V/A. Garden Party. Alienor Records.

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

V/A. Positively Teenage!!?.

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

Double Negative. Black Time.

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.

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

The Snivelling Shits. I Can't Come.

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

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

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.

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

Outer Limits Recordings. Foxy Baby.

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

Anorak Girl. Plastic Fantastic.

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

Another Sunny Day. Demos.

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

James Ferraro. Marble Surf.

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

Pink Floyd. A Sucerful of Outtakes.

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.

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

The Goodwillies. Greenmachines for All the Childrens.

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

The Field Mice. Demos & Peel Sessions.

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

Wingdings III. Symbol of Infinity.

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.

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

Joseph Spence. The Complete Folkways Recordings.

Joseph Spence played the guitar and sang. Sort of. He rarely seemed to know the words to the traditional gospel and folk standards that made up his repertoire, so he growled and grunted with an infectious, gravelly dirt road of a voice. His vocals bob like a fisherman’s floater, dipping and popping in the surf; sometimes leading the guitar, sometimes just harmonizing with it. He sings like a man constantly swept up in joy—his lyrics more laughter than words.

He was the master of one of the most idiosyncratic and inventive guitar styles ever put to tape. Tuning his guitar to his own eccentric standards and picking out counterpoints and rhythmic shifts that wowed and baffled professional musicians, he earned comparisons to improvisational masters like Thelonious Monk. No one has ever been able to replicate or equal him, and whatever it was he was doing, he did it with immense heart.

The effect is delightful and ebullient. It’s simply insane how good he is. You can’t feel bad while listening to him.

Download

Joseph Spence on myspace

Finally Punk. Casual Goths.

Erin Budd, Stephanie Chan, Veronica Ortuno, and Elizabeth Skadden play perky, spazzcore, freak-punk. Karen O and Beth Ditto are apparently big fans, although Finally Punk aren’t making anything as radio friendly as either the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Gossip. They’re more of a no-wave riot grrl outfit—in it for the gleefully ragged joy of playing your guitar like (or perhaps, with) a cheese-grater. Like the Vivian Girls crossed with Wavves crossed with a defibrillator, Finally Punk favor sharp bursts of dissonant, primitive lower-than-lo-fi noise. They cram twenty-six songs into just less than thirty minutes, and a shriek-tastic stab at Nirvana’s Negative Creep is the poppiest moment on here (it’s also excellent). Casual Goths is actually a collection of the band’s first three limited edition EPs, so you can hear them progress from primitive (but not alienating) roots to a more complex, (though still tangled-in-barbed-wire) anti-pop structure. The album is pressed on a beautiful slab of marbled raspberry vinyl, and comes with a CD of all the tracks, plus video footage of their on-stage mayhem. Buy it while you can.



Download Link removed. Go buy it, folks.

Finally Punk on myspace

Buy it from Germs of Youth records

The Haywains. Get Happy with the Haywains.

Real life has seriously gotten in the way of this blog recently, but I still want to get some posts up, so I stole this write-up from The Haywains' myspace page:

Formed way back in 1988, The Haywains, based near Bristol, played three-chord buzzy guitar indie-pop with bittersweet lyrics and sixties style melodies. Part of the 'twee' pop underground and the fanzine culture that held the scene together, The Haywains were familiar faces at Bristol's legendary Tropic Club and many of the 'Waaaaaah!' indie-pop nights around the UK.

The band's early gigs could be rather shambolic at times, but their refreshingly minimal approach fronted by singer Jeremy's jovial on-stage banter would define the very ethic of their lo-fi punk-pop roots. Bristol rapidly became one of the UK's most productive areas on the 'indie pop' scene of the late '80's, and The Haywains were simply one of many bands on a vibrant pop scene that the city enjoyed during that now legendary 'C86' era.

The Haywains began their recording career with the 'Surfin' Trowbridge EP' a flexi-disc issued with a pop fanzine called 'Woosh!' in 1988. The following year, the band's first single 'Fisherman's Friend' was released on the band's own 'Emily's Shop' label and received some all-important exposure by John Peel. The band went on to release a string of somewhat elusive 7" singles for small independent labels in Europe and the USA, ultimately signing to Vinyl Japan in 1991. The band recorded two albums for the label, 'Never Mind Manchester, Here's The Haywains' and the follow-up 'Desperately Seeking Something'. Those hard-to-find early singles were also re-released on a compilation CD 'Get Happy With The Haywains' by Vinyl Japan in 1992. Another seven-inch single 'Why Do I Get The Feeling Your Mother Hates Me?' was released in Spain by Elefant Records in 1995. It would be their last.

There comes a time when you just get too old for singing songs about teenage angst, and The Haywains officially disbanded after announcing a farewell hometown gig in the summer of 1996. A brief reunion took place in 2002 showing that the boys, and girl, could still get away with playing pop music five years after their split. The former band members still insist that the recipe behind their irresistible charm was in doing it just for fun. Let's hope that spirit lives on.

Get Happy

The Haywains on myspace