watching volume after volume of fan-sub anime was discovering the intro song to Berserk. The series is available in America now, but back then it was like finding the perfect record for your collection at a garage sale: rare, a gem in the rough.

Maybe not everyone goes for the Japlish/Engrish lyrics or the sugary sweet power pop the Penpals dish out, but I spent hours and hours and a lot of money just one import CD so I could have this 30 second clip from Berserk's intro. A full album is available, with the FULL version of the song, but still at import prices. But at least with the internet all you have to do is click.

I tried to track down an mp3 of the full version but with no luck... So I hope you enjoy every second of Penpal's Tell Me Why because I paid a buck for each of them. (It's really a minute, fifteen.. but I couldn't do any wordplay with that...)

Here's the lyrics, though I doubt they'll help you understand:

Feel no shame about shape
weather changes their phrase
even mother will show you another way

So put your glasses on
nothing will be wrong
there's no blame,there's no fame,it's up to you

The first words should be found
whatever holds you back
I can get it off

Tell me what you want
I don't know why are you afraid
Tell me what you wanna say
I don't know why,but it's too late

(Buy Americaman at Amazon)

Don't Leave It All Unsaid

2006-03-21T01:51:00.000-08:00

Morrissey - ~~Sing Your Life~~

I’ve been wanting to post some tracks from Morrissey’s upcoming album Ringleader of the Tormentors for some time now, but it seems like every day another blog has already beaten me to the punch. I think the album has been completely leaked at this point, and at the very least the single (which is the best song on the record anyway) is widely available enough to make it redundant for me to post it. It is amazing to me though how consistent Morrissey has been in his solo career. He continues to put out good records after over 25 years of making music and by now easily has a body of work on his own that can rival, classic for classic, that of The Smiths. I know there is an unspoken rule in rock and roll that if you were in a seminal band, your solo career can never be as good. But Morrissey has proved time and time again to be the exception. And in fact, to the objection of most die-hard Smiths fans I know, my favorite Morrissey song is from one of his solo records.

According to Wikipedia, Kill Uncle is "generally considered Morrissey’s poorest album." While I would be inclined to agree with this assessment, I do think it says more about Morrissey than it does about Kill Uncle. I would also agree that Beatles For Sale is the worst Beatles album, but it’s still better than a lot of bands’ best album. Morrissey is always at his best with a collaborative ear to lean on - Johnny Marr in the Smiths, Stephen Street on his debut solo album, Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer on his two classic 90’s albums; but Kill Uncle finds him all but on his own, with Fairground Attraction guitarist Mark Nevin providing little help. Musically, the album is substandard; generic jangly pop with the occasional garishly syrupy string section, and the production is often solely characterized by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley’s infatuation with reverb and overdubbing. Yet Morrissey’s lyrical brilliance and wit manage to shine through and he still turns out several excellent songs, though none quite as endearing as the album’s third track "Sing Your Life".

"Sing Your Life" was released as a single in 1991 but failed to do much on the charts. It’s not surprising, as the song doesn’t leave the immediate impression that singles like "Suedehead" and "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get" did, in large part due to its shattering one of the cardinal rules of pop songwriting: its bridge is catchier than its chorus. But that’s the best part of the song, that’s the reason why I can listen to it over and over again and it has endured long enough to stand out as my favorite Morrissey composition. It’s structured like a film, subtly building to the climax (ushered in by the superb couplet: "Make no mistake my friend/Your pointless life will end"), but throwing in enough memorable moments along the way to make it worth listening to the whole song over again to get to that ending bridge. I know Kill Uncle is not as good as Strangeways, Here We Come or Vauxhall and I, and it will never be as important as The Queen Is Dead, but in that instant, that blissful last minute of "Sing Your Life" feels like the most perfect thing he’s ever recorded.

The old cliché about Morrissey, that his music is depressing, seems all the more absurd when listening to a song as uplifting as "Sing Your Life". Nothing quite brings me out of the doldrums on a bad day like Morrissey telling me that I have a lovely singing voice. And when I’m happy, when I’m having a good day and feel like singing, I can always be assured that all of those who sing on key... they stole the notion from him and me.

(Click Here to buy it from Amazon.)

I Hope You Have the Cody Chesnutt CD

2006-03-20T02:16:00.000-08:00

Michael Andrews - ~~Signs~~
Michael Andrews - ~~Heaven in Five~~

I have to completely ignore the film or this post will be at least three screens long, but one of the most striking elements of Miranda July's film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, was the score. As I watch a man light his own hand on fire in some impotent gesture to ceremony, the garage sale electronic symphony instantly forces me into perspective: while naive, quaint and not-entirely-helpless, the characters and instrumentation exude an inner beauty in their futility and failures.

Michael Andrews came into film score composition when his band, The Greyboy Allstars, was asked to score The Zero Effect, Jake Kasdan's first feature film. He also scored the cult classic television show, Freaks and Geeks, and the ubiquitous MySpace-must-see, Donnie Darko. In fact the cover of Tears for Fears' Mad World (with Gary Jules on vocals) was a number one hit in the UK and charted across Europe. He's also done production work like Metric's Old World Underground.

Andrews read a copy of July's script and it blew him away. Meanwhile, July listens to the Donnie Darko soundtrack and thinks Andrews is way out of her league but concocts strategies to approach him anyway. Like the characters in the film, fate brings them together.

Rather than simply commission Andrews to score the film based on images or dialog, July becomes an integral part of the composition. She doesn't want the music to sound "like movie music." She wants it to sound as if someone who didn't quite know how to play music had performed it. The pair sought to create mistakes that somehow work, happy accidents.

Andrews crafts the sound with an orchestra of vintage synths, garage sale Casios and drum machines. He works with the concept of using sterile, amateur and inorganic instruments to create emotional and magical music. One of the film's musical motifs features a melody played on a calculator with a built-in 12-note keyboard. Andrews also makes use of a modified piano where the hammers hit a piece of felt rather than the strings directly.

Andrews' hit Tears for Fears' cover, Mad World (with Gary Jules), was just posted yesterday over at Indie Girls Fly Kites. So go download that too...

(Buy Me and You and Everyone We Know Soundtrack at Amazon.)

(Find out more about the Me and You and Everyone We Know film... winner of just about every indie-film award and deservedly so.)

There Can Be Only One

2006-03-17T01:15:00.000-08:00

~~Annie Lennox - Train In Vain~~

~~Sheena Easton - Sugar Walls~~

I was getting exasperated trying to come up with some good Irish music to post today. I don’t like U2 much, I like Thin Lizzy alright but I don’t have much of their stuff. I love Stiff Little Fingers but that seemed a little obvious – everyone has "Suspect Device" don’t they? Same with Van Morrison/Them. I figured other blogs will cover those bases. And obviously all that Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphy’s crap wasn’t an option. So what’s an Irish boy to do on his namesake’s holiday? But then I got to thinking - why don’t we celebrate any Scottish holidays in America? I guess there really aren’t any unique Scottish holidays, just Boxing Day and stuff that the rest of the UK celebrates too. And celebrating St. Patrick’s Day is easy – you just wear green and drink. But I don’t think Scotland gets enough credit; there’s more to Scotland than haggis and kilts and sword-fighting immortals (and whatever kind of strange Scottish yak is in the picture above) - so while the rest of the world is listening to the Pogues, today I’m all about Franz Ferdinand and Donovan and maybe just a little Annie Lennox and Sheena Easton.

Annie Lennox’s version of The Clash’s "Train In Vain" is from her covers album Medusa. I must admit, I’m not a huge Annie Lennox fan (and, conversely, I’m an enormous Clash fan) so I was a little skeptical when I first heard this track. But once those drums kicked in I was sold. The jazzy stand-up bass is a good start but throwing those hip hop sounding drums on is a stroke of genius. And the gospel back up vocals are a nice touch as well. If you ever wondered what it would sound like if Mick Jones took it to church, here you go.

And Sheena Easton’s 1984 dance hit "Sugar Walls" is fucking epic. It should be reason enough for the Scottish to get their own American-diluted holiday. Written by Prince in his breathtakingly prolific mid-80’s prime (when he was also writing, producing and playing every instrument on successful albums by The Time, Sheila E., Vanity 6 and his own records), "Sugar Walls" is one of the catchiest pop songs about genitalia you’ll ever dance to. It’s kind of like the 80’s version of "skeet, skeet, skeet." Wikipedia has a pretty hilarious article about it here. (Just in case it wasn’t clear what "Sugar Walls" was about.)

That’s it for today, a little shorter than usual, but unfortunately I don’t have that much to say about Annie Lennox and Sheena Easton. I just like these songs. Hopefully you will too. Slàinte mhath.

(Click here to buy Medusa on Amazon.

(Click here to buy Sheena Easton's Greatest Hits on Amazon.)

“There’s no crotch factor playing the keyboard.”

2006-03-16T02:15:00.000-08:00

~~Tim and Geoff Follin - Silver Surfer (NES)~~
~~Tim and Geoff Follin - Gauntlet III: Subtrack 2 (Commodore 64)~~
~~Tim and Geoff Follin - Plok: Akrillic (SNES)~~

Somehow or another I got onto this Nintendo trip recently. I never actually owned the system growing up; I always played it at friends' houses. On a spur, I did a quick look online at latest emulators and games ports. It was scary how quickly I had a little NES running on my Mac OS X. The advantage to coming into the NES emulation game so late is that the emulators are at reliable versions and a good number of games are available. And at an average size of about 150k the ROMs download quicker than mp3's and award with an instant gratification the childhood urges your allowance had suppressed.

I never played Silver Surfer but the Marvel character was always fascinating to me so I went ahead and downloaded the game. Without having to do the ritual puff-puff-blow, my Mac was soon swirling with 8-bit blipps and blopps. And within the first few seconds I realized I had stumbled upon a gem. The game plays out a lot like 1942 with the WWII plane replaced with Norrin Radd post-Galactus conversion: the Silver Surfer. But it's the musical soundtrack that dwarfs any possibility this game had of being remembered. In fact, the soundtrack seems to be the only redeemable factor of this lackluster comic-to-console video game.

Written by a pair of brothers, the Silver Surfer theme opens with an analog descending scale that sounds like it could be on the radio today. The driving beat and bass line propel the song into low resolution dance frenzy as the echo-y lead bounces from planet to planet.

Between their co-written tunes and solo work, the Brothers Follin account for a good number of games across the chronology of home consules: the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga, NES, Super Nintendo and even Dreamcast and PSP. (Tim even did the music for the 2003 Starsky & Hutch game.) I couldn't get soundchip emulators to work for every system the Follins wrote music for, but I did compile a small sampling, including Gauntlet III from the Commodore 64 and Plok from Super Nintendo.

As the technology advances to the 16-bit Super Nintendo, you can hear more clearly Tim and Geoff's influences. While the limited technology of C-64 makes for innovative uses of the technology, the more 'realistic' sounding SNES seems to allow the composers to get closer to 'what they want.' The soundtrack to Plok spreads across genres from cowboy novelty to pulsing 90s dance, but Akrillic sounds closer to The Stranglers or Yes. At times it slips into tragic sampled instruments that come off as too-early 90s nostalgia... maybe the next generation will be ready for that.

Tim Follin shared these thoughts on composing for the various systems with the now defunct webzine in 1998:

The thing I liked about computer music, especially on the C64, was that it was like playing an instrument in its own right. I also liked the fact that you couldn't be pretentious with something that sounded so unreal. But this is also its curse. The general public thinks computer music and computer sound FX might as well be the same thing; unless you know the limits of the sound chip, you won't understand what the composer is doing. If you expect an orchestra and get an electric guitar solo, you'll be disappointed. If you've never heard an electric guitar, you'll just be confused!

Tim recently retired from the console music scene and is focusing on low-budget films. Geoff has become a school teacher.

Download all the emulator music you can from the Follins (and a handy 'discography') at The Follin Drome.

And find out more about Tim Follin at his expertly designed website: Dr. Follin's Home Surgery.

Where Brooklyn At?

2006-03-15T02:59:00.000-08:00

~~Aaron Copland - Fanfare for the Common Man~~

"A Spike Lee Joint." There aren’t many words that get me more excited about a movie than those four. It’s tough to make out but if you look closely at the preview of the new film Inside Man you’ll see the credit "Directed by Spike Lee." It’s a shame that the name of the most important filmmaker of the last two decades has to be buried in his own marketing campaign (although at least he can console himself with being in the same elite company as fellow controversial genius Woody Allen), but it’s something I’ve gotten used to after many years of being a Spike Lee fan.

I saw Spike’s masterpiece Do The Right Thing when I was 10 or 11 years old and I couldn’t get hyperbolic enough if I tried on how profound it’s effect on me was. Not just in terms of my love for cinema but my way of looking at the world, and to no small degree my taste in music. Music has always been paramount in Lee’s films - Public Enemy’s anthemic "Fight The Power" in Right Thing, his father Bill Lee’s elegant jazz scores in his early work, the devastating use of Sam Cooke’s "A Change Is Gonna Come" at the climax of Malcolm X; but often overlooked in his body of work is the way Lee sets the physical poetry-in-motion of basketball against the dynamic orchestral work of Aaron Copland in 1998’s He Got Game.

It seems like an insane notion, not just exclusively scoring his film with Copland’s work but often placing it back to back with Public Enemy (resulting in one of the more surreal credit wipes in film history – "Music by Aaron Copeland" fades to "Songs by Public Enemy"). But it works and it works beautifully. As Spike explained in an Independent Film Channel interview: "Aaron Copland is one of the American composers and basketball is an American game. I just felt that the largeness and the scope of his sound… when you hear “Fanfare for the Common Man” you hear America."

Copland, born in 1900 in Brooklyn not far from where Lee himself grew up, wrote the short brass and percussion piece "Fanfare for the Common Man" in 1942 at the request of Eugene Goossens, then conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. The fanfare, recorded with Copland conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and originally used as an introduction to orchestral concerts, later became the main theme of the fourth movement of Copland’s Third Symphony and has since become one of the most well-known pieces of 20th century classical music. But when I first saw He Got Game nearly eight years ago, I was much more knowledgeable about Public Enemy than I was about Aaron Copland. And while "Fanfare for the Common Man" felt somewhat familiar to me at the time, it seemed to be one of those songs that most people have heard but few my age could name.

Looking back at He Got Game last night (as part of my inconsistently annual consumption of all things Spike before the release of a new film), I was struck by how much I was genuinely moved by both the movie and that song in particular. Removed from its usual background context, "Fanfare for the Common Man" holds up as an astonishing and epic piece of music. It’s disappointing to me that for years I didn’t even know the name of this song; it deserves to be thought of as more than just an anonymous motif floating in the classical music ether, fodder for commercials and cartoons and sitcoms. And I think a similar argument could be made about Spike Lee. Too many people dismiss him as a filmmaker, focusing on his outspokenness or his courtside behavior at Knicks games instead of his talent. Could you imagine if Aaron Copland had to hide his name from the credits of his own composition?

(Click here to buy the He Got Game soundtrack, featuring 13 songs composed and conducted by Aaron Copland, on Amazon.)

(The latest Spike Lee Joint opens in theaters everywhere March 24.)

Too Smart for the Garage; Too Raw for the Lecture Hall

2006-03-14T05:12:00.000-08:00

~~The Traditional Fools~~ ~~- Please~~
~~The Traditional Fools - Rock and Roll Baby~~>

Orange County has a tendency for squelching the creative flame and the two possible means for survival seem to be either clustering into niche groups or taking any chance to just get the hell out of town. One of the most frustrating things with trying to continue to live in OC is that whenever a good band just starts to get going, someone moves away or decides to go to college. But sometimes these can be fortuitous departures or new beginnings.

Moving away from home can be isolating and lonely and sometimes loose knit friends can be brought back together. Andrew, David and Ty were known to be seen and heard around the scene, or at least my corner of it, in bands like The Epsilons and The Clamour but it wasn't until all three of them relocated to San Fransisco this past semester that The Traditional Fools were born. David ran into Ty at Amoeba and once Andrew moved up, it was on.

Load up the USF dorm room with drums, guitars and amps, borrow a four-track, upload the mp3's onto your new MySpace page, and, viola, you're a 'real' band.

The trio shares an obsession with garage rock past and present, from the Mummies to Redd Kross, from Link Wray to Billy Childish. But the marked departure from a simple clone or neo-revival, is Traditional Fool's strangled sound and lyrical approach.

The guitars wail away at the same blues progressions that have echoed out of suburban garages for the past five decades or so, but they don't sound like the drenched-in reverb or Blues Screamer Distortion you're used to. The sound is closer to Jon Cougar Concentration Camp or Scared of Chaka than Chocolate Watch Band or The Troggs.

The lyrics, when audible, are far removed from the clichéd garage rock material. And this is where the missing piece 'falls' into place. The other shared obsession among the band is The Fall. The focus of the lyrics seems to be more on surrealism or absurdity and how they sound rather than conveying a simple message or telling a tale of unrequited romance. I'm told the ridiculous lyrics to "Rock and Roll Baby" were inspired by Guitar Wolf, and at times I'm even reminded of Pere Ubu.

Maybe it's quite simple: garage rock goes to university.

Two more songs are available at The Traditional Fools' MySpace.

This Is A Sampling Sport

2006-03-13T16:06:00.000-08:00

~~Scarface - On My Block~~

~~Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway - Be Real Black For Me~~

Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, the eponymous 1972 duets album from two of soul music’s most enduring vocalists, is not a particularly rare record. It would look more obvious than impressive in your collection; it’s not the kind of record you’d have to soak the label off of so that DJs wouldn’t know what it was. But it sure was a pain in the ass for me to find. I’m the world’s laziest record collector. I’ve never traveled through the South knocking on people’s doors asking if they had crates I could dig through, I don’t even look at eBay for records. But I have a short list in my mind of records that I want and whenever I find myself at a record store I’ll look for them. And for a long time Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway was at the top of my list.

Back in the summer of 2002, back when I had cable TV, I was spending a lot of time watching Rap City in the middle of the night. And of all the songs Big Tigger introduced me to that summer, I was most enraptured with Scarface’s "On My Block". The video is absolutely brilliant, a sort of visual palindrome following Scarface around his neighborhood in Houston, bringing to life both the imagery and the ideas laced throughout his lyrics. Despite the limited airplay the video got, it affected me enough to go buy the album.

The Fix, Scarface’s seventh solo album, is the kind of record that makes you happy to actually pay Suggested Retail List Price for a CD. The packaging is great, from the cover to the liner notes folded up and stuffed in a little plastic baggie inside, and the music is solid from start to finish. Although I would say "On My Block" is the standout track, this is much more than a single padded with album fillers. Guests are kept to a minimum; Jay-Z and Nas are both at the top of their game on their respective contributions and the two Kanye West produced tracks are flashes of his future genius, but the focus is always Scarface’s startling cinematic flow. He’s a master storyteller, not just telling a conventional narrative, but building upon layers and layers of illustration to transport you into his world. I’ve never been to the Southside of Houston, Texas but Scarface creates the experience for me with a series of verbal snapshots of dominoes, Swisher Sweets, Vietnam vets and chromed-out Impalas.

But the more I listened to "On My Block" the more I became transfixed with that piano sample. It’s a simple pattern, but evokes so much feeling in just a couple of notes. From the liner notes of The Fix I knew the sample was from a song called "Be Real Black For Me" by Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway and I became obsessed with finding that song. I figured that, loving "On My Block" like I did, "Be Real Black For Me" was likely destined to be my favorite song of all time. Eventually I gave up looking for the Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway LP and settled for a CD copy I found at Amoeba Music in Berkeley. It wasn’t going to have that same dusty nostalgia that it did on Scarface’s appropriation of it, but at least I was finally going to be able to hear it. And you know what? It was disappointing.

Finding that song was a turning point in my musical education. It’s not a bad song, but all I can think of when I listen to it is how much better it sounds with some cracking drums elevating the piano, with an introspective MC inside that beat, expertly matching the tone of his back-in-the-day tale with the emotions inherent in the crackling vinyl. I had it all backwards - the sample didn’t make "On My Block" better, Scarface made the sample better. It’s something that people who are anti-sampling don’t seem to understand; they seem to think all sample-based hip hop is like Diddy rapping (badly) over a Police song. But in a song like "On My Block" a couple seconds of music from another era, chopped and looped and adjusted, are used as just one element to construct something entirely new and, in this case, better. I’ve had countless arguments with professors and sometimes peers over sampling; theft or art, compositional laziness or conscious artistic decision. I could have saved a lot of breath and just played them these two songs.

Click here to buy The Fix.
Click here to buy Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway.

It's Alright To Mistreat Me. It's Kinda What I'm Used To

2006-03-10T02:47:00.000-08:00

Sheephead - ~~Shooter~~

With nothing to do on a Friday night, Dathan and I headed out to Koo's Cafe (back when it was still in Santa Ana). I think Litmus Green was playing one of their ubiquitous Orange County shows, and like I said, we didn't have that much else to do. I was leaning up against the pinball machine in the back corner when five young men in matching suits, devilocks or pompadours took to the stage. (It was really just a section of floor designated as "the stage.") According to the liner notes of their split seven-inch with Multi Facet, ”Sheephead always wears fine suits. It's a statement; they're just well dressed. They're also usually well-mannered young lads...”

My jaw dropped as Sheephead unleashed an unabashedly poppy but loud and angry and dark onslaught of raw rock and roll. Imagine The Misfits obsession with horror and gore replaced with a gritty, personal portrayal of life in a place with the worst of both the rural small town and the urban big city: Antioch.

“Shooter” describes the relationship with an estranged father that teeters on the edge of melodrama. But the beat remains so danceable and the melody so hauntingly sincere, that when the chorus hits, "And if I'm crying it's just because I'm happy / Not because you remind of me my dad," you can't believe that they make it work so well. By the final chorus, Sheephead has you singing along to the melancholic lyrics of betrayal... but somehow there's a tone of acceptance, recovery or closure. I think the final lyrics sum it up best, "And everything he ever said never meant a goddamn thing anyway." And curiously enough, that snippet at the end, is the catchiest part of the song.

Sheephead still has copies of the split seven-inch this song comes from, (East Bay Explosion No.1, on Zafio Records), as well as a full length CD. They also have four songs on their MySpace page available for streaming. (“March of the Flying Squirrels” appears on this split seven-inch as well)

Sheephead's MySpace also features this photograph:

Who Put The Bomp In The Power Pop Shoo Bop Shoo Bop

2006-03-09T04:04:00.000-08:00

~~20/20 - Giving It All~~

~~The Nerves - When You Find Out~~

It seems like whenever I hear people talking about power pop (which, admittedly, is not as often as I’d like) they talk about the Midwest. And well, it makes sense. You can picture bands like The Raspberries and Blue Ash, stranded in Ohio, or Pezband and Cheap Trick (although of course a true power pop aficionado would only admit to liking early Cheap Trick) stuck in suburban Illinois being so far removed from the “happening” scenes that they didn’t realize it wasn’t cool to be playing this outdated Beatles-esque bubblegum music. That fantasy kind of dissipates however when you realize that some of the best power pop of the mid-70s was coming out of Los Angeles on the seminal Bomp! Records.

In fact, Bomp! claim to have actually invented the phrase "power pop" and while this seems like a dubious boast at best (most sources attribute it to Pete Townsend circa 1967), you certainly can’t deny their contribution to the genre. The Flamin’ Groovies, The Plimsouls, Shoes and even The "What I Like About You" Romantics all released early singles on Bomp! before making the jump to major labels. 20/20 and The Nerves were two legendary bands in the L.A. power pop scene that Bomp! was documenting.

"Giving It All" was 20/20’s first single, a blistering burst of crisp harmony and catchy melody with an absolutely irresistible soaring chorus. And I’m not sure if the English-accented "oh oh" bridge is a knowing wink at the Beatles or just an outright theft, but it’s pretty brilliant either way. The band went on to release two full length records on Bomp!, received some moderate radio play and somehow scored an appearance on American Bandstand (which is shockingly not yet available on youtube) before buying some synthesizers and jumping ship to a major label. Unfortunately 20/20 were caught in the power pop backlash of the early 80’s brought on by the annoyingly massive success of The Knack and were dropped from the label before their third record could be released.

The Nerves met with a little more commercial success than 20/20, mostly due to their "Hanging On The Telephone" being a Top 10 hit for Blondie and included on the album Parallel Lines (and currently being covered by someone else in a commercial that runs about every 15 seconds on TV). "When You Find Out" is from the same four-song EP as "Hanging On The Telephone", the band’s only recorded output, released on Bomp! in 1976. All three members of The Nerves, Peter Case, Jack Lee and Paul Collins, shared songwriting and vocal duties (Case sings lead here), which may have led to their premature break up. There was too much talent to be contained in just one band. Case and Lee went on to sporadic Billboard success with the aforementioned Plimsouls and Collins formed The Paul Collins Beat. But the music snob in me, and power pop is nothing if not a music snob's genre, feels the need to tell you - I only like their early stuff.

(The Nerves’ self-titled EP was recently re-issued by Bomp! as a commemorative 10". 20/20’s records are out-of-print but their early singles can usually be found on any good power pop compilation.
Click here for the Bomp! Records mail order catalogue)

Fake Communication Has A Big Time Out

2006-03-08T00:11:00.000-08:00

Dance Disaster Movement (DDM) - ~~Turn On “On”~~

Late Spring hinted at warmer weather and longer nights just after dusk at a nondescript warehouse in Costa Mesa. I had convinced myself that I was over whatever illness I had been struck with the previous week. (As I recall, I thought it was just a bad reaction to Melatonin but it turned out to be the onset of Juvenile Diabetes.) Dim lighting in a dingy garage-space and loud, youthful and noisy music left me with one desire: to dance. The Flying Saucers and The Pomp provided destructive garage punk, Miracle Chosuke stroked their egos in 7/8 time, and Dance Disaster Movement blasted out the building's foundation.

After DDM's set, Kevin stepped outside, where I was chugging 2-liter bottles of water and smoking a cigarette. He said, "This was the best show Costa Mesa has seen in decades." And whether it was too many $1 Pabsts in my reduced-to-100-pounds frame or a blood glucose level of around 600, I wholeheartedly agreed. It wasn't just the music or the people; it was something in the air. A sense that liberation was just within our reach, that maybe we could carve out someplace to exist.

I danced like I never danced before and when I ended up the hospital a week later I thought a lot about that night. Somehow that night I lost track of myself and was just able to be, to take in the scene. Maybe I've been trying to replicate that feeling ever since. Maybe the whole reason I wanted to start a 'dancey band' was to provide that feeling for others. It's easy to get idealistic with hindsight and it can be tempting to mythologize certain moments, but something in me really sees that night as a turning point, as an epiphany.

Since then, dance-punk has been turned into a dirty word and the pose has been taken up by all sorts of typically non-subterranean bands. But DDM keep it glitchy and repetitive enough to defy any sort of cashing-in criticism. At times Snow on the TV comes off a bit self-conscious and pretentious but I admire what they're going for. Without the minute and a half of powerdrill beats, DDM could come too close to being Rapture-clones. Without the open ringing guitars and ham-fisted synth chords, DDM would be nothing more to me than an idealized memory.

(Buy it at Insound)

Love At First Listen

2006-03-07T01:06:00.000-08:00

Ante-Meridiem - ~~Thinning Air~~

How long does it take to fall in love with a song? There are songs I have loved after listening through just once and songs that have grown on me over the years; songs that grabbed me almost immediately and songs that, as the cliché goes, rewarded repeat listens. With Ante-Meridiem’s "Thinning Air" I was head over heels in 15 seconds.

It’s the laugh that does it. During the intro, over a sparse and lovely acoustic chord progression, with echoes of slide guitar reverberating in the background, singer Karin Jancuk breaks the sober mood with a giggle. It's the kind of studio imperfection that’s too perfect to edit out and it’s one of those strange pleasures you find in music; a passing note that might not mean anything to anyone else but for whatever reason defies me not to smile whenever I hear it.

To smile at such a decidedly melancholy song is the kind of contradiction that much of "Thinning Air"’s appeal hinges on. It's somber yet sweet. It’s a gorgeous pop song that eschews pop conventions of verse and chorus. Guitarists Fonzie de Leon and Bradley Scott Robertson create an atmospheric landscape of sound rather than worry about chord changes or melodic lines. Jancuk’s voice is achingly beautiful and haunting and at the same time unabashedly youthful and joyous. It's a sad song that makes me happy.

How long does it take to fall out of love with a song? In the last month or so I’ve easily listened to "Thinning Air" hundreds of times, leaving it endlessly on repeat and getting lost in it, riding busses and trains wearing out my thumb hitting the back button on my iPod to hear it again, and I never seem to get sick of it. I can already attach memories to it; listening to it for an entire day at work to try to forget how much I hated my job, seeing the band play it live in the miserable weeks after a friend passed away and it bringing a little much needed joy into my life for four minutes. And yet it’s too good a song to be tied to any one memory. It transcends those kinds of literal time-place connections like only truly great songs can. When I’m 90 years old and need to smile, I know I’ll always have that laugh to turn to.

(Click here to see Ante-Meridiem on Myspace)

“Laundromats are a good place to play music, all ages welcome, no cover charge, warm dryers”

2006-03-06T01:31:00.000-08:00

Brent’s TV - ~~Parisian~~
Brent’s TV - ~~Hairdoo~~

Born from four students at Humboldt Univeristy in 1988, Brent’s TV and Appliances (the ‘Appliances’ was later dropped) brought their brand of rootsy rock-and-roll and skiffle to the people the best way they knew how: the laundromat. Imagine the scene: dozens of students and young people dancing, clapping, pounding on the warm dryers while brotherly harmonies echo over a snare drum, spaghetti colanders and a few acoustic guitars. Their jamboree-like live shows became legendary and when Brent's TV embarked on their laundromat tour of the Pacific Northwest, a caravan of ‘fans’ followed. Aaron Cometbus describes the phenomenon, “Brent's TV was really a whole group of extended friends much more than the four members of the band.”

Brent's TV released Lumberjack Days (Lookout! 36) in 1990 and quickly broke up as friends and band members moved away from Humboldt. The band reformed briefly a year later for a West Coast tour with Green Day. (Six people crammed into a 1978 Toyota hatchback... Green Day missed the first few dates but caught up after they borrowed someone's mother's car.) And aside from one reunion show two years later, Brent's TV was over.

In 1994 Lookout! released a compilation of Brent's TV material as a tag-along with a Sweet Baby compilation, Hello Again. While the bands are similar, share a history, drum set and a pair of brothers, and present a sort of proto-East Bay pop-punk, it seems a shame that Brent's TV doesn't warrant their own retrospective compilation. In fact, a few internet trolls seem to regard Brent's TV as an unlistenable predecessor to the Hi Fives. It seems Lookout! still has copies of this seven-inch, which is either a gross injustice that no one ever bought them... or a case of repressing a genuinely important record. I'm feeling slightly optimistic, so I'll stick with thinking that Lookout! has repressed this record just so that folks like me who weren't around in 1990 can listen to a bit of history, and a one of a kind sound from a one of a kind band.

The Lookout! website offers an mp3 of Superwoman from Hello Again

(Buy it from Lookout!)

The Way The Cops Converged, They Fucked Up My Swerve

2006-03-03T02:38:00.000-08:00

Dead Prez - ~~Hell Yeah (Pimp the System) [ft. Jay-Z]~~

I’ve been obsessively absorbing pop music for so long that sometimes it seems like I can only think in song lyrics. The other day I was at In N Out and spotted a slightly nerdy red-haired teenager with glasses, a scraggly barely post-pubescent beard, a West Coast Choppers T-shirt... and a blue bandana hanging out of his back pocket. I whispered to my friend: "Look, he’s got a blue flag hanging out his backside. But only on the left side. Yeah that’s the Crip side".

I tried to think of all the possibilities of what would possess a geeky white boy from suburban Orange County to be rocking gang colors – was it just an incredible coincidence? He needed somewhere to put his bandana and he just happened to pick his back left pocket? Or have the Crips severely lowered their membership standards? I guess both those things are possible, but the most likely answer came to me from Jay-Z’s verse on the remix of Dead Prez’s "Hell Yeah (Pimp the System)": "Lil Joey got his doo rag on/Driving down the street blasting Tupac songs/But Billy like Snoop, got his blue rag on".

Jay-Z's lyrics are great for that, they're surprising applicable to many everyday situations. (I've been waiting for months now for someone to ask me what my favorite color is so I could answer that my favorite hue is Jay-Z blue). And more often than not my favorite lyrics are from Jay's guest spots. Hov is the king of the guest verse. With a chameleon flow he can switch up to match whatever style you put through his headphones and an uncanny ability to cover a number of complex ideas in a deceptively simple 16 bars, give him a good beat and he will undoubtedly turn in a great performance. And while he’s proven time and again he can breathe life into Top 40 pop (Mariah’s "Shake It Off") and run-of-the-mill blow and bling hip hop (Jeezy’s "Go Crazy"), "Hell Yeah" shows him to be just as adept at conquering the so-called "conscious rap" genre.

Dead Prez’s M-1 and Sticman both turn in capable verses, and if I had heard this in high school when their debut album Let’s Get Free was essentially the soundtrack of my senior year, I’m sure I would have focused more on them. But the 23 year old me is a little more cynical about their robbing-the-pizza-guy revolution and, with the exception of "Hell Yeah", Revolutionary But Gangsta just doesn’t seem as fresh and smart as their previous work. After all, who's more subversive – two underground emcees rapping to the choir or the multi-platinum CEO of a major record label "slinging rap to your kids"?

Dead Prez can currently be seen in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, in theaters everywhere today.

Jay-Z can currently be seen breaking those boxes y’all tried to put him in.

(Click here to buy Revolutionary But Gangsta from Amazon)

Your Boyfriend Never Meant Shit to Chuck D

2006-03-02T03:49:00.000-08:00

Wanda Jackson - ~~Tunnel of Love/Funnel of Love~~

Here's a reverse cliche, a new snowclone, if you will: I don't love rockabilly, but I do love a great song. And there's a lot of personal taste, a mix of memories and emotions, and a whole laundry lists of intangibles that make up why someone loves a song, or thinks it's great. I want to dive into those gray areas and hear all about it. I don't want to resort to cannons, or dismissals or overly academic discussions of meter or key.

You might not like Wanda Jackson and might not have even heard of her. Apparently she has a new CD out called "I Remember Elvis" and if you want some Queen of Rockabilly hype, her website is gag-inducingly chock full of it. It would be easy to write this song off as movie soundtrack fonder or maybe something you heard on the Country Music Channel once, but for me there is something that sticks. Maybe I have a soft spot for those low, growly vocals, or maybe I can still hear this song the way I heard it first: in a low lit Airstream on the outskirts of Orange County. Maybe it's impossible to divorce your identity from music.

And I think I'm glad for that.

(Buy at Amazon)

Oh Christ! It's The Crucifucks!

2006-03-01T02:11:00.000-08:00

The Crucifucks - ~~Washington~~

When I was 15 the Crucifucks were everything I was looking for in a band. They were loud and fast and sloppy, they had gleefully dumb lyrics about the “establishment” with brilliant song titles such as “Go Bankrupt and Die”, “Democracy Spawns Bad Taste” and “Cops For Fertilizer”, they had a name sure to piss my parents off, and best of all they had a singer with the most obnoxious, shrieking, paint-stripping voice I’d ever heard.

The voice in question, Doc Corbin Dart, started the Crucifucks (along with, bizarrely, future Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley) in Lansing, Michigan in 1982. Their first album was recorded two years later and was released on Alternative Tentacles in 1985. In addition to the standard punk lyrical fare about government and religion, the self-titled debut featured more comically surreal subject matter in songs like “Oh Where, Oh Where?” (a song that appears to be entirely about losing a piece of paper. Sample lyric: “I can’t find my piece of paper/I should have been more careful with my piece of paper) which hinted at Dart’s ongoing struggle with borderline personality disorder.

1987’s Wisconsin gave even more insight into Dart’s deteriorating mental health, but also featured songs that were slower, more melodic and more mature (well, as mature as you can get and still be in a band called the Crucifucks). The albums third song, “Washington” was always my favorite and would invariably be the one I played for my friends when trying to convert them to the cult of Corbin Dart. It’s not wholly representative of the band; the lyrics are much more subdued and the music is actually palatable, but the love-it-or-hate-it elements that make the band great are all very much intact. You’ll either cringe at the singing like nails on a blackboard or, if you’re like me, you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to find a band with a voice that is nearly as good.

(The Crucifucks and Wisconsin are available on a single CD entitled Our Will Be Done. Click here to buy it from Alternative Tentacles)

“Tell Them It's Been Wonderful”

2006-02-28T22:42:00.000-08:00

Shelley/Devoto - ~~System Blues~~

Twenty-five years after releasing Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch EP (featuring 'Boredom,' 'Breakdown,' 'Times Up,' and 'Friend of Mine') on their own New Hormones label, Pete Shelly and Howard Devoto collaborated again . In 2001, Cooking Vinyl produced Buzzkunst, an album that manages to capture both previous discoveries while simultaneously treading new ground. Buzzkunst finds Devoto resigned to a life as a photo-librarian, no longer seeking to live off of his creativity, but with over a decade's worth of credentials from Magazine and Luxuria. And while Buzzkunst owes heavily to Magazine and Luxuria's art-damaged electronica, it often feels more akin to Eno's Another Green World or Bowie's Low.

Buzzcocks crossovers do appear occasionally, perhaps as entrance for curious fans ('Till the Stars in His Eyes Are Dead'), the majority of the album explores analog synth soundscapes, dark wave, and distorted drum machines. Devoto supplies an eerie vocal presence similar to his previous work but remains detached emotionally from this often bleak electronic/synthetic soundtrack. God, I hate to resort to hoity-toity literary allusions, but his delivery is akin to Meursault from The Stranger. Cold, detached and unaffected. His comfort with his disconnection is hardly soothing but seems to be a perfect fit for the trapped-in-the-CPU sound underscoring his sterile delivery.

Devoto on the 'System Blues', " I wanted to write a blues song. Pete came up with this wonderful murky soundscape instead. Legend has it that "Tell them it's been wonderful," were the dying words of the philosopher Wittgenstein." (So that sort of one-ups my brooding-teenager level reference.)

(Buy it from Amazon)