Victorian Squid

V/A. Garden Party. Alienor Records.

2011-12-30T16:30:00.000-06:00

Some lovely stuff here, particularly the gorgeous Bedflowers who sound like Opal if Amelia Fletcher had joined up after Kendra Smith left. Also, is it just me or does Bulldozer Crash's Changing sound a whole heck of a lot like Just Like Heaven?

Side A

1. Des Garçons Ordinaires - Summer Games
2. Bulldozer Crash - Changing
3. The Spinning Wheels - Don't Get Me Wrong
4. Meek - Beautiful Day
5. The Straw Dogs - My Cherished Lonelyness
6. La Sintesis - September
7. The Bedflowers - My Ex-Lover's Adress
8. Antiseptic Beauty - Shoegaze
9. Les Daffodils - So Easy As You Lie
10. Flame Up - Let The World Smother You
11. Charming Boys - Rain

Side B

1. The Little Rabbits - The Boy Who Never Saw The Light (live)
2. Penelope Trip - Inside The Taxi
3. The Gravy Train - Happy Again
4. Les Chaplinn's - Sunny Day
5. The Prayers - Sister Goodbye
6. The Lovelies - Stupid Habit
7. Kaleidoscope - Dream 2
8. Koma Kino - Weaky Town
9. The Penelopes - A Place Called Home
10. Alival Tiosihteeri - Nasta Kaupunki
11. Mosaic Eyes - Klaus' Eyes
12. Die Time Twisters, Verdammt! - Denn Jetzt Bist Du Da

Garden Party

Best of 2011.

2011-12-30T15:30:00.000-06:00

Best Albums

24. Speed the Plough - Shine
23. The Feelies - Here Before
22. Smith Westerns - Dye It Blonde
21. Dignan Porch – Deluded
20. Seapony - Go With Me
19. U.S. Girls - U.S. Girls on KRAAK
18. Craft Spells - Idle Labor
17. The Bats - Free All The Monsters
16. Blasted Canyons - Blasted Canyons
15. Terror Bird - Human Culture
14. Amen Dunes - Through Donkey Jaw
13. EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints
12. Wax Idols - No Future
11. Xray Eyeballs - Not Nothing
10. The Cars - Move Like This
9. Wild Flag - Wild Flag
8. Tom Waits - Bad As Me
7. Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee Part Two
6. Veronica Falls - Veronica Falls
5. Dum Dum Girls - Only in Dreams
4. Blouse - Blouse
3. Royal Headache - Royal Headache
2. Men - Talk About Body
1. Shannon and the Clams - Sleep Talk

Best singles

Bake Sale - Bake Sale
Beach Fossils / Wild Nothing - Gruesome Flowers: A Tribute to The Wake
Blouse - Into Black
Catwalk - One by Words
Head On Electric - Ghost Hunter
Terry Malts - Something About You
Midnite Snaxxx - A Guy Like That / Jackie
Pope Anything - Witch Tits
Vein Cranes - True Believer
Wax Idols - All Too Human / William Says
Xray Eyeballs - Crystal

Best Reissues

Chalk Circle – Reflection
Various Artists - The Hidden Tapes: A Compilation of Minimal Wave From Around the World '79-'85
Various Artists - Those Shocking Shaking Days: Indonesia Hard, Psychedelic, Progressive Rock and Funk 1970-1978

James Dean Driving Experience. Complete Recordings.

2011-09-10T16:15:00.001-05:00

These songs are like snapshots; the wet, chemical alchemy of real-life emotions frozen and blurred, crystalized and captured in velvet-grained silver gelatin. That's not a knock. Good pop distills the messy ambiguity of life and rearranges it into perfectly balanced nuggets of time and sound, allowing us to romanticize our pain, or even see it as heroic. (Those old vinyl 45s are legendarily fetishistic, and by their very nature as self-contained physical objects allow us to externalize, manipulate, and catalog our emotions from a safe distance. It's not for nothing that these sleeves all feature the detached, isolated, context-free iconography of romantic cinema. Starlets looking as cool, cold and untouchable as actual stars, and yet here you are turning them over in your hands.)

My experience with so much of C-86 is about what it's like to feel a feeling instead of being the direct embodiment of feeling itself, which is why so much of it evokes things safe and wistful. It's instant nostalgia (I miss the comfort of being sad, indeed) ionically charged with the symbolism of things acutely felt, existing in the infra-thin moment between loss and possibility.

That tart crispness becomes a roundabout way of eroticizing isolation—the tingling sensation of being wrapped in a warm sweater on a cold day and getting goosebumps anyway. While rock and roll of the past aimed directly at the groin (and what it might be doing in the vicinity of someone else's), C-86 is a generation or more removed from the 60's pop it reveres and acknowledges that temporal distance by underpinning the physical and emotional distance between the singer and subject, and between the song and its listener. To make up for the carnal absence it prefers to idealize loss itself the same way it idealizes the white pop and girl group sounds of the 60's. Everything is perfect in memory. Your skin can feel just as electric as your ears when being touched by invisible waves.

I think this is why the majority of C-86 and twee bands of the 80's existed primarily on singles. The songs on albums have to relate to each other, but singles come to you as individuals. You can have private relationships with them. They're meant to be handled. Singles are flirts, constantly demanding your attention to flip them on your record player, or pore over their enigmatic sleeves. Albums belong to the world, but singles are yours, no matter how many other people have one.

But, whatevs. The James Dean Driving Experience are actually pretty upbeat (and as evidenced by their name, a bit cheeky), but mostly dreamy. It's perfectly realized jangle-pop in the vein of the Sea Urchins, Remember Fun, or Hey Paulette. The download includes the singles and eps for World Weary & Wise, Lonely Hearts XI Versus The Rest Of The World, Dean's Eleventh Dream, Clearlake Revisited, and Sean Connery.

Drive

Oppenheimer Analysis. New Mexico.

2011-07-13T11:00:00.002-05:00

Achingly beautiful cold-wave fluttering between melancholic minimalism and elegant, fizzy electro-pop from way back in 1982. Andy Oppenheimer has the most gorgeously androgynous voice, perfectly suited for his songs about cold-war paranoia and detachment. The coming atomic Armageddon and technological dystopia were perennial themes of 80's new wave, made all the more poignant here, as Andy was apparently an actual science writer and nuclear expert. I had the same thought upon hearing it as I did when I discovered Eleven Pond—this has got to be one of the most sublime albums released that decade and somehow no one has ever heard of it. You need this now.

New Mexico

Alex Bleeker & the Freaks. Alex Bleeker & the Freaks.

2011-07-08T16:30:00.000-05:00

Somebody reshuffled Real Estate’s cards, and instead of turning over Woods or Beach Fossils, they cut deep into the middle of the deck and came up with Neil Young. This side project from bassist Alex Bleeker features most of the Real Estate crew, along with Julian Lynch on guitar, and sounds for all the world like an unsung Laurel Canyon band coming down with the last good buzz of the 70’s. Wistful and meandering with undercurrents of real power, it rolls down the highway like a Studebaker into the evening’s twilight. Cozy and easy going with tidal rhythms spiked by Lynch’s loose and ragged soloing, it’s classic rock for the “let’s rock the beach” set.

Freaks

Another Sunny Day. You Should All Be Murdered.

2011-06-25T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 22
Released: November 1989
Tracks:
01: You Should All Be Murdered
02: Horseriding
03: Green

Murdered

14 Iced Bears. In the Beginning.

2011-06-21T11:00:00.000-05:00

Finally, an album that won’t make you want to have sex with your mother!

Tired of music that does nothing but feed your unholy Oedipal desires? Weary of bands whose idea of a MILF is waaay too narrow? Who isn’t? Let’s face it, popular music today is a minefield of pants-tightening paeans to the insatiable itch to put the “mother” in “motherfucker”. Gaga’s miming it on stage, fifteen years ago the Dave Matthews Band devoted a double concept album to it, and back in the 80’s you couldn’t get Phil Collins to shut up about it.

Well, worry no more! The 14 Iced Bears special blend of jangle-pop and psychedelic-punk is 100% guaranteed to take your mind off boning the baby cannon that brung you into this world, or your money back.

Beginning

V/A. Positively Teenage!!?.

2011-06-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

1. The Love Parade - Dave Clark 5
2. The Gravy Train - Devil In Your Shoe
3. Lavender Faction - In My Mind
4. The Sunflowers - Sunflower Babies
5. St.James Infirmary - The Sun Don't Shine
6. The Mayfields - Out To Sea
7. Penny Candles - Memory Box
8. Regulators - Southside Johnny
9. Remember Fun - P.S. Elaine
10. Church Grims - Plaster Saint
11. Marc - Clearer, Brighter, Sharper
12. Felicity's - Why Don't You Come Round
13. Crimson Mints - Makes Me Want To
14. Mousefolk - Wishing The Summer Away
15. The Fat Tulips - All That Matters
16. The Love Parade – Eternally
17. The Gravy Train - All Fall Down
18. The Sunflowers - Sunflowers Mum
19. Perfect Kiss - So Many Alike
20. Church Grims - Seen It All
21. Panda Pops – Submarine
22. The Williams - Still Keep Coming
23. St.Christopher – Charmelle
24. The Driscolls - It's Your Daughter
25. The Sohfas – Thorns
26. The Spinning Jenny's - Gardeners Weakly
27. Bulldozer Clarts - Walks Away
28. Librarians - Stripping In The Cemetry
29. Strawberry Story - For The Love Of Billy
30. Hellfire Sermons - Down All The Days
31. Patrick Skelly & The Prescriptions - Land Of Tears

Positively Teenage

V/A. Ideal Guest House.

2011-06-02T11:00:00.000-05:00

Songs introduced by Ted Chippington
1. Big Flame - Man Of Few Syllables
2. The Wedding Present - You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends (Version)
3. The Soup Dragons - Fair's Fair
4. The Creepers - Sharper And Wider
5. The Shop Assistants - Home Again (Live)
6. The June Brides - This Town (Acoustic)
7. Rob Grant with Yeah Yeah Noh - Mr. Hammond Has Breakfast In Bed
8. Stump - Kitchen Table
9. The Legend - Everything's Coming Up Roses
10. Pigbros - Barren Land
11. Stitched Back Foot Airman - The Deadly Spore
12. BMX Bandits - Sad
13. Bogshed - Jobless Youngsters
14. Chumbawamba - Kinnochio

Ideal

The Jags. Evening Standards.

2011-05-20T15:25:00.001-05:00

I have this fantasy that the sleeve for this album got made first and then handed to the band with instructions to make an album that would fit inside it. Because nothing else could have produced the synesthetic mesh of image and sound found here. It may not be an unjustly overlooked classic of new wave power-pop, but it may have unintentionally created its iconic apotheosis. Four nattily dressed lads stand looking studiedly aloof in front of the clean lines of a bauhausian office building beneath a romantically airbrushed turquoise sky. Sort of a cross between The Cars portraits on the back of Candy O and The Feelies Crazy Rhythms. The Jags themselves sound (a lot) like early Elvis Costello, and were in fact dismissed by critics as unworthy imitators when this was released in 1980. I was actually never a big fan of Costello, so this doesn't bother me, as I don't consider him terribly sacred. Their song Back of My Hand made the Top 40 and is occasionally resurrected on power-pop comps, but they never quite equaled it or scored another trip to the mainstream. It is undoubtedly the catchiest song on the album, but the rest of the songs are strong, punchy bundles of crisp, nervous energy, and to the people who encountered them, they're very fondly remembered.

Here's the problem, though. Either someone in the Jags had very recently been dumped, or they were just generally misogynist pricks (could be both/and). It seems like eighty percent of the songs on here are about how women are this stupid, sadistic alien species with the single-minded goal of breaking men's hearts, fucking with their lives, trapping them into bourgeois marriages and—of course—doing all this with men who aren't them. I know, I know...these sort of attitudes towards women are so common in popular music that if I had to edit out all the bands that weren't perfectly feminist, there would be precious little left to listen to. I'm hoping to get a copy of Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music for my birthday. Writing of the Sex Pistols' Bodies she said

It was an outrageous song, yet I could not simply dismiss it with outrage. The extremity of its disgust forced me to admit that I was no stranger to such feelings---though unlike Johnny Rotten I recognized that disgust, not the body, was the enemy. And there lay the paradox: music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, love, hated---as good rock and roll did---challenged me to do the same, and so, even when the content was antiwoman, antisexual, in a sense antihuman, the form encouraged my struggle for liberation. Similarly, timid music made me feel timid, whatever its ostensible politics.

They Jags may not be political in their stance, but the feathery-haired guy who sort of looks like Bruce Campbell on the cover is a pretty sharp songwriter and clearly has a vision he wants to communicate. It's the typical vision of nice guys turned bad boys due to not being given the pussy they so clearly deserve, but at least he owns it heart and soul. If guys start bands to be more attractive to women, I will never understand why they then go on to write songs insulting women and generally calling them heartless sluts for dating guys who weren't them before they had their own stage. Especially when you consider that (at least in the 80's) women were the primary audience for and consumers of new wave and power-pop music. Who did The Jags think their audience was? Who were they writing to?

Their saving grace is that the music is really catchy and choosing pleasure is its own kind of rebellion. Also, without the lyrics sheet I rarely know what the singer is singing about. It's just that...when you do read them—jeebus they can be pretty bad. Woman's World outright states in the chorus that It's a woman's world we live in / And a woman don't think straight, handily pointing out the confusing, oppressive, and flighty pussyarchy white male rock stars are forced to live under.

Then there's their one hit, Back of My Hand. Pandagon was talking about giving out fake phone numbers to get creepy guys to leave you alone at bars, and how women aren't entitled to the space to just be out with their friends. It was in response to this post at The Hairpin about how stalkery guys can be in those situations, and it made me think of this song, which sounds at first to be about getting a woman's phone number, but is actually full of thinly veiled threats of violence. With the double meanings of "I've got your number" (I have your phone number / I know what kind of person you areand what sort of sneaky thing you're up to) adding "written on the back of my hand" makes it pretty clear that he's threatening to hit the woman in question for the sin of not calling him for dates. Savor this run of lyrics and see what you think:

You only call me if you're feeling blue
You tell me I don't pay attention to you
But if you only knew just what I'm going through
You wouldn't phone those guys who mess around with you girl
...
You're not unreadable, you're not unbeatable
I know just what you are, don't push your luck too far
You're not untouchable, not just another girl
I get in touch with you, I only wish you knew...
I got your number written on the back of my hand
I got your number...

The weird thing is that I remember there being a lot of masculine gender panic over insufficiently manly new wave acts in the 80's, which was coupled with anxiety/resentment that this style was supposedly being driven by sexual young women having the hots for this new, androgynous version of the male. So to find this kind of sexual push back—a warning to women to know their place—in the songs that helped inspire that panic is odd to say the least. It seems like for every gain women achieve in regards to freedom and pleasure, there's a backlash—even within the cultural items that women's choices have helped make successful.

Evening Standards

The Wake. Crush the Flowers.

2011-05-14T11:11:00.000-05:00

Sarah 21
Released: October 1989
Tracks:
01: Crush The Flowers
02: Carbrain

Crush the Flowers

Double Negative. Black Time.

2011-05-06T11:00:00.000-05:00

Another band that learned all it ever wanted to know about rock and roll from Dave Davies’ razor slashed guitar amp. Fully deserving of the In The Red stamp of approval, they may be the loudest goddamn band I own, other than Guitar Wolf. It’s magnificently lo-fi, too, like it was recorded in a closet of an abandoned hammer factory built inside a cave. They claim to be proponents of the “heavy vampire sound”, whatever that means (they are neither goth nor sparkly, though they do carry on a long British tradition of spookifying their garage rock; cf. When the Clock Strikes Twelve and Scary People).

It’s all raw-screaming-noisy-punk-garage-rockabilly-distorition-blues-raw-raw-rawr with a heart of 60’s pop confection that gets torn out from under your feet and shredded amid ear stabbing primitiveness every time you think you’ve got a hold of it. The standout—sounding all the sweeter for being nestled in so much bone chafing distortion--being the indie-crushed I’m Gonna Haunt You When I’m Gone (sung by Janie Too Bad) which could be a psychic-historical pre-echo of Beat Happening caught on the only known acetate of a 1960’s regional girl band trying their hand at one of those MY Boyfriend’s Back/My Girlfriend’s Dead songs that used to be so popular.

The All Music Guide describes it as being "performed and recorded with a technical finesse that makes Billy Childish sound like David Gilmour", which may be the best blurb ever.

Black Time

Dan Melchior. Bitterness, Spite, Rage and Scorn.

2011-04-29T11:00:00.000-05:00

Like some rare, unexpectedly righteous blues rock platter dug out of a garage sale, Bitterness, Spite, Rage and Scorn is an homage, an elation, a junkyard cathedral to the Savage Chord. Its grooves were carved by hand with a pair of rusty knives.

With a voice like a smashed window and a devotion to pile-driving minimalism, Dan Melchior plays fuzzed out swamp rock (swamped out fuzz rock? rocked out swamp fuzz?) like John Lee Hooker and Mark E. Smith’s love child. He has a long pedigree with Holly Golightly and Billy Childish, so you know what you’re getting into.

Bitterness

Cave Weddings. Bring Your Love / Let’s Drive.

2011-04-15T11:00:00.000-05:00

Eric La Grange is in too many bands for me to keep track of. I know about Eric & The Happy Thoughts and The Romance Novels, and….okay, three. I guess he has three bands. But I am here today to tell you about The Cave Weddings and this one perfect single—exquisite, impeccable guitar pop in the mold of countless 60’s summer bands. Bring Your Love (tart and tight like The Archies, only without sucking) kicks off like a racehorse with a driving, perfectly chosen guitar line and drums galloping like a hormone rush. Let’s Drive is as jangly and rollicking as Buddy Holly’s jalopy. It’s all there: tambourine rhythms, sparkling, clearly drawn melodies, harmonized “ba-ba-ba’s”, and occasional bouts of frothy, frenetic, shredding guitar. I wanna lick it and see what it tastes like.

Cave Weddings

Boomgates. Bright Idea / Cameo.

2011-04-12T11:00:00.000-05:00

Eddy Current Suppression Ring put on the best punk show I’ve ever seen. And I don’t mean punk as a style of music, but whatever it was about the original incarnation, whatever DIY exuberance, whatever magic connection it had to its audience, a true you/me/us, Eddie Current has it in spades. It was jaw dropping. There were maybe only twenty or so of us in the club, but they performed like their life depended on it.

Lead singer Brendan Suppression was a nervous bundle of energy who seemed to find his peace while performing, despite the fact that he was stalking back and forth on the stage like a slightly less manic Cornholio. It was the release of being truly yourself, even if that self is a bit twitchy and tightly wound. During instrumental portions he would lean wearily on his bandmates and hold his mic to their chests, like some sort of autistic attempt to plug directly in to their heartbeats, which seemed profoundly sweet. Towards the end of the show, after climbing all over the stage and merchandise table, he cautiously staggered into the audience while the band strummed and thumped and riffed furiously as if they could conjure up a secular rock n’ roll rapture right then and there. Drenched in sweat, Brendan repeated his mic gesture, touching each of us in turn as a sort of punk rock communion, sharing with us their energy and adding the sound of our bodies to their mix. A fan held a cold can of beer to the back of his neck to cool him off, and then it was over.

I’ve loved and thrived off music for ages, but that night was an epiphany. Fuck the hippies, this was the real thing. In that moment I felt like we all—all of us in the club, everybody on stage—loved one another; like we’d all just shared a communal vision of something rare and astonishing and perfect and beautiful. No church revival could ever compare.

Boomgates is (so far) a one off featuring Brendan and friends (Trial Kennedy, Teen Archer, The Twerps, Dick Diver), and it has a definite ECSR vibe, but softened by the addition of Stephanie Hughes’ dulcet voice. It’s a looser, poppier affair that just wants to hang out with you and settle comfortably onto your heart. The summery Bright Idea trundles along on a strolling, rubbery bass that falls somewhere between a relaxed ECSR and the Go-Betweens, and the interplay of Brandon’s vocals and Steph’s backing whoah-o-ohs make me think of old C-86 tunes or Slumberland releases. The guitars are still nice and trashy, though. B-side, Cameo, lets Steph take lead on the vocals before Brendan comes in with an homage to Lou Reed’s talking songs, only with an Australian accent and having to do with relating some weird dream he had. It alternates between the story and the sharply jangly chorus where they all erupt, singing “you’re just a cameo in my dreams”.

In short, they are expectedly awesome, and “for your information, this is all you need to know”.

P.S.: They have a new single coming out on April 18th on Smart Guy Records.

Boomgates

The Snivelling Shits. I Can't Come.

2011-04-01T11:00:00.001-05:00

I feel like I should just be able to point out that these guys named themselves The Snivelling Shits and that their signature song spends six minutes detailing all the many ways in which their lead singer can’t achieve an orgasm, and leave it at that. But that would mean leaving out mention of Crossraods, wherein they take the piss out of Lou Reed by turning Waiting for the Man into a Bowie-esque vamp about impatiently waiting for their favorite British soap opera to start. Or bludgeon the French language to death. Or lament their inability to become samurai, question god’s gender and daily grooming rituals, and write a song for The Damned.

Anyway, as Maximumrocknroll once said, this album is "essential for music lovers and music haters alike". Formed as a bit of a lark in 1977 by music journalists Giovanni Dadamo and Dave Fudger (Zig Zag, Sounds, and The Face), they recorded Terminal Stupid (backed with the aforementioned I Can’t Come) and sent it anonymously to their rivals at NME, who made it single of the week. With a lineup rounded out by members of Eddie & the Hotrods and eventually legendary producer Steve Lillywhite, the Shits recorded a total of nine songs that, through utter devotion to being as magnificently stupid as possible, manage to be as good as or better than most of the bands they were supposedly mocking.

If you can dig a viciously unholy smash-up of the Velvets, The Damned, Bowie, and the Sex Pistols, then this is a criminally forgotten classic of punk-as-fuck snots who couldn’t even take themselves seriously (thank god).

Shits

V/A. Grimsby Fishmarket 4 Norrkoeping 0.

2011-03-18T11:00:00.000-05:00

This ridiculously hard to find compilation was originally issued by Swedish pop fanzine Grimsby Fishmarket (I think in 1991). The Orchids track was an exclusive to the tape and never appeared anywhere else. Quite a few bands I'd never heard before, too.

1. Eusebio - Louis Philippe
2. Song About Girls - Bummer Twins
3. Walking Back To You - The Cherry Orchard
4. This Friendship Of Ours - This Perfect Day
5. Chick House - Roof
6. Barriers Of Mine - Are You Mr Riley
7. Silent Sigh City - Happydeadmen
8. Shaunty - Joe Clack
9. She Fakes Apples - My Finest Hour
10. I Fell In Love Last Night - Cerise
11. Kymri - The Apple Moths
12. Jennifer Anywhere - The Kitchen Cynics
13. Room - Bridge
14. Turn Over - Momus
15. Into The Morgue - Mary-Go-Round
16. Next Summer - Brighter
17. New World - Venus Peter
18. Chelsea Guitar - Blueboy
19. Not Unusual - BJ Eagle
20. The Light That Will Cease To Fail - Stereolab
21. High Rise - The Cherry Orchard
22. Windmills And Milestones - Bummer Twins
23. Wood Dust - Joe Clack
24. Ralph De Bricassart - Happydeadmen
25. Time Will Pass - The Rileys
26. And When I Wake Up - The Orchids
27. Birds Of Prey - Marble Hammock

Grimsby

The Lumerians. Burning Mirrors / Chevaux Fous.

2011-03-15T11:00:00.000-05:00

I got sucked in by the trippy cover art smiling enigmatically at me from the shelf of 45s in my local record shop. A gnomic, three-eyed, golden mystic looking out underneath a field of eyes (leaves? paramecium?) that transform into a convulsive wave of moire dots. Also, I'd just finished reading Invented Knowledge, all about fake histories and pseudosciences, and it had a chapter on Lemuria—a "lost" continent supposedly located between India and Australia—so it seemed fortuitous. I'm perfectly OK picking up an album based on its cover, and this one matched perfectly.

Burning Mirrors erupts in a spasm of pummeling drums and bass driving a deeply grooved krautrock beat, like the Silver Apples crossed with Hawkwind. It’s a whirlwind swirl of noise rock and psychedelica that builds up towering layers of whooping incantations, howling organ, and fuzzed-out guitars that quickly saturate all the available psychic space in the room. It’s a total brain melter. They’re getting comparisons to the Black Angels, and although they definitely build analog altars of throbbing reverb, it feels less retro. They’re looser, wilder, more exploratory and way more likely to just start going wiggy all over the place.

The b-side, Chevaux Fous, translates the Osmond’s Crazy Horses into a grinding echo-chamber of siren noise and triple-bad-acid occult freak-outs. They’ve got a full length out now on Knitting Factory Records that you should definitely pick up.

Burning

St. Christopher. All of a Tremble.

2011-03-12T11:00:00.000-06:00

Sarah 20
Released: August 1989
Tracks:
01: All Of A Tremble
02: My Fortune
03: The Hummingbird

Tremble

The Wild Tchoupitoulas. The Wild Tchoupitoulas.

2011-03-09T11:00:00.000-06:00

Today is the day I traditionally spend biting off the impulse to tell people they have schmutz on their forehead, which means that once again Mardi Gras has come and gone and I missed the opportunity to post this album.

I’ve never enjoyed the various pleasures of Mardi Gras, nor even visited New Orleans, although I did once attend Key West’s Halloween celebration, Fantasy Fest. I imagine they’re somewhat similar, although Fantasy Fest (when I attended in ’94 at least) was primarily being enjoyed by droves of middle-aged naked people in body paint. I do recall one delightful couple who had dressed from head to toe in vintage ‘50s duds and were wheeling around an old fashioned baby stroller. When people leaned in to see the “baby”, a little person dressed in leather bondage gear would leap out making boogada-boogada-boogada noises. So I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re looking for a getaway built around heavy drinking and nudity, Key West is probably the more family oriented destination. Although New Orleans’ celebration lasts all week and they could probably use the money more. As I’m sure you’re aware, New Orleans has not exactly been suffering from a surfeit of good fortune lately. The way things have been going, we all know it’s only a matter of time before Ben Stiller unleashes Fuck the Meters (“the hilarious and heartwarming tale of one man’s struggle to overcome dyslexia and join a New-Orlean’s funk band”¹) upon the already punch-drunk metropolis.

Speaking of the Meters, they, along with several of the Neville brothers, can be found on this non-stop rump-shaker from the heyday of New Orleans funk. Despite the pedigree, the stars of the show are the Wild Tchoupitoulas themselves, a tribe founded by George Landry (better known as Big Chief Jolly) in the early 70’s. It’s a swampy stew of New Orleans jazz, R&B, and blues, with an emphasis on appropriately dirty funk. The songs are built around traditional call-and-response chants, with niceley rough and raw vocals from Big Chief Jolly and the rest of his tribe. If you’re a fan of Professor Longhair, or early Dr John, grab this now.

The word fonktaculastic gets bandied about a lot in favor of bands who would barely be in danger of catching gonorrhea if it were actually spread by rhythmic clapping. But the Tchoupitoulas are the real deal. They're more than infectious. They'll leave rabid hoodoo brand upon your brain.

1. Script available upon request. You may also be interested in my original screenplays Forrest Gump II: The Gumpening and Abel Gance’s Napoleon Dynamite.

Wild Tchoupitoulas

Henry's Dress. Bust 'Em Green.

2011-02-24T11:00:00.000-06:00

One of Slumberland’s best noisepop releases. The band has swept up the shrapnel from their debut into bristling piles of jagged, brightly colored confetti. Their shoegaze excesses have been condensed into blasts of garage punk mauling 60’s mod rock. You can see the genesis of the Aisler’s Set, but it’s a much, much louder, fuzzed-out version of what’s to come. When they’re going full tilt, they have a way of pummeling through a song with delirious abandon, which just digs the hooks in deeper. You may not notice them the first time, but soon you won’t be able to get Hey Allison, All This Time for Nothing, and Self Starter out of your head. It hurtles by in just under half an hour, so I’ve appended the songs from their 1620 single as a bonus.

Green

Schatzi and Hazeltine. Happy Birthday Baby / When Yr Alone.

2011-02-22T14:45:00.000-06:00

The first couple of times I listened to this, I was sure some part of it had been recorded on the wrong speed. The vocals are so damnably cute and coy—a winking come-on from a couple of Ronettes obsessed teenage garage punks hiding switchblades in the pockets of their leather jackets. But now it all falls together. All the great 60's girl-group pop was about love and obsession, so it makes sense that Schatzi and Hazeltine have built their own musical shrine to the sultry sound of tuff-girls and the menacing vulnerability of teen love. You can feel the sway of her hips in the swagger of her voice. They're lipstick killers—gang debs demanding kisses in exchange for the pleasure of their songs.

The hand-made, low-budget wall of sound is exceptionally well crafted and layered, much more so than you'd expect for a couple of songs that were probably dreamed up and tossed off in one exuberant afternoon. It's a total blast. Plus hand-claps! Glockenspiel! That moist, swollen-lipped, tiger-kitteny growl they stole from Ronnie Specter for the "oh-oh bay-a-buh's"! Crush worthy.

Video for When Yr Alone

Happy Birthday Baby

Buy it from Insound (US) or Bachelor (Europe)

Butterglory. Downed.

2011-02-18T14:30:00.000-06:00

Still feelin’ kinda 90s, so here’s some slackeriffic evanescent psychic pezz drops from Lawrence, KS duo Butterglory. I’ve seen numerous comparisons to Pavement (who, honestly, I never cared for) and Archers of Loaf (who I’m not all that familiar with), but to me they sound like a crackling, ragged wire version of Yo La Tengo’s Genius + Love. They were contemporaries of all those bands, so it’s not like they were trying to recreate that sound, it was apparently just some lo-fi virus going around at the time. Indie mono, in more ways than one.

Despite the comparatively lackadaisical attitude emanating from Matt Suggs and Debby Vander Wall’s vocals (I imagine this being recorded when neither member felt like getting off the couch), the songs are endearing, hooky, and melodic in a skewed, left-handed fashion where you’re never quite sure which way they’re going to swerve next. The melodies easily win out over the noisy, ramshackle trappings, and part of the magic is the way they paste together all the unpredictable, unpolished bits of buzzing guitar feedback, perky trap drumming, and cool boy/girl vocals into two minutes of hummable chaos.

Downed

Brighter. Around the World in Eighty Days.

2011-02-12T11:00:00.000-06:00

Sarah 19
Released: August 1989
Tracks:
01: Inside Out
02: Tinsel Heart
03: Around The World In Eighty Days
04: Things Will Get Better

Around the World

Susan Voelz. Summer Crashing.

2011-02-04T17:30:00.001-06:00

Getting back to my nostalgic lamentations for the 90s¹, I’d like to mourn the passing of feminism and pro-choice activism as a mainstream phenomenon². I got spoiled, coming of age at a time when women had taken their rightful place on the stage (partially by force, mostly by being more awesome than everyone else) and feminist and pro-choice concerns were front and center in the culture. It seemed that we had finally broken through; that there would be no turning back the clock. I realize that I was still living in an insulated “alternative” bubble, and that large portions of America didn’t share my convictions³, but it was thrilling to see the challenge being made (besides, who was going to mess with Kim Gordon, PJ Harvey, Kathleen Hannah, Kim Deal, or any of the numerous other women kicking ass across the country?). We had L7’s Rock 4 Choice⁴ and Riot Grrl, and even the boys were in tune—I seem to remember Eddie Vedder scrawling “choice” on his arms when Pearl Jam played SNL, and Curt Kobain made a habit of puncturing traditional male rock-star machismo by getting photographed wearing a lot of cardigans while holding cats (things usually coded as female) and appearing in his pajamas on the cover of Out Magazine.

Unfortunately, we finished out the decade with a president who largely backed off on his pro-choice promises, with both NOW and NARAL asking the street-level movements to tone down the demonstrations for fear of alienating an administration they thought was tenuously still on their side. By the turn of the millennium, fully in the sway of “finding common ground” with anti-choicers⁵, abortion rights had been chipped away to such an extent that it was more difficult to obtain one than it had been under Reagan and Bush⁶. And now we’ve arrived at the point where a Republican Congress can shamelessly introduce a bill that would not only prohibit abortion coverage through private insurance, but that attempts to define rape out of existence for the majority of women who have been sexually assaulted. They’ve since backed down and removed the “forcible rape” language (proving that street-level feminist activism still has power, and is needed more than ever), but they’re still going ahead with the bill. If you live in the U.S., write to your representative, and if you’d like to do something more directly positive, donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds, which helps fight these measures and helps pay for women who can’t afford abortions on their own.

I was thinking of all this when I recently revisited an album that had been a favorite of mine back in ’95, but had fallen off my radar in the ensuing years. Susan Voelz is probably best known for playing violin in Poi Dog Pondering (and has contributed to albums by John Mellencamp, Alejandro Escovedo, and Ronnie Lane). Much of Poi’s work is characterized by the use of relentless optimism as a weapon against the inevitability of death, but Susan’s solo work finds her examining more ambiguous territory. Recorded after surviving a horrific car crash, she starts to question the ability to connect or take action within this brief existence, asking, "When we die, will we think this was anything?".

That emotionally abstract, quizzical tone flows through the album. The instrumental Mystic River Bridge refers to a real-life suicide while Susan wonders if the jumper chose the location for its name. The poppy Happy can be read as a manifesto for allowing yourself to be who you are (“Just for an hour I'm going to be happy/Just for a day I'm going to let dumb things happen/I don't care how I look 'cause I look good-enough/I don't care what I think 'cause I'm not thinkin' much”) and as a caustic take on happiness as a goal instead of a state of being (“I don't wanna feel bad/So I stop feelin' anything”). Later on, William, about a man hospitalized for manic happiness, expands the idea further. In the liner notes, Voelz writes of Step Off the Roof, “There was a news story of protesters blocking entrance to a clinic, forcing girls to climb a ladder to enter through a second floor window. What if she skipped the procedure and turned and induced her abortion by jumping off the roof onto the protesters below?”.

She can be solemn, but none of it feels depressing or dour. It’s actually breathtakingly beautiful—somewhat like Mazzy Star’s languid sensualtiy crossed with Andrew Bird’s spritely, tight-rope dancing virtuosity. Dreamy—like so many things back then tended to be. The arrangement and production for such a small album are spectacular. Seductive, swooning melodies (rich and velvety with deep purple hues) are cloaked in mesmerizing, atmospheric guitar drones that swarm around the more distinct core of Susan’s breezy voice and the bright solar flare of her violin. She has a way of pinning a hook to your eardrum (especially in Taka Looka Round and Step Off the Roof) and the rare ability to sing about discrete, concrete things in a tender, personal way while at the same time holding them just far enough out of reach to analyze it like a butterfly impaled on a needle.

1. I have a theory (which is mine), which is that “The 90s” actually comprised a period from about 1988 (the year of the first Pixies’ album) to about 1994 (around the time Curt Kobain killed himself. Not that Curt “owned” the 90’s or that his death caused its downfall or anything, but it’s as good a date as any, and my memory of the period is of things going downhill fast after that). At least, this was the in-between time period for the cultural highlights of my in-between generation. Yes, other stuff (soul-deadening effluvia) happened in the 90s “the decade”—boy bands, nu-metal, rap-rock—but those things didn’t belong to “The 90s”.

2. No, I’m not saying that feminism is dead, just that the media has wholly fallen for the backlash.

3. In fact, a lot of activism was in response to the wave of home-grown, Christian terrorism directed at abortion clinics in the late 80s and early 90s.

4. Doing some research online^4a, I notice that Gillian Anderson emceed in 2001. *nerdgasm*

4a. I also see that Stone Temple Pilots once played Rock 4 Choice, despite having recorded Sex Type Thing, which was totally rape-y. I know Scott Wieland later claimed it was an anti-rape song, but I find it nearly impossible to get over the first person perspective and the fact that there’s nothing in the song to undercut his point of view. There’s probably a whole other post that could be done just on the subject of male bands writing what they think of as anti-rape songs that identify with the rapist instead of the victim. Just off the top of my head, there’s NIN’s Big Man with a Gun, and Nirvana’s Polly and, of course, Rape Me. Polly at least, puts the creepiness of the narrator front and center (whereas Sex Type Thing just makes STP sound creepy), and could be read (if you were thinking of writing a term paper on it) as alluding to the inability to have true sexual equality in a patriarchal society. Rape Me, on the other hand, with its cop from the Teen Spirit riff, just seemed to be Curt going off on his hatred of fame and what mass media did to his art, which is pretty trivializing of actual rape victims.

5. There is none. When one side believes women have the right to make their own decisions about their health, their lives, and their bodies—and the other side thinks of women as less human than a clump of cells, as people who deserve to be punished for their sexuality, and who have no interest in the needs of children once they’re born—I can’t imagine what we could possibly have in common. There is no compromise to be made on women’s rights. You either believe they have them or they don’t, and the anti-choice crowd is not going to stop until they’ve overturned Roe v. Wade. And after they’ve accomplished that, they’re going after Griswold v. Connecticut, so stock up on birth control now.

6. There’s an excellent article on the history of Rock 4 Choice, its place in the 90s alternative culture, and the withering of mainstream feminist activism here.

I still wonder why everyone stopped wearing Doc Martens.

Crashing

Girls at Our Best. Pleasure.

2011-01-28T15:00:00.001-06:00

Teen sexual health and information website Scarleteen is starting a new project to help young people find or recommend quality doctors. It’s called Find-A-Doc. Scarleteen founder Heather Corrina explains:

We all know one of the best ways to find quality sexual healthcare and other in-person care services is by asking people we know and trust for a recommendation. But that can be difficult, especially for young people: so many are either ashamed about sexual healthcare and other related services, or are afraid that disclosing they’ve had care will result in a breach of their privacy. Many young people don’t even get care they need in the first place, so don’t know anyone to refer someone else to, especially in areas where services are limited or where seeking out services presents a profound personal risk.

We know you can’t always get a good recommendation in-person, so we’re aiming to build the next best thing

Readers can use our new online tool to find out who Scarleteen users around the world have gotten great care from that they’d personally recommend, and see listings of care services our staff, volunteers and allies know to be bonafide. Or, you can enter your own review to help others find services they need from providers you know are great, or add your review of a provider or service to an existing listing. If you’re a service provider, you can enter information about your clinic, center or practice and it will be published for review. Any of the above can be done anonymously, so no one has to worry about privacy.

The project covers doctors and health facilities that provide sexual and reproductive healthcare, STI/STD testing and treatment, birth control and emergency contraception, pregnancy testing and all-options counseling, abortion services, pre-natal care, obstetrics and midwife services, counseling, therapy and support groups, trans gender and gender-variant services, LGBTQ services, teen specific services, rape/abuse crisis services, and shelters and crisis housing. You can also target your search for non-English speakers, disability access, and cost. The plan is to make this worldwide, so if you need a doctor or have one to recommend, head on over there.

And now on to the album at hand.

An unjustly forgotten classic, Girls at Our Best’s sole album falls somewhere between post-punk, twee pop, and new wave—combining elements from Siouxsie-style artiness to Gang of Four’s punk-funk to general power pop, with the occasional nod to disco, music-hall, and surf rock thrown in to boot. It’s a delightfully fun romp from a period when young bands were willing to try on whatever random sound struck their fancy.

Formed in Leeds in 1979, the band (actually featuring only one girl) played the scene without much success and were about to break up when they saw an ad for a recording studio offering half-off rates. Their resulting single was released on Rough Trade and managed to go to the top of the indie charts, as did their follow up. In 1981, the singles and b-sides were collected together as an album (reissued here with some additional tracks, and available again as an expanded album from Cherry Red) after which the band wandered off, never to be heard from again.

It’s punk/new wave with a light touch. Their sunny exuberance and choir-girl falsetto clearly set the tone for later C-86 bands like Talulah Gosh, Flatmates, and the Siddeleys. Like the Au Pairs, a lot of their songs can be read as humorous, somewhat feminist critiques of politics, pop culture, and capitalism, but they don’t have as coherent a philosophy and they’re putting more of their energy into writing pogo-riffic melodies.

Just a note of warning: The lead single, Getting Nowhere Fast is intentionally cut off before the end of the song. It kinds of bugs me when bands do that, but whatever.

Pleasure

Can. Ogam Ogat.

2011-01-19T16:00:00.000-06:00

It rolls up joints,
It won’t disappoint,
It’s rockin’ the back of your van.

It’s a hot messy funk,
Smells better than skunks,
It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s Can.

Can

Seefeel. Quique (Redux).

2011-01-13T11:00:00.000-06:00

In 1916, Russian Futurist painter Vladimir Rossiné invented the Optophonic Piano, an electronic instrument that created sounds and projected colors and patterns through a series of painted glass discs. Most likely, it sounded like shit. But if you could do such a thing correctly, and had someone like, say, Helen Frankenthaler or Agnes Martin or Bryce Marden been responsible for the layers of plates, then you might have gotten something quite beautiful. Something like Seefeel.

Formed in the early 90’s as dream pop was just beginning to discover electronics and samples, Seefeel melded My Bloody Valentine’s lush fuzz with Aphex Twin’s serenity into a mesmerizing pulsar of languidly revolving beats, rubbery bass lines, and looped guitars. Approaching the idea of techno from the standpoint of a rock band, and using its instruments to replicate and interpret that sound, they stretched dream pop out like ribbons of taffy, endlessly folding it over and over on itself until it became a moebius strip of glassy-skinned candy.

Like looking through a glass clockworks, their compositions reveal themselves by adding and subtracting layers of sound, with different elements rising to the surface or slinking off into darker depths, with only the slightest of glows to remind you of their presence. Chord and tempo changes are kept to a minimum, so the songs float along as the textural, ambient equivalents of Op Art. It’s better than sonic wallpaper though—it’s more like the dizzy buzz of butterflies in your stomach, or the blissful space between orgasms and sleep.

I seem to remember referencing the Cocteau Twins ambient experiments before and I was planning on doing so again here, when I noticed that Seefeel member Mark Clifford produced those remixes (on the Otherness ep), which is probably why this album feels so familiar. The second disc includes remixes and alternate takes that push the songs further into pillowy, endorphin-flushed, Terry Riley territory.

CD 1
CD 2

My Favorite. The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

2011-01-11T18:00:00.000-06:00

The ghosts of dead teenagers sing to me while I am dancing.

Speaking of nostalgia, I was a total classic rock snob in high school. If the band hadn’t existed prior to 1970, I wasn’t interested. There were occasional cracks—an REM tape inherited from a friend, an abiding love for The Cars (who I still think were highly underrated, despite being popular)—but for the most part, I listened to The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Simon & Garfunkel, and Buddy Holly. I considered dance music the bane of my existence. Groove Is In the Heart was wildly popular during my senior year, and I wanted to stab it in its shiny, happy face. As a teenager with insufferable hippie pretensions, there was nothing I hated more than mindless happiness. I reveled in miserabilism and wanted my music to do the same. If it wasn’t whiny, depressive navel-gazing then it wasn’t about anything, maannnn. So fuck you guys coping through communal ritual and physical ecstasy, because I’m going to my room where I am a rock, I am an island. (I’m reminded of Robyn Hitchcock’s line that “It’s the privilege of youth and beauty to hate themselves”).

Thankfully, Fuchsia introduced me to all sorts of 80’s alternative, goth, and college rock, and eventually the power of a good beat was more than I could resist. It was a revelation—I could dance and be depressed! Now, of course, all the best dance music carries sadness in its heart, even at its most escapist. My Favorite understood this dichotomy perfectly and crafted an elegiac love letter to those intense days when it felt like everything in the world could break your heart, but you still really wanted to dance and get laid. So now I’m nostalgic for a band creating meta nostalgia for a scene that I had no interest in when I was actually living through it.

Michael Grace lives in a scintillating twilight world of gray New Order melodies and Andrea Vaughn has the sort of cool, clear, schoolgirl voice you used to find on Sarah Records releases. They understood the comfort of being sad, but they also found the humor in it. Their lyrics are positively littered with throwaway couplets of bitter wit: Loneliness is pornography to them but to us it is an art. They won’t read your biography , these men, they will only break your heart…Your darkness is brighter than all the lights in the disco tonight…The streets were crawling with vampires, because after your shelf life expires you’re not a kid, you’re a monster…I spent five years in the infirmary but he never sent me letters. He only sent me dirty polaroids…I wear her dreams like a badge, pinned upon the wrong uniform...

The standout is the devastating Homeless Club Kids (especially the Future Bible Heroes remix on the second disc). Over a beautifully melancholy melody, Andrea eulogizes the lost kids trying to escape the daytime world through a new type of family on the dancefloor. The kids see themselves as “indivisible”, but Vaughn can see their eventual doom (whether through actual death or the eventual death of all youthful dreams). Like a less jaded version of Pulp’s Sorted for E’s and Wizz, Homeless Club Kids can’t help but wonder: Are you a shimmering, transcendent beast moving as one organism, or just a bunch of awkward kids in a warehouse basement? Well, both probably, just as Vaughn both mourns their loss while wishing she were one of them. As the song fades out, she’s walking home with their voices still in her ears, “and they’ll be sad and young forever, and I cry until I throw up.”

CD 1
CD 2 (remixes)

Tearist. CDR.

2011-01-07T18:00:00.000-06:00

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. ~Albert Camus

Holy fucking fuck. This.

A Siouxsie-Salem-Suicide goth freak-scene making out with the memory of the Cocteau Twins, trying to find out what really made Elizabeth Fraser’s voice quaver so ecstatically. Yasmine Kittle (really) bleats round, aching, bruise-black moans and screams over sticky-fingered synth fugues and clittery-clacking subway-track beats. It’s dark and powerful and flushed with sex.

I keep thinking, goddamn, why doesn’t anybody make music like this anymore? Not “like this” in the sense of sounding like the bands I think they sound like—although that counts, too—but “this” in the sense of a band that arrived just for you, that says here I am, singing in your voice, even if you cannot make these sounds. Something that can infuse you and take over your DNA. I can barely remember the last time I fell fucking hardcore for a band. Maybe it’s my age; maybe I listen to too much music to be intimate with any one album anymore, but this makes me want to string up Christmas lights over our bed and commence with the gettin’ it on.

Digging for music is looking to find your true heart. Or to rediscover it, to bare your chest to a melody’s dart, slipped like a needle through your red heart and suturing you with long, swooping silver threads, a riotous fray of impossible roller-coaster loops and knots strung like telegraph wires to passing clouds and buzzsaws and dizzy helicopter-seedlings and fractured cups of papershell eggs and fingernail clippings and nothing at all and nothing more so than (and above all) Fuchsia.

Memory is a graveyard of carefully stowed cardboard boxes and index cards; things you’ve snipped off with shears hoping to preserve. But I still want them in me. I stop the world. I melt with her. I pull out my web of veins and peel them back like I’m unrolling an elegant glove, until it hangs like a mirror from my fingertips, and press the tips and tracery into the ground, or into the mossy, crushed-velvet cave between her legs,

(legs, hips and arms smooth and taut as a sapling, her gamine body, the pearlescent skin of a crepe-myrtle draped around a tangle of antlers, her scapula and pelvis revealing themselves in subcutaneous parabolic swells like waves in the ocean, and at the apex of her inner thighs, two creamy divots like the first scoop from a clean spoon through a freshly opened box of vanilla ice cream)

but every pulse and fluid surge between us ticks off another perfect sphere of unrecoverable time—glass candle grenades strung like morse-code crystals on chandelier strands stretching back into the inky black nebula of a startled squid’s ejaculate—time making its slipstream getaway the moment it’s been noticed.

I worry that I am succumbing to nostalgia. Things used to be different and I was used to that. But it’s still the same (and new) every time.

I need to hit play again.

Tearist

Hovercraft. Live. Unknown.

2010-10-04T11:00:00.000-05:00

This was on the flip side of the Mercury Rev show posted below. Whoever sent it to me didn't record where or when it came from. Judging by the accented voices you can hear at the beginning, this was recorded somewhere in the UK, which probably dates it to 1999 as that was the only year they toured in England (outside of one London show in '97).

There's some tape hiss, but it's quickly drowned out by Hovercraft's ear-scouring levels of demented noise (There may be a good way to remove ambient tape artifacts, but whenever I've tried it, it just leaves the rest of the audio sounding clippy. Besides, as Cat and Girl have said, tape hiss is the only authentic sound).

Hovercraft preferred to improvise live, lurching and swaying between mid-century, abstract industrial training-film music and reverberating, psychedelically mechanistic interstellar overdrive. It could be the soundtrack for a very destructive ballet about a belligerently drunk, hyper-jointed, giant robot stumbling down a dark alley.

Hovercraft

Mercury Rev. Astoria Theater, London. 11/2/93.

2010-10-01T11:00:00.001-05:00

A volcanic upwelling of psychedelic magma. A slow motion film of Neil Young crashing the Death Star face first into the unicorn sequence from Fantasia. A circus of jelly-bodied squid wobbling around the ring on unicycles, cards fluttering in the spokes.

It's the David Baker years, when a slippery black-light liquid ran thick in their veins. Back then, they could even out-flame the Lips.

1. Very Sleepy Rivers
2. Syringe Mouth
3. Something for Joey
4. Chasing a Bee
5. Meth of a Rockette's Kick
6. Boys Peel Out

Astoria

Update 10/7/10: VoltronsHead made a video for Meth of a Rockette's Kick, which you can now sample below.

Les Rallizes Dénudés. Tachikawa. December 17, 1976.

2010-09-28T16:05:00.000-05:00

Despite LRD's explosive aural and visual assault on their audiences, Takashi Mizutani was never a flashy singer, usually sounding instead like a lost spirit on the verge of revelation, wandering in an existential forest of his own making. This must have been a happier night, as White Waking is positively poppish, and even the trademark, brain-scouring levels of white noise are uplifting. There's still plenty of menace, like the way the bass stalks Mizutani throughout Flames of Ice, but even there the crackling guitar lead eventually outstrips it, swelling with light and enveloping the once dark forest.

I've written before about the nihilism of LRD's music, but my point is that it's a benevolent indifference. They would never do anything so gauche as to rock you like a hurricane. Similies are for chickenshits. They are a hurricane, but not metaphorically, either. The kind that sees you leaving with a mic stand blown through your cranium (OK, that may not be benevolent. But you buys your ticket, you takes your chances). Thy're as close as you can get to safely watching elemental catastrophe as performance art.

Like the vast majority of the Rallizes' output, this is of bootleg quality (although they may be the only band for whom that works in their favor), but whoever recorded it must have been sitting in the auditorium's sweet spot. The separation is great, and you can tell the instruments apart for once. It's almost like listening to them in widescreen. The guitar comes through really well, and you can actually hear the notes Mizutani's picking out (I particularly like the spirited run towards the end of Angel). And whoever was playing bass for them that night really knew how to lay that shit down, which is a whole new dimension for them.

The vertiginous, see-sawing Heat Wave—powered by a surprisingly confident, stomping bass line and some great rock drumming—finds Mizutani leading them all to fantastic new heights, thundering along like a herd of naked biker hippies, straight into the sun. It's one of his all-time best moments—the sort of thing that raises the hair on the back of your neck and makes your heart catch in your throat. You know without a doubt that this was one of those songs that took over a crowd, instantly transforming them into a solid, beastly, interconnected mass of head-banging, transcendent abandon. It'll make your soul explode.

Dream finishes things off by melting back into a tense, worrisome, brittle space. A dream askew with shadows and twigs. The forest closes back in, and the white light streamers slither and shake back into the darkness. It's an inversion of where they started with White Waking and the perfect end to the night.

Tachikawa

The Field Mice. Sensitive.

2010-09-25T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 018
Released: February 27, 1989
Tracks:
01: Sensitive
02: When Morning Comes To Town

Sensitive

Au Pairs. Playing With a Different Sex.

2010-09-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

A bit of queer feminist reggae-disco punk-funk for your weekend. Have The Gossip covered We’re So Cool, yet? They should.

Like Gang of Four, The Au Pairs made authoritative, tight, and imminently danceable songs that rocked their politics just as hard as their grooves. Lesley Woods sang with a smoky, snarky, blues voice and played a twitchy guitar that she used to scratch up the hollows of the throbbing, syncopated punk rhythms. They wanted to take over the world, or at least the pop charts, but disappeared after two albums.

They aimed big while revolutionizing the small. Unlike a lot of political-with-a-capital-p bands, their politics were personal, honest, funny, awkward and unflinching. They weren’t telling anybody what to think, or even what they thought. They were just dramatizing situations and roles, and left it up to their listeners to make the connections to larger contexts. Most of their lyrics address power hierarchies, whether between romantic couples, governments and people, or even within bands. The mixed genders of the group and their use of Jamaican dub aesthetics were both ways to bypass and test the flexibility of those levels of authority. Simultaneously playing with and ignoring sex and gender (sort of like The Raincoats), they mixed it up with everyday stories of the negotiating that goes on in all types of relationships.

Come Again (banned by the BBC) looks at the way even the most private of spaces and moments are fraught with competing demands and sympathies. There’s nothing more transcendently fun than an orgasm, but here (even progressive) women have to be aware of the pressures on them to perform for their partners—it’s only polite—and sometimes fake it; even when they want it, even if they know their partner is trying, especially when they don’t and he isn’t. And what about feeling like you have to because you’re a new woman who changed the rules, and has sex on your own terms—because those women always have orgasms, now, right? Just thinking about it can throw you off your game, even when things had been going well. An allmusic review patronizingly called their songs “hectoring”, but Come Again rocks like crazy and ends with this hilarious and all too recognizable chorus:

Is your finger aching? I can feel you hesitating.
Is your finger aching!?!
Yes, thank you, I got one. Yes, it was nice.
Yes, we should go to sleep now. Yes, yes it was fine—
We must, we must do it again sometime. We must—
Yes, but I'm tired. Cum again? Wot?
Shit, I forgot to put my cap in!

The album came out at a time when the British government was busy ignoring rising levels of Fascist youth violence directed at Asian and Pakistani communities, gay clubs, feminist spaces and performers—anything not white and right wing. At the same time, the government was torturing female IRA prisoners (many falsely accused) while maintaining a public face of innocence. In Armagh, Lesley calls out the way torture and rape are used as tools of governments and patriarchies, both of whom hide behind professions of belonging to a higher order that couldn’t possibly be guilty of those things. We don’t torture / We’re a civilized nation / We’re avoiding any confrontation, Lesley mockingly chants throughout the song.

I wish she were still around today. In just under thirty years, “We don’t torture, we’re a civilized nation” has mutated from denial to excuse to justification. “We’re civilized people, and civilized people don’t torture, therefore all that stuff you’ve seen and heard about that looks like torture isn’t.” It’s become a hallmark of right wing discourse to argue in bad faith and to claim that the horrible thing being done isn’t really happening, and even if it is, they’re just doing it to protect you. Witness the disingenuous claims that anti-choicers don’t hate women or want to punish their sexuality. Why, no! They love women so much, they’re taking away their rights and choices so they don’t make any of those stupid decisions women (especially poor women) are likely to make when there isn’t a man around to tell them what they really want. Right now, in the US, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) is trying to make the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal Medicaid funding for abortions services) permanent law. As it stands, it’s a budget item that gets voted on each year (which is bad enough, and has been going on for 34 years), but making it permanent law would have the effect of making abortion coverage illegal for low income women on Medicaid, federal employees, and military women. It would also effectively end abortion coverage in private employer policies, and endanger life-saving emergency abortions at state and local public hospitals. If you live in the US, visit this link to The Center for Reproductive Rights, where you can write to your Congressional representative and tell them to oppose this act.

Playing

Outer Limits Recordings. Foxy Baby.

2010-09-22T14:05:00.001-05:00

As my girlfriend is fond of saying about a certain genre of my music collection, “this sounds like something you’d listen to”. And it is. Originally released during the microsecond the Outer Limits Recordings website was operational (so presumably the work of Sam Meringue. See also: Wingdings), Foxy Baby has been reissued on lovely marbled pink vinyl by Not Not Fun. It’s officially described as telling "the strange, fragmented story of a young weirdo artist who has an encounter with an exotic otherworldly woman (the titular Ms. Foxy Baby), becomes obsessed, loses her into the cosmic blur of the city, then slips backstage at one of her shows to find her, where they mysteriously share a final cigarette while staring out across the metropolis’ skyline, then ascend into a holy void of alien lights”, but unless that story line is inscribed somewhere in the wax itself, I defy you to figure it out from listening to the album.

It’s always intriguing how much this stuff evokes the 80’s without ever sounding like any specific part of it. It’s synth-pop by way of Ariel Pink and James Ferraro; a tumultuous mulch of new-wave sounds, answering-machine beat-boxing, trippy FX, and the speed of submerged highways specially built for talking Camaros. A Xeroxed copy of a memory. It’s the music of apocalyptic sci-fi movies that only appeared on late night Canadian TV channels, flavored by the scaly rust of industrial decay under neon light. Fitness video grooves and phazer fire commingle and jumble while squeezing through wormholes into desert supermodel dimensions. I can never tell if anyone is actually making these sounds or if they’ve just been found and subjected to some mysterious process that involves dubbing them through millions of generations of cassettes dug out of the back seats of abandoned cars.

Foxy Baby

Buy it from Not Not Fun

The Housemartins. Glastonbury 1986.

2010-09-21T14:45:00.000-05:00

A little companion piece to yesterday’s demos. Here’s the Housemartins opening the main stage on the last day of the 1986 Glastonbury Festival. That year also came with The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, The Pogues, Madness, The Brilliant Corners, Nightingales, The June Brides, Robyn Hitchcock, The Go-Betweens, and Half Man Half Biscuit, among others. If only time travel were possible.

Glastonbury

The Housemartins. Themes For The Well-Dressed Man. Demos.

2010-09-20T17:15:00.001-05:00

A very early demo tape from everyone’s favourite purposefully dorky, sincerely sarcastic, Christian Marxists. Also includes some tracks from a BBC session.

1. All Men Are The Same
2. When Will I Be Released
3. Skatsburg
4. Swansea
5. Singapore
6. It's History
7. Time Spent Thinking
8. The Day I Called It A Day
9. Taxi to Singapore
10. Caravan Of Love (live)
11. He Ain't Heavy (live)
12. Heaven Help Us All (live)

Themes

Elf Power. Treasures From the Trash Heap.

2010-09-10T16:05:00.000-05:00

I quite often describe bands as being the equivalent of some hypothetical cross-breeding of their influences. It’s rarely true and can unfairly diminish the singularly unique elements they’ve created. So without discounting the fact that Elf Power really are something wholly more and better than the sum of their antecedents, I think it’s fairly possible to draw an accurate, if inverted, phylogenetic map of their sound.

Really, it’s only because of how secure they are in their own identity that they can be so successful when revisiting the songs of their heroes. It’s why Nothing’s Going to Happen¹ is one of their best albums, and possibly the best representation of what they do, despite being made up entirely of covers. The Flaming Lips, Brian Eno, R.E.M., T. Rex, Wire, Sonic Youth, Jesus and Mary Chain, Roky Erickson, Robyn Hitchcock, The Buzzcocks, The Byrds, Hüsker Dü, and The Misfits all find some expression in Elf Power’s perfectly balanced mixture. Maybe it’s because their own songs—filtered and soaked in so many different elements—can function like a simultaneous mixtape that it’s so easy to like the band. They’re clueing you in to where they’ve come from and what they’ve loved along the way like your older sister sending you back all the cool bands she discovered in college.

This album was only available at their Back to the Web tour, and collects pretty much everything they’d done that never made it onto an album, or was only available as part of some other compilation you didn’t have. As an obsessive collector, I have to commend and thank them for really doing this type of album right. I want it all, and they’ve put it on here. Demos, more covers, a few live tracks, a remix, and a number of songs that just never saw the light of day. And they’re all really, really good. Historical Ant Wars rules. Back to the Web was a bit of a return to their old sound after a few albums that had found them stepping away from their early dive-bombing buzz, but Treasures From the Trash Heap is an even better encapsulation of the early days (although it covers every period). Like R.E.M.’s similar Dead Letter Office, it’s like getting to rummage around in your favorite band’s junk drawer. Without the pressure to create a coherent album, everything just reverts to being its own weird type of fun.

1. Temporary Arm (country version)
2. Face in the Sand (demo)
3. Feel a Whole Lot Better (Byrds cover)
4. Dandy in the Underworld (T.Rex cover)
5. Another Face (demo)
6. Hole in My Shoe (demo)
7. All the Same
8. Rise High Giant Fly
9. Historical Ant Wars
10. Empty Pictures (demo)
11. Princess Knows (Olivia Tremor Control cover)
12. Invisible Men (demo)
13. Dark Circles
14. Underneath the Bunker (R.E.M. cover)
15. Arrow Flies Close (live at Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto)
16. Blackbirds
17. Invisible Men (techno version)
18. Run Through the Forest
19. I Know I
20. Spiders
21. It's Not Cold
22. Reuters (Wire cover, live at Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto)
23. Honey (Spacemen 3 cover, live at the Landfill, Athens, GA)
24. The Slider (T.Rex cover)

1. Actually, A Dream In Sound and Creatures are the pinnacle of their work, but Nothing’s Going To Happen seems to hit right in the middle of what they’re usually aiming for.

Treasures

Anorak Girl. Plastic Fantastic.

2010-09-01T11:10:00.000-05:00

If it weren’t for the references to the Spice Girls and Tamagotchi, and the fact that they claimed to be a Helen Love cover band, you could easily believe that this long lost bit of casio-powered pop had danced its way out of the band’s bedroom back when twee was going all electro. Even the name is an obvious nod to the scene’s choice of outerwear.

As it is, they showed up out of nowhere in 1996, released two singles and promptly disappeared. No one’s entirely sure who was in the band (There’s some speculation it involved Helen Love members in an even goofier mood, or a spoof perpetrated by the Reading UK band Cuckooland. Another bio claims they were from the Isle of Wight, so who knows). Whoever they were, they left some adorably twee disco tunes full of chirpy, sparkling keyboards, punk guitar, and heavenly vocals.

To give you some idea of how cartoonishly fun they were, I’ve half convinced myself that Andrew WK stole the thrashing keyboard/ guitar intro and rousing horn section from the chorus of Cybersex.

Plastic Fantastic

Dolly Mixture. Peel Session. August 7, 1979.

2010-08-31T11:00:00.000-05:00

1. A Dream Come True
2. Ernie Ball
3. He’s So Frisky
4. New Look Baby
5. The Locomotion
6. Theme From Dolly Mixture

Germs of Youth records has put out a limited vinyl reissue of Dolly Mixture's Demonstration Tapes, hand stamped and signed by the band. They're only making 300, so hurry.

Peel Session

Another Sunny Day. Demos.

2010-08-30T11:15:00.000-05:00

1. Eternal
2. Her Friend
3. I Guess I'm the One Who's To Blame
4. I Want You
5. It's OK if You Don't Want Me
6. The Boy from St. Ives
7. What's Wrong

Demos

The Golden Dawn. George Hamilton's Dead.

2010-08-28T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 017
Released: 1989
Tracks:
01: George Hamilton's Dead
02: The Sweetest Touch
03: Let's Build A Dyson Sphere

George Hamilton

Great Lakes. Great Lakes.

2010-08-27T11:00:00.003-05:00

From back when references to “the collective” meant Elephant 6, not Animal.

Actually, The Great Lakes were on Kindercore, but this album does feature most of of Montreal and Elf Power in guest spots, and Robert Schneider of the Apples In Stereo produced it. In fact, of Montreal’s Jamey Huggins was an official member of both bands, and when I first encountered the two groups playing a double bill, nobody seemed all that concerned with which one they belonged to. At one point, this enormous hillbilly-looking guy (wearing nothing but overalls and a beard) wandered out of the crowd, climbed onto the stage and played a gorgeous French Horn solo. I assume he was friends with the band, but they were weird times.

Of Montreal had just put out The Gay Parade and were having a lot of fun onstage with wild costume changes and confetti, but the Great Lakes put on a more musically powerful set with great, blooming swirls of well orchestrated psychedelia. If you were into the Athens scene at the time, you know that this style was not exactly in short supply, but while the Great Lakes shared a common chemical makeup with the rest of the collective, they cooked the ingredients with a little more care. None of these songs spiral out into the directionless abstractions of Olivia Tremor Control, nor do they share the latent prog tendencies of the Apples, or of Montreal’s penchant for twee storytelling. A bit like The Essex Green crossed with The Zombies, their songs are buoyant affairs built on vivid layers of swaying melodies that float and drift like an early morning dream. Storming and Become the Ship have a nautical flair, and An Easy Life and Virgil recall the Beatle’s habit of incorporating British music hall elements in their psych-pop (it occurs to me nearly every song on here echoes the relaxed footfalls of that band’s Fixing a Hole or Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, which is a pace I have no problem keeping up with). Elsewhere, A Banana’s gentle synths sigh and flutter like a leaf tumbling through the cool fall air.

It’s a non-stop parade of elegant, sunny pop and retro joy, and although they never achieved the (relative) fame of their scene-mates, it’s still some of the best music the Elephant 6 had to offer.

Great Lakes

The Driscolls. The Complete Recordings.

2010-08-26T13:05:00.001-05:00

Update 9/8/10: I've uploaded a new copy of the file and redirected the link. If any of you still have problems with it, let me know.

Other than a skeletal entry on Tweenet, there's not a lot of information about these guys to be found. I'm pretty sure they were from Bristol, and a several of their singles were released by Tea Time Records, a label they started with one of my favorite lost bands, Mousefolk. Like a lot of 80s indie groups, they seemed to exist mostly on compilations, appearing on at least fifteen different tapes (including Airspace II, Are You Ready?, Corrupt Postman, and Something's Burning In Paradise). They have a 60's garage pop sound that can fall anywhere between the Kinksian Mrs. Jones to the walloping Call Me Anything. Groovy Little Town was probably their biggest "hit", and like most of their tunes it's a total earworm.

I love that they haven't even bothered to even change their set dressing between these two videos (probably couldn't afford to).

Girl, I Want You Back

Groovy Little Town

Complete Recordings

Acid Mother's Temple & The Cosmic Inferno. Iao Chant From the Cosmic Inferno.

2010-08-13T11:10:00.000-05:00

For some unfathomable reason, iTunes lists this as being Responding to the Treasures of Faith from the album, Staying On the Road to God. That may not be too far off. Kawabata Makoto has often paid tribute to his musical heroes and fellow travelers by adapting their music to his own transcendental wavelengths. He’s built entire albums around Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra and Terry Riley’s In C. Here, he goes a step further, turning Gong's Master Builder into an epic shamanistic journey of heavy-metal astral-projection. It's like the Boredoms' Vision Creation Newsun being possessed by early Hawkwind. Introduced by an unaccompanied chorus of solemn Buddhist chants, the track quickly explodes out of the gate with the furiously head-banging "OM Riff", never stopping to look back for the next fifty-one minutes.

If you're new to the Acids, this might be a relatively safe introduction. Their trademark layering of spacey electronics, rocket powered riffage, and propulsively thunderous drumming is all here, but where they can occasionally wander off into aimless, free-form chaos on record, this comes the closest to capturing their rapturous live sound. On OM, their path to religious ecstasy is pretty well plotted. Although they take the opportunity to travel from space rock through prog, Celtic and Asian folk influences, ambient drone, and full-on psychedelic racket, they never meander. Each section evolves naturally out of the previous one. Oliver Sacks wrote about the way migraines arrive fully formed, but distant. The whole experience is there, but it's like watching it approach from the horizon until it envelopes you. Similarly, the various styles the Acids traverse are all inherent in the preceding sections. They're just drawing them out as they go along.

Recorded in the midst of line-up changes, the band takes the opportunity to sum up their deep history as well as use Gong’s source material to propel them into new territories. Elements of their outer-space freakouts have been stripped down to their essential bits and channeled through the OM Riff’s monster-sized bad-assery, imbuing them with a singular vision and sense of purpose. Kawabata is unquestionably a guitar god, although his usual style has little to do with the specific notes he's playing. It's all about the feel of the song, or more accurately, channeling whatever he's feeling—which is probably something like growing to be 5000 feet tall and reaching through the heavens to grapple with the infinities of atom-smashing, burning star cores of the universe. When he’s really on, he can make you feel it too. By the time the OM Riff crashes in again for the final third of the album, it’s pulled elements of all the preceding movements along in its gravitational wake. This is the true sound of the Cosmic Inferno. Kawabata’s soloing like a maniac, his controls set for the heart of the sun. Higashi Hiroshi’s electronics could be an Aurora Borealis of scintillating scotomas; or just as likely, you’ve gone subterranean, and what you thought were shimmering stars was a wildly writhing mass of glowworms. And Shimura Koji and Okano Futoshi power the entire trip with their dual, hammer-of-the-gods drumming.

This is pure, glorious, brain-melting exhilaration all the way, and easily one of the top five albums in the Acid’s sprawling Temple.

Here's the original version by Gong. Now imagine that stretched out for nearly an hour and played by Dr. Manhattan on an LSD freakout.

Iao Chant

Ifwhen. Null Set.

2010-08-11T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sometime after posting All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavor’s Turning Into Small, I got an email from guitarist Merc letting me know that he and drummer Brian Doherty had a new band called Ifwhen. Actually, they’ve been around since 2003, but they do have a new EP that’s available as a free download from their website. I’ve got it linked below in mp3 format, but if you head over there you can also get it in FLAC, plus download their cover of Syd Barrett’s No Good Trying.

Ifwhen doesn’t sound exactly like ANL&LF, but it does sound like its natural progression. The shoegaze and post-rock elements have become very compressed, and the songs are more jaggedly three-dimensional. There’s a geometric feel to it, as if they aren’t playing melodies, but unspooling the schematics of theoretical architecture from an AUTOCAD machine that’s just finished reading House of Leaves.

The logic/programming implications of their name become readily apparent in the multifaceted intersections of sound and direction. Each song is a maze of possibilities being explored simultaneously. It verges on noise, but like ANL&LF, Ifwhen is always revolving around and reflecting a solid pop core through its many twirling prisms. It’s the Everlasting Gobstopper of ear candy. It’s still highly disorienting—psychotically (psychedelically) schizoid, like listening to Barrett, Belong and Melt Banana all at the same time—but they really are working to fuck your shit up for your own good. They’re trying to change your perception.

And they can do it, too. Unlike most post-MBV bands, Ifwhen don’t compose based on volume, or reverb, or textures, or shades of color. They aren’t feeling things out improvisationally, they’re reconfiguring the actual internal structure of the music. Keyboardist Mary McDowell can actually play in two different time signatures (one with each hand) at the same time. And Merc’s guitar has a way of constantly folding in on itself like origami that never resolves into known shapes. Everything is oblique without being obfuscatory. The hidden song structures will slowly crystallize on repeated listens as you learn to navigate their psychohedron space.

Null Set

Another Sunny Day. What's Happened?

2010-08-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 016
Released: 1989
Tracks:
01: What's Happened?
02: Can't You Tell It's True?
03: Impossible?

What's Happened?

V/A. Wig In a Box.

2010-08-05T10:30:00.001-05:00

The Religious Right Can Suck My Left One.

In honor of yesterday's victory for equality in California, here's the incomparable Hedwig and The Origin of Love.

I once spent an entire evening standing next to John Cameron Mitchell at a Breeder's concert thinking, "Hey that guy looks familiar. Do I know him from somewhere?", and then he climbed on stage and they tore through Angry Inch and I felt like a dork, especially since I missed the opportunity to ask him if he autographed body parts.

The Breeders, along with a slew of alternative icons¹ contribute covers and tribute songs to this wonderful little compilation that benefited the Harvey Milk School for LGBTQ youth. And as much as I love the original Origin, I think Rufus Wainwright may have recorded the definitive version. Also, if I ever became president, I would put all my effort into reuniting Sleater-Kinney and possibly getting them to make Fred Schneider at least a semi-permanent member of the band.

OK, all my effort after ensuring that LGBTQ Americans had full equality under the law. The ruling striking down California's bigoted Prop 8 is a great and important victory, but unfortunately it's still only another small step towards truly egalitarian civil rights. The pro-hate crowd will continue to fight this until it ends up in the Supreme Court, where real justice is iffy at this point. You can help by joining with or donating to groups like The Courage Campaign, Freedom to Marry, the Human Rights Campaign, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

1. Frank Black, Robyn Hitchcock, The Polyphonic Spree, Spoon, Imperial Teen, TMBG, Cyndi Lauper (who absolutely tears the roof off on Midnight Radio), Yo La Tengo, Yoko Ono, etc.

Wig In a Box

Tunnelrunners Update

2010-08-03T14:42:00.002-05:00

Madoc Roberts—leader of the rip-roarin’ DIY punkers The Tunnelrunners—contacted me to let me know that Sing Sing is considering a release of their remaining songs, though nothing is certain yet. If you have a record player, go and order the Plastic Land seven inch and let Sing Sing know there’s an audience waiting to hear the rest of their material. With their incredibly catchy melodies and adrenaline-fueled playing, I’m astonished these guys aren’t remembered as punk superstars. Even today, it’s one of the best releases I’ve heard all year, so don’t let them down this time.

Tunnelrunners on myspace

Wake Ooloo. Stop the Ride.

2010-07-30T11:00:00.000-05:00

The last Wake Ooloo album, in case anyone was waiting.

Stop

James Ferraro. Marble Surf.

2010-07-27T11:00:00.001-05:00

If you're unfamiliar with James Ferraro...remember the guys in high school who planned to start a band and then change their name for every release, and it didn't matter if anyone knew how to play an instrument? James Ferraro actually did that. If he's most well known for anything (and he isn't), it's probably The Skaters. As a "solo" artist, he's had more identities than it's worth listing here. He's probably the only person who's more prolific than Acid Mothers Temple. You could spend a lifetime trying to track down all of his releases and never be sure you'd found them all, or if they were even the right ones. It can be pretty hit or miss, too, depending on your patience for lo-fi, scrambled tape messes of wasteland-psychedelic samples and alchemical keyboards and random noises that sound like they were rescued from a box of betamax tapes. That whole alternate 80's universe that bands like Wingdings, Sun Araw, Dolphins Into the Future, Infinity Window, Matrix Metals, et al are floating in? James invented it. I think he's kinda genius, but it's an acquired taste.

Except for Marble Surf. This is simply the most endlessly beautiful thing I've ever heard. In a post-post-Eno way, he's composed a slow-motion, ocean-sized waterfall of washed-out angelic choruses, watery steel drums, and dreamy synths that repeat the same basic structure for forty minutes (there are two tracks, but they're essentially the same piece of music). Eno proposed the idea of "holographic" music that would be indistinguishable from any other part of the recording no matter where you started listening to it. Marble Surf does it in a way that's gorgeously, almost psychedelically hypnotic rather than ambient.

At first it might seem like he's just set a brief snippet of music on repeat, but as you get drawn in it's clear that he's actually playing this. Musical cues come in at slightly different points on each loop, making it sound shiveringly, shimmeringly alive and organic, like light sparkling on water. Even when new instruments do arrive, it's so subtle and matched to the grand astral pageantry of the whole that you hardly notice they weren't there before. It's a cloud-floating heroin-basted rimjob from jesus in a Terry Reilly calypso dream. It's J.S. Bach for the polaroid-transfer, new-age tapes set. It's weightless and epic and magnificent and ecstatic and transcendent all at once, and it's the best fucking thing I've ever heard.

Marble Surf

St. Christopher. You Deserve More Than A Maybe.

2010-07-24T11:00:00.001-05:00

Sarah 015
Released: February 27, 1989
Tracks:
01: You Deserve More Than A Maybe
02: The Kind Of Girl
03: The Summer You Love

Maybe

The Scrotum Poles. Revelation.

2010-07-23T11:00:00.000-05:00

I assume that when you've named yourselves The Scrotum Poles you're not expecting chart success, or that many bookings (of course, you could say the same thing for The Butthole Surfers, and things turned out OK for them). I figured it was a riff on The Sex Pistols, but the band claims the name came from a book called The Choirboys. I'll let you write your own Catholic Priest joke.

They did pretty well for themselves considering they mostly recorded in their bedroom to two-track tapes. The one time they went into a studio proper, the sound engineer realized that all their instruments were incorrectly tuned and spent the afternoon putting them to rights, only to be forced to detune them when the band couldn't figure out how to play their songs in the proper key.

I first heard them on one of the Messthetics compilations where their song Pick the Cat's Eye's Out was one of the clear standouts. (I should point out that "cat's eyes" are what the British call highway reflectors, and that the band is not singing about blinding helpless kitties.) According to the band, they found the lyrics written on the back of a set list left behind by another group, Bread Poultice and the Running Sores. Yes, I'm sure that sort of thing happened all the time back then.

The record starts out with a great bit of down-tempo post-punk melancholy, Why Don't You Come Out Tonight, which puts me in the mind of Seventeen Second's strumminess. Then there's Night Train, which may or may not sound like a cross between LiLiPUT and the Swell Maps. After that they go pop, and they do it really well. There's the aforementioned Cat's Eyes, and sing-along Helicopter Honeymoon. Radio Tay rounds things out with some straight up punk.

It's all brilliant. Like most DIY bands, they make up for lack of skills with outsized enthusiasm, but even beneath the poor recording equipment (and residual vinyl pops and crackles) it's obvious they knew how to write a great pop song, which is no simple thing.

Here they are charmingly acting like a bunch of adorable dweebs.

Revelation

The Tunnelrunners. Plastic Land.

2010-07-22T14:00:00.001-05:00

Formed in 1977 and broken up by 1981 (to return to college like so many others before and since—damn you, higher education.), The Tunnelrunners barely played any gigs (most people stumbled into their shows by accident), and sold about twenty records (the last one to show up on ebay went for something like £700). Thankfully, someone found a copy and reissued five of their raw, hang-on-tight masterpieces.

Plastic Land, especially, features some fantasticly joyous guitar lines soaring through the lo-fi fuzz and rhythmic thrash. Bright and sharp and melodic, it makes me think of the sound you'd get if you played the evolution of C-86 in reverse and steered a course that took the attitude and songcraft but not the cuteness into early punk. It's rather Buzzcocks-y now that I listen to it again (especially Words, which must have been written with that band in mind). I Can, You Can, Fall In Love has that sweet-tart punk buzz with just a dash of the Beatles to throw you off the scent. They were more DIY than punk anyway (the lead singer had decidedly unpunk long, shaggy hair and a mustache, although this was the glorious period before punk came with quotation marks around it), but far more talented than most of that scene. Every one of these few songs is just perfect and makes me wish they'd stuck around longer and recorded more.

What a rush. I fall in love with it even more every time I spin it. Copies should still be available from Sing Sing records. Only six bucks!

Plastic Land

Robyn Hitchcock. Invisible History.

2010-07-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

1. Astronomy Domine
2. Outlaw Blues
Recorded 1980 at the Hope and Anchor. Also on Two Halves for the Price of One.

3. Postman's Knock
Recorded at the Portland Arms, November 1978. Left off Live at the Portland Arms album.

4. Look Into Your Mirror
Companion Piece to Of a Walnut, which eventually surfaced on 1976-81. Session recorded in 1977 in Robyn's living room.

5. Smoothie
Underwater Moonlight outtake.

6. Innocent Boy
Possible outtake from aborted 1978 Radar album.

7. The Man Who Invented Himself
Different mix from original test pressing of Black Snake Diamond Role.

8. Nightride to Trinidad
9. Kingdom of Love
Disco remixes by Steve Hillage.

10. Listening to the Higsons
Portastudio recording from 1982. Drum machine programming by Vince Ely of the Psychedelic Furs. B-Side to Eaten By Her Own Dinner 7".

11. Dr. Sticky
B-Side to Eaten By Her Own Dinner 7".

12. Surgery
Fegmania era outtake.

13. Calvary Cross
Live on 1986 US tour.

14. Legalized Murder
Globe of Frogs outtake.

15. Ruling Class
Queen Elvis outtake. Peter Buck on guitar.

16. More Than This
17. The Ghost In You
18. Birdshead
Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop, July 1988.

19. Fairplay
20. Linden Arden Stole the Highlights
Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop, May 1991.

Invisible History

Christine's Cat. Your Love Is...

2010-07-03T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 013
Released: July 1989
Tracks:
01: Your Love Is...

Your Love Is

Best Friends Forever. Romance Conflict Adventure.

2010-06-30T11:00:00.000-05:00

Oh my god...You guys?...Seriously... Ohmygod....

I think there is an excellent chance of this being your new favorite band. Yes, they’re cute and amateurish, but cute and amateurish in a way that's actually totally awesome. These were the girls in high school that you always wanted to hang out with, but they already had so many secret handshakes and insider jokes and possibly their own language that you never managed to get that close to them, even though they really weren’t trying to exclude you. They would have been theater nerds if theater nerds weren’t so insufferable. They’re dramatic, but they know being dramatic is hilarious. And now they’re here to let you in on the joke.

Jes and Bri have known each other since they were wee lasses, and have been making music together since the eighth grade in Minneapolis. They actually started out as a semi-emo, Smashing Pumpkins inspired instrumental rock band, although in their current form you would think they spent their childhood listening to K Records and the Unicorns. All the songs are indeed about romance, conflict, or adventure and they are also quirky, ramshackle, and silly—and yet completely heartfelt.

Handpocket employs the always welcome, but underutilized glockenspiel (it’s the new cowbell!), and rhapsodizes about inviting your paramour to casually feel you up in public. Also, you will learn that both of the singers nearly died in childhood ice fishing accidents. It’s incredibly catchy, especially the way they sing PUT PUT PUT PUT Put your hand in my back pocket during the chorus.

Ghost Song explores the existential and physical problems of dating the non-corporeal, and sexily implores their see-through boyfriend to “put [his] ghostly tongue in my mouth and move it all around and around”. Don’t laugh, spectrophilia is a real condition and sounds like one of the most inconvenient sexual fetishes of all time.

Eisenhower is the Father thanks the prez for building the interstate highway system so that years later she could travel cross country with her crush, and even if they had an accident it wouldn't be so bad because maybe they'd end up sharing a hotel and see each other in their underwear.

Actually, I shouldn’t have said they were amateurish earlier. The first couple of times through you're too busy laughing at the last cheeky line to notice that the bass playing is wickedly propulsive and detailed, the drums are rocking, complex, and far more creative than you hear from most professional bands, and the organ can effortlessly switch from roller-rink funk to cartoonish glee depending on what's called for.

Jes and Bri work crazy well together (as BFFs would), trading lines, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes stepping all over each other, occasionally belting it out like an out-of-tune opera star. They have incredible chemistry, which is really what lets the band pull off what would otherwise be novelty songs in the hands of lesser mortals (It's practically impossible for a band to be funny but not gimmicky). They make it sound as simple as if they got the directions off the back of a soup can.

Romance Conflict Adventure

Wake Ooloo. What About It.

2010-06-28T14:30:00.000-05:00

I really like this one. I tend to fall for albums that have a bit of sprawl and eclecticism to them rather than a purity of vision (I’ll take the Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and Wish over Disintegration any day). There are more rooms to wander into and explore. Part of the shifting stylistic focus is due to other members of the band taking a shot at the songwriting, so if you liked Dave Weckerman’s Yung Wu project, you’ll get a little more his unique vision here (the dude has some pretty odd lyrics, and his voice is even more informal than Glenn’s). I think it’s also probably unfair to listen to Wake Ooloo at this point expecting to hear another Feelies album. Of course, it’s hard to escape the memories, what with Glenn’s flatter-than-Lou-Reed voice, and a couple of songs do sound reminiscent of the slower moments on later Feelies records, but for the most part, this is its own beast. The rocking parts rock harder than they used to, and the poppier bits are usually just out for a nice stroll. There’s a nice mixture of lackadaisical slide guitar, country blues, classic rockisms, and garage burners.

What About It

Field Mice. Emma's House.

2010-06-26T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 012
Released: December 1988
Tracks:
01: Emma's House
02: When You Sleep
03: Fabulous Friend
04: The Last Letter

Emma's House

Sex Church. Dead End/Let Down.

2010-06-25T11:00:00.001-05:00

It seems inevitable that a goth band would eventually name themselves Sex Church. I'm just surprised it didn't happen twenty-five years ago. The genre was already awash in religious/erotic iconography (I used to have this sweet t-shirt that combined a medieval painting of the Virgin Mary with a similar painting of Jesus in such a way that made her look both topless and intersex), and everybody knows goths like to make out in graveyards and old churches. Even a large contingent of my non-goth friend’s stories of their first time begin with, “So, I was away at church camp…”

Dead End rides a stomping, Bauhausian bass line out of the gloom before wading knee-deep into a black pool of fuzz and feedback. From there it takes off on an endless, mesmerizing blanket of deep purple tones and crushed velvet vortexes. Chiming guitars skitter and pluck at silver threads while the rest of the band ascends a hypnotic Spacemen 3 riff that becomes the song’s driving force. At the last minute, they suddenly perform a graceful swan dive and explode into a joyful chorus of Jesus & Mary Chainisms. The B-side is more gloom and dirge; smeared lipstick to the a-side’s electric tangle of bird’s nest hair.

Sex Church is made up of former members of Catholic Boys, Vapid, and Ladies Night, none of whom I am familiar with, although I notice that Nick G was in The Tears.

They have a new EP out on Convulsive Records, too.

Sex Church

Pink Floyd. A Sucerful of Outtakes.

2010-06-24T15:00:00.000-05:00

The Syd Barrett estate is putting together a visual history of Syd’s artwork as well as a treasure trove of unpublished photos from his youth and early years in Pink Floyd. The vast majority of these images have never been seen before. If enough people are interested, it will all be published as a large format, cloth-bound, slip-cased, limited edition collector’s book. Right now, though, not enough people have signed up to make it worthwhile for the book to be published. If you think you might like a copy, head over to the Barrett Book website and register your email address. You are not ordering or promising to buy a copy by registering, you’re just letting them know you might want to.

To put you in the mood, here’s a collection of early Floyd recordings, including the extended version of Interstellar Overdrive and Syd’s last songs as part of the band, Vegetable Man and Scream Thy Last Scream.

1. Lucy Leave
2. I’m a Kingbee
3. Interstellar Overdrive
4. Astronomy Domine
5. Experiment
6. Flaming
7. The Gnome
8. Matilda Mother
9. The Scarecrow
10. Vegetable Man
11. Pow R Toc H
12. Scream Thy Last Scream
13. Jugband Blues
14. Silas Lane

Tracks 1 and 2—First Pink Floyd studio session
Track 3—Studio session, 10/31/66
Track 4—Live in London, 5/12/67
Tracks 5 and 14—Studio outtakes, 1967
Tracks 6 through 9—BBC session, 9/30/67
Tracks 10 through 13—BBC session, 12/19/67

Promo video about the book

A video for one of my all-time favorite Syd songs, Bike, that the band shot for Belgian TV

A Saucerful of Outtakes

Bikini Kill. Revolution Girl Style Now. The Demos. Plus a Peel Session.

2010-06-23T14:00:00.000-05:00

Kathleen Hannah could scream like nobody’s business. I’m talkin’ a hyper-tantrum wail that could pierce walls, lies, ignorance, ideologies, and indifference. She could sing it sweet, too, when she wanted, and the band could more than equal her furious, explosive energy or turn it down to 11 for some laid-back indie sing-alongs. This is movement punk—where the Riot Grrrls traded in anarchy for feminism—angry, articulate, fearless, and playful. Rebel Girl could put up a fight with any other punk song ever recorded. They were out to save lives; to reclaim the “radical possibilities of pleasure” when surrounded by rape culture; to define cool on their own terms in their own voices; to make their own noise, write their own stories; to be the subjects, not the objects of history. They channeled the transgressive, cathartic energy of punk into REVOLUTION GIRL STYLE NOW! If you’re a teen girl, don’t go another day without adding them to your collection. If you’re anybody else, you need to hear them, too.

Punk rock feminism rules, Okay?

Revolution

Wake Ooloo. Hear No Evil.

2010-06-22T15:00:00.000-05:00

Glenn Mercer loosens up and floors it down a twisty road leading somewhere between the Feelies, Tom Petty and Felt. It sounds like Glenn just wanted to crank it up and rock his socks off while Dave walloped the drums. There’s still plenty of the Feelies’ texture and knotty guitars, but louder, coarser and unplanned. It almost feels like you’re listening to an unknown Feelies album, but one where they were weary of being so uptight and precise and said “Awfuckit. Let’s just play.”

Hear No Evil

Exuma. Exuma.

2010-06-21T14:15:00.000-05:00

I’m an obsessive music collector, driven by the fear that somewhere out there my favorite band exists, and I haven’t heard them yet. Exuma may be that band. I stumbled across them on some random internet music blog and was absolutely floored by their power. It was like hearing your earliest, great musical discovery again for the first time.

Now, this is unquestionably a weird album. It could be the soundtrack to some grainy, underexposed “documentary” of dubious voodoo rituals that nobody quite understands. And yet it doesn’t sound at all unfamiliar. It’s a sing-along, dance-along album of strange and beautiful afro-calypso-soul-folk-voodoo-blues that will chill you to the bone and light a bonfire in your soul. It sounds like Ritchie Havens singing Paul Simon songs arranged by Dr. John over the underworld’s PA system. Oh, and they’re all zombies, and every spirit of the in-between is there to sing and chant and mourn and praise and keen right along side you in a fever dream of exhilaration and joy.

It’ll get under you r skin and stay there.

Exuma

Ministry. Jesus Built My Hotrod.

2010-06-14T14:00:00.000-05:00

Ministry never did anything for me, which is fine because Gibby Haynes fucking owns this song anyway.

Two versions plus a Ministry b-side.

Jesus!

The Trypes. The Explorer's Hold.

2010-06-11T11:00:00.000-05:00

The first of many side projects, this little ep is probably closest to their "classic" nervous sound. Aside from the lovely, Brenda sung opener (which sounds more like future Speed the Plough material), there's the requisite cover (the Beatle's Love You To, which seems like such an obvious fit I'm surprised it took them this long to get to it), and two songs that sound like outtakes or demos from Crazy Rhythms.

Explorer's Hold

Yung Wu. Shore Leave.

2010-06-10T13:00:00.001-05:00

Another of the Feelies' alternate incarnations, this one features Glenn, Bill, Stan, and Brenda along with recent Feelies addition, Dave Weckerman. John Baumgartner, from The Trypes and Speed the Plough, is also along for the ride.

Actually, this was Dave's side project. He takes lead on vocals and wrote the songs, but with Stan Demeski's characteristic rolling toms, Brenda's rich bass leads, and those wonderfully humming, intertwining guitars, there's no mistaking the band. Recorded in between The Good Earth and Only Life, it's a rootsier affair packed with all the shimmering, strumming, sea-faring folk-rock you've come to expect from a Feelies' side project. They cover both Neil Young and Brian Eno, and the album as a whole sounds a bit like what might happen if the latter produced the former. I guess they got out all their pent-up nerves on Crazy Rhythms.

I've yet to be disappointed by anything Feelies related, and this is definitely one of their more charming and beautiful affairs.

Shore Leave

Speed the Plough. Speed the Plough.

2010-06-08T13:30:00.001-05:00

Speed the Plough were one of several bands that radiated out of the Feelies on-again-off-again period. Begun as The Trypes—featuring Glenn Mercer, Bill Million and Stan Demeski—they recorded a single, understated EP before disentangling once again, with Brenda Sauter defecting to join the reformed Feelies. The Trypes became Speed the Plough, with Bill Million contributing guitar and production duties. Multi-instrumentalist John Baumgartner, rock critic Jim DeRogatis, woodwind and percussionist Toni Paruta remained, along with Marc Francia, Frank O’Toole and Pete Pedulla rounding out the group and adding several more guitars and drums.

The result retains the influence of the Feelies’ rustic, atmospheric work on The Good Earth and adds cerulean horns and accordion drones, shifting the setting from the golden hour to the deep blue twilight just before inky darkness absorbs the day. It’s a drifting, pastoral version of the Feelies’ tightly-wound, prim psychedlia, and achieves a rich, bucolic beauty of the sort I think R.E.M. would have liked to make—but instead opted for repeatedly having themselves photographed standing around in fields of grain. In fact, this is exactly the album I would want to hear if I could spend the day drifting waist-deep in a grassy field, or rocking to sleep in a hearty wooden dinghy floating on silver ribbons of water through a sea of cattails.

Speed

Emily's Sassy Lime. Desperate, Scared, but Social.

2010-06-02T11:00:00.001-05:00

Another craptacular week where I'm not going to have any free time. Stealing this description from wikipedia. I'll just say they sound like Sleater-Kinney as teenagers:

Emilys Sassy Lime (a palindrome) was an all-Asian American teenage riot grrrl trio from SoCal, formed in 1993 by Wendy and Amy Yao, and Emily Ryan. According to Experience Music Project, they formed after sneaking out of their homes one night to see a Bikini Kill and Bratmobile show, striking up a correspondence with Molly Neuman, the drummer of the latter band. They didn't live very close to each other and didn't have cars, so they often had to write their songs over the phone, sometimes leaving seminal ideas for tunes, jingles, and melodies on each others' answering machines. When they finally did have a chance to record, they did so on a singalodeon, a cheap off-the-shelf lo-fi tape recorder. They barely ever practiced (often forbidden from doing so by their parents who considered their studies a bigger priority), making their sound a random, spontaneous indie garage punk-noise collage of "Whatever, just play." They didn't have their own instruments for years, so with every show they played, they had to borrow someone else's in the DIY punk spirit of sharing, often swapping with each other carelessly and making every show sound totally different.

In 1995, they all appeared as dancers in the Kathi Wilcox-directed "Mad Doctor" video for The PeeChees, and they broke up the following year when they finally graduated from high school and attended separate colleges. In 2000, they all participated in the very first Ladyfest in Olympia, the Yao sisters collaborating with Sharon Cheslow in the experimental sound installation performance art project of Coterie Exchange, and in 2003, Emily Ryan starred in one of Jon Moritsugu's critically acclaimed no budget guerrilla underground punk films called Scumrock. Amy Yao's been involved over the years with several different bands, frequently collaborating with Tobi Vail, and completed her MFA in sculpture at the Yale School of Art. Wendy Yao currently owns and runs a shop and DIY indie-punk artist space in LA's downtown Chinatown neighborhood called Ooga Booga.

Social

Noseflutes. Zib Zob and His Kib Kob.

2010-05-27T11:00:00.000-05:00

It’s been a busy week, and I haven’t been able to pay attention to the blog as much as I’d have liked, so here’s some more divine weirdness from the Noseflutes.

I keep asking “why aren’t these bands better remembered?”, but obviously this was never going to be top 40 music. Still, even by the standards of the weird and wooly British underground, the Noseflutes were wildly inventive and really managed to make their purposefully awkward, herky-jerky rhythms and Dada-soapbox vocals gel into compellingly hard rocking songs. They have the same deconstructivist aspirations as A Witness (but less sing-alongable) and the punk spirit of the Membranes (but less bludgeoning).

Eminent could almost (almost) be a Camper Van Beethoven song. Charms has some delightful steel drums. Spitball on My Kisser veers wildly between extremes with exciting, crazed, shrieking choruses. No Plans peeks over the wasteland at country-blues with a punk slide-guitar.

I was going to say they were an art-house version of the Ron Johnson bands, but that makes me think of something refined and winking, like Roxy Music. They’re really more art-studio, and this is kind of a masterpiece.

Zib Zob

Washed Out. Tour CD-R.

2010-05-26T11:00:00.000-05:00

We saw Washed Out with Small Black a while back, and I snagged this little tour-only CD of demos and samples and experiments at the merch table. Having only heard Washed Out’s split 45 remix of a Small Black song (which is excellent, btw), I was a bit surprised that his solo portion of the show was mostly a techno/rave type thing. It sounded nothing like the sun-bleached, Balearic “chill-wave” that I’ve since encountered by him on record. His portion of the set with Small Black was amazing, though. I loved the self-titled EP they put out, but (like Le Loup, who we saw a couple of nights later) they’re so much better live. Their endlessly yelping, pogoing, joyous, upwardly spiraling indie-tribal dance jams reminded me a lot of Animal Collective’s energy back around Sung Tongs. Anyway, I wish this little album were longer and more fleshed out, but only because what’s there is so sunny and good natured. It’s dance music for people in hammocks.

Washed Out

The Orchids. Underneath The Window, Underneath The Sink.

2010-05-22T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 011
Released: 1988
Tracks:
01: Defy The Law
02: Underneath The Window, Underneath The Sink
03: Tiny Words
04: Walter

Underneath

Vaselines & Beat Happening. Live in London. 06/16/88.

2010-05-21T11:00:00.001-05:00

Even with Kurt Cobain’s imprimatur (Nirvana covered three of their songs), the Vaselines remained primarily a cult phenomenon. Which is too bad because, they were the perfect noise-pop band, and recorded possibly the best records by any group from their decade. Short, catchy, cute and psycho, the Vaselines were classic indie-pop tweeness leavened with punk’s raw edge. They had a naïve, nearly desperate enthusiasm for their songs—all played with pure, guileless abandon and wads of humor. Like a Hello Kitty cut out of ragged sheet metal. Or being shot at with volleys of sweet tarts. If your favorite Velvet Underground songs were the Moe Tucker ones…that fragile sweetness backed up by a band that could explode into vicious feedback at any moment, then you need the Vaselines. You can sing along with them even on the first spin, and you’ll never get the songs out of your head again.

Their friends in Beat Happening had nearly sub-levels of technical skill, were completely ambivalent about tuning, melody and key, and sang casually obsessive songs about teenage love and lust (We tip over apple carts / With the pounding of our hearts, runs a typical lyric). Calvin sounded like an indie-geek version of Barry White and Heather’s voice was achingly sweet in a way that made you think of cardigan sweaters and kittens (without also making you want to throw up). Somehow or another, they ended up playing a lot of hardcore shows with bands like Black Flag or Fugazi, and during their sets handed out candy to the bewildered audiences. They elevated naiveté to an art form.

They also wrote some of the most indelible and influential music of the last twenty years—from twee, acapella laments of unrequited love, thumping, two-chord rockers (also about crushing on a guy or gal who is currently going out with someone who isn’t you), sweet catchy pop about the timelessness of an Indian Summer, and aggressively noisy musical scribbles (again, with lyrics that were probably scrawled on a torn scrap of paper and pushed through the holes of your girlfriend’s locker).

This adorable tape finds them both playing together in London, with some hilarious between song asides.

Live in London

Secret Shine. After Years.

2010-05-19T12:05:00.000-05:00

Secret Shine devoured When You Sleep like an overripe orange, and now its viscous juice and glistening pulp sweetens their lips and sticks to their fingers. It’s gone viral in their DNA, and they’re pushing it back out through their pores. Loveblind (sample it below) is simply unfuckwithable. It doesn’t matter if they’re simply MBV devotes. All the shoegaze bands were (to the point where a MBV comparison is meaningless in telling you what they sound like. To expand, Secret Shine sound a bit like a warmer Lush with elements of the Cure’s Disintegration and a bit of the Pixies or the Jesus & Mary Chain’s spikiness). All that matters is how universally awesome they were at it.

After Years collects the Ephemeral and Loveblind singles, the Untouched album, and the Greater Than God EP, and places them all in chronological order so you can hear them progress with each song. Born as indie popsters in the classic Sarah Records mold, Secret Shine always wrote the songs first before worrying about the atmospherics. That they ended up being quite good at it didn’t overshadow the fact that you could have loved them in any genre.

After Years

Pigbros. Peel Sessions.

2010-05-17T14:30:00.000-05:00

8/21/85
1. Cheap Life
2. Hedonist Hat
3. Lick Bones
4. War Food

5/6/86
5. Bad Attitude
6. In Doubt
7. Immensity Home
8. What Counts

Peel Sessions

My Bloody Valentine. Loom. Vancouver. 7/1/92.

2010-05-12T11:00:00.001-05:00

Amazing facts about My Bloody Valentine:

Since its release in 1991, Loveless has been played on a continuous loop through underwater speakers, inspiring certain erotic feelings in cetaceans, and is single-handedly responsible for the resurgence of the Humpback Whale population
Before being mastered, the original tracks were beamed into space, bounced off the rings of Saturn, and then filtered through a device that mimics the sound of dragonflies on absinthe.
Loveless sounds the same in every known alternate universe.
Early copies of the album came with packets of Dramamine to counteract wooziness.
Not that I would know, but under certain influences you can actually listen to the album just by looking at the cover.
The band was named after an unsuccessful Bing Crosby Christmas special.
At least one track was created by dropping magnetic recording tape through the Aurora Borealis.
Vinyl copies of Loveless actually contain minute trace amounts of love, Pixie Stix, and Kevin Shields’ pocket lint.

Loom

The Birthday Party. Peel Sessions.

2010-05-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

The only hits the Birthday Party ever landed were to their audience’s guts. “Dangerously unhinged” barely begins to describe their mutant hybrid of punk, goth, funk, improvisational jazz and psychotic-sleaze-blues.

The band seemed locked in a death-battle with melody, thrashing and throttling the life out of it, often sounding like each member was playing a different song to the others. Meanwhile, Nick Cave strutted and preened like a demonic carnival barker daring you to buy a ticket to the most depraved freak-show around.

Their bared-teeth wit and gleeful nihilism sound like nothing else ever attempted. “Wherefore art thou, babyface?”, Cave screeches, summoning the haints and voodoo-dollies that haunt the roots of rock and outlaw country—spavined vinyl gods out for a final, delirious spin.

Peel

The Springfields. Sunflower.

2010-05-08T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 10
Released: July, 1988
Tracks:
01: Sunflower
02: Clown
03: Are We Gonna Be Alright?

Sunflower

Sway. The Millia Pink and Green.

2010-05-06T11:00:00.000-05:00

Information on the band is almost nonexistent. The website listed on the album has disappeared, and the band itself abruptly and inexplicably changed names a number of times. As far as anyone knows, they’ve broken up, which is too bad as this seems to be regarded by those who like their pop dreamy as one of the best shoegaze albums of the decade (admittedly, there probably aren’t a lot of bands still working in this category).

Instead of following MBV’s swarming, electron-honeybee buzz, Sway tend more towards the blissful, liquid pigmentation of Slowdive, Chapterhouse, and Lush. Their waterfall guitars are blurred and melted like those super-saturated polaroids of flowers that used to show up all the time on fffound.

Short and sweet.

Pink and Green

All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors. Turning Into Small.

2010-05-05T11:00:00.000-05:00

Although it’s fair to say that All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors sound like an exquisitely realized cross between My Bloody Valentine and Stereolab, they’re actually more interested in shaping and manipulating those waves of feedback and distortion into a kind of frazzled, cubist space-rock rather than solid sheets of blissed-out headspace. Eschewing classic shoegaze’s supposed avoidance of straightforward melodies, they compose their swells of woozy, stomach-ache synths and guitars as “actual” songs, slipping in subtle instrumentation, psychedelic washes, and shuffling funk beats amidst the syrupy speaker-drippings. Your Imagination could be the blueprint for A Sunny Day in Glasgow, and Lattershed totally makes out with New Order. The whole album feels like being swept under in a threatening but majestic riptide.

Small

The Ecstasy of St Theresa. Susurrate.

2010-05-04T11:00:00.001-05:00

Inspired by the divinely orgasmic states (in which she was bodily pierced by a flaming spear) described by the 16th century mystic nun, The Ecstasy of St Theresa take their namesake to heart, attempting either to replicate that holy delirium or inspire it through clouds of angelic vocals dissolving in a volcanic barrage of tremoloed guitars.

Apparently, they’ve long since switched to an ambient/techno sound, but in early 1992, they were reinterpreting Isn’t Anything era MBV as a Dvorakian noise symphony. As possibly the only shoegaze band in Czechoslovakia, The Ecstasy of St Theresa received what little attention they did after recording a session for the omnipresent John Peel. Even that didn’t translate into much success, and this album sank without a trace only to be rescued from obscurity nearly a decade later by the indispensable Clairecords.

Aside from the obligatory MBV references, The Ecstasy of St Theresa share plenty of DNA with Dinosaur Jr. and Catherine Wheel—pitching their blurred, thundering songs down a wind-tunnel of melodic, emotional shifts. They’re drowning you in sound, but they always keep their ear on the “big moment”, finally climaxing with the reckless, free-form maelstrom of Absinth. It may not be the most innovative or original recording of the shoegaze era, but it’s definitely a classic example of everything that so often made the genre so transcendently great.

Susurrate

The Casual Dots. The Casual Dots.

2010-04-30T11:00:00.001-05:00

This quite often ends up being the album I put on when I can't decide what I want to listen to. It's cool-people-hanging-out music.

Christine Billotte (Autoclave, Slant 6, Quix*o*tic), Kathi Wilcox (Bikini Kill, The Frumpies), and Steve Dore (Deep Lust) create blithe, laid-back pop that’s lean and seductive. Produced by Fugazi's Guy Picciotto, the group weaves an indie-garage-lullaby out of a casually complex dual-guitar interplay, and a propulsive backbeat that lets Christina’s gorgeous, smoky voice lead the way.

They’re by no means folk, but the songs have a Woody-Guthrie-punk quality to them in their own indie-populist way. I would like to have attended the grade school that sang Mama’s Gonna Bake Us a Cake alongside This Land Is Your Land. Despite (or perhaps because of) years in the trenches, they managed to appear with a unique, fully realized sound that none of their previous bands would prepare you for. While genre-hopping from leftist punk, to classic blues (the marvelous Bumblebee), to surf rock instrumentals, they manage to stiffen everything up, giving it a backbone and a little swagger as it marches along with their own distinctive stride.

Dots

V/A. Cambodian Casette Archives. Khmer Folk & Pop.

2010-04-29T14:00:00.000-05:00

A wild and wonderful collection of Cambodian pop culled from mostly unidentified tapes found in the Asian Branch of the Oakland Public Library in California. Covering recordings from the 60’s through the 90’s, it’s a

blend of folk and pop stylings - Cha-Cha Psychedelia, Phase-shifting Rock, sultry circle dance standards, pulsing Cambodian new wave, haunted ballads, musical comedy sketches, Easy-Listening numbers and raw instrumental grooves presented in an eclectic variety of production techniques. Male and female vocalists share the spotlight, embellished by roller rink organ solos, raunchy guitar leads and MIDI defying synthesizers.

Despite the wide range, the album plays as a very cohesive whole, and it’s slinky, funky, and fun as hell throughout.

Cassette Archives

Noseflutes. Several Young Men Ignite Hardboard Stump.

2010-04-28T11:30:00.001-05:00

The Noseflutes had a more open sound than other death to trad rock bands. The bludgeoning density of Bogshed or The Membranes is replaced by an elaborate clockwork of rotating, interlocking musical tines that sound just as likely to poke you sharply in the eye as create a song. It’s everywhere as twisted and knotty and challenging as you would expect, and Martin Longley’s caustic lyrics and vocals take on a lot more prominence than you usually hear on these things. Elsewhere, they add a keening violin and spooky accordion to songs that constantly sound like they’re snagged on something and trying to pull free.

They manage to cover a lot of distinctive territory without making any of the songs feel repetitive. Like a lot of other bands in this genre, their weirdness seems to come naturally, which makes even the odder aspects easier to relate to. I never get the sense that they’re acting up just for the sake of it (even if the underground scene was a direct reaction to the “listless meringue peddlars” then ruling the airwaves). I think this is just how they hear things.

Several Young Men

Legs Akimbo on myspace

The Golden Dawn. My Secret World.

2010-04-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 009
Released: 1988
Tracks:
01: My Secret World
02: Spring-Heeled Jack
03: The Railway Track

Secret World

Palm Fabric Orchestra. Vague Gropings in the Slip Stream.

2010-04-23T13:00:00.001-05:00

Some of the best music I’ve ever heard came in snatches from passing cars, or fell from apartments, muffled and crumbling in the rich sonic mulch of the city.

This is the music that wafts through open windows. It’s a masterpiece of floating moods and textures that richly evokes the feeling of being adrift—in nature, in sleep, in life—calm, accepting, and sensual. Like feeling the pulse of the ocean making space in itself for the shape of your unmoored body. Vague Gropings in the Slip Stream works just as well as a review as it does a title. Its gentle, acoustic ambience drifts like dandelion seeds, or swells and ripples like prairie grass in the wind. It’s wordless, though not without vocals, and Susan Voelz’ violin works some kind of magic with Ellen Fullman’s “long stringed instrument”, weaving luminous drones throughout several songs (If you’re familiar with Volo Volo, that’s her playing on the almost otherworldly Entrance and Endtrance). And Frank Orrall’s guitar has the same kind of happy nonchalance that Mark McGuire has been playing with on his solo acoustic releases.

I should probably mention that this album was a side project of Poi Dog Pondering, one of my favorite bands when I was in high school and college. There were bands that I idolized (like the Cure or the Velvet Underground), and then there were bands that I would have actually wanted to be in, and being in Poi Dog Pondering sounded like it would have been one of the most exuberantly wonderful things you could do.

Orrall, who once portrayed "Happy-Go-Lucky Guy" in the film Slacker, managed to write incredibly catchy songs about how awesome being alive feels without any of them being the absolutely gag-inducing shit-fests that would imply. Also, a lot of the songs were pretty filthy (Pulling Touch, Diamonds and Buttermilk). It’s ridiculously happy stuff that doesn’t think feeling ridiculously happy is anything to be ashamed of. Irony doesn’t exist for Poi Dog Pondering. Even some of their best songs (Complicated and God’s Gallipoli from Pomegranate) put relentlessly danceable music behind tales of cancer and loss and death—not as a joke, but as an acknowledgement that eventually life will be your adversary, and that, although you want to live as much of it as possible, sometimes the only weapon you’ll have left against it is joy.

Slip Stream

Jackdaw With Crowbar. Hot Air.

2010-04-22T13:45:00.001-05:00

Hot Air splits nearly equally between absurdist, political, jump-cut, Dada wailers (A specialty on Ron Johnson. See also: The Membranes, A Witness, Pigbros, The Shrubs, The Noseflutes, and Bogshed. In fact, Tris King, Bogshed’s drummer was also in Jackdaw With Crowbar, as was Wilf from Dog Faced Hermans) and post-punk dub workouts assembled in Tom Waits’ junkyard. Weirdly, it works.

Their live shows were immersive multimedia events, with the band playing within projections of experimental films made especially for them. Apparently they’ve reformed, inspired by the ease and immediacy of laptop production (gigs in the 80’s often had to wait while their film maker spliced broken reels back together in the tour van), so look for their gigs if you live in the Leamington area.

Hot Air

Myspace

Website

V/A. The Rhythm of Rabies.

2010-04-20T16:45:00.000-05:00

This was a mix CD I made for my girlfriend a while ago. As much as possible, it’s fantastically unhinged garage bands, heavy on the rawk. I had intended it to be all women or female fronted bands, but I ran out about two thirds of the way through, although I think their contributions still come out on top. Shrag do a wonderfully snotty song about the horrors of pregnancy. The Cosmopolitans sound like a primitive B-52’s with a song about their giant cat. Shitt Hottt were exactly that. Miss Pussycat, of Quintron &…, is possibly my favorite singer, ever. Completely guileless. When, for no apparent reason, they throw in a verse of the Jefferson’s theme song, you’ll either be on your knees in awe, or giving them a standing ovation. If you ever get a chance to see them live, do. Miss Pussycat even puts on a puppet show.

1. Pregnancy Scene - Shrag
2. Bumblebee - The Casual Dots
3. Can’t Explain – The A-Lines
4. Wild Moose Party – The Cosmopolitans
5. Ungawa – Chow Nasty
6. Surfin’ Bird – The Trashmen
7. Bad Girl – The Detroit Cobras
8. Going Outside My Head – Thee Headcoats
9. Your Room – The New Rags
10. 1-2-3-Go! – The Violettes
11. Boxx Damage – Shitt Hottt
12. Cafeteria Rock – The Rondelles
13. Fly Like a Rat – Quintron and Miss Pussycat
14. Rockin’ Date – The Micragirls
15. What’s the Signal? – Fuck-Off Machete
16. Blew My Baby Away – The Tears
17. Jammin’ the Wedge – Bald Eagle
18. Snakebite – Them Wranch
19. All Across the World – The Fuse!
20. Whoyouknow – McLusky
21. Strong Mental Night – Guitar Wolf
22. Heat Lightnin’ – Tuscadero
23. Crackin Up – Moe Tucker
24. Run Cold – Holly Gologhtly
25. Don’t Know Why – Mr. Airplane Man
26. Emulsified – Yo La Tengo
27. Private Idaho – The B-52’s
28. NYC’s Like a Graveyard – The Moldy Peaches (full band electric version)
29. Mr. Chang – Cobra Killer

Rhythm Part 1
Rhythm Part 2

King of the Slums. Barbarous English Fayre.

2010-04-19T11:00:00.001-05:00

Sometimes the when and the where are just as important as the what. I first heard King Of The Slums on a Walkman as I wandered along a canalbank in Wigan through the teeth of a winter evening downpour. What I heard slotted into the moment perfectly. . . though I'd heard nothing remotely like it before.

Sour, twisted guitars framing austere power-riffs, a lone violin sobbing to itself on the outskirts of melody, and that voice; cold and desperate as an Ancoates drizzle, informing me that he would disappear up his own backside or end up breeding whippets.

'The Pennine Spitter', along with 11 other excellent reasons why KOTS are one of the most compelling bands on the planet, is here on this summation of the band's career to date. 'Barbarous English Fayre' is a rasping litany of tattoos, gasworks, shaving cuts and squeaking prams. A haunting, savage voyage into the underbelly of English life.

For England, and specifically the North, is the love / hate object they return to constantly. It's this obsession, and subsequent use of images like Britannia, The Union Jack and Enoch Powell, that has seen them occasionally smeared as fascists. This is a dim and insulting slur. KOTS sing of this country entirely without gloss and sentiment, without political hectoring but with an ironic and trenchant realism.

In 'Bombs Away On Harpurhey' they explode the myth of Thatcher's 'go for it' culture (as if it needed exploding) with a sparking, snarling grace. In 'Venerate Me Utterly' the shabby dreams of the luckless are evoked brilliantly. Love, ambition, failure, all are viewed with the same pitiless, sardonic eye.

The absence of a lyric sheet may prevent you from realising that Charlie Keigher is the best unknown lyricist in Britain. Ordinary phrases ('Mere slip of a lad', 'You're not much to look at') are invested with a new and menacing meaning while the music has an alien beauty all its own.

The new stuff is stunning. 'Up To The Fells' is as wild and sombre as its title. 'Full Speed Ahead' is their most powerful and direct statement yet. It might even be a hit. Ha!

Forget the Euro art-bores and the pimply Yank college boys, outside of the mainstream King Of The Slums are practically peerless. In five years' time you'll be claiming you loved them. So do it now.

Stuart Maconie, 1989 NME Review
Barbarous English Fayre

KOTS website

KOTS on myspace

Sea Urchins. Solace.

2010-04-17T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 008
Released: July 1988
Tracks:
01: Solace
02: Please Rain Fall

Solace

Sea Urchins on myspace

Sovetskaya Gone. Sovetskaya Gone.

2010-04-16T11:00:00.000-05:00

I came across this a couple of years ago and it instantly became of my favorites. Kevin Danchisko is a genius at creating endlessly fractalized abysses of cycling, shifting drones and golden tones. This self-titled tape coats blissful glacial fields with an analog glaze of synapse-frying, minimal psychedelia. Whether igniting a de-orbit burn into crackling, minimal dub space, or sending telegraph signals from the dream-like ambience of Twin Peaks, Sovetskaya Gone sounds like it’s choreographing a Skylab waltz among the stars. It’s music that exists only in crystal fracture planes—the sound of the infra-thin, that stretches to infinity when experienced head on but disappears entirely at right angles.

Look for an Ossining and Sovetskaya Gone vinyl outing on Digitalis in the near future.

Get Gone

Sovetskaya's Blog

Sovetskaya on myspace

R.E.M. So Much Younger Then.

2010-04-13T11:00:00.001-05:00

R.E.M. are right at the top of my list of Bands Who Have Wronged Me¹. Once arguably the greatest band on the planet, they have long since passed the point where my girlfriend now insists they died in a tragic plane crash shortly after the release of Automatic for the People. Sadly, the record company—not wanting to let go of a good thing—hired a bunch of look-a-likes and let them release a shitty faux-grunge/glam record (which, had he heard it, might have inspired Kurt Cobain to point the gun in the other direction). When it was clear that Monster was destined to pave landfills all across America, they dug around in the vaults and managed to drop the last of the original band's great songs (Electrolite, Leave) into an otherwise flat and annoying record. R.E.M. Version 2 trundled on, hiding their surrogate status by acting like such monumentally entitled assholes that no one would want to talk to them.

Fuck.

I remember before Monster came out that R.E.M. were talking about how they were going to put away the mandolins and string sections and just make a rock record like they would have done back in the beginning. Needless to say, Monster was not that record. This should have been that record. I remember being so excited, because I'd picked up this bootleg a couple of years before and knew how shit hot they were before they even had a record deal. So Much Younger Then captures them onstage sometime in 1981, probably at Tyrone's, absolutely destroying with a whole set of songs that never made it onto any of their official albums. I still can't fathom why they never put these out. Sure, Chronic Town and Murmur turned out to be masterpieces of new southern gothic, but these songs could have easily caused just as much of a stir had they been their first release.

So Much Younger Then exemplifies so much of what used to make R.E.M. special—fantastic tunes, a wicked sense of humor, and the ability to play like a band on fire. Just listen to them burn through these songs like they were already superstars. As great as they went on to be, they may never have topped this night.

Tracks²:
1. Body Count
2. A Different Girl
3. Action
4. Narrator (for the Jacques Cousteau Show)
5. She's Such a Pretty Girl
6. Baby I
7. Permanent Vacation
8. Wait
9. Scheherezade
10. Liza Sez
11. Mystery To Me
12. I Don't Want You Anymore
13. Little Girl
14. Dangerous Times

1. Also on the list, Belle & Sebastian, They Might Be Giants, Smashing Pumpkins, and Poi Dog Pondering. Currently "on notice"? Of Montreal. God, but that last album managed to suck and blow at the same time.

I'm not talking about a band who just isn't as good as it used to be (like The Cure, or The Breeders) that still insists on putting out albums that are sad shadows of their former selves. Bands Who Have Wronged Me have actively worked to destroy and deny all that once made me love them. I can forgive a band for running out of steam, for putting out a boring album, or just trying to cash in on past glory. But when a formerly great band decides to take a big steaming dump on their art, their legacy, and their potential, and then insist they're doing the greatest work of their career and that we should all be nicer to them...well, that just makes me enraged.

2. The back of the album lists one more song, A Girl Like You, but for whatever reason, it doesn't actually appear on the record. Supposedly there is a companion bootleg called Georgia Peaches—Ripe! that continues the show, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere.

So Much Younger Then

The Goodwillies. Greenmachines for All the Childrens.

2010-04-12T11:00:00.000-05:00

Tim Goodwillie is one third of (VxPxC). This is one of his solo releases, a washed out, sun bleached, outer-space groove decay of keyboard and guitar distortions. Digital fluff and flutter for the summer heat.

Greenmachines

Goodwillies on myspace

Another Sunny Day. I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist.

2010-04-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah 007
Released: July, 1988
Tracks:
01: I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist
02: Things Will Be Nice
03: The Centre Of My Little World

I'm In Love

The Field Mice. Demos & Peel Sessions.

2010-04-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

1. Life Without You (Demo)
2. As fas as I Can See (Demo)
3. And You Say You Don't Care (Demo)
4. In the End (Demo)
5. Any Minute Now (Demo)
6. From Here On In (Demo)
7. All I Do (Demo)
8. Loveless Love (from the Something's Burning In Paradise Again tape)
9. A Heart Disease Called Love (Demo)
10. Runaway (Demo)
11. Right as Rain (Demo)
12. I Really Don't Mind (Demo)
13. I Wish I Meant More to You (Demo)
14. Little One (Demo)
15. Can't Think Straight (Demo)
16. Anoint (Peel Session)
17. Sundial (Peel Session)
18. Fresh Surroundings (Peel Session)
19. By Degrees (Peel Session)

Demos Part 1
Demos Part 2

The Flatmates. Radio Sessions.

2010-04-06T11:00:00.000-05:00

Found these while digging through some old CDs. It was just labeled "radio sessions" but the last half of them have the distinct whiff of demos. I don't think New York City Surf Song has shown up anywhere else.

1. Thinking of You (Peel Session)
2. Tell Me Why (Peel Session)
3. Happy All the Time (Peel Session)
4. Love Cuts (Peel Session)
5. When I’m with You (Janice Long Session)
6. Everyday (Buddy Holly cover) (Janice Long Session)
7. I Wanna Be with Him (Janice Long Session)
8. My Empty Head (Janice Long Session)
9. Tell Me Why (1/86)
10. So In Love with You (1/86)
11. Crazy Town (1/13/86)
12. On My Mind (1/13/86)
13. Instrumental (1/13/86)
14. Femme Fatale (Velvet Underground cover) (10/85)
15. New York City Surf Song (10/85)
16. No Fun (10/85)
17. I Don’t Care (10/85)
18. Out of Love (10/85)

Radio Sessions

Les Rallizes Dénudés. Heavier Than a Death In the Family.

2010-04-05T13:00:00.000-05:00

Haters might say they only know one song, but Jesus Fucking Christ, what a song. They certainly play it like it's the only one anyone will ever need to know. Mizutani discovered how to mainline a migraine and make it a mystical experience. For a band that primarily exists as legend, it's a relief (and a wonder) to discover that they might be the only group that live up to (and exceed) the rumors.

The guitar is a thunderhead of coruscating, liquid white light; loud like nature. Mizutani's cool, detached vocals are so drenched and buried in reverb, they sound like they're being reflected off a thousand smashed mirrorballs. The bass and drums keep everything locked down by playing sub-genius to the guitar's solarized brilliance. Like—if a bass made only one noise that signified itself, if it were its own symbol on a one to one scale and whacking it with your hand made it say its own name; or hitting a drum made it say "drum" in its own hammer-stupid simplicity (not even like having found the primal groove or universal beat; just a satisfyingly, idiot simple thump). It's the Louie Louie oversoul.

Heavier Part 1
Heavier Part 2

Wingdings III. Symbol of Infinity.

2010-04-02T11:00:00.002-05:00

Much sharper and more rockist than most other neo-somnambulists, this is possibly the densest and most psychedelic of the three Wingdings releases. It's also my favorite. I especially love the Sha-Na-Na echoplex calliope 8:30 into Side A, followed by the partially sentient Commodore 64's built-from-memory approximation of The Association's Everyone Knows It's Windy. Side B is similarly awash in subliminal memories of tunes that have been peeled and re-fitted over Wingdings' unique framework (the best being The Walk/Japanese Whispers era Cure pastiche at 8:40), like an alien borrowing someone else's face.

Symbol of Infinity

Wingdings. Wingdings II: Zarathustra's Puzzle.

2010-03-31T17:50:00.001-05:00

So it turns out that Wingdings is Sam Meringue, of Matrix Metals and possibly Explorers and Flashback Repository. He also worked with James Ferraro on one of the 90210 projects. Wingdings I was pretty 1980s-radio-through-a-loop-delay-and-effects-pedal dipped in Lamborghini Crystal's beer, so that makes sense. Each of the subsequent Wingdings releases seem to develop more song-like structures. Wingdings II has a definite beachy feel to it—sort of like Rangers and Ducktails playing the Hokey Pokey at a roler rink on the boardwalk. There's so many layers of sound and I'm pretty sure they're referencing all sorts of cheesy, good-times songs (at the very end, they just space out on the Witch Doctor song. Oo Eee Oo Ah Ah, Ting Tang Walla-Walla Bing-Bang and all that) that have been processed through Dylan Ettinger styled memories of neon-lit futurescapes from bad 80s sci-fi films. It's quite enjoyable.

This one is by request for Glangel. Thanks for the email.

Zarathustra's Puzzle