joy of speed

Whale & Wasp

2012-01-24T14:21:00.000-05:00

Calling a hotel in Moscow the "Volga Hotel" is like calling an Indian restaurant the "Prince of India" (or the "The Taj" or the "Taj of India"). It's a bit obvious. Here in the Volga Hotel, I am listening to the Jar of Flies EP from 1994, early 1994, I think. I have a vague memory of a shadow of a wisp from that time of being in my red pickup truck and listening to something off this on my radio. That truck actually belonged to my brother-in-law but he gave it to me for free. It was totally beat up and a piece of crap from 1985. It was a Toyota, though. It had nothing inside except what bore only the faintest resemblance to a radio. Radio in western Massachusetts at that time was an obvious blend of post-grunge lite mixed in with some heavier guitar fare. I didn't like much of it but I did listen to a lot of it because I had no other options. Remember those bands? Blind Melon, Hole, Local H, Stone Temple Pilots, the Offspring, and so on. Mostly horrible bland stuff. But there's something about hearing a song on the radio, that precise moment when the song comes on, and you are about to switch stations but then you don't, 'cause you know, it's too much trouble, and there's no one around to judge you anyway. So why not listen to that new song?

Alice in Chains, I think, was better than that. They had some good ideas. They seemed to have cornered that halcyon genre of navel-gazing nihilism wrapped in commercial-sounding metal. I liked them, even though (or especially because, perhaps) they were a bit of a downer. Shove my nose in shit, indeed.

I had an eventful day today. Big day in Moscow. But if you don't tell anybody about it, did the events actually happen?

I feel like this right now, though:

Favorite Albums 2011 (part 2)

2011-12-26T14:25:00.001-05:00

11. Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will: Mogwai returned this yearwith undoubtedly the best album title of the year. As I noted in my review ofthe album in Inflatable Ferret, this album is more of recent periodMogwai, and in that sense, there are no surprises. What is surprising is theunceasing creative well of the band members. Even as they use the Mogwai formatof heavy-to-light instrumentals, they continue to produce tracks with amazingdynamics, melodies, and arrangements (...in contrast to Explosions in the Sky,another instrumental band who seem to have hit a cul de sac.) The hipsterwisdom about Mogwai is that that they peaked with their very first album, Mogwai Young Team, butI’m in the minority who believes that every album since then (1997!) has a classic or two. They havesuch a vast discography now that it can be a little daunting to get into, but I actuallythink this new one is not a bad place to start. You have the long languidcrush-your-bones tracks, the sweeping uplifting calls to arms, the deeplymelancholy musical nostalgia, and the utter sadness of failure-without-redemption music, all here. I had tickets to see them in April but they canceled andrescheduled to September because of visa problems. Then they canceled again,and the shows have yet to be scheduled. We shall see.

12. Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts: Again, I’ve alreadyreviewed this both on Inflatable Ferret and had a brief note here. Who’d havethought Moore had it in him to make a warm, lush, almost romantic album?Produced by Beck, this has some parallels to Sea Change. While not quite asbrilliant as Beck’s magnum opus, Demolished Thoughts has a little bit of thatsame weariness. What’s different is that it also has a tone of joy in it. All thoseacoustic guitars, violins, and wooden instruments play music that would be idealfor a sunny Sunday afternoon at Washington Square Park. Of course, it may ormay not be pertinent that Thurston Moore recently parted ways with Kim Gordon,and perhaps this album is the soundtrack to his new life? Who knows. My favorite track is "Space" which has some of the gorgeosity of Love and Rockets' classic "Haunted When the Minutes Drag"... or "Saudade." Either way, it may be the best Sonic Youth-related product be released in the past... um, at least five years?

13. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica: OPN is the name of Daniel Lopatin, some dude who lives in Brooklyn (where else) who makes music on vintage synthesizers and pianos. It's music more on the ambient, drone-y side of things, not unlike Boards of Canada's beatless soundscapes. There's a lot of space in this kind of electronic music, and that space often makes the music more creepy than evocative. This is another one that benefits from repeated listens, and once you start to distinguish each track you start to realize the arc of each song, from beginning to end, that there is some method to all of this. It's a little bit like the Books, especially in the way samples (especially vocal samples) are repeatedly looped and broken and looped again, to create a rhythm -- check out "Sleep Dealer" for example. But where the Books create a strange world out of normal everyday sounds, OPN do the same (and up the strangeness factor) with a panoply of analog synthesizers. I imagine that Pink Floyd's abandoned Household Objects project might have sounded a little bit like this if it they had synthesizers and GarageBand in 1974.

14. Radiohead - The King Of Limbs: So this album came out earlier this year, and it was a brief but exciting moment. Hearing the album was, however, underwhelming. It sounded vaguely unformed, meandering, almost tuneless. But you know, it's really grown on me, and I've come to appreciate it much much more now. If you have not heard it even once, prepare not to be able to tell the difference between the first four tracks. The album really takes off on the final four songs, beginning with "Lotus Flower," the song where Thom Yorke does his spassy dance in that video that was floating around a while back. "Give Up the Ghost" is a beautiful acoustic song while the album closer "Separator" is classic Radiohead pop that wouldn't out of place on In Rainbows. The best thing about the album is that it really works as a single musical statement. Any of the songs taken out of the context of the album really don't do justice to the overall power of the whole thing. Some people complain that Radiohead are too far down the road of programmed music and have permanently left behind the feel of a live band, but remarkably, despite all the bleeps and bloops of computers on this record, it sounds warm. And to prove that, they have recently released a live show (King of Limbs - Live from the Basement) where the band reproduced the whole album live in the studio. There's also a somewhat inessential album collecting various remixes of the album entitled TKOL RMX 1234567, and while some of the folks recruited are impressive (Caribou, Four Tet, Modeselektor, etc.), it's not that great. What is great is that the band released a few songs from the same sessions later in the year, which are fantastic, particularly "Supercollider" and "The Butcher."

15. Real Estate - Days: I first heard Real Estate a couple of years ago when their song "Beach Comber" came out, which I played like a million times. I couldn't believe that there was a song this good that existed; very good R.E.M.-ish Byrds-esque indie rock circa mid-1980s. Maybe it was a bit nostalgic for me, but again, I'm a sucker for a good pop tune that's just a bit off-kilter. The new album is all that and more. Standout tracks are "Younger Than Yesterday" (a sly Byrds reference?) and the brilliant "It's Real." There seems to be a slight resurgence of 1980s-era indie guitar pop these days (see also the band Wild Nothing with their Smiths-esque Gemini from a year or two ago). Real Estate may be the best of the lot. I know I should be posting something from the new album but I can't help but post "Beach Comber" yet again (via Stereogum).

Real Estate - Beach Comber [mp3]

16. Seefeel - Seefeel: This, probably the best electronic band of the 1990s, suddenly reformed in 2010, released an e.p. (Faults) and then a full album in 2011. Bizarrely, as far as I could tell, no one noticed and the album kind of dropped out of sight. Just to back up, Seefeel produced some of the most beautiful electronic music of the nineties. And they somehow they did it all (mostly) with guitars. I like to think that if Kevin Shields hadn't lost his shit and produced a follow-up to Loveless, it might have sounded a bit like Seefeel's utterly brilliant Polyfusia (actually a compilation of singles and e.p.'s). I've written love letters to Seefeel on my blog before (and on the now long lost Fred newsletter), but I haven't mentioned this album yet. The most stark difference with earlier Seefeel here is that they have a live drummer, Lida Kazuhisa (or E-Da) who used to drum for the Boredoms. The main architects of the band, Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock, still produced blissful music but it sounds more fractured, damaged, brittle, distorted, largely to the dry syncopated drumming that gives it an almost tribal tone. It's definitely an acquired taste and on the fringes of experimental pop but frequent listens will be rewarded. A worthy return from a great band. Here's a recent interview with Clifford and Peacock.

17. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy: I didn't pay that much attention to St. Vincent (Annie Clark) until I saw her shred some guitar covering Big Black's "Kerosene." I mean I'd heard a few tracks here and there (including "Actor Out of Work") but this new album really caught my attention. She seems to have a little bit of the nice-mannered-young-woman-bordering-on-deranged sensibility (a la Kristen Hersh) but without being too predictable. She's clearly very talented as an instrumentalist and the album makes good use of many different instruments (including trumpets, clarinets, violins, flutes) but you kind of never forget the guitar which is front and center here. Which is what you get from this clip:

It will be interesting to see where she goes from here.

18. Tinariwen - Tassili: I've liked Tinariwen for a while now (loved "Amassakoul 'N' Tenere") and judging by the press they've gotten in recent years, they have a big following here in the U.S.. This is partly I think enabled by the fact that members of TV on the Radio have played with them. Incredibly, they were on the Colbert Report recently. Their music is still a nice mix of Tuareg blues but now the band incorporates more rock influences (including songs in English). The album is also very live-sounding, very loose, like a band jamming along, almost discovering unexpected trajectories for each song to take. I wouldn't go quite as far as NPR when they called Tinariwen "just about the best guitar-based rock band of the 21st century" but they are exploring similar spaces that bands like Television did back in the 1970s, a kind of a dream-trance state of guitar music. This makes it three-in-a-row for great Tinariwen albums, and Tassili holds up well to repeat listens. Dream on.

19. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo: I’ve already written a bitabout Kurt Vile so I won’t repeat what I wrote before. It has a classic rockvibe not unlike a young Tom Petty—his vocal affectations are eerily like Pettyat times—but there’s something about Vile’s music that raises it above genericclassic rock nostalgia. The low-fi production, the surprisingly warm andcreative arrangements, and most of all, the killer tunes, make this worth allthe praise it has gotten. It's the perfect modern classic rock album in ages. Almostevery song on the album has pop melodies that get right to the heart. And theheart is really the target here; although not all the songs are about love,they're all about romance, damaged romance for a variety of topics, one ofwhich happen to be girls. And I’m unable to explain exactly why but this may bemy favorite album of the year. I’ve listened to it a thousand times and I keepcoming back to it over and over again. Worthy of note: he’s released a follow-upe.p. called So Outta Reach that has been packaged with newer editions of Smoke RingFor My Halo.

20. Wild Flag - Wild Flag: Members of Sleater-Kinney and Helium get together. Add guitars and organ. Loud drums. Play.

Favorite Reissues

1. Can - Tago Mago (originally 1971): I come to kraut rock as a complete novice.I’ve resisted the temptation for years to listen to this stuff, especiallywhen, in the late 1990s, it became the hipster badge-of-coolness to have someawareness of krautrock. And then by the early 2000s, when every band this sideof Interpol was talking about motorik, I actively resisted. I’m also wary ofthe revisionist history that folks like Pitchfork will throw at you. Peoplereally didn’t listen to this stuff in the 1970s. Or most people didn’t. Sotheir influence was minimal at best, until, I would say, post-punk a la P.I.L. andstuff like that. So my sum total of krautrock songs I’d heard until 2011 was1. And that was the song “Oh Yeah” from this very album, a track I heard only because it wason an awesome compilation I’d picked up back when I lived in Northampton in the‘90s. Either way, “Oh Yeah” was actually quite amazing, and for the longesttime I actually thought that the percussion on the song was programmed, notrealizing that, no, it was actually a LIVE human being playing drums. Soanyway, on a whim I picked up this reissue thinking that I should start mykrautrock education at basically Year Zero, or Tago Mago. Because I’ve read somuch about Tago Mago, it’s hard to escape the weight of its legacy. Yet, Ifound it oddly freeing to have never heard it until now. I don’t owe it anything. Iwasn’t gonna like it if it sucked. That was basically what I came with. So... now that I’veheard it a few times I can say that it is indeed good. It has theslight whiff of post-Barrett Pink Floyd, vaguely from the Ummagumma years. The two most "visible"instruments are the drums and the vocals, the formerly cranking into amesmerizing metronome beat that’s mechanical and hypnotic, andsometimes creepy. Damo Suzuki’s vocals mostly play as instruments rather than vocals;and if sometimes he sounds absolutely insane (see “Mushroom”) he also knowswhen to modulate and drone (see “Oh Yeah”). And one more thing I didn’t knowabout Can: they sure know how to funk up the music: “Halleluhwah” absolutelycranks up the ‘70s funk even as it creates some sort of space rock jamin a foreign language that wouldn’t be out of place at the Saturday night partyon an interstellar battleship heading off to a new nebula. In the contextwhat’s going in 1971, sure, it’s out of place, but not that out of place, ifyou consider the whacky stuff even popular bands like Pink Floyd were doing.But you know, as a piece of music ripped out of its context, it is an oddlyperfect album to bridge the personal with the social. I’ve listened to it onheadphones in airplanes and airports, and it seems to mirror the anxieties andmovement of the mass of people around me perfectly, while at the same timecreating a bubble around me. About the reissue: it comes with a second disc containing a complete live Can concert (three songs!) from 1972. Twoof the three “songs” on the live CD are also featured on the original album but they bear absolutely noresemblance to the recorded versions. Highly recommended!

2. Nirvana - Nevermind (originally 1991): What tosay about Nevermind at this point? I have a (very) long essay actuallycoming up soon on that very issue, but as far as the reissue isconcerned, is there much to say? Well, the album is the album, everybody knows the deal, but what about the extras? Disc 1 hasappended (after the original album) all the original single b-sides some ofwhich are actually essential (“Aneurysm,” for example). Disc 2 has a bunch ofpreviously unreleased tracks from around the time of Nevermind, most of whichare alternate versions of songs you’ve already heard a million times. Sure,some of them are of moderate interest (especially some of the pre-Butch Vigversions of the songs, which are generally inferior). There’s the absolutelyincredible cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Here She Comes Now” which hasactually been floating around on several compilations. The key tracks, that Ithink worth getting (or at least hearing) are: a brilliant version of “Sappy,” andlow quality boom box-recorded versions of “Verse Chorus Verse” and “Old Age.”All three songs are, in my mind, as good as any of the songs actually onNevermind. “Old Age” in particular was “taken” by Courtney Love and released asa b-side by her band Hole without any writing credit to Kurt Cobain. I’m notan audiophile so I’m not terribly interested in Disc 3, basically a slightlydifferent mix of Nevermind. Disc 4 is worth getting: a complete liveshow from Halloween 1991 in Seattle. This one has been bootlegged a milliontimes and this pristine recording shows why: it is the three-piece band atabsolutely the top of their game. They rip through various Nevermind and Bleachtunes with a single-minded focus that is impressive. Opening the set is a brilliang electric cover of the Vaselines’ “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,”which later showed up as an acoustic song on “MTV Unplugged.” Just to round out things, there is also a DVD of that Halloween show, with the film remastered to such clarity that the sweat flying off the band members can be seen in Hi-Def.All-in-all, this box set is not worth getting unless you're into the live show and theDVD. And unless you fetishize expensive and redundant objects that remind you of your lost adolescence. You decide.

Other good reissues:

The Beach Boys - Smile

Mercury Rev - Deserter's Songs

R.E.M. - Lifes Rich Pageant

Marvin Gaye - What's Going On

Queen - various albums 1973-1976

Ride - Nowhere

Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water

This Mortal Coil - box set

Throbbing Gristle - various albums

Favorite Albums 2011 (part 1)

2011-12-21T00:23:00.000-05:00

So, I've been perusing through various year-end lists and the one thing that I've realized is how little new music I heard in 2011. I went to NPR, I went to Sound Opinions, Stereogum, the Quietus, PopMatters, Pitchfork, and I have no idea about most of these artists/bands. Never heard of most of them. What does that mean?

Well, it means many things, but first and foremost, it means that I'm disconnected from the prevailing critical consensus. For some reason, by the end of the year, you start to see the same old records circulating in everybody's lists, and you're never sure why. Is it because everybody actually likes those albums? Or is because they don't wanna feel left out?

Second, it means that I'm disconnected from what is required listening for people who are "up-to-date." This means that my music tastes are slowly calcifying, held back a little bit more firmly every year by the accumulating inertia of a collected past. The past is a big presence in my imagination these days. In fact, the past was one of the big stories of popular culture these days, judging by the fact that one of the most thought-provoking books out this year was Simon Reynolds' Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. Just today I stumbled upon a piece in Vanity Fair about the same topic. I'll have more to say about the past in a later post, but looking at my list of my favorite albums of the year, one gets the obvious creeping realization that there's nothing really new or innovative that I'm listening to. Everything on the list could have been made in 1992, honestly. This is something that's been preying on me more and more the last few years, that all the music I've been listening to, since about 2000, kind of sounds like a facsimile--perhaps a more high-tech facsimile--of music that was around before. But then, saying that, kind of sounds like an old grandpa thing to say. "Back in my day, mumble, mumble, etc."

Either way, here is my list of 20 albums that I liked in 2011. They're mostly old bands and what not, but they did reflect music that I repeatedly heard all through the year. I tend to listen to a lot of music. A lot of music. On my headphones, walking around, at home, going to sleep, etc. At home, I rarely watch TV or anything visual--if I have the choice of watching TV or listening to music, I'll almost always opt for the latter. The main problem has been that since about 2005, my music collection has grown in leaps and bounds thanks to the internet, so I'm basically accumulating more music than I can actually listen to. My iPod currently has something like 15,262 songs. It we assume that each song is about 4 minutes long on average, that comes to about 42 days of non-stop music. So basically, there's a lot of competition for my music-listening time. So... in the battle between a new album and something old, the new one has to be really good for me to occupy my time. So what fell into that category in 2011? In alphabetical order, they are:

1. Atlas Sound - Parallax
2. Battles - Gloss Drop
3. Bombino - Agadez
4. AA Bondy - Believers
5. Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow
6. Death In Vegas - Trans-Love Energies
7. The Field - Looping State of Mind
8. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
9. M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
10. Metronomy - The English Riviera
11. Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
12. Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts
13. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica
14. Radiohead - The King Of Limbs
15. Real Estate - Days
16. Seefeel - Seefeel
17. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy
18. Tinariwen - Tassili
19. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo
20. Wild Flag - Wild Flag

Some more detailed thoughts on the first ten on this list. In a few days, I'll have capsule reviews of the remaining ten.

1. Atlas Sound - Parallax: I've developed a fascination and respect for Bradford Cox, he of the band Deerhunter, who is obviously as obsessed with creating music as I am but has about 100 times more talent and motivation to do it. He has a wonderful imagination, not unlike Kristen Hersh, in that you imagine that his songs come out as fully formed reflections of ideas that pop into his head. And sure, some of it is self-consciously referential to the history of pop music but Cox really makes it sound so attractive and alluring, it's hard to resist. This, I think is the best of his solo albums (which he releases under the name Atlas Sound). If there's a common stylistic thread to it, it's a vague nod to early 1970s pop, embellished with modern electronics and guitars. Listen to this song, "Terra Incognito":

2. Battles - Gloss Drop: Much has been made of the fact Battles lost a key member last year, and now they are down to a three-piece band. They're about as "experimental" as any band gets in my list, but they still work within the confines of pop. This album is very much a different beast than the previous one, in that it really exudes ebbulience. There's a joy here that's kind of refreshing. The record is like a soundtrack to a party written and orchestrated by a bunch of very skilled but excited geeks. You can see that joy in this awesome live performance of the song "Futura" from this album.

Battles | Futura | A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

3. Bombino - Agadez: I don't know much about him but he's apparently from Niger (or Agadez, to be precise). The dude, whose "real" name is Omara Moctar, is a sublime guitarist, and produces something called Tuareg blues. Bombino has lived through a lot of strife and conflict, particularly a civil war within Niger involving the Tuareg minority rebelling against the central Niger government. Not sure if any of this informs his guitar-playing but it's hypnotic and mesmerizing, almost trance-inducing. A little bit like Tinariwen (see below) but more drone-ish, if that's possible.

4. AA Bondy - Believers: Back in the nineties, I used to like this band called Verbena, kind of a sub-Nirvana power trio playing punkish rock'n'roll. I liked them a lot, even saw them live once in Pittsburgh in a tiny little club where the band seemed surly and uncomfortable. Fast forward a decade, the main guy from Verbena has gone solo, completely disavowed his punk rock past, and now plays Dylanesque folkish Americana. I'm not a big fan of the genre as practiced by contemporary musicians (if I want my Dylan fix, I listen to Dylan) but Bondy is a rare gem. His songs really do sound like ghosts singing them. I had a previous post on Bondy but his new album is even more spectral and eerie than usual. It's goes along at the speed of Low backed by Galaxie 500 with the spirit of Dylan hovering by. Beautiful. Listen and reflect:

5. Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow: Kate, O Kate, wherefore art thou, O Kate? Kate is so strange. Kate is 53 years old now but we still remember her as a 20 year old when "Wuthering Heights" came out back in 1978. I don't want to rehash her career since then--others can do (and have done) that much better than I. I listened to The Whole Story all through my college years, without doubt one of the best "greatest hits" compilations ever put together. She disappeared for a while but came back with Aerial in 2005, and now in 2011, she put out two albums, one called Director's Cut, which revisits some of her latter day material, and this one, 50 Words For Snow, a brand new album that is as weird and yet old old-fashioned as one might expect from Kate Bush. When I say "old fashioned" I don't mean regressive, just that Kate Bush has a very "old world" mentality. Many of her songs are about nature, especially the misty dark wintery wisps of English nature, and this one is no different. There are songs here about the life of a snowflake, a love song to a snowman, about a lake in search of a dog, and one that summarizes 50 (somewhat absurd) words for snow. Steve Gadd (who played drums on "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" and "Aja") provides subtle but wonderful percussion throughout on this largely piano-based album that has been a perfect winter companion for me.

6. Death In Vegas - Trans-Love Energies: Most people probably know Death In Vegas from the lovely "Girls" from the Lost In Translation soundtrack, and that's not a bad thing. But Death In Vegas have a much wider palette than evocative electronica; their album Dead Elvis (1997) still remains one of my favorite albums of the nineties and a fantastic journey through all manner of electronic music from four-on-the-floor techno, to hip hop, to guitar-based My Bloody Valentine-esque dance anthems. They kind of disappeared for a few years but have come back with this album (and the subsequent e.p., Medication). Trans-Love Energies has a lot of my favorite influences (kraut rock, electronic dance music, My Bloody Valentine) but it puts it all together in a pretty amazing seamless whole. If you want moody dance music that isn't always for dancing but for blissing out, this is perfect. Lead architect Richard Fearless explains his aesthetic here. There's no one song that really does justice to the album, as all the tracks are so different, but the 7+ minutes of "Your Loft" captures a little of the blissosity of the album.

7. The Field - Looping State of Mind: I have a soft spot for this guy (Alex Willner), especially his album, From Here We Go Sublime, which is the kind of techno, ambient, repetitive techno, I love. Willner, as the Field, basically takes a perfect instrumental loop and slowly adds keyboards, guitars, and all manner of noise until by the end of the song, you reach a wall of sound designed to overpower you into the great sublime. What makes this album particularly different from his prior efforts is that he appropriates a variety of other musical genres into his music, including gospel, shoegaze, house, funk, and guitar-based rock. You'd think that mixing all this stuff into one would be have the Wal-Mart effect, i.e., lots of different things no unified purpose, but amazingly this album works. It has a suitably happy (or at least upbeat) and almost transcendental vibe. I imagine that if this was around in 1967, the hippie kids would be listening to this as they swayed back-and-forth at their love-ins.

8. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake: I wrote a long review of this album for Inflatable Ferret, so I won't repeat all of what I said there. One thing I did write: "There is death everywhere on the album but the music is light, sometimes even jaunty, often pretty (as in 'Hanging in the Wire'). Where her last two albums were musically spartan, sometimes sounding incomplete or brittle, the music here is lush, full of reverb... She expands her musical palette with plinks of electric piano, xylophones, trumpets, saxophones, and strange samples... The pop centerpiece of the album is 'The Words That Maketh Murder,' an almost creepy song constructed out of a skip-dancing beat wrapped around a simple descending figure on an autoharp and a saxophone. She sings, 'I've seen and done things I want to forget / I've seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat / Blown and shot out beyond belief / Arms and legs were in the trees.' "

9. M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming: Wow, well, what to say about this? Who makes double albums these days? Anthony Gonzalez says that he was trying to emulate the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (or The White Album). To try and create something big, huge, expansive, ambitious, sprawling, etc. His music has always been about nostalgia, but in this case, it's nostalgia for a kind of musical experience that wasn't simply about music, but about the act of buying and hearing records with sleeves, lyrics, pictures, etc., and how it used to be before everything migrated on-line. Musically, everything you need to know about the album you can figure out by watching "Midnight City" (below) which is being transmitted directly from the year 1985, sounding a lot like a track from Songs From the Big Chair (or maybe The Hurting).... but what's the harm in that? Especially if the melodies are great and the production makes you want to yearn for things that you didn't even know existed as you slide ever so further away from adolescence. In a way, this album is much more like Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (but with a much more eighties vibe) and less like (still my favorite) Saturdays=Youth which was a concise and perfect pop statement that wasn't as much looking in the rearview mirror as this one is. Still, the more I listen to Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, the more I love it for its music rather than its ambition. Great for a really long drive.

10. Metronomy - The English Riviera: Look, I don't really know much about who these people are, but they must be from the UK since they were up for the Mercury Prize (ultimately won by PJ Harvey). It's great pop music, light, breezy, catchy. A bit like Phoenix but more clever, I think, but just as eager to stay "pop" and not "rock." Surely, these guys would have intersected with Steely Dan if they'd been around in the seventies, perhaps with some plastic soul thrown in? I'm actually shocked that anyone makes this good pop music in 2011. Everyone else is either too serious or too retarded or too clever or too hip. Not these guys; Metronomy seem utterly incapable of writing a poorly conceived pop song and they make it seem effortless. Can this really be the best unabashed candy pop album of the year? You be the judge on my favorite song off the album, "The Look." (And I forgot to mention, they have the coolest looking bassist of all time).

The rest of my list in a couple of days + my favorite reissues/compilations and soundtracks. (and below, another clip from Battles doing "Futura" at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago this past summer.

Surgeon

2011-11-09T00:42:00.000-05:00

St. Vincent discusses and performs "Surgeon."

I Wanna Be Adored

2011-10-25T23:12:00.002-04:00

For many reasons 1989 was a good year, maybe the best year of my life. And I think, to top it off, I was exposed to an absurd amount of new music in 1989 and 1990. Anyway, it just so happened that one of the best albums of all time came out that year, the self-titled Stone Roses album, which had just come out in March or April or something. I have no idea where or how I heard that album first, but I do remember how it was the soundtrack to many a night. I have this distinct memory of eating chicken wings (!) with K. at some late night eatery, no doubt super drunk, watching the TV and them showing the video to "I Wanna Be Adored." Without any kind of qualification, I can say it's one of the most sublimely beautiful songs ever recorded, perfect for when you're alone or with company. And the album was just as brilliant. What songs! Anyway, turns out the Stone Roses are reforming. You know me, I'm totally against any band reforming to relive bygone glories. So I wish they hadn't. But I don't wish them ill. They will never recapture 1989 again but, you know, who would begrudge them for making the money that they originally never made. There is probably no other band in the history of pop music that burned so brightly but so briefly. They were here for one spectacular album, a series of fantastic singles and then completely and immediately burned out. The second album was a disaster. And then they split up. But what a beautiful set of songs they left behind

This Week = 10 Years in New York city

2011-10-12T22:49:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday morning under the George Washington Bridge.

Music Ranked By Year 1969-2010

2011-10-12T13:37:00.000-04:00

Over there at Paper Street Cinema, they did a massive list of all music from all time (well, from 1970) that's good. So I thought I'd try and one-up him and do one from 1969. It's kind of randomly done and I haven't put too much thought into it. I'm sure I'm missing super important albums. I didn't include live albums, compilations, box sets, or E.P.s.

Some preliminary observations: Paper Street Cinema (PSC) and I have some overlap. Years where we picked the exact same album as the best album: 1980 (Remain In Light/Talking Heads), 1985 (Meat Is Murder/The Smiths), 1988 (Surfer Rosa/Pixies), 1994 (The Downward Spiral/Nine Inch Nails), 1996 (Aenima/Tool), 1998 (Mezzanine/Massive Attack), 1999 (The Fragile/Nine Inch Nails), 2001 (Lateralus/Tool), 2002 (Sea Change/Beck). But beyond that, there's a lot of overlap in the "other albums that were good" category. We did diverge significantly on other stuff: I don't include much kraut rock in my list. In fact, most of my 1970s selections are fairly straight forward classic rock (including the dreaded Led Zeppelin...), the kind of thing I railed against when I was a youngster. PSC also has a fondness for Porcupine Tree and Crystal Castles whereas I have a fondness for sweeping instrumental music a la Godspeed, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, and Sigur Ros. I apparently like a lot of real embarrassing 1970s pop (Gerry Rafferty anyone?). And guess what, I like Madonna! On the whole I tried to list albums I liked instead of albums I was supposed to like. In other words, if it's on the list, I have heard the album a lot.

Some of the choices were difficult. Kid A (2000) is one of my favorite albums of all time but it didn't make the best album of 2000 because of Godspeed's Lift Yr Skinny Fists, partly because the latter album is embedded in my memory while I was suffering through a lonely summer in Moscow. It's just the way I associate that album.

1969

Best album: Abbey Road (The Beatles)
Other good ones: Let It Bleed (The Rolling Stones), Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, The Velvet Underground, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Neil Young), The Stooges, Crosby Stills and Nash, Trout Mask Replica (Captain Beefheart), Blind Faith, Then Play On (Fleetwood Mac)

1970

Best album: Fun House (The Stooges)
Other good ones: Loaded (The Velvet Underground), After The Gold Rush (Neil Young), John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Deja Vu (Crosby Stills Nash and Young), Bitches Brew (Miles Davis), Abraxas (Santana), John Barleycorn Must Die (Traffic), All Things Must Pass (George Harrison)

1971

Best album: Sticky Fingers (The Rolling Stones)
Other good ones: Led Zeppelin IV, Meddle (Pink Floyd), Who's Next (The Who), Hunky Dory (David Bowie), Imagine (John Lennon), Blue (Joni Mitchell), L.A. Woman (The Doors), If Only I Could Remember My Name (David Crosby), Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys (Traffic), Machine Head (Deep Purple)

1972

Best album: The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (David Bowie)
Other good ones: Exile On Main Street (The Rolling Stones), Harvest (Neil Young), #1 Record (Big Star), Talking Book (Stevie Wonder)

1973

Best album: The Dark Side Of The Moon (Pink Floyd)
Other good ones: Houses Of The Holy (Led Zeppelin), Time Fades Away (Neil Young), Aladdin Sane (David Bowie), Raw Power (Iggy & The Stooges), Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Elton John), The Human Menagerie (Cockney Rebel), Inner Visions (Stevie Wonder)

1974

Best album: On The Beach (Neil Young)
Other good ones: Countdown To Ecstasy (Steely Dan), Band On The Run (Paul McCartney & Wings), Radio City (Big Star), Crime Of The Century (Supertramp)

1975

Best album: Horses (Patti Smith)
Other good ones: Blood On The Tracks (Bob Dylan), Desire (Bob Dylan), Physical Graffiti (Led Zeppelin), Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd), Zuma (Neil Young), Katy Lied (Steely Dan), The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (Joni Mitchell), Still Crazy After All These Years (Paul Simon), A Night At The Opera (Queen)

1976

Best album: The Modern Lovers
Other good ones: Station To Station (David Bowie), The Royal Scam (Steely Dan), Hejira (Joni Mitchell), Arrival (Abba), Year Of The Cat (Al Stewart), Radio Ethiopia (Patti Smith)

1977

Best album: Marquee Moon (Television)
Other good ones: Animals (Pink Floyd), The Clash, Low (David Bowie), Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Rocket To Russia (The Ramones), Aja (Steely Dan), CSN (Crosby Stills and Nash), Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (Joni Mitchell), Gone To Earth (Barclay James Harvest), Moonflower (Santana), The Album (Abba)

1978

Best album: Leave Home (The Ramones)
Other good ones: Some Girls (The Rolling Stones), First Issue (Public Image Ltd.), Dire Straits, Adventure (Television), C'est Chic (Chic), City To City (Gerry Rafferty), The Modern Dance (Pere Ubu)

1979

Best album: Metal Box (Public Image Ltd.)
Other good ones: The Wall (Pink Floyd), London Calling (The Clash), Rust Never Sleeps (Neil Young), Regatta De Blanc (The Police), Tusk (Fleetwood Mac), Three Imaginary Boys (The Cure), Unknown Pleasures (Joy Division), Entertainment! (Gang Of Four), Communique (Dire Straits), Replicas (Gary Numan), The B-52s, Off The Wall (Michael Jackson), Y (The Pop Group), Cut (The Slits)

1980

Best album: Remain In Light (Talking Heads)
Other good ones: In The Flat Field (Bauhaus), Gaucho (Steely Dan), Boy (U2), The Pretenders, Seventeen Seconds (The Cure), Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables (Dead Kennedys), McCartney II, Wild Planet (B-52s), Back In Black (AC/DC), Never For Ever (Kate Bush), Underwater Moonlight (The Soft Boys)

1981

Best album: My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (David Byrne & Brian Eno)
Other good ones: Ghost In The Machine (The Police), Faith (The Cure), Damaged (Black Flag), Computer World (Kraftwerk), Tom Verlaine (Dreamtime), The Au Pairs (Playing With A Different Sex), Fela Kuti (Black President)

1982

Best album: 1999 (Prince)
Other good ones: Thriller (Michael Jackson), The Sky's Gone Out (Bauhaus), Album-Generic Flipper (Flipper), Plastic Surgery Disasters (Dead Kennedys), The Night Fly (Donald Fagen), The Dreaming (Kate Bush), Vs. (Mission Of Burma), Songs To Remember (Scritti Politti), Lou Reed (The Blue Mask), Avalon (Roxy Music)

1983

Best album: Murmur (R.E.M.)
Other good ones: Hootenanny (The Replacements), The Final Cut (Pink Floyd), War (U2), Synchronicity (The Police), Learning To Crawl (The Pretenders), Soul Mining (The The), Speaking In Tongues (Talking Heads), Infidels (Bob Dylan), Violent Femmes

1984

Best album: Let It Be (The Replacements)
Other good ones: The Smiths, The Unforgettable Fire (U2), Purple Rain (Prince), 'Pop' (Tones On Tail), Reckoning (R.E.M.), It'll End In Tears (This Mortal Coil), Double Nickels On The Dime (The Minutemen), Like A Virgin (Madonna), The Waking Hour (Dalis Car), Meat Puppets II

1985

Best album: Meat Is Murder (The Smiths)
Other good ones: Time (The Replacements), The Head On The Door (The Cure), Psychocandy (The Jesus and Mary Chain), The Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven (Love and Rockets), This Is The Sea (The Waterboys), Songs From The Big Chair (Tears For Fears), Low-Life (New Order), This Is Big Audio Dynamite, Hounds Of Love (Kate Bush)

1986

Best album: The Queen Is Dead (The Smiths)
Other good ones: EVOL (Sonic Youth), Throwing Muses, Infected (The The), Candy Apple Grey (Husker Du), Lifes Rich Pageant (R.E.M.), Gun Shy (The Screaming Blue Messiahs), Big World (Joe Jackson), True Blue (Madonna), Filigree and Shadow (This Mortal Coil), Skylarking (XTC), Black Celebration (Depeche Mode)

1987

Best album: Pleased To Meet Me (The Replacements)
Other good ones: Strangeways Here We Come (The Smiths), Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun (Dead Can Dance), Sister (Sonic Youth), The Joshua Tree (U2), Children Of God (Swans), Sign O'The Times (Prince), The Ideal Copy (Wire), Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (The Cure), Floodland (The Sisters Of Mercy), Darklands (The Jesus and Mary Chain), The Lion & The Cobra (Sinead O'Connor), Crowded House, Document (R.E.M.), Bikini Red (The Screaming Blue Messiahs), Atomizer (big Black), If'n (Firehose), Solitude Standing (Suzanne Vega)

1988

Best album: Surfer Rosa (The Pixies)
Other good ones: The Serpent's Egg (Dead Can Dance), Daydream Nation (Sonic Youth), The Burning World (Swans), A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck (Wire), Nothing's Shocking (Jane's Addiction), Naked (Talking Heads), Earth Sun Moon (Love and Rockets), Fisherman's Blues (The Waterboys), Starfish (The Church), Songs About Fucking (Big Black), Viva Hate (Morrissey), Bringing Home The Ashes (The Wild Swans)

1989

Best album: The Stone Roses
Other good ones: Doolittle (The Pixies), Disintegration (The Cure), Spine Of God (Monster Magnet), Mind Bomb (The The), 3 Feet High And Rising (De La Soul), Neil Young (Freedom), Don't Tell A Soul (The Replacements)

1990

Best album: In A Priest-Driven Ambulance (The Flaming Lips)
Other good ones: Pretty Hate Machine (Nine Inch Nails), Goo (Sonic Youth), Bossanova (The Pixies), Ritual de lo Habitual (Jane's Addiction), The Vision Thing (The Sisters Of Mercy), I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got (Sinead O'Connor), God Ween Satan (Ween), Bloodletting (Concrete Blonde), Ragged Glory (Neil Young), The Replacements (All Shook Down), Pod (The Breeders)

1991

Best album: Loveless (My Bloody Valentine)
Other good ones: Nevermind (Nirvana), White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity (Swans), Yerself Is Steam (Mercury Rev), Lazer Guided Melodies (Spiritualized), Wings Of Joy (Cranes), Gish (Smashing Pumpkins), Blood (This Mortal Coil), The Drill (Wire), Screamadelica (Primal Scream)

1992

Best album: Television
Other good ones: Dirty (Sonic Youth), Harvest Moon (Neil Young), Slanted And Enchanted (Pavement), Psalm 69 (Ministry), Dry (P.J. Harvey), Erotica (Madonna)

1993

Best album: In Utero (Nirvana)
Other good ones: Undertow (Tool), Zooropa (U2), Superjudge (Monster Magnet), Orbital II, Rid Of Me (P.J. Harvey), A Storm In Heaven (The Verve), Forever (Cranes), 14 Songs (Paul Westerberg), Quique (Seefeel), Exile In Guyville (Liz Phair), Suspiria (Miranda Sex Garden), Souvlaki (Slowdive), Saturation (Urge Overkill), Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements (Stereolab), Where You Been (Dinosaur Jr.)

1994

Best album: The Downward Spiral (Nine Inch Nails)
Other good ones: To Bring You My Love (P.J. Harvey), Selected Ambient Works Vol 2 (Aphex Twin), Dopes To Infinity (Monster Magnet), Crappin' You Negative (Grifters), Live Through This (Hole), Ungod (Stabbing Westward), Superunknown (Soundgarden), Dummy (Portishead), Hips And Makers (Kristen Hersh)

1995

Best album: The Bends (Radiohead)
Other good ones: A Northern Soul (The Verve), Paralyzed Mind Of The Archangel Void (Harmony Rockets), Maxinquaye (Tricky), Exit Planet Dust (The Chemical Brothers), ToBring You My Love (P.J. Harvey), Elastica, Mellon Collie And The InfiniteSadness (The Smashing Pumpkins), Washing Machine (Sonic Youth), Garbage

1996

Bestalbum: Aenima (Tool)

Othergood ones: In Sides (Orbital), As Good As Dead (Local H), Millions Living WillNever Die (Tortoise), Entroducing ... DJ Shadow, Different Class (Pulp)

1997

Bestalbum: Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (Spiritualized)

Othergood ones: OK Computer (Radiohead), Urban Hymns (The Verve), Sounds Of TheSatellites (Laika), Dead Elvis (Death In Vegas), Either/Or (Elliott Smith), ICan Hear The Heart Beating As One (Yo La Tengo), Mogwai Young Team, Dig YourOwn Hole (Chemical Brothers), Time Out Of Mind (Bob Dylan)

1998

Bestalbum: Mezzanine (Massive Attack)

Othergood ones: Lift (Love And Rockets), Music Has The Right To Children (Boards OfCanada), Moon Safari (Air), Introducing ... The Asteroid No. Four, (The Asteroid No. Four), Is This Desire?(P.J. Harvey), Deserters' Songs (Mercury Rev), XO (Elliott Smith), Good MorningSpider (Sparklehorse), Psyence Fiction (U.N.K.L.E.), Ray Of Light (Madonna)

1999

Bestalbum: The Fragile (Nine Inch Nails)

Othergood ones: The Soft Bulletin (The Flaming Lips), Afterglow (Dot Allison), IntoThe Pink (Verbena), Stereo Type A (Cibbo Matto), Midnite Vultures (Beck),Central Reservation (Beth Orton)

2000

Bestalbum: Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (Godspeed You BlackEmperor!)

Othergood ones: Kid A (Radiohead), Mer de Noms (A Perfect Circle), Two AgainstNature (Steely Dan), XTRMNTR (Primal Scream), Stories From The City StoriesFrom The Sea (P.J. Harvey), And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out (Yo La Tengo),Supreme Beings Of Leisure, The Mirror Conspiracy (The Thievery Corporation),The Hour Of The Bewilderbeast (Badly Drawn Boy)

2001

Bestalbum: Lateralus (Tool)

Othergood ones: Amnesiac (Radiohead), Simple Things (Zero 7), Get Ready (New Order),Is This It (The Strokes), I (Buffalo Daughter), Melody A.M. (Royksopp), One DayI'll Be On Time (The Album Leaf), White Blood Cells (The White Stripes)

2002

Bestalbum: Sea Change (Beck)

Othergood ones: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (The Flaming Lips), Geogaddi (BoardsOf Canada), Stereo/Mono (Paul Westerberg), () (Sigur Ros), Murray Street (SonicYouth), Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Wilco), Turn On The Bright Lights (Interpol),Yanqui U.X.O. (Godspeed! You Black Emperor

2003

Bestalbum: The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place (Explosions In The Sky)

Other good ones: Phantom Power (Super Furry Animals), Berlinette (Ellen Allien), A Strangely Isolated Place(Ulrich Schnauss), 100th Window (Massive Attack), Elephant (The White Stripes),Happy Songs For Happy People (Mogwai), Rounds (Four Tet), Chutes Too Narrow(The Shins), The Lemon Of Pink (The Books), Speakerboxxx/The Love Below(Outkast), Fever To Tell (The Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Up In Flames (Caribou), Hail To The Thief (Radiohead)

2004

Best album: Funeral (The Arcade Fire)

Other good ones: Good News For People Who Love Bad News (Modest Mouse), Summer At Abbadon (Pinback), Now Here is Nowhere (The Simple Machines), Fabulous Muscles (Xiu Xiu), Florida (Diplo), Homesongs (Adem), Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (M83), Tekitoi (Rachid Taha)

2005

Best album: The Woods (Sleater-Kinney)

Other good ones: The Campfire Headphase (Boards of Canada), Silent Alarm (Bloc Party), Feathers (Dead Meadow), LCD Soundsystem, '64-'95 (LemonJelly), Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Arular (M.I.A.)

2006

Best album: Silent Shout (The Knife)

Other good ones: Return To Cookie Mountain (TV on the Radio), Rather Ripped (Sonic Youth), Orchestra Of Bubbles (Ellen Allien and Apparat), Transparent Things (Fujiya and Miyagi), I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass (Yo La Tengo), The Eraser (Thom Yorke)

2007

Best album: In Rainbows (Radiohead)

Other good ones: The Sound Of Silver (LCD Soundsystem), Untrue (Burial), Aman Iman (Tinariwen), Year Zero (Nine Inch Nails), Alpinisms (School of Seven Bells), Kala (M.I.A.), Boxer (The National), Mirrored (Battles), Here We Go Sublime (The Field)

2008

Best album: Microcastle (Deerhunter)

Other good ones: Ghosts I-IV (Nine Inch Nails), Saturdays = Youth (M83), The Slip (Nine Inch Nails), Dear Science (TV on the Radio), Vampire Weekend, Third (Portishead), Dig! Lazarus Dig! (Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds), Furr (Blitzen Trapper)

2009

Best album: The xx

Other good ones: Logos (Atlas Sound), Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Phoenix), It's Blitz! (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Veckatimest (Grizzly Bear), Embryonic (The Flaming Lips), Actor (St. Vincent), Glasvegas

2010

Best album: Halcyon Digest (Deerhunter)

Other good ones: The Suburbs (The Arcade Fire), My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Swans), Plastic Beach (Gorillaz) Cerulean (Baths), This Is Happening (LCD Soundsystem), Body Talk (Robyn), Cosmogramma (Flying Lotus), Write About Love (Belle And Sebastian)

Poolside - Harvest Moon

2011-09-28T23:25:00.001-04:00

Is it wimpy of me to like -- nay, love -- this version? It almost beats the original.

And here is the gorgeously beautiful original. Does anyone bring more beauty into this world than this dude?

Stolen from a post by Simon Reynolds.

My R.E.M. Story

2011-09-28T01:21:00.000-04:00

Here's a short excerpt from Chapter 8 of my "rock'n'roll book" which I have been writing for 82 years now. The writing is sophomoric, communicating very precisely the self-indulgence of adolescence:

___ had these hippie friends and I fuckinghated them. The types who would wear strings tied around their wrists, notflush the toilet to save water, whose idea of a good time was to plan going toAlaska for the summer to make “a ton of easy cash,” and who believed that smokingpot and talking about Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick was the coolest thing that ever happened tothem. One time, in November, we went to see Pink Floyd at the Summit in Houstonwith those kids, and once we got on the road, they cranked up the stereo with“Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf. Yes, "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf. I just about jumped out of car and let itrun over me. Please kill me right now. The concert was horrible. Pink Floyd was just patently horrible--if sucking itself could suck, a kind of a auto-sucking, that would describe the show.

The next day, my roommate and I went to see R.E.M. at G. Rollie White,our little basketball stadium on campus. R.E.M., touring in support of Document, were brilliant. This was themost stark display of the old vs. the new. The ‘60s were dead. Live and breathenow or die. R.E.M. played with scalpel-sharp precision, alternating between theheaviness of their Wire cover (“Strange”) and the implosive beauty of “So.Central Rain.” The singer came on wearing an oversize suit and a hat, all ofwhich he gradually disrobed before ending the show bare above the waist,wearing baggy pants, huge combat boots, and a shaved head with a strand of longthick black ponytail hair sticking up from the top of his head. He also hadthick black marks that underlined his eyes. He looked like a shaved raccoon. Ithought that was cool as shit. In “Disturbance at the Heron House” from the newalbum, the singer repeatedly raised his arm in time and in salute to the beautiful,ascending notes of the intro:

Disturbanceat the heron house

Stampedeat the monument

To liberty and honor under the honor roll

And something about monkeys too:

They're numbering the monkeys

The monkeys and the monkeys

The followers of chaos out of control.

Lots of monkeys, I see. I had no idea what a heron was. Still don’t. To a mute audience,the singer described the band Suicide as one of his favorite defunct bands. “Goout and buy their record,” he said. I didn’t, but they sure sounded cool. For the show, my roommate and I put hairspray on our hairs, wore a bunch of earrings, piercings, and bangles,and got super-dressed up in black (pants, shirt, combat boots, chains). There was a small-scale intensity about the show, all things that I took for granted over the years: the fact that I was pretty much standing right in front of the band, that there was no laser show, no dry ice, just four misfits totally rocking out. It was the first concert I ever went to where Isensed I belonged. Fuck Pink Floyd.

2011-09-23T00:12:00.001-04:00

REMRIP

Saved

2011-09-14T00:07:00.003-04:00

1990 was a weird year for me. It was transitional for sure. I shared an apartment with, umm, someone on Wellborn Road somewhere between Bryan and College Station, Texas. There were train tracks next to our apartment complex and everything would shake when they passed by. Those trains lasted an eternity when they passed by. A whole cigarette = one train. I had long hair, I'm embarrassed to admit, very long black hair. I wore black all the time. Not good looking or anything, but kind of nondescript. Average. I had a car that barely ran, some sort of a Chevy type thing, also very average.

Bill Sparks, our resident anarchist/nihilist, walked by me one day on campus, and mumbled something, like he was reading a poem to me or something. He was always acting like he was reading a poem that he'd just written, when in fact, he was just simply talking to you. He mentioned the Swans. "You gotta hear this shit." What did I know of them? Nothing, really. The year before, they had released an album, The Burning World. It seemed that everyone was talking about it. I went out and got it. It seemed vaguely folkish to me, not the kind of music I was listening to a lot at the time (Big Black, early Sonic Youth, Screaming Blue Messiahs, White Light/White Heat). Ironically, later, I learned that Swans themselves had emerged from that crazy nihilistic machinery-of-violence no-wave aesthetic. This album, The Burning World, was but a small false clue, a peace offering, a folk music pause from all the horrible noise that Swans inflicted upon the world. Let me put it this way: there was probably NO band on Earth in the 1980s that sounder louder and more deranged and skull-poundingly heavy as the Swans. (My favorite lyric: "The sex in your soul will damn you to hell!!!" repeated ad nauseam in ALL CAPS for 10 minutes while music that sounds like four thousand Terminator robots marching into your brain screams out of the speakers).

So in 1989, The Burning World was a surprise, because it was so ... lush. Lead Swans architect Michael Gira [pronounced "Jeera"] has since disavowed the whole album as a mistake, and quickly returned to a less "commercial" sounding aesthetic in a series of albums in the early nineties. These subsequent albums had the same repetitive, monolithic drones of earlier Swans but without the noise. Kind of like folk drones. You could find kernels of beauty among the minimalism. (The best of the latter period was White Light From the Mouth of Infinity. For my previous concert review of Gira, see here.)

But that summer, in 1990, I listened to The Burning World a lot. It wasn't their best album (which was and still is undoubtedly 1987's Children Of God). But the songs seemed to mirror my anxieties about things. There was one song, in particular, that I gravitated to a lot, called "Saved." It still seems amazing that Gira would allow himself to sing a song so tender as this, so full of longing and regret rather than his usual hatred and disgust. I always keep coming back to this one lyric:

When sunlight falls on your shoulder
You look like a creature from heaven
You're holy, when you open your eyes
And look up, inside that sheltering sky

And you're an angel, I'll never betray you
But I'll always be ... an only child

It's a powerful moment. You know what he means.

In January 1991, we moved to another apartment closer to campus, at Las Casitas, probably the shittiest apartment complex in College Station (or the world, actually). These pictures here might actually be the exact apartment we lived in in that spring of 1991. Oh My Jesus God. By that time, you know, things were kinda falling apart. But I tell you this, there were a lot of parties that spring and summer. I met a whole lotta people and did a whole lot of dubious things. I've forgotten the names of almost all of the people I met. Except Ted. Ted Townshend? He was an MD student. He was good looking, he kinda looked like a Nordic God with long hair. Ted, where are you these days? But more important, I wrote some damn good songs that year. Damn good songs.

Anyway, tonight I have to admit, "Saved" is a good song to play. That it is.

Japandroids

2011-08-11T10:45:00.005-04:00

"We used to dream / But now we worry about dyin'
We used to dream / But now we worry about dyin'
But I don't wanna worry about dyin'
I just wanna worry about those sunshine girls....."

There's something in that small couplet that captures completely and ineffably the cusp, the point between (invincible) youth and (damaged) adulthood. The Japandroids are a couple of children in their early/mid-20s from Vancouver who make this music. Some of their music reminds me of that old forgotten band, Eddie & The Hotrods, a precursor to British punk who had a major hit in 1977 with "Do Anything You Wanna Do." (And I'm so fucking old, I actually remember how much I loved that song as a child). I don't know much of the Japandroids' discography but the songs I've heard so far are about this precise turning point between being young and being old, suffused with a dollop of nostalgia, an unfortunate awareness what they're experiencing is totally fleeting, it's here and it's gone, and then all that's left is nothing.

I heard this song "Young Hearts Spark Fire" (from their album Post-Nothing) a million times in 2009. I would jog with it all the time, blasting it through my headphones. This is a live-in-the-studio version of "Young Hearts Spark Fire." Incredibly, the actual recorded version rocks much harder.

Here is a subsequent Japandroids single from 2010, a little bit like 1980s power pop a la the Replacements. A song predictably called "Younger Us":

"Gimme that naked new skin rush / Gimme younger us
Gimme that you and me to the grave trust / Give me younger us
Gimme that girls love running wild and free / Give me younger us
Gimme that boys out swimming through the streets / Give me younger us
Gimme that night you were already in bed
Said 'fuck it' got up to drink with me instead."

Immersia

2011-08-08T23:50:00.005-04:00

Sitting around doing nothing, waiting for the flight back. Days are going by. Eating. Sleeping. Doing nothing. I watched the entire first season of True Blood. I'm still living in 2008 apparently. I loved it -- who'd have thought white trash vampires would be this funny? Speaking of trashy but good: I can't wait to see the Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Then I tweaked my syllabi. I don't listen to that much music. I eat a lot. I do nothing. This is called ennui. Or as I like to call it: immersia.

The Baths album Cerulean was on my top 10 list for the year 2010. I'm too lazy to say much about it. Yeah, it's an acquired taste. Yeah, you have to listen to it with headphones on. And yeah, the bass and the beats are the shit. Here's the standout track "Lovely Bloodflow." Dedicated to you, out there in the New York heat.

When will I get back to New York? Not soon enough.

Joni Mitchell (Part 1)

2011-07-22T05:14:00.001-04:00

Joni Mitchell occupies a peculiar place in the pantheon of modern popular music because there's little consensus about where she fits as an artist. The most common and lazy definition is the one about her as a folk singer and singer-songwriter, that she was some sort of 1970s folkie who sang songs about nature and love and all manner of twee things. Her song "Big Yellow Taxi" is probably the one most recognized by people who don't follow music and falls into this category of kind-of-hippie-ish light-headed girlie folk music. But then there's the more exaggerated perception, one that sounds like a compliment but is really a reflection of how we tend to gender-ize the arts. I'm thinking of Allmusic.com's comment that, "when the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as one of the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century." If that isn't hyperbolic, then there's Rolling Stone magazine's claim that she is "one of the greatest songwriters ever." And then there's the third perceptive wor(l)d on Joni Mitchell: the one where you see her name crop up in the most unexpected places. Consider some of the musicians who have gone on record as being obsessive fans of Mitchell:

Led Zeppelin, Sonic Youth, Morrissey, Prince, Bjork, Jeff Buckley, Elvis Costello, Janet Jackson, Slash, Boards of Canada, and my favorite: Maynard James Keenan, whose favorite Joni Mitchell song (and, as it turns out, one my mine, is "Black Crow" from Hejira).

Since I'm spending a lot of time writing this, it's probably redundant to say that I love Joni Mitchell's music. Actually, I'm not sure if "love" is the right word. For starters I don't love all her music. But there's a quality about her music that's both familiar and yet removed; I've found that I've kept coming back to it no matter how my musical tastes have evolved over the past two decades. I don't find her music sophomoric, or "too seventies" or "too folk" or too anything. It's kind of transcended the times. That said, she did produce some bland (and frankly bad) music at times in her career. But for my money, the music she made between 1975 and 1980 was unimpeachable and represents as good a run as anybody ever had in music at that time. She wasn't just a great songwriter, she was/is a brilliant guitarist, beautiful singer, fantastic lyricist, and expert arranger/producer. She also painted all her album covers. She had fully conceived visions for each album as artistic statements.

Before I move ahead, the period that I love, 1975-1980, needs some explaining. If you read anything about Joni Mitchell or watch a documentary about her, they tend to focus the lion's share of attention on what I call "phase 1" of her career, from 1968 to 1974. This was the height of her fame, she sold millions of records, and she was an undeniable folk-rock icon in the U.S. Her music, while often ambitious and unconventional in subtle ways, was still very much grounded in the folk-ish singer-songwriter mode that made stars out of James Taylor, Carole King, Crosby Stills & Nash, America, and their ilk. But it's clear that Mitchell's ambitions were not limited by this genre, and she was way ahead of the pack. Beginning the mid-seventies, she released a series of albums that progressively pushed the boundaries of pop music in new and exciting directions, particularly by embracing jazz and African music. Her guitar tunings, her lyrics, her arrangements, her delivery, all crossed into uncharted territory. It's not surprising that most of these albums were not embraced by the public or the critics, many of whom wanted and expected her to continue in the more traditional singer-songwriter folk rock vein. She clearly alienated a huge chunk of her audience but stuck to her guns. It is to these records that I come back to, again again, mesmerized and sometimes bewildered by the density of her ambition. This was some pretty fucking amazing music from a rock chick who was supremely talented.

So, with that said, let's try and dissect "phase 1" of her career in this post. I'll deal with her more experimental "phase 2" in a second post, and then conclude with her latter day work in "phase 3."

Mitchell's first album, Song To A Seagull (1968), was 'produced' by wonderboy genius David Crosby and is somewhat of an anomaly in her ouevre: it's a peculiar combination of classical sensibilities and folk music. Her lyrics are super dense. This is not the folk of Judy Collins or Peter Paul & Mary. And yes, the words are a little ponderous, in the way that someone who believes that songs should be 'serious.' In the title track, she sings:

I came to the city
And lived like old Crusoe On an island of noise
In a cobblestone sea
And the beaches were concrete
And the stars paid a light bill
And the blossoms hung false
On their store window trees
My dreams with the seagulls fly
Out of reach out of cry

There's a lot of "I" in these songs, and despite the slightly novel classical arrangements, the album is firmly in the confessional singer-songwriter mode that was emerging at the time: so many people with self-titled albums: James Taylor (1968) and Neil Young (1968) come to mind. Below, from a live TV performance in 1971, we see Mitchell doing "Cactus Tree," the final track on Songs To A Seagull.

Mitchell's second album, Clouds (1969), is better known to casual listeners, and the cover, a self-portrait, is often reproduced. The music is very sparse here, mostly just her and an acoustic guitar. (Steven Stills plays the occasional bass). There are several iconic Mitchell songs here, many of which actually predated her first album but which she didn't get around recording until Clouds. The include "Both Sides, Now" and "Chelsea Morning." The former has been covered by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Bing Crosby to Hole to Leonard Nimoy to Tory Amos to Clay Aiken (don't ask). It was made most famous by Judy Collins who had a hit with it in 1968, the year before Mitchell's version was out. Here's Joni, from a live performance in 1970. Her voice is tender, light. Probably this is what David Crosby (who "discovered" her) meant when he said "I walked into a cafe, my heart almost stopped..."

Probably the biggest departure on this album, and the one that seems to communicate a little bit of her future ambition, is "Songs to Aging Children" which has been described as "perhaps the most sophisticated chord sequence in all of pop music, employing chords chromatically related by tritones or thirds." "Chromatic" chords are basically chords that include at least one note not belonging to the conventional diatonic scale. Without getting too technical, it's not something that you would find popular singers doing, partly because it creates dissonance and not resolution. Some music scholars (notably Susan McClary) have argued that chromaticism in music can be understood as representing "the other" (racial, sexual, class, etc.) in music. In identifying chromaticism in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (c. 1860s), French feminist and literary critic Catherine Clement called it "feminine stink," whatever that means. Not sure what any of this has to do with Joni Mitchell, but clearly she was experimenting with form already on her second album. Here she is doing "Songs to Aging Children":

Her third album, Ladies of the Canyon (1970) shows further evolution, especially lyrically. Where Mitchell's music had a yearning quality, sprinkled with anticipatory nostalgia, here we have more topical songs, loosely about California--the album title is an allusion to Laurel Canyon, where a bunch of these West Coast rock star types would hang out. As was the tradition, Crosby Stills & Nash were involved in various ways with the album, most critically perhaps in covering the penultimate song "Woodstock" for CSNY's 1970 album Deja Vu. The song "Circle Game" was a direct response to Neil Young's almost hypnotic acoustic "Sugar Mountain," another song about lost youth and getting older.

The biggest song here was undoubtedly "Big Yellow Taxi" which has been played so many times in college dorm rooms that it may be the leading cause of suicide in universities. OK, it's not a bad song but it does have a cloying quality that is hard to escape--"they paved paradise to put up a parking lot" indeed. Mitchell showed up at the infamous Isle of Wight festival in 1970 to play the song, perhaps regretting that she missed Woodstock. She was clearly freaked out to be performing at such a big venue--with 600,000+ people in attendance, some still claim that this was the largest rock festival ever--but nevertheless manages to sound competent. Here is the clip from Murray Lerner's Message to Love documentary about the festival:

Ladies of the Canyon was a big hit; it was the one that catapulted Mitchell to superstardom, at least in established rock circles. She sold lots of records, guest-starred in other people's records, and generally was everywhere. Perhaps the (over) exposure shocked her, for her next move was an intensely personal statement.

So now we get to the real deal: Blue (1971). In pretty much every snooty rock establishment list of the top 100 albums of all time, you will find Blue. It's just one of those axioms that have been encrusted into the official canon of rock history. But it is true that several generations of sensitive young women (and their moms) identify with this album in a way that is too intense to be simply peer pressure. I heard this album sometime in 1986/87-ish, I don't remember -- I went out and got the album, believing that official rock lists must not lie. I put on the album and admit to being slightly underwhelmed. It wasn't so much the songs, but the production, which was very tinny and with huge spaces between the instruments. Over the years, though, I've grown to appreciate it, and to see its undeniable beauty. For one thing, it's really an adult album, dealing with the crises and conundrums of adulthood, circa age 30 (Mitchell was 27). Second, unlike her previous albums, which hinted at melancholia, this album was suffused in sadness, adult sadness, the kind you would see a decade later in Kramer vs. Kramer. And yeah, the melodies are beautiful. It's about as far as you could get with the traditional folk format: tender acoustic guitars, acoustic pianos, light percussion, and sparing backing vocals.

My favorite song on the album is the first, "All I Want" in which the her voice vocal swoops up and down several octaves over a gentle bass drum hop. It's unabashed love. She sings of not falling in love, but about how even when you've been in a relationship for a while, there can still be a kind of mixed up intensity ("Oh I hate you some, I love you some, I love you when I forget about me..."). As far as being in love, whoever encapsulated that total feeling better than her, when she says "Oh I could drink a case of you darling / And I would still be on my feet"? Yet despite these almost euphoric touches, every song here has dark undertones. Even in "A Case of You," she sings:

Just before our love got lost you said
'I am as constant as a northern star'
And I said, 'Constantly in the darkness, where's that at?
If you want me, I'll be in the bar.'

Prince does an amazing cover of this song.

The big hit here was "Carey" which is catchy. But really, the centerpieces are three (almost unnervingly) intense songs: the title track, "River," and "The Last Time I Saw Richard," each harrowing portraits of the costs of giving yourself to others. "River" begins with an adaptation of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer before musing on the end of a relationship: "I wish I had a river / I could skate away on." On "Blue," she talks about "acid, booze, and ass / needles, guns, and grass / lots of laughs." Someon on Sputnikmusic.com writes about the final song "Last Time I Saw Richard":

As perhaps a last folk tale before a move towards diversification in sound, "The Last Time I Saw Richard" tells the tale of an impure despicable man named Richard. As a direct contrast to her hopes and dreams, Richard can be felt as the anti-truth in relationships, the mistrust and also the ugly reality of life. "Richard, you haven't really changed, I said. It's just that now you're romanticizing some pain that's in your head."

As one of the saddest moments of the album, "The Last Time I Saw Richard" embodies lost hope and untruthful relationships. The entire song feels wrong, as her voice reaches unnatural highs, unlike the beautiful high notes in "All I Want." The piano never quite reveals itself, but moments of sadness are coupled with key lyrical lines and peaks of the ugly vocals. It is one of the most intense moments of the album, combining Mitchell's usual subtlety with a vivid portrayal of an ugly soul.

For me, not all of it works. "California" feels meandering and not a little bit plain. "Little Green" could have been left off. (At the last minute actually, she left two excellent songs off the album, "Urge for Going" and "Hunter," but they showed up later on various releases). Musically Blue doesn't have much depth, and this is probably to some extent a fault of the production which is tinny (or maybe it's because she wanted a stripped down minimalist sound); the guitar sounds too trebly and it's like she took out all the mid-range frequencies. She has amazing command of her voice but at the very high notes, she can come off a little grating. It's an acquired taste. (In my opinion, her voice actually improved as she made her way into the seventies.) But although I wouldn't rank Blue as highly as number 30 in the 500 greatest albums of all time (as Rolling Stone magazine did), it's still a superb album. Maybe not Mitchell's best, but in her top 5 for sure.

This is a fantastic clip of her doing a very early version of "All I Want," about a year before Blue was released, so the song was completely new to the audience at the time. This is an inferior version of the song to the one that actually ended up on record but it's still worth hearing. She's such an incredibly talented instrumentalist.

Here is a live version of the song from 1972, using that wonderful trademark Appalachian dulcimer.

The next album was For The Roses (1972), sandwiched as it was between two bonafide commercial successes. It's an odd album and I confess I'm not too familiar with it. The big hit here was the country-ish "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio," a song she wrote sarcastically when her label asked her to produce a hit. It's a cute song but the b-side of the single,"Urge For Going," written apparently in 1966, is a gem of a song. Left off of Blue, the song has been covered by many people. My favorite version is by Crosby & Nash which itself was left unreleased until 1991. Can you think of a better song about wanderlust? Crosby's voice is sublime here:

The sound is much more fleshed out than Blue, and you get the sense that Mitchell is slowly gravitating towards a more full band sound. We have drums, bass, and even electric guitars on "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire," a jazz-tinged song about a heroin addict. This is, in fact, the first album, in which she begins infusing her music with jazz inflections, the first step away from traditional folk music. The usual Stills and Nash turn up in various roles--the latter plays the harmonica on "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio." For some reason, the National Recording Registry has added For The Roses to its database, one of 50 recordings chosen that year. And the New York Times noted that "Never does Mitchell voice a thought or feeling commonly" on this album.

Mitchell's commercial apotheosis came with her sixth album, Court and Spark (1974). Here, you see a further forays into full-band rock as well as jazz, in other words a combination of CSNY-ish folk rock with jazz. A whole bunch of slick LA-based session musicians have their names on the album: Larry Carlton, Wilton Felder, etc. The album reached number 2 on the top 100 albums chart in the U.S. And most notably, it was voted the best of album of the year by the famous Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll for 1974, no small task given the general fickle nature of Village Voice critics. Besides sporting the best ever title for an album, Court and Spark was one of those rare albums that was intelligent but populist by an artist at the peak of her commercial powers.

The key commercial song here was "Help Me," Mitchell's biggest top 40 hit; she had Tom Scott's jazz band, the L.A. Express, play the backing. They would stick with Mitchell for another couple of albums. I'm not sure why it was such a big hit, but most notably, one Minneapolis teenager named Prince was evidently impressed by it. Later on, when he released his classic Sign o' the Times (1987), he invoked the song in his "Ballad of Dorothy Parker." My favorite song here is "Free Man in Paris," a song apparently about David Geffen. It's been covered by Neil Diamond, Sufjan Stevens, and even Phish (!):

You can see how her chord progressions never go to the place you expect them to. You would never mistake this for a jazz song, but, like another contemporary act, Steely Dan, she was working firmly within the confines of pop but adding little bits of jazz into her music. At its core, though this is a smart pop album, not folk or jazz album and it's on that level that it succeeds. On "Car On the Hill," for example, you hear these beautiful stacked-on harmonies that never stray from the pop format but attain an almost hallucinatory effect. The other thing that I like about this album is that she's actualy funny. This is not like Blue (maudlin, self-directed). This is Joni Mitchell looking outward, smiling, smirking, with a tongue in her cheek at the world around. Her guitar-playing (a Martin acoustic guitar tuned to all sorts of weird scales) is exemplary. She shows here why she was one of the best instrumentalists working in the pop medium in the 1970s. Slant magazine notes that, "Court And Spark is not only the best soundtrack to a Sunday morning ever made, it's also an essential, timeless artifact of an era when pop could be both popular and personal, and would be rewarded critically and commercially for such qualities." If you want the best of the "phase 1" Joni Mitchell, both the commercial and critical high point, there is no better place to start than Court and Spark.

The final album in my "phase 1" is Miles Of Aisles (1974), not a studio album, but her first live album. During the tour for Court and Spark, Mitchell went on a long tour with the L.A. Express. She recorded a series of shows in August 1974 at L.A., which were then edited, mixed, and released later in the year as a double album, Miles Of Aisles. Mitchell's outlook on her life and music are portrayed nicely in a review in (the late great) magazine, Circus, here. The songs pretty much cover her entire career so far, although weirdly without a single song from Court and Spark, but with at least two brand new song ("Jericho" and "Love Or Money"). All the songs from her earlier "folk" period are given the full jazz-pop treatment, reflecting Mitchell's tastes at the time. Some would call it "easy listening" and perhaps some of it is, but she never really lets the music become treacly and/or predictable. The live arrangements are tasteful and the band sympathetic. She noted that:

I'm going to start looking for people who are untried ... who have a different kind of enthusiasm that comes from wanting to support the artist. Like Miles Davis always has a band that are really great, but are cushions for him, you know. I've got a voice I haven't used yet and haven't developed, which is very deep and strong and could carry over a loud band. And I'm very tempted to go in that direction experimentally.

Below, we see her totally transform the song "Rainy Night House" (originally from Ladies Of The Canyon) for her 1974 tour:

Well, that brings me to the end of "phase 1" of Joni Mitchell. We'll carry on with the more exciting "phase 2" soon.

The Ship Song

2011-07-21T12:41:00.000-04:00

Yes, it's a love song. Originally written and performed by Nick Cave, it was on his 1990 album The Good Son. I've always been partial to this version by Concrete Blonde, which was originally a b-side, also dating from 1990. I'll have a longer post on Concrete Blonde later, but I'll just say this, the moment when Johnette Napolitano comes into this song (around 1:30) still sends shivers down my spine. It's a song about two lovers who have forgotten the world, lost in the damage of their own world. The key lyrics are about how the connection you make with someone can make you forget all sorts of dubious and destructive moral choices you've made in the world outside.

We talk about it all night long
We define our moral ground
But when I crawl into your arms
Everything it comes tumbling down

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

And then, she sings, unbelievably and inevitably [at 1:30]:

Your face has fallen sad now
For you know the time is nigh
When I must remove your wings
And you, you must try and fly

Fujiya & Miyagi

2011-07-17T02:49:00.005-04:00

I know I've been buried under the radar for a while now. Part of it is lack of inspiration, part of it is lack of time. But I've been thinking that I want to do some long form posts on the careers of certain musicians: I'd like to consider the entire corpus of work of a particular musician or band and add commentary to it, post some videos, and maybe mp3s of unreleased tracks. The first one on my list is Joni Mitchell, an idea (partly) suggested by an anonymous reader of this blog. Joni Mitchell has 19 original studio albums and two live albums, all worth perusing for one reason or another so it's gonna be a long haul.

In the meantime, I post here a song by a British band called Fujiya & Miyagi. I discovered them during a trip to New Orleans in 2009 when someone was playing their album Transparent Things in the car. They're supposedly influenced by kraut rock (who isn't these days? it's like saying you were influenced by guitars or drums). They take their name from a vintage record player (Fujiya) and Pat Morita's character in The Karate Kid (Miyagi). They have released a new album this year called Ventriloquizzing, which I have not heard. But it's definitely worth digging up a copy of Transparent Things (2006). Every track on that album is good. Every track, I kid you not. An old review here.

Here is the video for "Ankle Injuries," the first song off Transparent Things.

And the video for "Collarbone," the second track off the album.

Thurston Moore - Space

2011-06-15T23:50:00.002-04:00

I wrote a review of Thurston Moore's new album, Demolished Thoughts, for the next issue of Inflatable Ferret (out tomorrow, I think). I'll post a link to the review once it's out, but for now here's a track off the album. I have to say right out that I was surprised by this record. It's a really lush sounding record (Beck produced) with 12-string guitars, violins, harps, and a light rhythm section. The guitar-violin combo really works here and the music is perfect summer music that's a little off-kilter. I highly recommend the album. Here's a particular gorgeous track ("Space") from the album:

You can download mp3s from the album at The Aquarium Drunkard. Also watch a cool video with Thurston Moore reminiscing about New York and talking about the album at the French website La Blogotheque.

WOW

2011-05-25T15:15:00.006-04:00

There's something just incredibly awesome when musicians normally known for soft/mellow music suddenly shift gears and do music totally uncharacteristic and HEAVY.

And if it's some quasi-folkie (attractive) soft-spoken chick with a guitar, it takes it over the limit. Here's Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent, known for 2009's awesome Actor) doing a cover of Big Black's "Kerosene" last Sunday (May 22) at the Bowery Ballroom here in NYC. This was the show to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Michael Azerrad's classic book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991. Several contemporary bands took turns covering the bands covered in the book.

Here, Annie Clark fucking rips a hole in the ozone layer with this. It's worth watching all 7 minutes of this. You will be pounded into submission. Steve Albini, eat your heart out.

Stuff

2011-05-24T22:08:00.005-04:00

For Ashim, here's a cover of a song by the Soft Boys from a Replacements show on July 1, 1985. It's from a bootleg variously called Simply Unacceptable or 7th St. Entry in Minneapolis. Full rip of the show here.

The Replacements -- I Wanna Destroy You (live) [mp3]

Happy Birthday

2011-05-24T13:47:00.002-04:00

The Fleet Foxes

2011-05-09T23:35:00.004-04:00

This following song was the soundtrack to my late winter 2008 and early 2009, during a time when I spent a lot of time in Boston / Cambridge. The Fleet Foxes are a Seattle-based band who do beautiful songs about dreams within dreams washed by unbelievable harmonies, voices stacked on each other like a million parallel rail lines from here to the horizon.

Their first album, self-titled, appeared in 2008 and they just released their sophomore effort, Helplessness Blues, which I am told, is just as good, if not better than the debut. The people in the band seem kinda young (mid-20s), and maybe that's one reason why their music seems dislodged in time, without influence or context. Sometimes the voices remind me of the Everly Brothers, that crazy dream harmony that they used to conjure up in songs like "All I Have to Do is Dream" and "Cathy's Clown." But where the Everly Brothers sang about unrequied love, Fleet Foxes sing about weird make-believe worlds, lives kidnapped from Medieval times. The cover of their first album was a Dutch painting from the 16th century (actually by a Flemish Renaissance painter by the name of Pieter Bruegel the Elder).

This song, "White Winter Hymnal" is spine-tingling-ly beautiful. It was the single off the album and undoubtedly the best song from it. The video is a little off-putting but just close your eyes and put on repeat. There is something mesmerizing at work here.

Unable to embed in my blog, but click here for the video. And here is a live performance.

The Besnard Lakes

2011-04-16T11:16:00.004-04:00

Well, it's my last night in Moscow. Goodbye to Russia and all that. For some reason, Moscow makes me tired in a way that New York doesn't. I've been here a week and I feel exhausted. Walking the streets of Moscow, you see posters for lots of shows coming up: System of a Down, Roger Waters (doing The Wall!), Whitesnake, and Shakira. Yes, I have now mentioned both System of a Down and Whitesnake in my blog, and I did not do that out of irony. I took the picture on the left on Wednesday, walking near the U.S. embassy on my way to the nearest subway station (Smolenskaya). Whitesnake is playing Moscow on June 2. I would imagine that the guy in Whitesnake is, like 70 years old. But that seems like a small obstacle to be able to do "Here We Go Again" in Moscow, right?

Like any major big city outside the West that is caught in the whirlwind of swift-paced 'modernization,' Moscow is a bundle of contradictions. But I think, more than any other place I've been to, it thrives on kitsch but without the self-consciousness of knowing that it's kitsch. In other words, there's lots of bad taste in Moscow. That doesn't mean that people don't do haute culture or whatever you wanna call it. There's an abundance of that. But once you get below the radar level of say, a Mozart opera or a exhibit about Suprematism, it's pretty much a straight nose dive to, um, the Black Eyed Peas or Talo Cruz or whatever. Or the exhumed corpse of bad Whitesnake (yes, back in the mid-1970s, there was a brief moment---mind you, a very brief moment---when it was thought possible that Whitesnake might be a respectable band, having emerged out of the cadaver of Deep Purple, an actually good band; but alas Whitesnake's future hand in single handedly inventing hair metal has made us all forget that moment).

But there are, of course, people who like decent pop culture here. I remember that Laika played here back many years ago. I think the reunited Swans played here recently. I see that a lot of bands/musicians go through here, tap into the subculture, and then leave. There's cool stuff going on in Moscow but it's a bit difficult to track down.

One of my favorite tracks on the iPod here in Moscow was the Besnard Lakes' "Albatross.' This is a band that plays big music. They are the bastard progeny of My Bloody Valentine crossed with circa 1966 Beach Boys. Based in Canada, they put out one of my favorite albums from last year, The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night. Apparently a husband-and-wife team affair, kinda like Thurston and Kim. Or Bert and Ernie. Crank it up and get washed over by the wash of candy fuzz distortion. Goodbye Moscow. Enjoy

Kurt Vile

2011-04-13T09:28:00.005-04:00

Back when I lived in Pittsburgh (circa '99-ish), I tried recording a whole bunch of my songs on a 4-track TASCAM cassette model. I was on a roll. But it was really hard to translate the music I was hearing in my head onto the thing that I would hear back on a cassette or a CD. I wanted something that was a little world-weary, something low-fi, sometimes very heavy, sometimes soft. I recorded a lot of songs and some of them came out OK--about 15 songs.

Well, recently James asked me to review the new Kurt Vile album for the next issue of Inflatable Ferret which I haven't gotten around to yet (oops). Vile has long curly hair and his new album is called Smoke Ring for My Halo, almost as good a title as his last one, Childish Prodigy. Either way, been listening to Smoke Ring for My Halo a lot this past few weeks, and here in Moscow too. Russian subway trains are way too loud to listen to music so it's mostly out in the dreary streets. I keep coming back to this one song, "On Tour" which I found really reminiscent of something, but it turns out that it's actually reminiscent of nothing real. It's just reminiscent of the sound I was trying to get when I was recording songs in '99. This is the sound. The vocals are not really anything I would have done (he sounds a little like Tom Petty) but the sound, the guitars, the drums, it was in my head. So it feels really comforting to listen to it now, like an old friend or something. The song seems quite simple on first listen it has these little embellishments that slowly gather steam and stand out after repeated listening. I love the bells-chime-y electric guitars that play over the acoustic guitar background through the song. They achieve a kind of state of grace that's kinda mesmerizing.

The facts: Smoke Ring For My Halo came out last month (March 2011) and is a most delicious album. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth likes him. He's on Matador. His recent show with his band, the Violators, at SXSW is archived here.

Do Re Mi

2011-04-12T04:33:00.001-04:00

Here in Moscow, something made me think of this song.
Apparently, the last song he recorded right before the deed.
Quite amazing, actually.

Philadelphia Freedom

2011-03-31T14:22:00.004-04:00

This was the first song that ever registered in my brain as something to like, to listen to again, to appreciate. I think I was about nine years old, living in Manchester, England. Before this song, my appreciation of music was somewhat disconnected, without much conviction or commitment or emotion. I don't know what it is about this song in particular. I'm sure it was serendipity more than anything else; it just happened to be on the radio at the right place at the right time. But I do know that what got me was the drums, something about the metronomic heavy down beat, that snare sound that was like being hit on the head. I distinctly remember trying to play-act being the drummer. Elton John, it seems, opened up a part of my brain that I never knew existed. After that, it was only a hop-skip-and-jump to the wonderful incredible world of music, music, and more music as an adolescent. Many years (decades) later, when I moved to Philadelphia, I thought about this song. But alas, it was no longer the seventies....

I should add that listening to it now, it's clear what a great pop song it was. It's structurally a complicated song with lots of different passages, an incredible hook, a fantastic chorus, and just a great example of white soul from the seventies. "Philadelphia Freedom" is also a great example of how sixties and seventies rock produced wonderful three-to-four minute long singles that were fantastic and could be enjoyed without any knowledge of the singer or the album, i.e., without any context. This song, in fact, wasn't even on an original album; it was just released as a stand-alone 45. I miss that.

Excited!

2011-03-13T21:20:00.002-04:00

Upcoming shows have tickets for:

Godspeed You! Black Emperor @ Church of St. Paul the Apostle (March 17)
Explosions In The Sky @ Radio City Music Hall (April 6)
PJ Harvey @ Terminal 5 (April 19)
Mogwai @ Webster Hall (April 22)

Hmm... except for Polly Jean, I detect a trend here: grand instrumental music designed to awe you into submission.

Now, if only Seefeel suddenly decided to tour the U.S., that would put me in heaven. And in fact, just as I was writing these words, a quick look at their website shows that they are indeed coming to the U.S., but at the very precise time when I am all but guaranteed to be elsewhere. Well, that sucks.

OK, OK, I know it's unconscionable

2011-03-05T23:19:00.003-05:00

I loved Fleetwood Mac as a child. I love them as an adult.
I will ALWAYS love Fleetwood Mac. FOREVER.
Can I just get that out of the way?

Inflatable Ferret

2011-03-05T19:40:00.004-05:00

I have a couple of reviews of mine (of the new Mogwai and PJ Harvey records) published in the new issue of Inflatable Ferret. Check it out here. The whole set of issues is here. They have this whole thing where you can read the issue like a 'real' magazine or download a pdf. The whole operation is run by James Passarelli.

Gorgeous Obscurity

2011-02-28T23:15:00.004-05:00

Am still digesting the new Radiohead album. This morning, while on the way to work, I started playing random Radiohead songs, especially ones that I don't remember, to see if I could find anything I'd missed the first time around. And wow. I just stumbled on this song "Go Slowly" which was released in 2007 on the extra 8-track e.p. that came with physical copies of In Rainbows. This second CD basically collected outtakes from those sessions which, for whatever reason, they thought not good enough for the actual In Rainbows album. Gorgeous obscurity from Radiohead:

Radiohead -- Go Slowly [mp3]

Radiohead - Lotus Flower

2011-02-20T22:05:00.000-05:00

songs of childhood

2011-02-19T22:36:00.006-05:00

Wish I was back home. Or a kid again. Or both.

Birthday

2011-02-11T23:31:00.007-05:00

Today is my birthday. So ... I thought I'd write a few words about "birthday songs." The most obvious is, of course, the song "Happy Birthday" which has a pretty fascinating history. Apparently, the melody is from a song originally entitled "Good Morning to All" written and composed by Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill in 1893. This melody was eventually appropriated for "Happy Birthday to You" by 1919.

My first real recollection of a song about birthdays was Stevie Wonder's "Happy Birthday" from his 1980 album Hotter Than July. The song was actually part of a campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday and was released as a single in 1981.

Later, by my late teens, I heard the Beatles' "Birthday" from the White Album, a slightly insane song that seems a little bit tongue-in-cheek:

They say it's your birthday
Well, it's my birthday too

It was one of those silly songs off of the White Album that was probably knocked off in an hour.

Soon enough, when I became old and cynical, I heard the Smiths' "Unhappy Birthday," one of the most sublimely beautiful songs off their final album Strangeways Here We Come from 1987. That chord progression of Johnny Marr's is just stunning, and the song itself is just so weird and sad and almost pathetic:

As a final birthday song, I would put the Replacements' "Birthday Gal" which for years I thought was called "Birthday Carol." This song was recorded in 1987 during sessions for Pleased To Meet Me but never released until almost two decades later. I had the fortune to hear a bootleg version and I even had the chance to ask Paul Westerberg about it once. He just grumbled and said it wasn't that good. In fact, it's brilliant. I think the song is about a girl who's about to turn 30, i.e., nothing to do with me. But then again, it's kinda universal:

Birthday gal, did you wish yet?
Can you handle the turning?
The candles are burning low.

Birthday gal, do you wish that
There weren't quite as many candles
that you had to blow.

Anyway, so much for that. Happy Birthday to me! I hope I have a good year ahead. I really do. See ya.

Favorite Music 2010

2011-02-07T23:31:00.003-05:00

This is my year end list with the caveat that these aren't necessarily the best albums out in 2010 but the ones I liked the most. And since I listen to like 0.005% of all available music in the world this is not even close to the definitive list of anything. Having said that, it was a cool year for my music listening. I do not discern any pattern in any of this stuff, except that almost all music I listen to these days is derivative, as in, everything sounds like something you've heard before. As I've mentioned before, this is not necessarily a bad thing, just that real sonic innovation has moved to the fringes of popular music while what is popular generally tweaks or updates or excavates (or all three) old formulas. There were a few eras when sonic/lyrical innovation moved into the pop area (late '60s, late '70s/early '80s) but these were short-lived phases.

A second comment: There were a lot of good albums but none that truly knocked the ball out of the park. As someone mentioned on some blog somewhere on the internet, this is actually a good thing in a way, cause that means there's a lot of good stuff instead of a few stellar records.

A third comment: A lot of music I listen to is from the past. My friends at Kick Out The Jams Mofo made the same observation. I don't know that what means beyond the fact that I am old. But then I asked one of my 19-year old students what they listened to, and to my horror, he answered Rush, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and Yes.

A final comment: A lot of year-end lists are floating around. I'd like to give props to Kick Out The Jams Mofo whose year-end lists were also mentioned in (gasp or shudder, depending on your perspective) Rolling Stone magazine. He has an awesome list; check it out. KOTJMF 's absolute best pick was Janelle Monae's The ArchAndroid which also features on my list. There's also Paper Street Cinema, who is apparently some kind of obssessive movie genius freak who also has time to listen to music and have a job and a life.

Here is my list in some order that makes sense exactly right now but will be disowned by me ten minutes later. In fact, I already disagree with my list and I haven't even started to write it down.

1. Deerhunter -- Halcyon Digest: I put Deerhunter's last album as my top choice for 2008 so this is strange that they made it to the top for another year. I realize that kinda liking Deerhunter is pretty easy--after all, they make good pop music, the kind that just washes over you. On the other really liking Deerhunter is hard--after all, they make good pop music, the kind that just washes over you. Their modus operandi is not complicated: they write good pop songs with fantastic hooks with a deep tinge of nostalgia; the songs are impeccably arranged and produced, and every song has a strong hint of reverb. Their music harks back to the 1960s and 1970s in many ways; you hear shards of Motown, early 1970s pop (like Big Star and the Raspberries), pre-Who's Next Who, but are never antiques. The songs sound modern and old at the same time. The main songwriter of Deerhunter is Bradford Cox, a young and incredibly prolific songwriter who seems to live and breathe music. His side band Atlas Sound is a bit more 'experimental' (or demo-ish) but he seems to put his heart and soul into Deerhunter. Yet, the best song on the album, "Desire Lines," was not written by Cox, but by guitarist Lockett Pundt. Yes, his name is Lockett Pundt. Watch a fantastic live performance of the song here; watch especially as the song begins to spiral into the stratosphere at around the three minute mark. Heavenly stuff.

2. Swans -- My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky: In their original incarnation, Swans had two distinct phases: the blood-curling sludge noise phase of their early to mid-eighties phase, and the almost tender (and often pretty) but undeniably doom-laden latter phase which began with White Light From the Mouth of Infinity in 1991 (which was pretty much my soundtrack to that year). Sandwiched between these two distinct phases was the album Children of God, a work of mad genius that distilled the best of both phases into a potent tour de force, and The Burning World, the Swans brief foray into 'commercial' (and I use that word loosely) folk-ish music. I think I listened to all three albums non-stop in 1991. You can tell I was happy that year. In between all of this, they managed to influence just about every twisted musician in the world and sold almost nothing. For sure, Maynard James Keenan got something out of it. In a playlist on a radio show back in 2001, Keenan played Swans' "Coward" (from Holy Money) (right after he played Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow" (of Hejira). As The Guardian says:

Like the Velvet Underground 15 years before them, Swans were an affront to almost everyone of decent sensibilities, and were also remarkably influential -- most visibly as a blueprint for later US industrial artists such as Ministry and Nine Inch Nails.

For sure, they are an acquired taste. Not for the faint-hearted. So what does the new album sound like? Well, for starters, it grabs you into a vortex of null and void. Gira's idea of a party is to spew all sorts of venom at the world and at himself; his is a commentary on the ugliness and betrayal of life, and when ugliness and death and betrayal have reached a crescendo, he finds beauty, some sort of salvation. Without being religious, this is overtly spiritual music. There are few chords, there are only pummeling drones, repeated into oblivion until you lose yourself in the music. Gira explains the whole album track-by-track here.

Gira originally disbanded the Swans sometime in the late nineties, but continued to make music either solo or with his new band Angels of Light. I actually saw him live a couple of years ago; he showed up with an acoustic guitar and basically pummeled the entire crowd into mute submission. Now, suddenly, in 2010, he decided to resurrect the Swans moniker.

3. The Arcade Fire -- The Suburbs: I was not a big Arcade Fire (have never heard Neon Bible, for example) but I picked this up on a whim and I really liked it. I mean really. I liked every song and that's saying something for an album that has, like, 16 songs on it. The music is neither innovative nor revelatory but it is really brilliant, almost perfect 1970s rock. Yes, they do have a little of the early Springsteen in the them but they have really created their own sound. They are also much more versatile than people give them credit for. Here, the songs veer from gentle quasi waltzes (the title track) to four-on-the-floor punk ("Month of May") to an awesome synthpop number ("Sprawl II") that wouldn't be out of place next to Kim Carnes in 1981. The album is supposedly some sort of commentary on urban sprawl and perhaps it is. When I hear this album, I see in my mind 1970s American suburbia, the kind with ugly modernist houses and post-Wonder Years colors. The music pallet is rich, the production is lush, and Win Butler's voice is always yearning for something, often for something better, often for an imagined landscape of youth and expectation that exists only in an adult's imagination. This album is so good, I sometimes wake up to melodies from it, half-dreaming, with ghosts of melodies in my head.

4. Gorillaz -- Plastic Beach: Damon Albarn is now very deep into his second (third?) career as some sort of early 21st century David Byrne who has transcended pretty much anything he might have represented in the 1990s. Plastic Beach is the sound of an album rich, just rich, with unlikely sounds. Albarn and Jamie Hewell pretty much do what they do, it's the continuing adventures of the pomo band, lots of genres, lots of sounds, lots of ideas, lots of guest stars. But despite all this variety, it's really cohesive and surprisingly consistent; it maintains a mood throughout (vaguely pessimistic), grounded with a deeply electronic sheen. It's a superb album, and even the filler songs are listenable. The good songs are just brilliant. I don't know if this is the sound of the future. But it does feel like the sound of now.

5. Baths -- Cerulean: For sure, this is an acquired taste but something about it keeps nagging me, growing on me, taking me in. It's electronic music, a little bit glitchy, some weird vocals (the stuff that takes getting used to), and up front in-your-face electronic percussion. In fact, if there's one word that describes this music, it's that it's percussive. These are beats that hit you in the head. This is headphone music for 2010, meant as a distraction music (isn't all music distraction...?) for those long train rides into or out of the city. You stare out the window, you had a long day, the scenery rushes by, all urban grime. I've listened to this album a million times and I still have no idea what the songs are called. It doesn't really matter.

6. Broken Bells -- Broken Bells: Over the years, I've grown to like more and more the music and voice of James Mercer, the lead architect behind the Shins. It's been only recently that I've realized how amazing the pop of the Shins is/was. Mercer's voice can be chirpy and happy but there is a mournful quality about it. He's the guy you know as a teenager who seemed to think a lot but never let on that he was. Here, Mercer teams up with Danger Mouse to produce what is a great poptronica album that compels you to sing along after the third or fourth listen, the tunes are that good. This is a superb pop album full of imagination and odd twists and turns (the kind of stuff Mercer excelled at) that wouldn't be out of place in Beatles' White Album from an alternate reality.

7. Janelle Monae -- The ArchAndroid: Ah, the pop sublime. I totally accidentally heard this on Sound Opinions, resisted it, and then began to like it a lot more than I should ever have. I confess I don't know much about her but she seems to have a acute sense of the history of pop music. In fact, this album is like a short history of pop music as sang by a weird mutant between classic Motown and eighties R&B pop; throw in some rock, soul, Prince, Tricky, and hip hop, and you get this totally delicious album. Unfortunately, you can't embed her "Tightrope" video but you should check it out anyway. Is she a genius or is she voyeur?

8. The Radio Dept -- Clinging To A Scheme: I know absolutely nothing about this band but I do know that they made this song ("Domestic Scene/Heaven's On Fire"). The album is great. I'm a lame reviewer because I can't describe it. Or am too lazy to do so.

9. Wild Nothing -- Gemini: Anyway, so imagine you are spending a year in Cambridge (Massachusetts) for some reason. You rent an apartment somewhere. It's a good time. Imagine you took a picture of someone as she stood on Mass Ave near Central Square. She has sunglasses on, a scarf, with a giddy smile, young. Nothing can break her. Now imagine it's a 35 mm movie from a long time ago. People (you, her, others) are walking fast in the movie, the colors are a little washed out. That girl in the picture? You no longer know her, all you got is the movie. Now imagine that Wild Nothing's "Summer Holiday" is the soundtrack to that. Just wait for the break at 2.10. It will break your heart in two.

10. LCD Soundsystem -- This Is Happening: So I've written about these guys before and honestly there's not much to write about them. Everyone knows that their music sounds like something you've definitely heard before. You know you have. You've heard it before. You think it's David Bowie but it isn't. Is it Lou Reed? Is it some sort of Gang of Four ripoff? Hard to say. It's too melodic. If it's such a facsimile of the original, why is it so good? You keep listening to it over and over, and after a while, you don't even remember that it's a copy of something else. And you actually enjoy it.

OK, that's the top ten. Here are some other albums I liked. The order of the rest of it is rather arbitrary. Some quick one sentence reviews.

11. Four Tet -- There Is Love In You: Happier than the usual Four Tet
12. Call Me Lightning -- When I Am Gone My Blood Will Be Free. A bit like the Who circa Live at Leeds.
13. Oneohtrix Point Never -- Returnal. Almost as weird as Boards of Canada.
14. The Chemical Brothers -- Further
15. The Besnard Lakes -- The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night. A bit like My Bloody Valentine with Brian Wilson as a woman.
16. Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse -- Dark Night Of The Soul. So sad.
17. Flying Lotus -- Cosmogramma. This is a super fucking cool vibe. You need to be high.
18. Neil Young -- Le Noise. Well, you know he does whatever he wants.
19. School of Seven Bells -- Disconnect From Desire. Amazing anthemic blissout rock with a couple of chicks.
20. The Books -- The Way Out. As weird as ever but funnier.

21. Robyn -- Body Talk
22. Clive Tanaka y su orquesta -- Jet Set Siempre No. 1. I have been listening to this cassette nonstop for weeks. I have no idea who Clive Tanaka is but I assume he is googleable.
23. The Drums -- The Drums
24. Nest - Retold: Enjoyment of ambient music depends to a great degree to how little it forces you to pay attention. It's about mood, repetition, movement, sometimes at glacial pace, and yes, ambiance. Nest, a duo comprising Otto Totland and Huw Roberts, make music that crosses the delicate boundaries between modern classical music and modern electronic ambient genre. The album begins quietly, with tracks played often on a single instrument but builds up to orchestral swells by the end that would perfectly score a movie awash in deep melancholia. It's easy to dismiss much of ambient music as variations on a single (or couple of) themes; we have all heard the common complaint that "nothing much happened." But this is undeniably one of a kind, a beautifully constructed, meticulously executed set of music designed to transport you to a place where details don't matter anymore.
25. Robert Plant -- Band Of Joy
26. Summer Fiction -- Summer Fiction
27. Foals -- Total Life Forever
28. Grinderman -- Grinderman 2
29. M.I.A. -- Maya: I know, it's supposed to be crap. The other day, I went back and listened to it, and I liked it! I didn't want to, I really didn't. But I did. I can no longer show my face.
30. Beach Fossils -- Beach Fossils

Soundtracks
Clint Mansell -- Black Swan
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross -- The Social Network

Reissues, Live Stuff, Whatever
1. Bob Dylan -- The Witmark Demos (The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9, 1962-1964)
2. Mogwai -- Special Moves
3. Various Artists -- The World Ends: Afro Rock & Psychedelia in 1970s Nigeria (Parts 1 & 2)
4. Serge Gainsbourgh & Jane Birkin -- Je T'Aime...Moi, Non Plus
5. John Spencer Blues Explosion -- Orange
6. Neu -- Neu! Vinyl Box
7. Orange Juice -- Coals To Newcastle
8. The Stooges -- Have Some Fun: Live At Ungano's
9. The Who -- Live At Leeds: 40th Anniversary Super Deluxe Collectors Edition
10. John Lennon -- John Lennon Signature Box

Blog Posting

2011-02-03T10:44:00.008-05:00

Emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo
Ironic comment
More emo emo emo
Knowing comment with a wink with reference to totally obscure pop culture reference
More emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo
Derisive comment about life
Pitchfork sucks
More emo emo emo emo emo emo emo
Woe is me woe is me woe is woe is moe
Ironic comment covered in emo
Emo comment covered in irony
Unintelligible list that no one will read
San Francisco sucks
Further meditation on my emotions
Emo emo emo emo emo emo emo
That band rules
The other band sucks
That band used to rule
Now they suck
My feelings
Emo emo emo emo emo emo emo
Anger at post-capitalist order
Careful note of works of Marcuse, Gramsci, Marx
Also: Curious George, the Three Stooges, Nicolas Cage
Further comments about how I'm sad
Emo emo emo emo emo emo emo
Oblique reference to lyric by Morrissey
Medieval history not all that bad
My feelings
Further emo emo emo
Dénouement

Best Music/Pop Culture Reading On-Line 2010

2010-12-25T11:18:00.015-05:00

I read a lot this past year. 99% of it comprised student papers, student exams, tax forms, office paperwork, e-mails, and bills. So a real top 10 list of things read would give wide coverage to those aforementioned things. However, I'm choosing to focus on the other 1% of my reading matter. Only one caveat: I'm not including anything that is political, just because I think it would turn people off; ironically some of the best writing I've read this year has been political in nature. Anyway. Culture:

• Mark Grief, "The Hipster in the Mirror," The New York Times, November 12, 2010: This is a surprisingly interesting take on the 'hipster' phenomenon, which goes behind the obvious aphorism that no hipster would be caught dead admitting that they're a hipster.

• Zadie Smith, "Generation Why?," The New York Review of Books, November 25, 2010: Remember there was a time when everyone who was on Facebook was complaining about being on Facebook? This is not an article about that. This is a review of that movie about Zuckercorn, I mean Zuckerburg, by Zadie Smith, the very young British novelist who wrote White Teeth, who is now apparently a tenured professor at NYU.

• Eliot Weinberger, " 'Damn Right,' I said," London Review of Books, January 6, 2011: The author makes the obvious comparison between George W. Bush and Michel Foucault.

• David Bromwich, "The Fastidious President," London Review of Books, November 18, 2010: Completely nails it as to why Barack Obama is strangely uninspiring and like a ghost.

• Steven Hayden, "What Happened to Alternative Nation?," The A.V. Club: Somebody had to do it. Twenty years later, this guy is brave enough to revisit the frenzy over 'alternative' music in the early to mid-nineties, a period that seems slightly embarrassing in many ways now. This is a six-part article taking the story from the pregnant-with-expectation of something-big-about-to-happen circa 1990 on the cusp of Nevermind, all the way through Seattle, to the inevitable and inexorable slide to Bush in the mid-nineties. There's all sorts of unexpected detours in the essay, and even if the topic doesn't interest you, it's worth reading as a reasonably good example of rock'n'roll history as personal memoir done without nostalgia.

• The A.V. Club, Gateways to Geekery: There's so much good shit on the A.V. Club that it's kind of pointless to identify specific articles, but I've always liked this feature. You know how for years your friends would talk endlessly about a band or a director or a TV show or a genre and you'd kinda picked up on it but you never really committed to it and so you were never 'in the know'? And now ten years later it just seems too overwhelming to enter the canon anymore? (I feel like that with Buffy, Lost, Leonard Cohen, Frank Zappa, for example). Well, these folks give you an excellent introduction to that thing, complete with how to start, where to go deeper, and where not to go. These lengthy articles, my friend, are the finest examples of public service. They have good ones on Anime, French New Wave, Roxy Music, Paul Weller, The X-Files, Humphrey Bogart, John Waters, the Fall, and a gajillion other things. By the way, I really don't like Leonard Cohen even though I've only heard one song by him. Just the concept of Leonard Cohen completely rubs me the wrong way.

• "Retroactive Listening: Perspectives on Music & Technology," PopMatters.com
"The Secret History of Technology and Pop Music," NPR
Recently, I've become interested in the relationship between popular music and technology. Both PopMatters and NPR do a great job of distilling down the main issues in a series of articles/radio clips. If you are at all interested in the history of popular music, this is as insightful as it gets. Great stuff.

• Dana Steves, "The Heat Seaking Panther: A Few Thoughts on the Mannered Weirdness of Nicolas Cage," Slate.com: Just cause I think Nicolas Cage is a genius; and I don't say that with irony or with a wink. He seems to possess some ineffable force within him that compels him to do things that make no sense at all. One day, they will give him a lifetime achievement award or something and I pity the person responsible for putting together the set of clips that make up his oeuvre.

• Annalee Newitz, "A History of Zombies in America," io9.com: I was teaching zombies this past semester. This was a fairly interesting exposition on the phenomenon which appears to have reached a zenith in the past few years.

• Phil Freeman, "Captain Beefheart: A Beginner's Guide," The Village Voice: Yes, they all say the same thing: for the love of God, DO NOT BEGIN WITH TROUT MASK REPLICA.

• Mark Hogan, "This Is Not a Mixtape," Pitchfork.com: I've been suddenly thrust back into the world of cassettes because of two things: first, the other day, as a way of educating my progeny, I was searching for the sounds that whales make underwater and I remembered that I had a cassette tape from the early '90s of said sounds. I dug it out of a box, and lo and behold, it sounded strange and beautiful (if a little muzak-y). For those interested it's called Beneath The Waves: Vocals By Humpback Whales. The other reason I am into cassettes is because of Jet Set Siempre No. 1 by Clive Tanaka y su orquesta, available here. It was recommended by someone at work and it is only available on cassette. Beautiful music. This essay by Hogan kind of parses through the history of the cassette as an artform and its supposed resurrection these days. I'm not sure I buy the fact that it's "coming back" but I will always have an old fogey's fondness for the cassette, both in premade form and as a mix(ed) tape.

• Joe Tangari, "Africa 100: The Indestructible Beat," Pitchfork.com: This was a great introduction for me into the world of African pop, especially stuff from the 1970s.

• "All Things Reconsidered: The 35th Anniversary of Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks," PopMatters.com: Not that there needs to be more written about Blood On The Tracks, but the set of essays makes for interesting reading. In the last decade or so, there has a been a massive mainstream media fetish for all things Dylan related, and I'm not sure I understand why this has happened. It's actually kind of annoying in a way. Dylan (like the Beatles) has been overwritten into our collective pop consciousness in way that has almost completely denuded them of any kind of mystery. All this media attention has made them less interesting, not because of the volume of it but because of the tenor of it; you know that when Martin Scorsese produces a documentary about Bob Dylan that the PBS-Starbucks-NPR-ization of Dylan is not far behind. So much for "Play It Fucking Loud." When I listen to Blood On The Tracks (which I try to do sparingly), I feel removed from it. It no longer blows my mind or makes me weep. It's still one of my favorite albums of all time (probably in the top 5) but this is because the music and words are utterly beautiful, not because they make me feel weak at the knees. I know that made no sense.

• "Detours: The Strangest Albums From the Biggest Artists," PopMatters.com: I've always been fascinated by completely mainstream artists doing absurdly weird albums ever since I heard Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. The articles here break it down, and although I don't agree with many of their choices, I still feel like conceptually it's an awesome topic. What makes Tears for Fears produce a b-side like this or Paul McCartney do this? Who knows.

Best TV in 2010

2010-12-21T17:55:00.007-05:00

I don't watch that much TV but I thought I'd do a best of 2010 in terms of TV shows. The AV Club did a list and honestly I haven't seen most of what they put it in it. But it sure seems like a lotta good TV was on last year. I suffer from a severe disability in terms of writing about movies and/or TV so I will not say much about these shows beyond a few cursory comments.

30 Rock (NBC): Continues to be very funny. Tracy Morgan may be a genius.

Being Human (BBC America): This is a British TV series originally shown on BBC Three. The premise sounds stupid: a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost share an apartment in Bristol. Uh-huh. But you know, it kinda sucks you in.

Boardwalk Empire (HBO): Slow burner of a show about early 1920s east coast America. Meticulous attention to detail. You wouldn't think a show set in 1920 would be interesting. But it is. Even a young Al Capone is in it.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central): Well, you know the drill. It's still hit and miss and Stewart can be often be obsequious to his guests but, John Oliver continues to be a genius.

Louie (FX): This is a show starring the awesome standup comic Louis C.K. It is not the kind of sitcom that one would expect of a standup comedian. Very subversive. Synopsis of the first four episodes here.

Mad Men (AMC): Yeah, I know, everybody thinks it's great. I was introduced to it by a friend a couple of years ago. I thought the first episode was great. Fell asleep to the second one but then couldn't stop watching it. It's the only show I've downloaded onto my iPhone. I know, I'm very uncool.

Modern Family (ABC): The family sitcom mockumentary gets a new twist. Sharp writing. Ed Norton showed up in one episode as the fake bass guitarist for Spandau Ballet.

The Office (NBC): Still has not jumped the shark. Still very funny and makes you squirm to watch.

Party Down (Starz): Criminally canceled after two seasons, this was the perfect vehicle for Adam Scott, a dude who looks just like the junior swim instructor at my son's swimming class at the JCC. The show was about a catering team in LA who work a new event in each episode. It's more funny than you would ever expect.

The Walking Dead (AMC): Strangely shown at the exact time slot as Mad Men, this show is also about mad men (and women), just ones who are zombies. Based on the long-running graphic novel of the same name, this show started off with a bang and has been more or less outstanding through its short six episode run. It has a similar premise to 28 Days Later (or at least begins the exact same way) but veers into completely unexpected territory. Stark realism meets the post-zombie apocalypse.

Kathleen Hanna on Smells Like Teen Spirit

2010-12-18T09:58:00.002-05:00

a coupla days ago at Joe's Pub:

Desiderata

2010-12-13T23:50:00.005-05:00

Lizzy Mercier Descloux died on April 20, 2004 from cancer at the age of 47. She was a French singer and musician (and sometime writer and painter). I really didn't know much about her until a few months ago I ran into this:

The song ("Room Mate") is from her 1981 album Mambo Nassau. Amazing stuff. Some kind of weird mutant no-wave disco post-punk Afro music hybrid.

I look at her picture and I'm not sure what to think. I love these old black-and-white pictures from the first punk generation in New York in the mid-1970s. They're so rich with expectation. Mercier Descloux first visited New York in 1975 and became close friends with Richard Hell and Patti Smith, both of whom contributed to her first book Desiderata. A biography reads:

Self-taught as a guitarist, Mercier Descloux revealed herself as a supreme minimalist within the no wave genre, concentrating on spindly, single-note lines combined with wrong-note harmonies and funky rhythms. Mercier Descloux's singing voice, while limited in terms of carrying a tune, was devoted to rhythmic chattering, humming, and chanting lyrics that serve to cheer the music on and to build a quirky sense of excitement.

I actually read about her long before I'd ever heard of her. A long long time ago, I read Richard Hell's novel Go Now (1997). It's a really brilliant book--beautifully written--which I'm sure lots of people read when it came out and then promptly forgot. William Gibson (he of Neuromancer and cyberpunk fame) called it "vile, scabrous, unforgivable, and deserving of the widest possible audience." The main character is a dude named Mud, clearly modeled on Hell himself. A review noted, "Capable of moments of profound personal insight and revelation as well as acts of profane indecency and sexual deviance, Hell's character both seduces and repels."

Hell himself, of course, had been ground through the New York punk scene in the 1970s, forming the incredible Television with Tom Verlaine, and single-handedly creating the punk aesthetic of ripped shirts and safety pins that would be appropriated by the Sex Pistols. After Verlaine fired him from Television, Hell formed Richard Hell & The Voidoids, recording one of the best songs of the class of 1977 ("Blank Generation"), before succumbing to an eon of heroin addiction. Believe it or not, he was was a brilliant prose writer, much better than he was a musician.

Anyway, what does this all have to do with Lizzy Mercier Decloux? When she died, Hell published a statement on his website:

Lizzy Mercier Descloux has died. She was diagnosed with cancer a year ago. I met her in 1975 when she came to New York from Paris at the age of eighteen to investigate what musicians were doing on the Bowery (she would eventually make some albums herself). She was the primary model for the "love interest" Chrissa in my novel Go Now. These lines from that book are based on those first weeks I knew her:

In the course of the three weeks she first spent here she'd moved me and removed me and then moved into me, leaving me gasping--I can still feel it in my stomach when I think about it--like I was the invaded victim in a space-parasite movie, as if my heart and lungs were furniture she might be throwing out but would certainly rearrange at whim. She seemed to come from another dimension.

She was little, with matted hair. She had--she has--a strong jaw and these big marshy lips. Eyes like drains, like reality drains, like in Psycho where Janet Leigh's blood whirlpools away down the tub along with everything else in the movie. Her nose is flat, her whole face is flat. A slim body, nearly hipless [...]

She was a spectacle: carnivore and prey in one, like a walking wildlife film, with that riveting amoral charisma of nature. A complete mystery. At 17 she was more sophisticated than anyone I'd ever known, while also seeming utterly unaffected. Or at least her affectations came from such a stubborn confidence and will to defy convention that they were irresistible [...]

Having read what Hell had to say, I went back, listened to her album again. Looked at the picture above and tried to discern some secret of life. A life. A death. And all that came inbetween.

Richard & Lizzy, sometime in the mid-1970s

You're Still Fucking Peasants As Far As I Can See

2010-12-09T01:37:00.002-05:00

John Ono Lennon (1940-1980).
There was nothing like him before.
Nothing like him since.

Lennon playing the best guitar of his life, in 1970:

Lennon playing the best rock'n'roll of his life, in 1969:

Lennon playing the best song of his life, in 1970:

New PJ Harvey

2010-12-03T14:01:00.003-05:00

From her forthcoming album Let England Shake, this is the first single (courtesy of Punkreas):

PJ Harvey - Written on the Forehead [mp3]

Joy of Speed EP

2010-12-01T15:42:00.003-05:00

Joy -- Invisible
Joy -- The Big Tear
Joy -- 1989 Or So
Joy -- Anodyne
Joy -- The Reluctant Astronaut
Joy -- Wake Up [version 2]

She Had To Leave .... Los Angeles

2010-11-19T21:47:00.005-05:00

I am in a hotel in Los Angeles watching a particularly good episode of Boardwalk Empire. I often wish that I lived in places that I visit. I felt this way as the plane flew over the city and landed at LAX. The downtown is generic, sterile, but the sprawl of the rest of the city seems strangely alluring. These thousands of houses spread out across miles and miles, suburbs, neighborhoods with strange Spanish names, the kind of places you would never see in New York.

New York is the stuff of the modern, the cutting edge, the frenetic artery of popular culture. Los Angeles is just ... the place where you always imagine life will be better and worse at the same time. I want to run away to LA so that one day I can complain about it. Wanting to move to LA makes me feel slightly young again. At least I want something. The thing is: LA exists as myth in my mind because it can still be the place I run away to and start a new life. It's a blank slate in a megacity on the ocean. Anything could happen. I could move here. Buy a car. Roll down the window. Drive by chain restaurants that serve Mexican food. Listen to KROQ. Drive up the mountains to Laurel Canyon. Maybe I can find where Joni Mitchell lived when she wrote The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Or where Neil Young (channeling Charles Manson) wrote:

"Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon / is full of famous stars
But I hate them worse than lepers / and I'll kill them in their cars."

Being here makes me want to watch Thom Anderson's legendary and disappeared-from-existence documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003).

LA was also the place of Jane's Addiction, Tool, Guns'n'Roses, the Germs, the Doors, and X.

And oh yeah, one more thing: Fuck San Francisco.

In honor of L.A., two songs, both excellent air guitar anthems:

"Los Angeles" by X

and

"L.A. Woman" by the Doors.

Been Listening

2010-11-10T11:26:00.001-05:00

The original video, worth watching, here.

Parks Whose Names I Have Forgotten

2010-11-09T23:19:00.000-05:00

It was spring. I had a haircut. It rained sometimes. It was hopeful. The soundtrack of my brief time with J was mostly Tim, its dulled drumbeats making my little bedroom on the top floor of the apartment much bigger than it really was. Both our bedrooms, C’s and mine, were on the top floor connected by a bathroom. Once a naked woman wandered into my room, disorientedly looking for him. She giggled at me and left, continuing her search.

In the spring, new joy, new life. I told J that “The Sweetest Thing” was her song. She and I spent a lot of days and nights wandering parks in the city, parks whose names I have now forgotten. There was one with a big concrete cupola dome; you had to stand about a hundred foot away from the dome, run up to it to generate inertia, in order to climb to the top where we would often sit late into the night, looking at the deepest darkest blue of the night sky. We took a lot of pictures, her smile captured like an icecream in the sun. We thought it would be nice to rent a child for a day. A kid for a day would be fun but more than a day might interfere with our own growing up. She worked at a new Indian restaurant as a waitress (in the sky) but I think she never liked it and quit very soon. We had little adventures. Like rock climbers, we climbed up the dizzying side of my apartment--several floors up against a sheer wall--when we got locked out. She would call me, come over, do weird math problems on my bed, and fall asleep, her full lips as dry as leaves. When we parted the next morning, I would sit there and listen to Tim for the three hundredth time wondering if there was a way to “hold my life, ‘cause I just might lose it.” She had an impassive regal nature at times, her face, her posture, her sunglasses, and I would call her my Joan of Arc.

With J, I also discovered the multitudes of meanings within mix tapes, mostly in the making of them, but also in the giving of them, a topic given much critical attention by the dude who later wrote Hi Fidelity. I spent hours laboring over every beginning, every end of a side, just to make J listen to Firehose’s "In Memory of Elizabeth Cotton” or the Housemartins’ “Johannesburg,” two utterly beautiful songs that I earnestly believed would show, nay, shockingly prove that what was all around us on the radio, on TV, in books, in civic life all over the world, was shallow, cheap, and soulless since in this little secret world of music, there was so much beauty and depth that I desperately wanted to share.

Like much of what gives adolescence (or delayed adolescence) its charge or inspiration, that “beauty” had value only in opposition to what I considered “ugly.” We did not live in a bubble. Stuff from the outside was always present, at least as background radiation. At that time, the cultural ambiance included hair metal which seemed so awful then that so many years later, I still find little joy in the ironic celebration of Motley Crue, Poison, Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister, Dio, Whitesnake, and many many other bands on VH1. They were terrible then, and some things remain just as terrible even if you add the knowing wink of awareness. There’s nothing wrong with destroying the idiotic demarcations between high and low culture, but it’s another thing to worship the equation that says: Terrible Music + Ten Years Later = Cool Ironic T-shirt.

What is “good” music? What is “terrible” music? It is taste after all. What makes sense in someone’s world view is all that matters. To some people, music is stuff you were interested in as a young person but retain only a vague interest as an adult. For those people, the difference between good and bad music—or indeed the definitions of each—are based on a set of assumptions that would frustrate those who invest their emotions, their fucking lives and careers in the production or consumption of music.

What is good and what is bad music is an intensely personal thing on the one hand. Yet, it is also an intensely shared decision, since we are mostly driven to consume certain types of music not because they have some intrinsic value of goodness or badness but because others have let it be known that that music is worth consuming. Writers for entertainment magazines and newspapers and blogs, journalists on TV, posters at record stores—in other words, advertising—forces a consensus of consumption.

The goal is to create the largest consensus possible, so that millions of people will buy an album like Nevermind in 1991-92. But there are smaller consensuses too: for people of all different tastes, niches, and demographics. These consensuses typically have a brief window, through which acts or genres pass through, after which they are replaced by other acts or genres.

Does that mean that there is no absolute good or bad music? That we are led around like sheep by decisions other people make about what is good or bad? I hope not. I like to think that the music I like is the music I like because it is so good, because it moves me. But I can’t escape the feeling that much of the music I like(d), I discovered because it represented certain things, pre-packaged for a pre-packaged lifestyle, an ideology for disenfranchised youth seeking to avoid being part of the big (or biggest) consensus. This was especially true in college: my goal was to be part of a Small Consensus, but a consensus nevertheless. It’s no fun to like music if no one in the world has ever heard it (let alone heard of it). But there is a fine line and it is easy to get caught up in received knowledge. For us back then it was easy to owe our tastes to an already established canon. By the time I was in college, many people, including such joyless arbiters of good taste as Rolling Stone or Spin magazine, had created Rock History [tm], eras of self-conscious myth-building told in important looking history books on rock music that communicated gravitas. These magazines and books were supposed to tell us what was good and what was bad. I hated those books and magazines but read them all the time.

J was really the first American born desi I’d ever hung out with at any length (beyond my cousins back in Illinois). It was hard to be prejudiced once you’d met her—she was so amazingly disarming with her pictures of Rekha, tapes of Hindi film songs, and interest in the culture of the Indian subcontinent. She also had a big social network of Americans of desi origin, kids who I saw occasionally at parties and things but who I also generally avoided. But if I felt uncomfortable in these contiguous demographics, I also felt that the divisions between Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis were whitewashed here out in the wilderness away from “home.” Our brownness trumped any nationalistic impulses and rarely, if ever, was political or religious identity an issue. The many desi friends I had were Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, and Americans, and it seems so striking in the post-2001 world to think that none of us gave it the slightest thought. Race was more important than your passport. Being a mutt of sorts, neither a “true” desi, nor one of the American variety, I felt an acute sense of non-belonging to each subculture. I never liked Hindi films, I barely understood a word of the language, and as I drifted away from the idea of home, I became severely dislocated from a grounding in any culture except perhaps my adopted one of Western pop music, a language that seemed to me as universal as Esperanto. So…whither the subcontinent (or “South Asia” as it became more common in the ‘90s) in my imagination?

The subcontinent was alive in my imagination only through the eyes of desis I knew, principally J, who had grown up in a small town on the Texas border with Mexico and whose identity seemed so perfectly formed across the various intersections of her background even though she was so precociously young.

J was a big fan of Madonna ("I'm so excited 'cause you're my best friend...") and top 40 pop music in general but we found common ground—our private and brief musical consensus—in the odd and coincidental strands that intertwined for us in that spring, somewhere between Madonna and the Waterboys, music about possibilities. Rock’n’roll—at least the best rock’n’roll—is about being young, and the music that I associate with that time is very young: the voice of Michael Stipe on “Gardening at Night” or the cathartic noise of Husker Du's Warehouse: Songs and Stories. It was the first time I discovered that music that reminded you of something could be much more powerful than music that actually was, if that makes any sense.

Now, hundreds of years later, I no longer remember how or what I felt about J but I can redraw the skeleton of those times so clearly in the distant murmur of early R.E.M. or Morrissey’s first solo single which came out in the spring sometime. “Suedehead” was a wonderful and insidious spoonful of pop music bathed in pathos, bathos, and the ringing chimes of guitars and pianos transmitted directly from some heavenly recording studio. When J once tried to sneak a peak at my personal diaries, the song coincidentally mirrored reality: “You had to sneak into my room just to read my diary / It was just to see, just to see, all the things you knew I’d written about you . . .”

It was Morrissey’s first single, but also his best ever, rivaling everything that the Smiths ever put out. We had expected Johnny Marr to come out four cylinders firing from the Smiths, but he weirdly disappeared for what seemed like decades. Children by the millions who had waited for Johnny were instead treated to a spate of brilliant singles from Morrissey. So began my search for every Morrissey 12”, each one hidden with myriads of strange tracks never to be found on albums. My favorite b-side of the period: “Sister I’m a Poet,” another Stephen Street gem which was the soundtrack to many of my treks from the apartment to class on gray fall mornings.

The album itself, Viva Hate (how, at age 22, that title seemed to be so appropriate…), was fantastic, filled with peculiar songs about marginal characters, once on the cusp of greatness/love/sex/acceptance, now tossed to the detritus of adulthood.

If I wince now in embarrassment when I hear most of Morrissey’s self-absorbed ruminations (“Late Night on Maudlin Street” anyone?—a seemingly endless navel gazing endurance test), other songs, principally “Every Day is Like Sunday” (Morrissey’s second 45) was a superb meditation on 1970s England, the only one I remembered from having grown up there: the cheap trinkets at Blackpool, the Carry On movies,the comic actor Norman Wisdom, our hero of the downtrodden and ostracized.

In one rare moment of resignation, J voiced what we all denied:

we were all “ordinary boys” (and girls). And like all ordinary relationships, our very brief one did not last through the spring, interrupted by my attraction to the past when I should have been looking at the future. Later, in May, J snuck into my second floor apartment while I was sleeping and left a black earring on my dresser with a goodbye note that was so sad to read (true love, she said) but entirely unsurprising.

Very much enamored of her for a while, I wore the earring for many years but eventually, of course, lost it. (Picture of me above, wearing said earring, fall '88).

[Note: The above is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of my someday-to-be-published "rock'n'roll book."]

[Additional recent note: recently, I looked up Google Earth and located that awesome dome in the middle of that park in Texas. It looks eerie in a satellite photograph. And yeah, I rediscovered the name of the park too.]

Hardly Getting Over It

2010-10-14T00:46:00.004-04:00

I found Husker Du in the spring of 1988 when I bought Warehouse: Songs and Stories, a double album. Their music was very male, aggressive but yet vulnerable. It always felt like winter when you listened to Husker Du. When you listened to them, brittle cold became catharsis. A couple of years later I stumbled upon Candy Apple Grey. For some reason, it's not exactly a fan favorite but it completely blew me away. The production is awful but, boy, that Grant Hart, sure knew how to write a good song. Here's a beautiful song from that album, written by Bob Mould. Not much to say about it:

new music 2010

2010-10-10T22:17:00.011-04:00

Some new music that I've been listening to recently. I thought I'd do some capsule reviews:

• Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross -- The Social Network (2010): This a surprisingly top notch soundtrack to the movie of the same name, directed by David Fincher. I tend to think original movie scores are usually forgettable but this one is remarkably good, often even beautiful. It's a bit like Nine Inch Nail's album Ghosts I-IV (2008), and in fact, a couple of the tracks on the movie soundtrack are reworked tracks from Ghosts I-IV. Atticus Ross is some English dude who helped Reznor produce and/or program NIN albums With Teeth and Ghosts I-IV. As far as the music on the soundtrack, it veers between ambient soundscapes to techno pulsing beats. I highly recommend it. You can download the soundtrack here.

• Deerhunter -- Halcyon Digest (2010): I've been a big fan of Deerhunter since I first heard Microcastle (2008), one of my favorite albums of the past decade. The main guy behind the band is Bradford Cox, an unbelievably prolific and talented musician and songwriter who draws from a vast array of indie rock influences to produce pop music that's heavenly, nostalgic, and melodic. Each of Deerhunter's songs are packed, totally packed, with good ideas, from the sound of strange instruments to the shimmering production. Cox notes that, "The album's title is a reference to a collection of fond memories and even invented ones... The way that we write and rewrite and edit our memories to be a digest version of what we want to remember, and how that's kind of sad." The music is much better than that quote makes it sound. This is the best pop music around today, 11 magnificent songs guaranteed to put you in a dream state. The key song here is the first one, "Earthquake."

• How To Destroy Angels -- How To Destroy Angels EP (2010): Another Reznor creation, this one a six-track e.p. that was released as a free download and is much better than one might have expected. It's a collaboration with Reznor's wife Mariqueen Maandig and the aforementioned Atticus Ross. Since when have you ever heard a collaboration between a famous musician and their spouse be any good (Ram? Sometime in New York City?). Some of this stuff reminds of late period Nine Inch Nails but the female voice gives it a unique quality, a little bit like crossing Massive Attack with The Fragile, if that makes any sense at all.

• LCD Soundsystem -- This Is Happening (2010): On the one hand, this is more of the same, but on the other, it isn't. This album, supposedly the final one to be released by James Murphy under this name is, in terms of sound, actually a mix of the first two albums. Which means that there's nothing on this album that will surprise and if you liked the first two, you'll like this one. The standout track here is "All I Want," which rips off David Bowie's " 'Heroes'," but manages to somehow sound new at the same time. And as awesome.

• M.I.A. - Maya (2010): So word on the street has been that this is one mixed-up album that's unlistenable. Well, it's not a pretty album and it's very aggressive. For all of M.I.A.'s mixed up politics, terrible videos, and Madonna-esque obsession with fashion-as-substance, she did take a big chance with this album. I can see why no one on planet Earth liked it. So I'll take the unpopular stance that it's actually quite an interesting album. I'm not sure I like it, but it is a ballsy move on her part. It's like when VU followed up the first album with White Light/White Heat. It was kind of a big fuck you. I'm not sure if that's what M.I.A. intended but it's clear that since everybody hates M.I.A. these days, she has achieved something, in spite or perhaps because of herself.

• Mogwai -- Special Movies (2010): I didn't expect that much from a live Mogwai album, but wow, this really blew me away. It is recorded in pristine fashion so the sound is just supremely fantastic. But it's more than that: the song selection is perfect, the pacing is impeccable, and the music is awesome. Mogwai go from the prettiest most delicate music to blow-out-your-eardrums jet engine sounds in the space of seconds but they do it with grace. If you buy the CD (which has 11 tracks), you also get six extra tracks from the same shows, including a superb version of "New Paths to Helicon Part 1." And you can also get a DVD with a movie documentary entitled Burning that depicts the shows directed by some famous dude. And finally, one more thing: I was at one of the shows in Brooklyn (at the Music Hall of Williamsburg) where both the audio and video were recorded, so I have some extra attachment to this.

• Nest -- Retold (2010): I don't know much about the band Nest but I understand that they are apparently two pianists, Otto Totland and Huw Roberts, from Norway. This is a beautiful instrumental album of modern classical music. Besides piano, the musicians use the Welsh harp, violins, woodwind instruments, field recordings, and some percussion. They claim that their goal is "to produce beautiful music free of pretense" and in that, they are 100% successful. I've rarely heard music this beautiful made by pianos. It is an excellent contribution to the canon of ambient contemporary classical composition. A soundtrack for a movie never made.

• School of Seven Bells -- Disconnect From Desire (2010): This, the second, album from these people, betters the first one by expanding into more electronic music. It's still a mixture of shoegazer aspirations, Nico-esque chanteuse affectations, and pop music for beautiful people, but now they get the sequencers and drum machines out. I have to admit, I like it a lot. The two women in the band, the identical twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, who are oddly gorgeous, produce together a kind of drone-y sound best for zoning out. The main guitarist and instrumentalist in the band is Benjamin Garza, formerly of Secret Machines. (This band sounds NOTHING like Secret Machines.) At times, they can seem New Age-y, but overall, it's a good step away from being pigeonholed as worshipers at the shrine of My Bloody Valentine.

• Seefeel -- Faults EP (2010): After 14 years, Seefeel released their first recorded output last month. In my estimation, Seefeel were one of the greatest electronic bands of the 1990s and their breakup was tragic (although probably a good idea). Anyway, the main guy, Mark Clifford reunited with Sarah Peacock, and a couple of new members (from Japan!) and put out this four-track EP. The question is what kind of ground-breaking electronic music could one possibly release in 2010? Well, they sidestepped that whole question by making Faults, which is ... well, really, there's not much like this stuff out there. Seefeel's great achievement was always to make the totally eerie and weird sound totally natural. And they still do it. I hope an album is on the way.

• Swans -- My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (2010): For some reason, Michael Gira (now 56!) decided to restart Swans. He not only recorded an album but is touring with the band, which includes a few old members and a few new ones, but no Jarboe. Now, you either like Swans or you don't. So trying to write a review of a Swans album is a lost cause if they are not your cup of tea. They are mine. I think they are one of the greatest bands of the post-punk era. So what did they come up with this time? Well, a pretty fucking great piece of music. Yes, let me just get it out of the way and say that it's relentlessly grim and bone-crushingly despondent. But then again, what did you expect? One reviewer of the album writes: "The real bravery is for an album whose title equates religion with suicide to end almost at the other end of the spectrum: 'Teach me please, to cease to resist,' Gira asks. 'May I find my way to the reason to come home / May I find my way to the foot of your throne'." Uh-huh, yeah. This is one of the best albums of the year. Oh, one more thing: one of the titles of the songs: "You Fucking People Make Me Sick."

• Wild Nothing -- Gemini (2010): This is about as far away from Swans as you can get. Wild Nothing are a bunch of very young kids from somewhere in Virginia or something. They make good 1980s music, the kind of music that I actually grew up with, but for these kids is just fake nostalgia. You remember how you listened to "Ask" by the Smiths when you were in high school? You remember how you listened to the Sundays singing "Here's Where the Story Ends"? You remember how you checked out The Ocean Blue do "Between Something and Nothing"? It's sort of like that but in 2010. It's an album about being young and having nothing to remember. So yeah, it's a good feeling. I just can't get over how derivative yet unbelievably awesome the song "Summer Holiday" is.

By Request

2010-09-25T22:39:00.006-04:00

By request, here is an amazing live version of a haunting song, originally released on the I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings CD from 2001. Although announced as an e.p., it's technically about the length of an actual album (about 40 minutes).

Radiohead -- Everything In Its Right Place (live) [mp3]

jeeters

2010-09-21T00:19:00.005-04:00

My favorite guitarists:

Daniel Ash - e.g., "Stigmata Martyr" or the live "Bela Lugosi's Dead"
Ron Asheton - e.g., anything off the first two albums
Lindsey Buckingham - e.g., the entire Tusk album
Peter Green - e.g., "Albatross"
George Harrison - e.g., anything he ever did
Kristen Hersh - e.g., "Fish"
Adam Jones - e.g., anything off the first two Tool abums
John Lennon - e.g., solo stuff but also Yoko Ono's "Why"
Johnny Marr - e.g., anything he ever did
Nick McCabe - e.g., first two Verve albums
Joni Mitchell - e.g., her "jazz" phase in the late 1970s
Thurston Moore/Lee Ranaldo - e.g., pretty much anything
Jimmy Page - e.g., guitar God
Prince - e.g., are you kidding me?
Kevin Shields - e.g., anything he ever did
Mick Taylor - e.g., Sticky Fingers
Pete Townshend - e.g. Live at Leeds
Tom Verlaine - e.g., all three Television albums
Neil Young - e.g., "Cortez the Killer" or the Rust Never Sleeps album

I know, I know, it's a very conventional list and omits people I know should be on the list like Bert Jansch or Robert Fripp or Howlin' Wolf or Ry Cooder or Robert Johnson or Richard Thompson or Chuck Berry or Jeff Beck or Dick Dale or John Fahey or Link Ray or Eddie Fucking Van Halen or even Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton or Slash or Tony Iommi or yes, even Kim Fucking Thayil.

Which brings me to the most understated guitar solo of all time, from Daniel Ash, on the song "Lions" by Tones On Tail. This was the opening track of the only album Tones On Tail ever released, cleverly titled Pop (from 1984). The solo begins at 1.56 and ends at 2.17. It takes a genius to play something so utterly brilliant. You gotta know when to hold back.

Next up, my favorite drummers.

le ballon rouge

2010-09-18T16:23:00.003-04:00

For sai:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Rutti

2010-09-18T03:55:00.001-04:00

One of the things about writing a blog which no one (well, almost no one) reads is that it gives you some leeway to spout all sorts of crazy shit. Which brings me to being awake at 4 am (or close to 4 am). The point is: what's the soundtrack at 4 am, when you're alone in an apartment, and the only sounds are the ghost echoes of half-remembered conversations in your brain refracted through acute feelings of missing someone? Elliott Smith sang a perfectly good song called "2:45 am" which captured that odd ennui of being at someone's house at almost 3 am and kinda wanting to go home but not having the energy to. But that's 3 am. What about 4?

I give you Slowdive's "Rutti." I was a late arrival to Slowdive, having completely missed them when they were an actual functioning entity. Something made me get the greatest hits double CD (Catch the Breeze) that came out a coupla years ago. I took it to Bangladesh with me, and in the monsoon-drenched humidity of a July in Dhaka, I would lay awake at night in my parents' house, listening to this song on the headphones. The jet lag and "Rutti" would take me up to 5, sometimes 6 am.

Tonight, there's no jet lag, just insomnia and insanity, the former enabled by the latter, and the latter enabled by some recent missteps of mine which have fucked up a lot of things. So here it is, Slowdive's "Rutti." It's about 10 minutes long. Don't let the first few minutes fool you, it does indeed take off, and at about the 4 minute mark, it achieves a kind of hypnotic mood that will float you right along until it's 5 am and you can't stay awake any longer. Sleep well, my millions of readers.

the social network

2010-09-17T23:50:00.003-04:00

What kind of a person would make a movie about Facebook? Yes, the same guy who did Fight Club and Se7en and Alien3 and Panic Room. Yeah, not bad, not bad. But that's not the point. What kind of a person would score the music about a movie about Facebook? Yeah, at that level, you're gonna have to depend on the hack team who score for Law & Order or something. But apparently TReznor is on board. And he's apparently giving the shit away for free for a short time. Check it out.

New York

2010-09-16T23:37:00.006-04:00

In the year 2001, for some reason, I kept a journal. I began on April 27 and finished on December 30. At the time it seemed like a pointless exercise but in revisiting it nine years later, it's actually quite interesting. I say that not because I'm self-centered (which, of course, I am) but because in reading it now, it seems as if someone else wrote it. I don't recognize myself. A lot of it is banalities, much of it repetitive and boring, but I wrote so much (nearly 82,000 words) that some of it just happened to hit the spot. I was suffering some sort of catastrophic depressive episode at the time, the likes of which (Thank God) I've never experienced again. Serendipitously, in my writings, I happened to cover my move to New York. It's odd reading about how new the city seemed to me, every neighborhood revealing itself to be something slightly different than I'd expected.

The move to New York, in September, was a difficult one. I had packed up pretty much everything I owned in my Nissan hatchback and drove from Philadelphia to New York. I'd lined up an apartment on 112th st. between Broadway and Amsterdam, where I would share a place with a new faculty member at Columbia. I didn't really know her, had met her only once when I checked out the place. I didn't have any friends in New York although I had a few acquaintances. But the whole move was basically a solitary affair. Here's what I wrote:

Today was supposed to be the best day of my life. And it is, in some ways it is. After 16 years in this country, I’ve finally come home.

But it’s also the most bittersweet of days. The most bittersweet day of my life. This was today. As I drove on the NJ Turnpike, my emotions ran the gamut of sheer euphoria and excitement – to sadness and despondence. From hope for a new life to wishing my car would just veer off the freeway and I would die in some conflagration. Each feeling lasted seconds. Nothing too serious. But dusk on the NJ Turnpike (generally an extremely ugly stretch of America) was awesome. I arrived in this city alone. And that will prove to be the best part of all of this. I did it all by myself.

There's something odd about moving to a new place alone, without a goodbye (from the old place) or a welcome (to the new place). You really feel completely cut off from everything, completely free.

Anyway, what I listened to on my headphones that fall of 2001 was this song, over and over and over, as I walked in a dirty winter jacket, my Converse, crazy hair, chain-smoking cigarettes in the dirty New York winter winds, which later soundtracked one of my favorite movies of all time. Both the song and the movie on my mind today:

everything was forever, until it was no more

2010-09-15T23:43:00.005-04:00

i wear this crown of shit
upon this liar's chair
full of broken thoughts
i cannot repair

beneath the stains of time
the feelings disappear
you are someone else
i am still right here

Still Listening

2010-08-31T22:43:00.003-04:00

Music to get (in alphabetical order):

The Arcade Fire -- The Suburbs
Besnard Lakes -- Are The Roaring Night
The Books -- The Way Out
Deerhunter -- Halcyon Digest
LCD Soundsystem -- This Is Happening
Mogwai -- Special Moves
School of Seven Bells -- Disconnect From Desire
Phil Selway -- Familial
Wild Nothing -- Gemini
The xx -- The xx

For those that care, "Still Listening" is the b-side to Sinead O'Connor's single "Troy" (1987)

Valhalla Rising

2010-08-26T08:12:00.009-04:00

It's 8.12 am. I'm bleary-eyed. I saw the movie Valhalla Rising last night with the unbearably handsome Mads Mikkelsen. The movie was largely impressionistic, about a band of Vikings (actually, Christian Vikings) who go off on a quest to seek the holy land. The timing doesn't really make any sense to me, but whatever. It was grim and violent, with lots of dream sequences, and much gloomy goth guitar music. Mikkelsen gained fame, as a friend pointed out, playing the inimitable and evil Le Chiffre in the recent Bond movie Casino Royale (2006). And yes, Le Chiffre has a wikipedia page devoted to his character. Mikkelsen was playing a role made famous by Peter Lorre and Orson Welles. Big shoes to fill. But he is indeed a very handsome man, although has labored in at least a couple of movies now with a damaged left eye.

Last night had its moments. I've lived in New York for nearly ten years now, and the city still manages to excite me every single day (and night). There are new experiences to be had, new ways to walk to old places, new conversations to be had. The long walk, often from Union Square to Grand Central can be a nice one, depending on the route. Late at night, the street lights illuminate quiet lives, solitary pedestrians, intense lovers, and the tender shadows cast on lovely faces from hats bought at H&M. I want to continue to live here in Manhattan. I'm glad I went out even if perhaps I shouldn't have. You see, I want these things. I want them very bad. I've had trouble putting them in my sight. But I know what I want because these are worthwhile goals. I hope it's not too late...?

Nevertheless I'm feeling sad this morning. It's my early morning melancholia, today exacerbated by some obvious circumstantial issues. I'm tired of feeling sad. Can I not just be fucking happy and cheery? And play with puppies? And make jokes about movies where periodization makes no sense? (9th century? 11th century? WTF get it together, dudes). Can I not have a drawer all for myself and not have to make things so complicated that the drawer disappears from my sight as if in a dream? A dream with a home, littered with the detritus of memories.

out on the weekend

2010-08-24T08:26:00.007-04:00

Often I am cryptic in these pronouncements of mine. Some of that is laziness. Some of that is not. But right now, every waking moment is painful. It's hard to describe. "... can't relate to joy, he tries to speak and, can't begin to say."

Having Fun with Friends

2010-07-20T18:48:00.003-04:00

I gots dem kosmik blues. Wot can I say. Ho ho ho. And so this is the time fer happy songs!

A to Z: AA Bondy

2010-06-20T01:36:00.008-04:00

I am without music because the headphones on my iPod broke. And I dislike listening to music on my laptop with its rinky dink bass-less sound. As far as I can tell, there are no stereos in this house. (I'm at my parents'). There are speakers connected to the desktop that I'm using now, but they appear to be from the early 1990s, so you can imagine the level of their sonic fidelity. So ... that gives me nothing but silence. I listen to music a significant portion of my waking time, mostly through my iPod, so being away from it is an anomaly. Not of epic proportions, but an anomaly nevertheless.

My current iPod has a 160 Gb drive which is quite a lot I think. I've loaded up about 2/3 of my CD collection into it so far, which -- checking right now -- gives it 11, 117 songs. So, by rough calculations, I would guess that I can max out around 17,000 songs. Now, again, by rough calculations, if I assume that each song is roughly about 4 minutes long (conceding of course that I have songs as long as a few seconds and some as long as 45 minutes), I have about 50 days of music on the iPod. That's 50 days of straight listening without stopping for anything. That's actually not that long, considering.

If I listen to my iPod about 2 hours per day, then it would take me about 566 days to listen to my whole collection, which we can round off to about 2 years. Not bad. I think back in the 1990s I tried something like this, to listen to my entire music collection in alphabetical order. I got to G or H and gave up. I get caught up in the details. What should you do if you have to stop a song in the middle, do you start from the beginning the next time? What about albums? Do you break them up? What if you're in the middle of side of Yes' Tales from the Topographic Oceans (or whatever it was called) and need to stop? Do you start from the beginning again?

Anyway, once I get my headphones worked out, I'm going to start listening to everything in alphabetical order. This means that I will listen to entire albums. Sometimes if it's a good album, I may repeat it. And since my blog (let's face it) sucks, I'm going to try and inject some life into it by saying something (anything) about every artist that I listen to, even if the most I can muster up is an inane, this song is from that album by that artist.

Right now the first artist on my iPod is A. A. Bondy, he of Verbena fame who mysteriously remarkably has transformed himself from a second level grunge artifact of the 1990s to folk-ish troubadour of the 2000s. Despite what hipsters think or say, Verbena was a kickass band. Sure, they sounded eerily like Nirvana and had some tenuous connections with them (Dave Grohl produced one of Verbena's albums) but, look, they were a good competent band. They put on a good show. In any case, Bondy, the lead singer broke up the band, disappeared for a few years and then emerged with an entirely different persona, with some weird mix of the Band, Gram Parsons, and Bob Dylan. Here's a pretty good interview at Aquarium Drunkard along with a couple of mp3s. A couple of videos here. My favorite song, "When the Devil's Loose," is below. It's deceptively simple, but it winds your way into your soul. Give it a couple of listens:

Blind

2010-05-19T22:31:00.003-04:00

So, today, my iPod (yes, I still have one of those) was on shuffle, and lo and behold, the following song, "Blind," started playing. I'd first heard it in 1995 when Drainland came out, which was technically a Michael Gira solo album. The song later turned up on various other Swans compilations.

I was living in Amherst, Massachusetts at the time on North Pleasant Street at a place we affectionately called "the white house." It still stands there today. I was living what I recognized even then as a deeply aimless existence, working part-time as a computer technician at an Apple computer store in Northampton. In retrospect, life wasn't so bad. I had a few friends, a fair amount of free time, drank a lot, discovered an enormous amount of new music, went out a lot, etc. In those barely-internet days, it seemed totally random that Michael Gira would release a solo album. And it made no sense that it sounded totally like late period Swans. But whatever. I taped Drainland on a cassette and listened to it a lot. Not sure if I liked the whole thing, but this particular song, "Blind," always stood out.

Someone somewhere mentioned how the song slowly fades in as if it had been playing forever and at the end it fades out as if it will play on forever. That's a perfect encapsulation of the whole thing. It has a mournful tone, unlike much of Gira's stuff which is more maudlin than mournful. He seems genuinely emotional in this one, not distanced away from feelings. It's shockingly intimate for him. But even if you know nothing about him, this is an adult song in the truest sense of the word. Beautifully done.

Oh, nowadays, I am an academic and teach in a small-ish private university here in New York. Yesterday the powers that be informed me that I am tenured. No longer a minion here, I suppose. Not sure if this song below, "Blind," is perfectly appropriate or completely irrelevant. Either way, it's on my mind today.

What English Sounds Like To People Who Don't Speak English

2010-04-28T23:32:00.005-04:00

Here is the Italian artist(e) Adriano Celentano with the song "Prisencolinensinainciusol," released in 1972. I'm also posting an mp3 at the bottom. The song rocks. Thx to polkadot for the tip.

Adriano Celentano -- Prisencolinensinainciusol [mp3]

A (Medieval) History of Dead Can Dance

2010-04-24T23:58:00.006-04:00

A recent essay worth reading here, communicating eloquently and without pretension why Godspeed You! Black Emperor is such an anomaly in the world of pop music. The writer notes that "Godspeed brings to mind trains, that beautiful symbol of tangibility." And also: "One reason no one has filled the void Godspeed left is that no one else could gain a foothold while simultaneously coming over as so pretentious. I have no reason to think the band members aren't all good people, but in terms of presentation, these guys get away with murder, and it's wonderful."

Which all brings me to another "band" from the good old days, Dead Can Dance, now barely remembered, tossed into the dustheap of unhip history. But they were an important track in the soundtrack of my life in the late eighties and nineties. How to describe Dead Can Dance without using tired descriptors? Their early (and better) stuff encompassed everything from Gregorian chants ("De Profundis") to straight renditions of 13th century songs ("Saltarello") or 16th century Gatalan tunes ("The Song of the Sibyl"). Apparently their music was Neo-Medieval, whatever that means. They had a song called "Echolalia" and used glossolalia in their music.

Later in their career, they moved more into what folks today call "World Music" and away from their medieval roots. But it still holds up remarkably well. They were an important aesthetic influence on my musical education, especially in the late eighties but also into the nineties when they (first) broke up. I learned to be cautiously open to intellectual pretension. I understand that there's a thin line between intellectual aspiration and pathetic (and bathetic) parody but for some reason, I never placed Dead Can Dance in the latter category although many other bands were not spared by scorn. Dead Can Dance felt incredibly earnest even as they collapsed time (centuries) and space (continents) into tidy album-sized chunks with lyrics that would not be out of place in Chaucer.

Brendan Perry, one half of Dead Can Dance, was someone who played in punk bands as a kid but having been influenced by the post-punk of P.I.L. and Joy Division took a complete left turn into more expansive music. Lisa Gerrard, the other half, is someone who you imagine should have done her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies in a small liberal arts college in New England. She looks tiny, frail, wispy, and proper. She later scored the music for the film Gladiator.

Here then, are three random selections from the Dead Can Dance oeuvre.

Here is "Saltarello" from the album Aion (1990), first referred to in Napoli in the 13th century:

Here is "Echolalia" from the album The Serpent's Egg (1988):

Here is the band in the latter day / world music phase with a song called "Rakim," actually only released in a live version on the album Toward The Within.

Despicable

2010-04-21T23:37:00.001-04:00

Feeling mellow and happy today

2010-04-05T16:16:00.007-04:00

Note: John Lennon never played better guitar than on this. He rips the shit out of the guitar. Jimi Hendrix had nothing on this.

Real Estate

2010-04-01T09:21:00.004-04:00

Go to the song at the three-minute mark. And tell me that it doesn't want to make you sway and dance and remember what good times they were. They are a young band from New Jersey. Oh and one more thing: elc = awesomeness.

Real Estate -- Beach Comber [mp3]

A Little Big Star

2010-03-19T10:04:00.005-04:00

A lot of musical deaths recently: Jay Reatard, Mark Linkous (of Sparkelhorse), and now Alex Chilton. For some reason Linkous' death really saddened me. I have/had this attachment to Sparklehorse's music that's more emotional than casual (or cognitive). I first heard of Sparklehorse the night I saw them in concert, opening for Mercury Rev in a little bar in Pittsburgh in 1999 or so. I remember Linkous' frail body and the music that they made, it seemed like music made by insects or something. Later, a friend gave me their Distorted Ghost EP which succinctly combined all the disparate moods of Sparklehorse in one powerful and short package. There was the rock'n'roll blowout of "Happy Man" followed by "Waiting For Nothing." Linkous didn't seem like a happy guy but he did produce some awfully beautiful music.

The same could be said about Alex Chilton, whose records for Big Star are without compare. Again, for me, listening to Big Star is indelibly linked to my time in Pittsburgh in the late '90s. I remember discovering both #1 Record and Radio City in a budget 2-for-1 disc at Paul's Records out in Bloomfield. I played them a lot in Pittsburgh driving around, feeling young, and momentarily lightened. I put those songs in every mix tape I made for anybody. One word comes to mind: gorgeous music. Chilton often gets slotted into "power pop" but he was much more than that, and could veer off into his own little dark world of proto-goth or avant garde or Memphis soul anytime he wanted.

Like many people, I first heard of Big Star because of "Alex Chilton," the Replacements song off of Pleased To Meet Me. Later, when I saw them, they covered "September Gurls" in concert and I tracked down a bootleg that communicated the thrilling joy of that song. Like church bells chiming into heaven or something.

From top to bottom, Big Star's brief catalog is fantastic. They wrote fantastic songs, played well, and were without peer. Alex Chilton was a central part of that equation, producing song after song of pop genius, little three minute gems that were constructed, played, and sang perfectly. The fact that they were completely ignored and unloved for decades only adds to their mystique but that's not really the central point of their career. Chilton himself seemed completely uninterested in fame and money, just going from thing to thing as it pleased him. At its core, Big Star created the kind of music tapped into some deeper level, where melody and words and singing don't need to be explained. Just felt.

Anyway, here today, I'm writing from very far away, out of the country, 10 time zones away from New York. I've had some wine and I am missing a little big star of my own, a polka dot in heaven. And therefore I've been listening to Big Star's "Thirteen." More than any song I can think of, "Thirteen" captures perfectly the rush, ennui, and yearning of falling for someone when you are young:

And here is "September Gurls" by Big Star:

And Congressman Cohen paying tribute to Alex Chilton in Congress:

And probably the greatest single power pop song ever written, the Replacements' "Alex Chilton":

Feeling Low

2010-03-04T23:09:00.006-05:00

I saw the band Low a long time ago, opening for the Swans in Philadelphia back on January 26, 1997. They used to successfully capture that odd combination of ennui, navel gazing, loneliness, and melancholy ether that I would imagine my life being but never really was. If I tried hard enough, I would imagine that my life's banality hid some deeper meaning. This was, of course, self-deception on the grandest scale. But upon reflection, it's not so bad to think that way. And music is often my ticket to that self-deception.

Tonight I post two songs from Low, both of which I've posted before.

The first is a song called "Sunflower" which is possibly one of the most beautiful songs recorded in the last decade or two. I don't know what the song is about but it's a mini-story involving a death, a crime, and perhaps a betrayal. But it's also about a dream lost.

The lyrics are:

When they found your body
Giant X's on your eyes
With your half of the ransom
You bought some sweet, sweet, sweet
Sweet sunflowers
And gave them to the night

Underneath the star of David
A hundred years behind my eyes
And with my half of the ransom
I bought some sweet, sweet, sweet
Sweet sunflowers
And gave them to the night

The other song I'm posting is "Shame." The lyrics are:

A long time you waited
You thought it had abated
Shame of it all
The harm that it causes
Pours down like a faucet
Shame of it all

Tonight these two songs capture my mood.

Happy Birthday

2010-02-11T13:41:00.003-05:00

So, on this day, I thought I would post one of my favorite songs from last year. For a few minutes, life becomes exciting, dreamy, endless, mobile, full of possibility.

The song is "Quick Canal," the band is Atlas Sound, the album is Logos, and the woman's voice is that of Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier. Atlas Sound is the 'side' project of Bradford Cox, he of the band Deerhunter, another one of my favorite bands of the last few years. Turn it up.

Enjoy.

Joy Division's Pop Moment

2010-02-08T20:51:00.003-05:00

For some reason, people consider Joy Division above criticism... in the same way that for baby boomers, Jimi Hendrix is beyond criticism. They are artists who share similar trajectories and legacies, death punctuating their careers (I say "punctuated" because their careers have continued long after the deaths of Hendrix and Curtis). I'm not a terribly big fan of either, but I do understand why people tend to eulogize and worship them.

My discovery of Joy Division came with their compilation album Substance, which was basically a collection of random songs and singles which had not been featured on their two proper albums, Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980). I loved Substance, partly because it had a clear arc from its punk-ish first song ("Warsaw") to the inevitable and obvious concluding song "Love Will Tear Us Apart." People not into Joy Division but who are somewhat familiar with the name will know the latter song. It is famous for many reasons. The singer, Ian Curtis, after all, committed suicide only weeks after recording the song which ostensibly captured some inescapably poignant moment in his descent into desperation. But the song is also hummable, with a melancholy and maddeningly catchy melody, not difficult to dance to, aided by a propulsive drum beat advancing the minutes along. It's first and foremost a pop song, even if it emerged from the heart of the post-punk moment when discord and dissonance were the central aesthetics. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was for people who didn't really like or take to punk (or post-punk) but who could claim some modicum of hipness. Sort of like when liking R.E.M. in the eighties made you "edgy," you know, so you didn't actually have to listen to Husker Du or Mission of Burma. The song was made for a movie featuring John Cusack.

Yet, yet, yet, the song is undeniably beautiful and brilliant. It's not the best Joy Division song (probably "She's Lost Control" or "Isolation") but it may be the only song they ever recorded which had an emotionally vulnerable center. Ineffably sad. Like Polka dot sounded on the phone.

Here, then, is Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" followed by a version by (the?) Swans. The latter has been completely disavowed by Michael Gira as a horrible misstep but I find it strangely poignant in itself. Maybe it's because I know Gira's story too, which while not as terminally dramatic as that of Ian Curtis is still a story of sadness.

Joy Of Speed EP (song 1)

2010-02-04T20:06:00.004-05:00

Invisible

In my first science fiction novel
I wrote myself cartwheeling over a deserted highway
In a brand new spaceship
That flew over my father's car

He drove for miles past the lights
In the backseat I rolled down the window just a little
Pushed my nose against the glass
But I couldn't make out any stars

And then the boy left his home
He grew arms as big as his memories
But they never could reach far enough
when he looked down from his spaceship
He was now invisible

I need to get up, I need to wash my face
I need to make constant plans to travel from place to place
Arriving and departing all at once
I fall asleep the moment I wake up

And in my dreams, I'm with my dad again
Packed into the backseat on a trip across the state
I'm blowing air on the window
Blotting out the sky outside up above

And then the boy left his home
He grew arms as big as his memories
But they never could reach far enough
As he looked down from his spaceship
I was now invisible

Joy -- Invisible [mp3]

Top 10 Movies of the '00s

2010-02-02T08:00:00.000-05:00

My Top 10 Movies of the '00s

10. The Family Man (2000)
9. The Wicker Man (2006)
8. National Treasure (2004)
7. Ghost Rider (2007)
6. Knowing (2009)
5. Next (2007)
4. Lord Of War (2005)
3. Matchstick Men (2003)
2. The Weather Man (2005)
1. Adaptation (2002)

Am excitedly waiting for Season of the Witch (2010).

Life is good.

So It Goes

2010-01-29T18:41:00.009-05:00

I have a terrible headache, a bad cold, you know, the usual. It is a Friday night and I'm considering what to do. Not that there are that many options. I mean, there are basically two options, stay in or go out. The 'out' option is not terribly exciting and involves meeting up with a person, probably downtown somewhere even though I want to stay uptown. And conversation will inevitably be stilted. And let's face it, I don't really want to go out, I mean what's the point? I will spend money pointlessly, forget about the obvious shittiness of my life for a coupla hours, and then feel bad physically (and otherwise) tomorrow. And I don't want to stay in because I don't like 'in.' Long story.

I got an e-mail from an old friend of mine in Bangladesh yesterday who wrote to me to remind me of the songs we used to listen to as kids. Apparently, I had a cassette tape (!) which had a song by the band called Poco. Yes, Poco, that Poco. Think of 1970s-era sub-Eagles feel-good California music that flows over you. As soon as the song is over, you've forgotten it, but it felt good to listen to it for a few minutes, especially 'cause when you first heard it you were 15 years old and had a crush on some girl. The song in question, "Crazy Love," is actually not as bad as I make it sound. It still conjures up little feelings buried somewhere in my keenly sharped indie brain. "Crazy Love" was perfect for being 15 and being, um, of the sensitive ilk.

Anyway, the dude who wrote me the e-mail is exactly my age, has the same name. We followed very identical paths in our adolescence, smoking our first cigarettes together, having our first girlfriends, discovering Houses of the Holy at the same time, reading Slaughterhouse Five simultaneously, etc. etc. One might say that he was my best friend at that time. We were two clowns, he the witty optimistic and me the sardonic foil. (Although when we argued, it was always because I accused him of using my jokes, which were better than his, to impress people and pick up chicks). I have not had much contact with him since we were about 18 although I've seen him on and off over the years, sometimes at parties, once in a bar in the West Village, another time at the international airport in Calcutta (Kolkata). He remains perfectly frozen in time, maybe not physically but his personality and his presence. He's just as full of optimistic one-liners and has nary a dark strand in his entire body. He has no time for melancholia or navel-gazing or yearning or any such thing. Life is good and it is what it is. In his free time, he seems to follow English soccer and posts youtube videos of forgotten seventies bands on his Facebook page. ("California" by Manfred Mann, anyone?).

I have my headphones on, listening to stuff on random. Am listening to an old Verve song, the one called "So It Goes." He ends the song with the obvious lines.

"....another drink and I won't miss her
another drink and I won't miss her..."

Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- Skeletons

2010-01-26T11:55:00.004-05:00

I can't get over how awesome this song is. From their recent album It's Blitz.

The Knife

2010-01-18T00:13:00.007-05:00

In my haste to do a top 75 list of the '00s, I forgot a lot of really awesome albums, including, of course, Silent Shout (2006) by The Knife, those folks from Sweden--actually two people--who make the weirdest most interesting electronic music this side of Burial. They have this whole shtick in which they never appear in public and don't give interviews. I don't really know how to describe their music but lazy reviewers always say "electro pop." Whatever. One of the people in The Knife lists her influences as:

David Lynch
Aki Kaurismaki
Korean cinema
Trailer Park Boys
Donnie Darko
Doom
Black Hole

Hmm..

Anyway, recently, they decided to write an opera for the Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma. The opera, entitled Tomorrow, In A Year, is based on Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. They recently released the first product of this work, an 11-minute track called "Colouring of Pigeons" which is a collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock.

It's mind-blowing.

The Knife -- Colouring of Pigeons [mp3]

Jay Reatard (1980-2010) R.I.P.

2010-01-14T09:07:00.003-05:00

Very Sad.

I Was Buying Some Feelings

2010-01-04T16:24:00.001-05:00

Yes, Nick McCabe was awesome. This is from 1997

Birthday Gal

2010-01-01T22:36:00.006-05:00

Not to continuously go on about Paul W., but I just noticed that he turned 50 yesterday. Fifty! Wow. There's a very nice understated article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune here.

I was thinking today about what music has meant the most to me in my whole life, and I would have to narrow it down to two, perhaps three bands. I don't listen to any of them that much anymore, but I doubt that any other music will ever have that kind of an effect on my life again. There's something about absorbing music (or movies or literature or whatever) in your twenties that cannot be repeated. And so, with the Smiths, the Replacements, and possibly, with Nirvana, I experienced something deeply traumatic. Not, life-changing but certainly life-reflecting. I was obsessed with each of these bands, enough to track down EVERY SINGLE SONG they had ever released or indeed, recorded. (Ever heard the extremely rare and brilliant live version of "Some Girls are Bigger Than Others" that was released on the b-side of the 12" of "I Started Something I Couldn't Finish" in 1987? Thought So. Yes, I have it somewhere). But that's just the technical part. I was also so obsessed with these bands that I could hardly go a day by without listening to them or thinking about what they were singing about.

Now it is more than twenty years later. I discovered the Smiths and Replacements in '86. I found Nirvana in '91. That's over two decades ago. I'm much much older, not even like a cool older uncle, but just a hasbeen old guy who hasn't taken good care of himself in the past coupla decades, and just complains about his back and mumbles under his breath about how "the kids these days, they just don't get it, do they?"

Now, I'm not sure if Paul is like that these days, but he sure doesn't seem to give a shit about anything, and when he does emerge from his dark dank basement, he sounds like a curmudgeon. He's married, lives in a suburb of a big midwestern city, barely goes out or listens to anything in the outside world, probably watches sports, goes to see his son play baseball, maybe complains to his wife about having to take so many Goddamn anti-depressants every day. He could give two shits about Radiohead, probably still listens to albums by Sonny and Cher, and rarely smiles. He remembers very little of the Replacements, and why should he remember any of it?

Happy Birthday Paul.

You were always kinda young to me, but like an older brother who was about 25 or something. But still young. Without blemishes. Now you're 50. Ain't so young anymore. Just like me.

Here's a song you wrote a long time ago, never bothered to release, until your record company forced you to about 20 years later. It is called "Birthday Gal." It is as sad as all the girls who wanted to sleep you and the boys who wanted to be you.

"Wax is dripping from the frosting on the cake
Come on, girl, buckle up, and don't hesitate
Take a deep breath and blow 'em all away
...
Birthday gal, do you wish that
There weren't quite as many candles that you had to blow away?"

The Replacements -- Birthday Gal [demo]

Top 75 Albums of the '00s

2009-12-21T21:51:00.034-05:00

OK, here it is, my decade-end list of the top 75 albums of the past decade, the '00s. Hard to believe that a decade has passed since the oh-so-innocent panic of Y2K hysteria. My general feeling is that music, at least the kind of music I tend to like, was pretty stellar in the past ten years. But, as a point of reference, looking back at the past 50 years of popular music, it's hard to rank the past decade as anything particularly special. I still continue to think that there hasn't been a period as creative as the late 1970s/early 1980s but I would actually rank the '00s as a decade much better than the '90s and probably as good as the '80s.

Just a quick scan through the list suggests that I ranked very few artists from the babyboomer era as still producing good music. And let's face it, the only two real candidates in that category are Bob Dylan and Neil Young, both of whom continue to be as weird, iconoclastic, and inaccessible as ever but seemed to have cooled off in terms of producing sublime music. (And no, I don't like Leonard Cohen and maybe Scott Walker's doing some good stuff too). Neil Young's last peak was sometime in the mid-nineties while Dylan's "Love and Theft," which ranked on my top 75, was released in 2001 (actually, September 11, 2001, to be precise). Most of the other folks on the list came of age in the nineties.

In terms of genres, I can't really draw any firm conclusions besides the fact the '00s had a lot of derivative music (see Interpol, the Strokes, etc.) but that doesn't necessarily mean that it was bad music. I concede one can enjoy a copy of the copy of the copy. After all, I think we can all agree that authenticity is vastly overrated. Sometimes it's more fun to listen to the Rolling Stones than Robert Johnson, ya know?

It's also surprising to see so many of my picks from the early part of the decade rather than the later. The general trend seems to be that the decade began pretty well in 2000 (8 albums), reached a peak in 2003-2004 (about 12 each), then had a steady decline to 2009 (only three records from this year).

Finally, the issue of consistency. Very few bands/artists on the list had multiple showings, i.e., it was one good album and then done. I don't have an explanation for this but it seems to me that in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, you could probably easily find an artist (Joni Mitchell from the '70s, the Smiths from the '80s) who could be counted on to consistently deliver good albums, one after the other. Nowadays it ain't so, although I wonder if that has something to do with the attention span of the audience than the work of the artist.

So, my list:

75. Iggy Pop - Skull Ring (2003)
74. Ariel Pink - Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti (2005)
73. Burial - Untrue (2007)
72. Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped (2006)
71. Caribou - Up In Flames (2003)

70. AA Bondy - When The Devil's Loose (2009)
69. Kanye West - The College Dropout (2004)
68. Badly Drawn Boy - Born In The UK (2006)
67. Bob Dylan - "Love And Theft" (2001)
66. Tangemeenie - Faust (2001)
65. A Silver Mt. Zion - He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Sometimes Grace The Corner Of Our Rooms... (2000)
64. Paul Westerberg - Stereo/Mono (2002)
63. School Of Seven Bells - Alpinisms (2007)
62. Zero 7 - Simple Things (2001)
61. Rachid Taha - Tekitoi (2004)

60. Eluvium - Talk Amongst The Trees (2005)
59. Lemon Jelly - '64-'95 (2005)
58. The White Stripes - Elephant (2003)
57. A Perfect Circle - Mer De Noms (2000)
56. M.I.A. - Arular (2005)
55. The Album Leaf - One Day I'll Be On Time (2001)
54. Tinariwen - Aman Iman (2007)
53. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Yanqui U.X.O. (2002)
52. Sea Ray - Stars At Noon (2003)
51. Yo La Tengo - And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out (2000)

50. King Khan & The Shrines - The Supreme Genius Of (2008)
49. Califone - Roots & Crowns (2006)
48. Steely Dan - Two Against Nature (2000)
47. Ellen Allien & Apparat - Orchestra Of Bubbles (2006)
46. Verbena - La Musica Negra (2003)
45. LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem (2005)
44. New Order - Get Ready (2001)
43. Fujiya & Miyagi - Transparent Things (2006)
42. TV On The Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain (2006)
41. Radiohead - Amnesiac (2001)

40. Dead Meadow - Feathers (2005)
39. Sonic Youth - Murray Street (2002)
38. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)
37. The Strokes - Is This It (2001)
36. Boards Of Canada - The Campfire Headphase (2005)
35. The Secret Machines - Now Here Is Nowhere (2004)
34. Massive Attack - 100th Window (2003)
33. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (2009)
32. Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero (2007)
31. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig Lazarus Dig! (2008)

30. Mogwai - Happy Songs For Happy People (2003)
29. Four Tet - Rounds (2003)
28. Outkast - Speakerboxx/The Love Below (2003)
27. Atlas Sound - Logos (2009)
26. Buffalo Daughter - I (2001)
25. Royksopp - Melody A.M. (2001)
24. The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow (2003)
23. Primal Scream - XTRMNTR (2000)
22. Xiu Xiu - Fabulous Muscles (2004)
21. Adem - Homesongs (2004)

20. Ulrich Schnauss - A Strangely Isolated Place (2004)
19. M83 - Saturdays = Youth (2008)
18. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm (2005)
17. Diplo - Florida (2004)
16. Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Like Bad News (2004)
15. LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver (2007)
14. Beck - Sea Change (2002)
13. Deerhunter - Microcastle (2008)
12. The Arcade Fire - Funeral (2004)
11. Radiohead - In Rainbows (2007)

10. Boards Of Canada - Geogaddi (2002)
9. Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights (2002)
8. The Books - The Lemon Of Pink (2003)
7. Pinback - Summer In Abbadon (2004)
6. Sigur Ros - () (2002)
5. Explosions In The Sky - The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place (2003)
4. PJ Harvey - Stories From The City Stories From The Sea (2000)
3. Sleater-Kinney - The Woods (2005)
2. Radiohead - Kid A (2000)

1. Godspeed You Black Emperor! - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000)

Top 30 Songs of the '00s (part 1)

2009-11-23T23:17:00.020-05:00

Music was awesome in the '00s. Incredible. I had a lot of trouble narrowing down 30 songs I liked. And even then I left out at least another 75 that I could have easily included. But yeah, this past decade was just incredible for unrelentingly good music. Here's my list. People will notice that I went for 'pop' rather than 'esoteric' or 'experimental.' This is because I love da pop music. There's nothing like a good tune.

Part II in a coupla days.

THE BEST SONG

LCD Soundsystem -- All My Friends [2007]

RUNNER UP

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- Maps [2005]

THE REST (in alphabetical order):

1) The Arcade Fire -- Rebellion (Lies) [2004]

2) Battles -- Atlas [2007]

3) The Books -- That Right Ain't Shit [2003]

No official video, someone made this one up:

4) Death Cab For Cute -- I Will Possess Your Heart [2008]

5) Explosions In The Sky -- The Moon Is Down [2001]

6) Feist -- 1-2-3-4 [2007]

7) Fleet Foxes -- White Winter Hymnal [2008]

8) Fujiya & Miyagi -- Ankle Injuries [2006]

9) Gorillaz -- Feel Good, Inc. [2005]

10) Low -- Sunflower [2001]

11) Master Cylinder -- Jung At Heart [2000]

12) M.I.A. -- Sunshowers [2005]

13) MGMT -- Time To Pretend [2008]

14) Modest Mouse -- Float On

15) Mogwai -- Friend Of The Night

Next 15 in a day or two.

Top 30 Songs of the '00s (Part 2)

2009-11-22T14:26:00.000-05:00

16. The National -- Fake Empire [2007]

17. New Order -- Crystal [2001]

18. Okkervil River -- Our Life Is Not A Movie or Maybe [2007]

19. Outkast -- Hey Ya [2003]

20. Phoenix -- Too Young [2000]

21. The Postal Service -- Such Great Heights [2003]

22. Radiohead -- There There [2003]

23. Rhymefest -- Devil's Pie [2006]

24. Ulrich Schnauss -- Knuddelmaus [2001]

25. The Secret Machines -- First Wave Intact

26. Tinariwen -- Amassakoul [2004]

27. The Tings Tings -- Shut Up And Let Me Go [2008]

28. Vampire Weekend -- Oxford Comma [2008]

29. Kanye West -- Stronger [2007]

30. Paul Westerberg -- Crackle & Drag [2003]

Polly

2009-11-19T09:42:00.001-05:00

Will post my Top 50 Albums of the decade shortly. Until then, here's something from 1995.

"God of piston, God of steel
God is here behind the wheel."

Inconcerated (all of it)

2009-10-13T13:18:00.006-04:00

The Replacements -- Talent Show (live)
The Replacements -- Answering Machine (live)
The Replacements -- Anywhere's Better Than Here (live)
The Replacements -- Another Girl, Another Planet (live)
The Replacements -- Here Comes A Regular (live)

The Replacements -- Answering Machine (live)

2009-10-07T22:49:00.005-04:00

In 1989, the Replacements put out an e.p. called Inconcerated, which was basically a promo CD for radio stations. It was a blistering 5-song live record of a show they did at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee to support their then-latest album Don't Tell A Soul. This was a rare CD, and I paid a lotta money to get it on ebay. Anyway, it rocks -- and in typical Replacements fashion, they never bothered to release the whole show which would have been too good to be true. Whatever. Danielle wanted to hear the live version of "Answering Machine." Here it is.

The Replacements -- Answering Machine (live)

It's A Wonderful Lie

2009-10-04T00:51:00.008-04:00

Listening to mid period Paul Westerberg (the stuff that I don't really like) makes me feel uneasy. Paul began his solo career with the awesome 14 Songs but then quickly descended step-by-step into what I still consider AOR shlock. I generalize. Every album that he released after 14 Songs had a few drop-dead genius songs on it. But the other songs were so cliched, so much dead weight, that I could never make it through an entire album. I'm being too harsh. I think it's more that listening to those albums (Eventually and Suicane Gratifaction) made me depressed. There are few pieces of music that make me depressed. Usually, it's the other way around: I get depressed and then I listen to some music or other. But the stuff he put out in the mid to late nineties was just plain dour, maudlin. Later I find that Paul is a depressive and he's on some serious medication. Over the years, his edges dulled. What can I say.

After what seemed like a never ending slump, he finally (in 2002) showed up with a double album of sorts, Stereo/Mono, which (shock) was actually good. It took me a while to warm up to the albums, but they worked. He'd clearly changed his style. His music had gotten a lot simpler, he'd abandoned those clever chord progressions; and his voice had become more nasal, in a quasi-Dylan way that could occasionally be annoying. But if you got over that, his songs were still good, and at times brilliant.

Since then, he apparently doesn't leave his house in suburban Minneapolis. He's afraid of people and what not. He has a studio in the basement where he goes down and bangs out songs. The ethos is uncompromisingly low-fi with nary the slightest concession to polish or practice. Every few months he releases a bunch of songs on-line, songs that sound he like recorded them underwater. The drumming is usually awful -- he is a brilliant guitarist but he remains a terrible drummer. Paul, try and meet some people, for the love of God! You don't have to go to a bar, just put an ad out that you need a drummer! Jesus.

Anyway, a week or so ago, Westerberg released another e.p., this one called PW & The Ghost Gloves Cat Wing Joy Boys. Yeah, that's what it's called. Paul being Paul, he took a word from each of the six songs and made up a title. Some of the songs are really good. Hey, what the hey, indeed. [Go here for a free song from the e.p.]

One of Paul's favorite things to write about is: the sadness young men see in young women who never see it in themselves. He wrote a buncha those (see "Achin' to Be," "Merry Go Round," "Birthday Gal," etc. etc.). Those are good ones.

And then there are the requisite songs about dead people (cheery guy, he), including one about Sylvia Plath. In a terribly morbid poem titled "Edge," Plath wrote:

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

God, so gloomy, like a 16-year old goth chick. Paul, for whatever reason, wrote a song called "Crackle and Drag" (a lovely way to describe the static you hear when curtains move to close across theater stages). And he would sing it differently in various versions. The video below is an acoustic version, much better actually than any version he put on record. The other is a studio punk rock version. Both are brilliant.

But it's most important to understand that even when Paul puts out what could possibly be the shittiest album released by a human being in the entire decade of the nineties (Suicane Gratifaction), in his typically perverse way, the very first song on the album, "It's A Wonderful Lie," may be the best thing he wrote the whole decade. I hear it now -- I know exactly what he means.

Although Paul could give two shits about me, I still love the skinny bastard. I love his music. It changed my life. I don't listen to the old stuff that much anymore but that doesn't matter. Those buncha albums from the '80s that he and his bastards of young put out -- they are now imprinted in my DNA. Those who have loved me, and those who I have loved, know this about me. That I am one of those children by the millions, who wait for Paul Westerberg, to come home.

Paul Westerberg -- Crackle and Drag (unreleased live) [mp3]
Paul Westerberg -- Crackle and Drag (electric) [mp3]

Videos:

Hello Sunshine

2009-09-26T12:24:00.003-04:00

Fall is here. It's almost October. Would love to go to Colombia one day. But maybe not by train.

Super Furry Animals -- Hello Sunshine [mp3]

Tinariwen - Amassakoul 'N' Ténére

2009-09-24T10:52:00.001-04:00

Thom Yorke - Reckoner

2009-09-23T09:33:00.003-04:00