Miranda Sex Garden - My Funny Valentine

Why are two things connected?

A few years ago, I read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Around the same time, I was first introduced to Galaxie 500. I listened to their live version of "Summertime" a million times. I have no idea what the song is about, still. There are some songs that capture the way I feel as, um, a human being, and it's not about the words or the chords or the voice, just the whole thing. This song is one of those. It was fairly unremarkable on first listen but you know, the 12th or 15th time you hear it, it starts to lift you up. Especially the final 2 or 3 minutes of the song, this volcanic guitar solo verging on drowning in the thin air of the stratosphere. What does this have to do with The Lovely Bones? The story is about a teenage girl who is murdered; I guess the novelty is that it is told from the perspective of the dead teenage girl. For some reason, the two ("Summertime" and The Lovely Bones) are inextricably connected in my mind, not just in a random way, but totally so. Naturally, one must wonder if the song evokes the way I feel as a human being, does the book also? Well, I don't know, but the book sure left me thinking for weeks about death, loss, and stuff like that.

Why are two random things connected? Timing, obviously. Place is important. ("I first heard this song when we were in Washington Square Park"). People.

I don't have any real answers. I also don't have any readers of this blog, but let me throw this out to the massive emptiness that is the internet: In your life, do you identify a piece of music always with something totally and seemingly unconnected

Some Possible (but fake) Examples:

• Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" and steak burritos
• Mozart's "Piano Concerto No. 24" and the country Costa Rica
• Radiohead's "House of Cards" and Breaking Bad
• Urge Overkill's "Sister Havana" and Michael Caine

Oh, and don't forget to listen to the last 2 minutes of "Summertime," really really loud. It really is quite remarkable.

Wild Nothing - Summer Holiday

A summer-related post! Who doesn't feel nostalgic for the late eighties? Even if you didn't live through it, you must have some fake memories of the eighties.... right? And who better to recreate those memories than the band Wild Nothing, the brainchild of one Jack Tatum from Blacksburg, Virginia (home of VirginiaTech). I don't know much about him but he seems young, in his mid-twenties, and has a fondness for British indie-pop. Gemini, the first album by Wild Nothing came out in 2010, and it was one of my favorite (guilty) pleasures of that year. Awesomely great pop songs! Especially if you're missing an old girlfriend or something. I hear that his new album Nocturne is about to come out soon. Next month actually. Pitchfork (yucko) has a recent interview with the dude in which he confesses that he listens to Ministry. This sounds nothing like Ministry, but it's entirely likely that if you were around in the late eighties, you would listen to both Ministry and music that sounds like Wild Nothing. I know I did. That's what we senior citizens did! (More on Ministry in a later post). This here below is the "big single" from their Gemini, called "Summer Holiday." First the album version. And then in live-in-the-studio version. Both good.

Spiritualized - Run

There's a lot to say about Spiritualized, but not right now. But ... where better to start than with Lazer Guided Melodies, their 1992 debut? This is an album that still sounds like it was made in some blissed out dimension of outer space. One of the singles from the album was "Run" a quasi-cover of an old song originally by J. J. Cale. I say quasi because Spiritualized's mastermind Jason Pierce kinda makes the song his own. Bliss, indeed.

Laika - German Shepherds

This is the very first Laika song I ever heard, Laika being both a famous dog and a less famous band. The band, Margaret Fiedler and Guy Fixsen, put out a bunch of amazing albums in the late nineties, one of which, Sounds of the Satellites (1997) was top-to-bottom a great example of electronic pop done well. All about the 3 AM post-party vibe, they were. This particular song that I'm posting was included in a 21-song compilation album titled Whore: Various Artists Play Wire (1996) which featured various artists covering songs originally made by the British band Wire.

Today, suddenly, I got an itch to listen to this song, which is as perfect one can get in terms of deconstructing an original song. "German Shepherds" itself was first featured on Wire's IBTBA (1989) and then radically deconstructed during a John Peel session in the late '80s. The radio session version saw official release, many years later, on Coatings (1997). It is the latter version that Laika de/re/construct into electronic bliss.

What does it sound like? A bit of nineties trip hop, a bit of silky mood, a bit of electronic gloss, a few changes in lyrics, and here we are....

Oh by the way, that compilation called Whore? It is one of the best "tribute" albums ever made. You don't have to be familiar with any of the originals because the ethos of innovation on the album is so persistent and at a high level. Instead of cranking out note-for-note covers, all these bands try to emulate the spirit of Wire, instead of Wire itself. Good stuff. There are a couple of duds, but overall, it's a superb album, AND includes one of the few post-Loveless My Bloody Valentine tracks released, the fantastic "Map Ref 41°N 93°W."

Laika - German Shepherds [mp3] (via 39-40)

Real Estate - Beach Comber

As Close As This

Dead Can Dance

Here's another repost. Updated for 2011, this post was originally from April 2010.

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 moment in the soundtrack of my life in the late eighties and nineties. How to describe Dead Can Dance without using tired descriptors? They were/are a British/Australian duo who released seven albums between 1984 and 1996. Their early (1980s) work was primarily dedicated to excavating ancient and medieval European music from the grave of academic pretension and translate it for the arty underground/goth music scene of the 1980s. But Dead Can Dance were definitely not a goth a band. Their ambitions were much more limitless; their music encompassed everything from Gregorian chants ("De Profundis") to faithful renditions of 13th century music ("Saltarello") or 16th century Gatalan tunes ("The Song of the Sibyl"). They had a song called "Echolalia" and used glossolalia in their music. Some have called their music Neo-Medieval, whatever that means.

Later in their career (1990s), they moved more into what folks today call "World Music" and away from their medievalist roots. But the music still holds up remarkably well. They were an important aesthetic influence on my musical education, although they were in many ways antithetical to almost every other kind of music I listened to at the time. Through Dead Can Dance, 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 or artists were not spared my 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.

I like all of Dead Can Dance's albums but my two favorites are Within the Realm of a Dying Sun (1987) and The Serpent's Egg (1988), partly because these were the first two I heard. I still have both of them on vinyl and they sound beautiful, if a little strange. If I had to generalize, the former is based around melody and the latter around percussion, but both sound like nothing out of the twentieth century. For their latter, "world music" phase, I would recommend Into the Labyrinth (1993), probably their most successful album in terms of sales. Going more into territory that the Real World Records label was promoting, this album is impeccably produced but sounds a bit like two people who happened to accidentally put their (very) different songs on the same album. It was clear by this point that Perry and Gerrard were heading in different stylistic directions (and apparently didn't get along much either). Since then, Gerrard has had a fairly successful solo career contributing to movie soundtracks, having a beautiful voice worthy of sirens welcoming you into heaven.

Recently, Perry and Gerrard have decided to re-activate Dead Can Dance. Their new album Anastasis is due in August 2012 and the band is about to embark on a massive world tour (New York on August 29 and 30!). As preparation, they have released 21 live recordings from previous tours free on their website under the generic title Live Happenings. Many of these live songs remain "officially" unreleased on any album.

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

Here is "Saltarello" from the album Aion (1990), which refers to a dance first recorded in Napoli in the 14th century:



Here is "Echolalia" from the album The Serpent's Egg (1988). "Echolalia" literally means "the automatic repetition of vocalizations made by another person."



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.

Lotus Plaza

[Quick update on the back-and-forth between this blog and the band Asteroid #4: World Peace has been restored. We had a summit meeting at Camp David, representatives were sent, negotiations were had, hands were shaken, and water has now passed under the bridge. Also, the band has generously and free-of-charge shared their most recent albums with Joy of Speed, which is cool, so there will be a review sometime in the near future!]

Now back to regularly scheduled programming: I've mentioned Lotus Plaza on this blog before on one of my various long rambling posts on the whole Deerhunter family, but I couldn't resist one more mention. I fucking love Lotus Plaza's new album entitled Spooky Action At A Distance. Just to reiterate, Lotus Plaza is the side project of Deerhunter guitarist Lockett Pundt, who from what I can tell is the "quiet and shy one." Where Deerhunter operates like a fullscale rock band with a gamut of influences and tools, Lotus Plaza communicates a more private sensibility. The music is not necessarily innovative, but it's beautifully executed. It's mostly a variation of shoegaze pop, maybe harking back to bands such as Ultra Vivid Scene from the late 1980s, with bits and pieces of Stereolab thrown in, especially in the way in which the band finds bliss in repetition. Lockett has a crazy talent for mesmerizing minimalism: repeated riffs pummel your brain and unmoor you from the ground and put your head in a haze. The obvious touchstone here is My Bloody Valentine (Isn't Anything more than Loveless), but Lotus Plaza is much more poppy. And I gotta admit that this is album is very romantic, wraps you in a kind of swooning romance that is perfect if you're happy and in love, with just a hint that what you got is not gonna last too long, but you might as well enjoy it. This is one of my favorite records of this year so far. Definitely in the top five.

As a footnote, Spooky Action at a Distance is not Lotus Plaza's first album. Back in 2009, Lockett released The Floodlight Collective. I wouldn't recommend that first tentative debut, mostly because the production is so muddled that you can barely make out anything. I've read that he wanted the album to be vague, but it's a little too disjointed, and sounds like music made underwater with a cassette player.

Anyway, standout tracks on Spooky Action include:

"Strangers"



and

"Jet out of the Tundra"



Other reviews of the album here and here.

Disappointed!

Readers will note that I took down two mp3 files from band Asteroid #4 at the request of the band. (I posted them originally here). I have to admit that I'm disappointed that the band asked me to do this. Let me explain: (a) My blog post was intended to promote the band, not to exploit it. I did not post a whole album or anything, or link to some torrent site or some shit like that. I also pointed to links where readers could PURCHASE their albums for (real!) money. This is how people discover new music these days. They stream music or download an mp3 or two from a band, check it out and decide to investigate further. (b) I was under the (obviously misplaced) impression that The Asteroid #4 are a bunch of cool dudes, not part of some massive faceless corporate force ready to come down on people who like their music (or want to expose others to it). But apparently they are not. Either way, I still like their music but I'm severely disappointed in them. (Admittedly I am not that important to their big rock star world, but I had to get that off my chest).

EDIT: See Lotus Plaza post above for update.