Clatter

National Anthems

2010-05-21T13:14:00.001-07:00

Well, it’s quite the brouhaha lately re: High Violet, new LP from The National. & truthfully, it’s a friendly enough album with much to recommend it. I particularly enjoy the front-center placement of the drums in the mix while other, undifferentiated textures roil deep & dark beneath. I like the formless distortion noise that sometimes hovers throughout, seeping into every crevice. I have no objection to the cool detachment of Matt Berninger’s baritone, whose lyrics veer from anguished to absurd (“I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees” say what??).

Picture dark wood panel, leather & dim lighting. Brandy. A cigar, maybe.

In the end though, I am just not loving it. Much as I would like to. I think my objection is that it’s all too comfortable, too clean, too undangerous. Shouldn’t something this insistently dark have a least some bit of menace about it? I’ve waited in vain for that here, but High Violet is more than anything else very very pretty. I want to pinch its cheeks.

NOTE: MUSIC LINK REMOVED PURSUANT TO DMCA ENFORCEMENT ACTION.

Natl-Lemonworld mp3

LCD: This Is Happening.

2010-05-18T20:01:00.001-07:00

Jesus Christ Wow & words to that effect. This Is Happening is the rather apt title of LCD Soundsystem’s resplendent & dazzling new LP. Hear some here:

LCD-I Can Change mp3

LCD (& more specifically James Murphy) will continue to be accused now of being “merely” derivative & a novelty act, so let’s start there, yes? “You Wanted a Hit” is a novelty song, & likewise “Drunk Girls” at least arguably. Not incidentally, these are probably the least two interesting songs on the album, notwithstanding sundry fine aspects to recommend them. So. I will not object to their exclusion from this discussion for the sake of anyone offended by novelty songs, of which I am no great champion.

So, next. LCD = Derivative? Well, here is “Somebody’s Calling Me.”

LCD-Somebody's Calling Me mp3

Which I immediately sussed as signifying “Nightclubbing,” viz Iggy Pop, from The Idiot (1977):

IP-Nightclubbing mp3

Crazy right? & Hey, the whole album is replete with this kind of thing. Murphy’s songs quote freely & avidly from the best of the best of very late 1970s & very early 1980s new wave, synth pop, art funk, & pertinent antecedents thereof. e.g., Bowie, circa Heroes (1977); Prince, circa 1999 (1982); Talking Heads, circa Remain in Light (1980); Television; Joy Division; Mr. Pop supra; & cetera & cetera.

Many of the references jump right out at you; others reveal themselves gradually. The best parts of the LP, I will argue, are its rhythm grooves, protracted & sinuous & deep. Which tend to pose who’s-zooming-who-type of questions. i.e., is Murphy bastardizing seventies afropop? Or bastardizing later bastardizations of same by Caucasian-American rock stars? & does it even matter, since now you’re dancing?

So I guess the operative question is whether this music is somehow diminished by virtue of its being so nakedly derived from something(s) else. Like, is LCD just a crass little ripoff, devoid of its own ideas & inspiration? Is it just retro?

To be candid, I can’t seem to muster that much snark. Not in the face of what is such a clear & unreserved gesture of Love. Just listen: there is nothing ironic or snide to be found in these connotations of the earlier era. Murphy is not reveling in kitsch, he is no fucking Hipster. No way, that. He loves what he loves & he is unabashed about it. I’m finding his enthusiasm infectious.

Sleigh Bells, Treats. Beast & Beauty.

2010-05-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

Finally now, & following all manner of buzz & anticipation, Sleigh Bells’ debut album Treats is currently working the room. You likely know the backstory already, but it’s thus: Derek Miller’s hardcore band Poison the Well (nice name, that) went defunct, leaving him stranded waiting tables & chatting up customers re: the new band he was scheming of. One of said customers turned out to be the comely Alexis Krauss, who promptly then ditched her school-teaching gig. More or less directly thereafter, there was Sleigh Bells.

The project was founded, first, on Miller’s loop samples & his noisy beats, mixed strident & loud & then escorted in by raunchy guitar distortion. The latter ingredient performed live & dicey; the former ensconced in a laptop or iPod or whatevs. You with me so far? Derek hits Play, then he thrashes guitar alongside. It’s raucous & crunchy & rude. It’s a fabulous & decadent mess, it’s really fucking loud. So far so good.

Ok, then add Krauss, whose singing is breathy, lively, girlish & gamine. She really ought not to fit Miller’s musical premise, right? Krauss is all winsome, while Miller’s all WHOMP. & yet. On reflection, I’m hearing a yin-slash-yang kind of deal here: the two elements, disparate & incongruous, they accent & emphasize each other. It’s the disparity that’s compelling. & all the more so live, where Krauss (sexy & vivacious) & Miller (hunched & hoodied) perform side by side.

Anyway, Sleigh Bells started out with a half dozen songs, clearly home-made affairs rough & raw, dispersed willy-nilly over the interwebs. The duo scored a gig at last year’s CMJ, then proceeded to garner the right sort of attention. There ensued some hype, albeit virally deployed. More high-profile gigs followed, further stoking the anticipation until voila! we now have in hand an actual Sleigh Bells LP. Dressed up now in big boy pants.

Treats is way fun, let me just say it right off the bat. Every bit of the percussive excess continues unabated, & that’s a very good thing. At the same time, access to a full-on recording studio has been a boon to the Bells: the textural landscape is now more varied, more contoured, more interesting. The earlier recordings had pointed in a number of different musical directions, & Treats continues to offer an assortment of flavors. There are distinct plunges into the Hardcore realm. Somewhat less expected are all the winking references to European disco & electronica. Anyway, it’s a big thrill ride w/hairpin turns.

Most of the earlier material gets reworked here to fit the new, beefier paradigm. By & large, I am prepared to go along w/all of that. Previously, “Ring Ring” was a song that got picked on a lot bc the Funkadelic sample is so unembellished. But jesus chill it’s a fucking demo, is what I wanted to say to all of that. Anyway, that song is much more fully fleshed out now, and appears here as “Rill Rill.” It’s as close to quiet as this album gets, yet thunder still rumbles.

On the other-other hand, “Beach Girls” was already a fully-formed piece w/its seagull atmospherics & its comic narration. That one is transformed here into “Kids,” which operates now as a full-on cover of the original, referring to & commenting on a song we already know. e.g., the singsong-spoken bits re sunburns & sunglasses are accelerated & multitracked now. w/the result that they’re scripted, ritualized, one step removed: a Greek chorus of 9-year-old girls, all giggles & screaming over Thump Thump Thump. Anyway, both versions provided below, the side-by-side being fascinating to me, & maybe so to you too.

NOTE: MUSIC LINKS REMOVED PURSUANT TO DMCA ENFORCEMENT ACTION.

SB-Beach Girls mp3

SB-Kids mp3

Summer is upon us, peoples. I anticipate Sleigh Bells as something we’ll be hearing an awful lot of in the hot months ahead.

Video: HF @ SXSW

2010-05-12T09:27:00.000-07:00

Oyez! Courtesy of baeblemusic, comes now this sweet vid of Holy Fuck working their magic tricks at this year's South by Southwest fest. Fun stuff:

Watch the full concert at baeblemusic.com

(Guest Post!) Murder City Devils

2010-05-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

Note: Today's itinerant Clatter correspondent is Clint, author of the excellent & always entertaining Fernetiquette.

Murder City Devils
Slim's
San Francisco, CA
May 7, 2010

I don’t go to shows that often anymore. Unlike this blog’s primary author, I’m not “plugged in” to the “scene”. HOWEVA, I am “friends” with Murder City Devils on “The Facebooks.” This normally means nothing, but a few months ago it meant that I was told exactly when and how to buy advance tickets to the Murder City Devils show this past Friday at Slim’s. At the time they were first available my work situation wasn’t sorted out; I wasn’t sure whether I could afford them.

Then I figured: “Shit dude, buy the tickets now. If you’re unemployed by the time the show rolls around, you can sell them to lazy hipsters for ALL THE MUNNIEZ IN THE WORLD.”

So I bought the tickets. Thank Fucking God, I bought the tickets. And I went to the show. Thank Fucking Satan, I went to the show.

How to explain the phenomenon of Murder City Devils to those who have never experienced them? Wikipedia lists them as a “garage punk band active between 1996 and 2001.” I would argue that this is selling them a bit short. Our Devils are less a “garage punk band” and more “the band from the best party you never went to.”

Murder City Devils are absolutely motherfucking brilliant. They’re like Gang of Four on speedballs or a club rock version of Minor Threat (with a keyboard player.) In short, they’re the perfect mix between dance rock and balls-to-the-wall punk, and by the time I’d joined the battalions of other hipsters / punks / cool kids who had discovered the visceral majesty of this particular Seattle sextet, they had already fucking broken up. Before last weekend, they had played all of one show in San Francisco in the last 9 years. Basically, I never thought I’d get a chance to catch MCD live.

In other words, I was kinda excited to see them. KINDA!

Since 95% of Murder City Devils’ songs are about getting fucked up drunk, the lady and I got fucked up drunk before the show. It was better that way, and we weren’t the only ones. For the record, they do serve Fernet at Slim’s, though I was wayyyy too drunk to remember what a shot cost.

The band is fronted by the slight, bespectacled Spencer Moody. Spencer Moody (or “Howlin’ Spencer Moody”, as he apparently prefers) is a tiny, bearded man with the lungs of a Viking. He is part vocalist, part force of nature. The first time you listen to MCD, you will probably think “Man, this band would be the biggest thing ever if their singer could actually, ya know… sing.” You will be forgiven for thinking this, even though you will be gloriously incorrect. Moody’s cheese-grater snarl is half of what gives this band its edge. His voice is what separates something pure and thrilling like Murder City Devils from those accessible but terribly average bands like The Killers or The Strokes.

The other thing that makes Murder City Devils truly special is the quality of its backbone. Coady Willis (Big Business, The Melvins, Dead Low Tide) is quite literally one of the best drummers alive. Every snare hit is like a gunshot. Every floor tom is like the rolling tide. The man is a goddamned machine. Hearing him on record is striking. Hearing him live is a religious experience.

Then… there’s the organist. MCD would be an awesome band without the keyboard player, but adding it makes them as close to perfect as you would ever want them to get. Which, frankly, is not very close at all.

Anyway, back to the show. I gotta say, I was too blasted to take too many notes. For the most part, they played the songs I expected them to play. I have a few minor quibbles. For example, they didn’t play “Left Hand Right Hand” or “Boom Swagger Boom.”

Outside of a few setlist issues, most had few complaints. The painted, black-clad crowd pulsed and writhed, whipped into an absolute frenzy by the band’s manic, controlled sexual energy. Half the kids were dancing, half the kids were moshing, half the kids were heavy petting in the corner. Everyone got drunk. Everyone got laid.

In short, it was everything you could ever want from a rock and roll show. Highest recommendation.

MCD-Rum to Whiskey mp3

Tallest Man on Earth

2010-05-09T13:56:00.001-07:00

The Tallest Man on Earth
The Independent
San Francisco, CA
May 9, 2010

What a charmer: The Tallest Man on Earth, in his skinny jeans & square jaw w/his wee elfish boots & his raspish voice. On record, The Tallest has been fairly compared to a young Robert-o Zimmerman, for obvious similarities of timbre, phrasing, inflection, verbosity.

On stage in person, the analogy does not hold. The Tallest hops into the room & then proceeds to take efficient ownership of it. He roams hither & yon, upstage & down, he eyeballs the audience, now grave now flirting now comic now tragic. He cracks little non-sequiturs & we laugh as if we're in on some joke we maybe don't quite get but Oh how we wish to. The Tallest is a seducer, you see. Within ninety seconds, substantial contingents of the audience are swooning.

It was really quite a magical thing. The Tallest performs alone & unadorned. There's no band, the stage is clean, it's just him & his 3 guitars. He plays through a little practice amp that's miked right into the PA. He's got a cushy chair to collapse into from time to time as the need arrives. Which it doesn't much, The Tallest is a firecracker he doesn't much pause he doesn't much rest.

The Tallest goes & goes. His music generally gets called Folk. It's a fair descriptor, but a wholly inadequate one. I mean, ok, it's a guy & his guitar & his songs are all poignance & poetry, all of that is true. Still. I am not aware of any Folk paradigm that would encompass the ragged, naked charisma of the Tallest. Or more significantly, the raw & (hello?) sexy charge that he elicits onstage. It's luxurious & it's often quiet, right, but what The Tallest brings is rock & roll I just don't know how else to say it. You can find familiar things in unfamiliar places, sometimes. What a delight is that.

The Tallest has a couple of albums out, now. They don't (can't, really) do justice to the allure of this guy working the room. The songs are truly great ones however, & you really ought to check them out. The Wild Hunt is the apt title of the current LP.

TMOE-Burden of Tomorrow mp3

los Campesinos!

2010-05-08T17:48:00.000-07:00

Los Campesinos!

The Regency Ballroom
San Francisco, CA
May 7, 2010

I’ll be candid, I had some initial skepticism toward this band of seven or eight (it varies) players. What, w/the full-time violin & the glockenspiel, of all things. I mean, shit: such a thing could get a bit too proggy for a Friday night, right?

So I spent some time with Romance is Boring, the band’s current (& second) LP, & that did ease my concerns. It’s a sharp album: arresting, irreverent, darkly humorous. & while the playing exhibits finesse throughout, it just about never settles down into prettiness. Which would just be lazy. I appreciate that los Campesinos! are often rattling & roaring & (to tell you the truth) clattering. They went & hung that exclamation point at the end of their name &, by golly they do earn it.

So the album, I like. Friday night’s show, I fucking loved. Best concert I’ve seen in months. The audience was primed & ready, but there was no resting on laurels by this band. Los Campesinos! brought the goods, as if they had something to prove. Clear adherents to the more-is-more school of thought, the show was a rollick & a wallop, nonstop from start to finish.

There’s plenty of credit to share for that, but much of it does belong to lead singer (slash- glockenspielist, heh), Gareth (the band evidently eschews last names). Gareth is a disarming & delightful focal point onstage. & not only because he’s a thrillingly great bellower, but also for his herky-jerky stage moves. Explosive & spasmodic, all limbs akimbo, some might call it dancing I guess, whatevs. Gareth’s moves did inspire some decent moshing in the crowd there toward the end. Not to be undone, our man launched himself into the melee more than once. During the final encore, half the band followed, still playing on, patch cords trailing behind, utterly lost in the frolic in the crowd. Some might call that move punk rock, yo.

Strongly & unequivocally recommended, I must say. Hear some:

LC – We’ve Got Your Back (Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #2) – mp3

Punked?

2010-05-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

Well, my idea here was to start with a few introductory comments about Punk, by way of warming up my main topic. Which was going to be something about elitism, cultural & otherwise.
Then the Punk part got to be an obstacle. Turns out it’s hard to mention Punk just in passing. There’s just a lot to be said. & there is the temptation also of wanting to try & enlighten, to preach even. Which I can’t/won’t do, I really should not lay claim to any expertise re: Punk. The only point I wanted to make is that, once, Punk was inter alia a rejection of rock-star elitism. Once, it was a nihilistic & maybe even (very briefly, & only potentially) a revolutionary act, to (e.g.) sculpt your hair w/glue, fill your clothes & face w/safety pins, wear shabby black leather, loud plaid & what-have-you. Punk was supposed to be Not Beautiful was what it was supposed to be. It was anarchic, chaotic, it was haphazard, subversive, Free. Punk was not supposed to just end up w/its own Micks Jagger, up on the pedestal while you’re eating cake.

Very quickly, as we know, all things Punk became codified. The anti-glamour just up & became the new glamour. The king is dead long live the king, right. Then, we had (have) arbiters of what is & is not Punk. In music in dress in attitude. Gestalt, whatever. This is inevitable, ours is a capitalist culture, & all cultural values are Market values ipso facto & vice versa. There is nothing, no challenge to the received Marketplace that the Marketplace cannot simply assimilate, commodify. Emasculate. Neutralize.

OK, so thirty-plus years on, we still have our Punk bands. It’s a fashion it’s a style it’s a genre it’s an affect. It’s got its rules, now well-established, & no shortage of people happy to live by them. Cheers. That’s not what I’ve been thinking about all week, though.

No, I’ve been thinking about that original anti-Elitist impulse. How it persists, & how it shows up in unexpected places.

Last month, I saw Yo La Tengo play concert # 3 of 3 at the Fillmore. Certainly not a Punk band by any recognized yardstick. But, talk about your anti-glamour: YLT looks like your schlumpy brother-in-law & your Aunt Doreen teamed up w/that nerdy guy next door to murder Ventures covers in the garage. i.e., on the available evidence, these are not rock stars, there is no pedestal. YLT exhibits no affect, no attitude at all. It’s just Ira, Georgia & James. It could be anybody up there. It could be your moms. It could be you.

& yet the You it could be is playing music of abject, screaming brilliance & beauty. Stylistically, just to start somewhere, YLT are everywhere on the map even with only their own songs, & then add in the seemingly-limitless range of covers this band can pull off. So there’s virtuosity there, yes. More important though (IMO), are the instances of transcendence. By which I mean that the mundane physicality/temporality of the room can almost seem to fall away. For fleeting instants, a sublime effacement, a communion. I don’t know. Maybe you were there & didn’t feel it the way I felt it. &, full disclosure, my agenda that night did comprise a not-insignificant alcohol intake. Nonetheless, as a general proposition I think we can agree that Great Art can take you outside of yourSelf. & I will posit that Yo La Tengo is a band that makes Great Art.

But they do it in a way that is unassuming. Humble. Inclusive. The opposite of Elitist. Late in the evening, Ira got a little gushy &, I guess by way of giving props to the lovely & historic venue, he expressed a hope that every member of the audience might one day “get an opportunity to play this place.” What an odd & unexpected thing to say. & how generous. We did this, I think he meant, & therefore you could, too. It’s an ideal that strikes me as very Punk. Also, universally human. & possibly, distinctively American.

Later still, things were winding down. Someone next to me on the floor was heard to shout, heartfelt & ebullient: “You changed my life!” up towards the stage. I thought about that, I’m still thinking. Does/Can anybody actually change anybody else’s life? YLT seem to be normal people, daily engaged in a transcendent endeavor. You &/or I can transcend, too. We can choose to accomplish things larger & greater than our apparent selves. Change your life or don’t, the burden is yours alone. & the glory.

YLT - We're An American Band mp3

Broken Social Scene

2010-05-02T12:11:00.001-07:00

Broken Social Scene
The Fillmore
San Francisco, CA
May 1, 2010

I say it with no malice, but Broken Social Scene: what a fucking bunch of hippies, all bearded & whatnot w/their everybody-in-the pool ethos. It’s just a big old par-tay, chez BSS. The band last night was never fewer than five warm bodies onstage, & often grew to 8 or 9. This was the first stop on what will be their lengthy summer tour. As did not go unmentioned.

I’m rather fond of BSS’s albums. In particular (& probably like most people), I love-love You Forget It In People, the 2002 breakout. The songs are weirdishly wonderful, yeah, &/but it’s the interstices that are laden with all manner of little sonic gems, constantly surprising. You maybe just note them as production flourishes, but what I hear are all these discrete little fifteen-second masterpieces everywhere. Focused textural excursions to points previously unknown. That is the organizing principal of this music, as far as I’m concerned. [cf, also: Bee Hives, 2004. More righteous shit, that.]

Anyway, last night’s concert by & large took a different approach, opting for less subtlety, less open space, more in the way of just rocking right the hell out. Densely. I don’t begrudge anybody that, what with a packed-full house & five guitars & two drum-kits all playing (mostly) at once onstage. & then sometimes horns, keyboards, electronics & more vocals on top of all of that. There’re not many non-extravagant places to even go from there, right?

At well over two hours, I did find the whole thing more than a little exhausting, although I’ve been told I have a low-ish exhilaration threshold. It just doesn’t take that much to get me high, right? Anyway, things did finally get good & loose & spacey & weird enough for me sometime after midnight & a good ten minutes into “Lover’s Spit,” the final encore number. That was a sweet & genuine thrill.

The new album is called Forgiveness Rock Record. It comes out in a couple of days, although you may have already heard it by now. Here’s something a little bit older:

BSS Shampoo Suicide mp3

Setlist:

Holy Fuck LP Latin

2010-04-28T16:34:00.000-07:00

Just as a general proposition, I’m going to assert that the Best Thing about Holy Fuck is the pummeling: When the real drumming & the synthetic percussive-type noises reach a sort of critical mass, & then everything together all of a sudden is a blur. A raucous & forceful & ecstatic, pummeling blur. That’s the Best Thing.

Historically, the other Best Thing about Holy Fuck has been their sort of giddy freneticism, their madcap ethos. The songs have had a Rube-Goldbergy, slapdash quality to them &, not incidentally, a pervasive sense of humor. The Holy Fuck sound has been vigorous, lusty & hard, but nonetheless delightfully silly. While waiting on pins & needles for the new album, I went back & spent some time with their first, self-titled EP. I was noticing how, here & there amongst all the pointedly-cheesy synthesizing & the sweaty/brawny percussionizing (aka: the pummeling), you hear these effusive, mortal exhalations. A sigh, a pant, a whoot.

NOTE: MUSIC LINK REMOVED PURSUANT TO TO DMCA ENFORCEMENT ACTION

HF - Tone Bank Jungle mp3

That’s charming & amusing. It also serves as a neat little counterpoint to all the electronica, a reminder that this is human music albeit (I’ve said this before) all dressed up to sound machine-made. A ten-year-old boy in a robot suit, threatening world domination from inside the tinfoil & duct tape.

Anyway, the new album is called Latin, I have it now & you will soon too, probably. It’s not the kind of thing you want to miss. You’ll find, however, that Holy Fuck are now changing up the approach in a few different ways.

Importantly, the pummeling is alive & intact, so no worries there.

Absent now though are all those comic glimpses of the man behind the curtain –no gasps, no howls. Nor do we get the sudden veering from one trajectory to another –the quick, jerky starts & stutters. Instead, Latin exhibits a kind of ruthless efficiency, an almost-brutal pragmatism. Each of the songs here stakes out its territory within the first moments, cleanly & clearly. & then proceeds to just thrash boldly thrash thoroughly right through to the end. No hesitancy, no incongruous detours. There is still playfulness here, but more in the conception than in the execution.

Notably, there is also some dalliance with Disco (& other dance-beat variants) going on here. Which can play as arch & incongruous, but mostly only if you expect something different because you already know you’re hearing Holy Fuck. Otherwise, the simulation (irony assumed here to some negotiable extent) can get to be too accurate, & the juxtapositional aspect gets lost. So, there are missteps on Latin, if mostly minor ones. But hey: it’s an Experimental band taking risks. That’s the territory.

By now, you have almost definitely already heard the muscular meat & potatoes of the first single, “Latin America.” (& if not, just go here & get it now.) That song stands firmly on the shoulders of prior work & it’s satisfying & comfortable. If you know the band however, you’ll be more surprised by “Stay Lit,” for e.g., which is as close to like a power-ballad as this band is (probably) ever going to get. Which let's face it is a little weird. & in point of fact, a number of the pieces here just sound a lot more like, well, songs than any of Holy Fuck’s past work. So, while rhythm & texture remain the prime elements, you’re going to hear more melody, & you’re even going to hear some flirtation with vocals.

I will anticipate the obligatory objections to this album, at least to the extent it’s understood as taking a step toward “conventionality.” Whatever that even means anymore. I will confess to having bristled initially & more than once on first hearing this album. But, having spent some time now with Latin, most of it works. & what works, works very, very well.

I have not yet seen Holy Fuck play live, which I understand to be pretty much essential. Summer (& beyond) tour dates are planned. The San Francisco stop will be June 8 at the Independent. Here’s a taste from Latin:

NOTE: MUSIC LINK REMOVED PURSUANT TO TO DMCA ENFORCEMENT ACTION

HF - Positive Ghosts mp3

Grand Lake - Blood Sea Dream

2010-04-23T16:59:00.000-07:00

Wow, several giant steps are being taken in a forwardly direction here by our locally-grown trio Grand Lake. The band’s first LP Blood Sea Dream is freshly set for release next month (& also constitutes the maiden voyage of brand-spanking-new label Hippies Are Dead Records). Excitement abounds, peoples.

Some months ago, I did predict great things ahead for this band &, not to be a dick about it, but it is indeed nice to have been proven correct. Blood Sea Dream is brimming with surprises, starting right off with the rather solemn-yet-sexy midtempo opener, “It Takes a Horse,” w/its doorslam percussion & its wistful-cryptic refrain of Please Talk Slow (evidently on account of) You Breathe Fire.

See, I would’ve expected more of a windup to open the album, something along the lines of “Louise,” title track from last year’s EP. But no, that’s actually Track 2 here, except but Wait, this here is “Louise” two-point-oh: punchier, more muscled, 40 seconds shorter, & several fewer degrees separated from perfect.

Not that anybody should get cozy in the frenetic, avant-bruit realm here. Turns out that Grand Lake are now offering up plenty more flavors than just the one. “Carpoforo” is all mannerist-mournful, for e.g., while last year’s “Black Cloud” remains a fuzzbox ghost tale dissonant & distraught. Meanwhile, “Our Divorce” is a jazzish waltz of all things, with actual violins. Along the way we get squealing wine glasses, we get more strings, we get (I think) a freaking glockenspiel. These are just not the ingredients you typically expect to find stirred into your distortion, your feedback, your lovely/strident sample-loops.

Maybe even more surprising, the actual songwriting here is genuinely polished to a glossy sheen. Hooks abound, positively reeking of Pop (uppercase), & yet the band’s Noisy (likewise) foundation –the first & favored flavor– persists throughout. Blood Sea Dream is layered, complex & evocative. It’s a butched-up affair throughout, notwithstanding its sashays into prettiness, now here now there. This is Pop music, but it’s Pop w/a hard-on. Let’s make that the pull-quote, guys!

The Grand Lake dance card looks to be filling up fast, with gigs around town & elsewhere. You might probably want to check right into that &, meanwhile, you can stream the entire album right now, right here.

& plus, hear:

GL - Louise mp.3

the XX - "Islands" vid

2010-04-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

I continue to enjoy the XX. I put them down, I forget all about them, & then get re-thrilled whenever I hear them again. Watch the narrative that unfolds here via serial variations in the choreography. Nice!

(Guest Post!) Sleigh Bells

2010-04-18T19:40:00.000-07:00

Note: Sleigh Bells are currently touring, opening for Yeasayer. They stopped by the Fillmore SF on 4/17. Intrepid Clatter correspondents Eric & Kathy had it covered:

Sleigh Bells are a thrash metal dude and a hot hipster girl. They play seriously heavy low-end reverb with aggressive female vocals laid on top, using just a guitar and, I don’t know, a laptop?

I was asked to review this show after recently confiding to Clatter personnel that my favorite thing lately is noisy pop-punk with female vocals. This isn’t pop-punk (the geniuses at Pitchfork called it “discordant dancepop”), but in some ways that’s better; of the 4 songs on the Sleigh Bells Myspace page, I like the noisiest and most D&B heavy (“A/B Machines”, “Infinity Guitars”) best. [It does kind of bum me out though that one of those 4 songs ("Ring Ring") is either a joke song or a Funkadelic ripoff throwaway. Stereogum has a fifth song (Beach Girls"), but that's not my favorite either.] Derek Miller (the thrash metal guy) likes his bass as low and distorted as possible, and Alexis Krauss (the hot hipster girl) -- her singing is actually more like chanting. Before going to the show I was already predisposed to like them; they’re “a difficult listen,” and in just the right ways.

We arrived at the Fillmore at a little before 9:00. There was a technician in a red hoodie working on the center stage monitors, and a woman in a holstein-inspired tie-dyed bag standing off to stage right, massaging her own throat. My wife said: “That can’t be [Krauss]; that’s not a very rock star outfit.” Well, it was her, and soon enough the lights went down and she ran up on stage to join the red-hoodied dude, who pick up a guitar and turned out to be Miller.

They launched into “Infinity Guitars.” Now, before the show I hadn’t really heard Yeasayer (the headliner) and didn’t know what their fans would be like, but they seem like a polite bunch. Here they mostly just nodded along. It felt like Krauss was yelling at them, though, and I kinda liked that.

The second song was new, and Krauss said it would appear on their album in May. I didn’t catch the name. Two syllables, starts with maybe a T or a C? It contained the upbeat lyric, “Do your best today.” Hmmmm.

The third song was “A/B Machines.” You’ve been to their Myspace page, so you already know this, but this song is awesome. It actually got the crowd moving a little bit. And Miller is totally right about one thing: that deep, deep distorted bass cuts through everything. My notepad was vibrating, and so were my pants legs. On the fourth song (“Beach Girls”), Miller departed the stage and left it all to Krauss, who by then had thankfully removed her black-and-white bag.

The fifth song was another new one. It was a slow, sludgy, metal-inflected slog that ended with haunted house shrieking by Krauss. Then something happened: They started playing something, and I’m not sure whether it was a separate song or an ending to the metal slog or what, but it was a quick minute or two, distinctly more uptempo, and almost danceable. What was that? (Besides my favorite part of the show, I mean.)

Here is a picture:

Sorry that I don’t have anything better. My wife & I haven’t quite gotten the knack of taking concert photos. Still, here is another one:

Next came one more new song. It was hard to distinguish from the others, because these guys have a sound, you know? But it had a talky bit and more moans from Krauss, but here (unlike on “Beach Girls”), I felt as if they contributed something.

“Crown on the Ground” came last. This is the closest thing these guys have to a pop song. Some people in the crowd actually started pogo-ing. And really, the bass-heaviness went over the top here; you know how in movies when an Air Force test pilot is going faster than the speed of sound and the skin on his face ripples? Well, that’s how my skin felt with all the throbbing on this song. And now that I think about it, that’s actually a good thing.

Here’s a little snippet of video from that song.

Like I said: awesome. If Sleigh Bells would inject a little more pop into their other songs too, they would totally clinch their place as my favorite new band. So in all, that’s 4 old songs, 3 or 4 new songs. And some of the new ones were pretty good. The show didn’t confirm either the hype or the backlash; they’re just a band, right? And are you going to listen to their full album when it comes out? Of course you are.

BATTLEHOOCH.

2010-04-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

I think the time is pretty much Now, if you haven’t already, to make your acquaintance with BATTLEHOOCH. Yeah. Certainly not the first or only San Francisco band to insist on always shouting its name in the ALL CAPS mode. Yet, it’s an apparent point of honor for these here Hooochers that theirs is the Freakiest band in town. Hey, I can neither confirm nor deny & I’m not here to pick a fight on that. Without taking a position though, will you just look at these boys all mock-serious in their plaid pants & their ponchos.

OK, so the second LP by BATTLEHOOCH is set for release tomorrow 4/16, w/the clever & surprising title of BATTLEHOOCH. If you haven’t yet heard the band, the photo actually is a pretty decent prime indicator of their sound. In a curtains/carpetly way, right? What I mean is, much like the picture, the music is a raucously fun hodgepodge. It's boisterous it's a ballyhoo. Genre-wise, we're all over the map here from faux-jazz riffs to avant-surf to quasi-gypsy in a sort of a Gogol Bordellish vein. Just about every song is a protracted suite full of crazy twists & turns we're here we're there just hold on tight. The musicianship is sharp & canny, but --& this is key-- never self-important. Again, mock seriousness is the touchstone. Absent that pervasive sense of humor, this would just devolve & get all prog-rocky.

That is not the way of the Hooochers though, no no no. I'm going to go ahead & throw you a couple of downloads here but, seriously, go out & purchase yourself this delightful LP in its entirety. That is my forcefully-delivered recommendation. That, & also there are imminent record-release festivities that you may benefit from attending. Tomorrow night in Santa Cruz, then Saturday at Bottom of the Hill. Critical details found here. Couple of songs for you:

BH Only Baby Sharks mp3

BH Somersaults mp3

Spoon, & cetera.

2010-04-14T17:18:00.000-07:00

Spoon
Deerhunter

Micachu and the Shapes

The Fox Theater

Oakland, CA

April 14, 2010

Again I missed the first band, I’m sorry you (well, I) can’t have everything. So, Deerhunter & Spoon: is that like the dream team or what?

Anyway, I’ll be brief.

Most people are too polite to come right out & ask the question pointedly, but I can still read the thought bubbles floating over their heads. They wonder if, perhaps, I am starting to get a little too old for all of this going out to see bands at all hours of the night. & the succinct & appropriate response to that query, unspoken or otherwise, of course is Fuck No I Am Not. I will allow, however, that this whole getting up & going to work the next day is beginning to, uh, present some challenges. Moreover, the (hopefully prompt) writing of the Very Important blog entries is supposed to occur when exactly (?) well, There as they say is where the Rub is at. So brevity, yes, will turn out to be a hallmark of this post. The day's hours are finite.

Deerhunter: that’s just my favorite band all over again because (as one would hope) they came out & built up a Stonehenge fucking Monument of guitar distortion. I had never seen them play live before, & so it was a real treat to see the ensemble in action. I had seen Atlas Sound a couple of times, but Deerhunter is a real band it’s not just the Bradford Cox show (in spite of Mr. C.’s little crowd-surfing expedition toward the end; I never expected that). Every member is integral, musically speaking, & it’s all the goods. One nice surprise was bass player Josh Fauver at center stage, all earnest & spunky & bowing after every song. Whatta hunk I’m just saying. & “Nothing Ever Happened” did actually happen, thrillingly, for about fifteen minutes in the middle of the one-hour set. So Deerhunter was pretty great.

Of course it really was Spoon’s audience there, though, & I did overhear some sporadic audience griping between sets about DH's set having gotten too “edgy,” among other silly descriptors. Whatev.

OK, so: Spoon. This was not my first time seeing Spoon. Spoon are just consummate pros, you know? Like, I am not sure by what metric anything actually constitutes a “hit” anymore in the Industry's current distribution modes. But let’s just say that Spoon have a lot of songs that you know really well. & let’s also save a step by just agreeing that Spoon really know how to crank the shit out of every one of those numbers. I love those guys. I love their capital-C Cool nonchalance. I love that they are like kung-fu masters of the Pop Hook. Wax on Wax the hell off, right?

I do have to go ahead & mention that there was some kind of constant, aggravating BUZZ noise in the PA throughout the entirety of Spoon’s set. Everybody just had to ignore it & hope for it to be resolved & cured but that never did happen. So I was not cool with that rather glaring technical difficulty. But I'm done talking about it now, thanks.

I took some notes, I had a decent set list going. But right now I’m at work & it’s out in the car. “Everything Hits at Once” was played, I can definitely tell you that bc it’s my favorite Spoon song & they don’t always play it. Let’s see, I remember “Cherry Bomb,” “Target,” “Camera,” "Evah," all that great stuff. Oh, Bradford came out & jammed with them for “Who Makes Your Money” from the new album, that was cool. Oh yeah, & they covered a Wolf Parade song, also pretty cool. The band was loose (it was mentioned a few times that this was the last stop on the tour), but they were On.

Spoon, they know what they’re doing & they do it very well.

Shine On.

2010-04-12T21:42:00.001-07:00

“The Diamond Sea”
Sonic Youth
1995 (single)
2006 (Track 11, The Destroyed Room: B-Sides and Rarities)

You might want to settle in and pour yourself a beverage, this is the “alternate ending” version. Go ahead & press Play now, it takes a half an hour.

SY-the Diamond Sea mp3

0:00 It starts all YoingYoingYoingYoing, quietly. That’s the idling amp, it white-whispers a phase effect. It will be the guitar’s voice phasing, in a couple of seconds. Drumsticks click a 4-count, & we’re off.

I think it’s fair to say that Sonic Youth have pretty much always provoked controversy & they (maybe) always will. The naysayers tend to fall into one of two principal camps: (1) the reflexively-dismissive (SY= pretentious, mere noise, it’s too damn weird), and (2) the hipper-than-thou (SY= sell-outs, dinosaurs, it’s too damn conventional). The pendulum swings errantly.

For more years than I care to count, I have been listening actively to Sonic Youth. I continue to be challenged & surprised, mystified & thrilled by much of what I hear. I can say without much irony that, maybe, I never really heard any music before I began to learn how to hear Sonic Youth. I hope I’m still learning: how to hear music, how to ignore every ridiculous kind of hierarchy that people want to interpose between the music & my two ears.

Anyway, right here from 0:02 is where the one camp will be heard to complain about rock star tropes & conventionality & whatnot. Because, unlike much of what SY have done (& have historically been understood to “stand for”), this here is a song, with a clear chord structure. At least for the moment: tandem guitar solos introduce what is about to be a sung melody.

0:38 “Time takes its crazy toll,” sings Thurston in one of his typically “trippy” lyrics. The sung parts of the song follow an A/B structure: alternating back & forth between two distinct melodies. No chorus, no bridge. Here’s what he’s on about: mirrors, reflection, diamond, crystal. Is it a drug parable? Adolescent allegory? Tragic love tale? Who cares, honestly. Thurston’s lyrics often seem to consist of a handful of Groovy clichés (here, e.g., dressed in dreams, lonely storm, running wild, love, sand, blood) shaken in a bag, & then arranged strictly according to rhyme. I don’t actually have any objection to that approach. Anyway, three verses, then we move on.

2:25 A little interlude, & then, 2:42, again with the “rock star” solos. This was right around the time SY very suddenly shifted from esoteric art band to Lollapalooza headliner, hence the backlash. Anyway, notice the bass, accelerating tempo at 3:15 & evolving into a new motif, the first indication that what’s ahead will be a serial structure, a series of discrete sections that may/may not refer back to the ostensible “song.” It all starts to stretch out here.

By 4:26, that one guitar is getting pretty noisy. Increasingly-extraneous overtones, drifting afield of any melodic reference, evolving away from the “song,” but back toward what’s more commonly understood as SY territory. At 4:38 it’s the bass, again, that triggers a shift by actually standing pat, declining to make the chord change, & then it modulates sharp. The guitars both are more noisy still, there’s some feedback, shading & modeling the contours.

4:41 A brief plateau (albeit monolithic), then 5:06 one guitar steps out deliberately: four notes descending, almost doorbell-chime tones. The other guitar is howling. The four tones repeat. The snare drum heats up a little. Beginning at 6:19, I think that’s the classic SY drumstick-wedged-in-guitar-frets move: just hitting those strings, bridged so tight they ring like churchbells. Harmonic overtones y compris.

Can we digress a little? Forget about music for a moment? Remember when we talked about Jasper Johns? In 1954, he made that painting & called it “Flag.” It’s nothing but a flag &/or it isn’t a flag at all it’s a painting. “Of” a flag, maybe. Or maybe it isn’t a painting “of” anything. Because it doesn’t re-present in the way a conventional painting does. So it can only be understood as “depicting” a flag if it actually is a flag bc that’s all it is, except it isn’t: it’s a painting. It only sort of is a flag, but it also stands apart & sort of refers to “the” Flag. Remember that?

“Flag” is constructed of the irreducible, coded elements of “the” Flag (the stripes, the stars), but rendered rough, ostentatiously textured, made to operate both as (1) a sensory object and (2) a conceptual provocation.

What if there were art in a similar vein that, instead of connoting “flag,” connoted something like “rock music.” Something that only “sort of” actually is the thing it refers to, but also sort of stands apart & comments on it? Well. I submit that that’s Sonic Youth. The list of coded elements is longer & their relative irreducibility more varied. But I don’t understand SY to have ever set out to make actual Rock music in any sort of conventional way. SY makes art pieces that only sort of actually are Rock songs. But which also stand apart, sort of referring to, connoting (signifying!), Rock songs.

In the present example, I think “The Diamond Sea” actually refers back to itself, as a “song” when, at 6:52, there is a slow-ish reprise of the chords (!) of the song (remember the song?). It’s probably the least expected development at this point after several minutes of what might fairly be called a Space Jam (truth to power, sorry), but there we are. Easing back into the song, the melody, & then 7:12 Thurston is singing another verse. Just the one, though. & still just that little bit slower. We’ve been outside for awhile now, & we’re taking a brief look back in.

Then we move on again. 7:58 begins a lengthy, slow meander. Drifting, if inexorably. By 9:58 the two guitars are shimmering against each other in a sort of auditory moiré pattern. Sporadic taps on the cymbal, the drums seeming to have dropped out almost altogether some time back. When did that happen? Is this a little disorienting? At 12:24 undercurrents are modulating, there’s no real solid ground. Did you ever read about those scientists in the ‘60s, taking LSD in their laboratories & then trying to keep notes? I keep getting lost here, having to go back & start over. Because this intoxicates me.

At 13:34 we’re rousted, after a fashion, with a single high note, then some feedback that builds for a full minute. 14:36 were those the doorbell chimes again? In reverse this time? At 14:46 a glottal stop, & then 14:58 the drums thrash a little, along with some backwards sounds at the periphery. By 15:51 it’s chaos. It’s anchored, but it’s chaos. Notice the texture. At 16:33 notice the texture. At 17:18 the texture. (Shit, for that matter, you could go back & just notice the texture at 14:00, at 8:58, at 4:54, & (not the slightest bit incidentally) at 0:02.) Shifting again into another new phase at 17:42, every image freakishly elongated & in black & white every voice slow motion underwater, a burglar alarm three blocks over. It’s a terrible movie, it’s waking from a dream. I love this part. Notice the texture.

OK but, texture, what?? Well, we can’t hope to hear this the same way we hear normal music, that’s not what this is. In normal music, you listen, e.g., to the melody, the harmony, to the way the soloist both accommodates & challenges the chord changes, that sort of thing. It’s a specific kind of structural interplay that is largely absent here, bc it’s just not what makes this music interesting or satisfying. &/but is this music at all? Is it “just” that art stuff discussed supra? Is it “just” noise? Yes, yes, & yes. It is capital-A Art, theoretically deployed, call it bullshit if you must. It’s also a bunch of old, broken cast-off guitars, tuned all “wrong,” played loud & sloppy & fast. Sonic Youth is pretentious elitism & it’s anti-elitist Punk, capital-P no apologies. Naysayers on every side are one hundred percent correct &/but don’t have the first idea how to shut the fuck up & Just. Listen.

There is Music here, but it is mostly not to be found in the rudimentary melodies, the inscrutably-haphazard harmonies, the (often, virtually) perfunctory rhythms. That’s not the intended focus here, it’s just the scaffolding. Here, those are just the coded elements (i.e., the stripes, the stars), just enough to situate you & provoke you. So then what you listen to hear here are the rich (shit, the endless!) variations of texture. It’s not about pitch it’s about timbre. It’s about relative depth, it’s about dynamic. It’s about dissonant tunings at high volume making harmonics that vibrate in your chest. It’s all about the way the thing just feels on a tactile level. You can’t hear it if you don’t shut up & listen. But it’s there for you. It’s fundamentally hedonistic, it’s luxurious it’s sexy it’s gorgeous it’s delicious. It fucking rocks. We don’t have a settled vocabulary to discuss it. This is not what they teach at Berklee, at Eastman, at Julliard. You’re pretty much on your own here. But you got ears.

At 18:41 a whole new palette of sonic colors is introduced. Like if everything were suddenly backwards, played in reverse. It’s an element that’s been hinted-at earlier in the piece (e.g., at 14:58), & now becomes the primary motif. Reminds me of all the mirrors referred-to eighteen minutes ago in the lyric: reflecting back now, turned inside-out. Backwards cymbals crash, feedback feeds back backwards. A rhythmic structure starts emerging, oddly, until at 19:43 everything (again!) degenerates, seems again to burn. Bass “notes” (quote-unquote bc it’s pretty much all melting textures now, all flaming magma) modulating now flat. I’m hearing scattered references to earlier thematic segments, suggestions of a reprise. Then made explicit at 23:14, where the guitar solo of 3:00 is revisited & reinterpreted, briefly. There are only a couple of minutes left, I’m shutting up I’m hearing giants walking.

Early Sunday morning it rained ferocious in my city, but the dog needed walking & so duty called. We went outside in the wet cold. We trudged, bundled, up to the park & around the pond. It was barely light. I wore headphones & listened to “The Diamond Sea” w/volume high, hearing nothing from the real world & feeling underwater. So the world around was as if silent while inside, in my head, it was very, very loud. Like I was deep inside of something relentless & oblivious & unspeakably beautiful. Soundless, ducks landed skimming the water from the air, the dog barked also soundless, in the downpour in the near absence of sunlight everything somehow gleamed. & shined & shined.

New Dead Weather Vid.

2010-04-09T14:21:00.000-07:00

Jack & co. get all spooo-kay.

(Guest Post!) Method Actors

2010-04-06T13:52:00.001-07:00

Ooooh. Guest post. Sexy.

I grew up in a suburb of Atlanta, sort of halfway between Atlanta and Athens, and I graduated from the University of Georgia in the late ‘90s.

Wait, the guest post is about Georgia? Yeah. Still a little sexy, I hope. … No? Yeah, that’s fair.

Anyhow, as a result of my geographic fate, growing up I was lucky enough to be exposed fairly regularly to a lot of the bands in the now classic ‘80s Athens scene. R.E.M. like everyone else, but I also absolutely LOVED Pylon in high school.* Watching the documentary Athens, GA - Inside/Out now makes me weirdly sentimental.

* By the way, it makes me really happy to see that fellow Atlantan and Clatter poster boy Bradford Cox is such an ardent supporter of Pylon.

I only knew the Method Actors, who interestingly started out as both Pylon’s management and opening band, by name. So reading that someone reissued a lot of their early stuff made me really curious. Okay, really excited. But then, I strangely possess a lot of Georgia music pride. Seriously, I run a lot, and yet there are exactly two bands on my “running mix” – OutKast and Mastodon.

This Is Still It didn’t even sort of disappoint. Consisting of just two dudes – guitar and drums – both singing these weird almost operatic-tinged vocals (don’t worry, nothing like Geddy Lee), it doesn’t seem like The Method Actors should work. But Vic Varney and David Gamble took a minimalist approach to create a very unique form of new wave. Their songs basically boil down to a bunch of spastic jangle guitar rock that seems to have little use for the tropes of much of the rock music that preceded it. Similar to Pylon, at times they almost seem like a danceable no wave band. Imagine if DNA was a little more interested in song structure, or, say, being tolerable to the masses.

If you ever thought The White Stripes were groundbreaking in the sounds they could wrest from just a guitar and a drum kit, well, I present to you The Method Actors. They managed to fill a LOT of space with very little. Hopefully This Is Still It will cause the music world to remember The Method Actors as more than just a footnote in the history of Pylon and the Athens scene (themselves too often just considered footnotes in the history of R.E.M.). The Method Actors were easily unique enough to be remembered in their own right.

Do The Method - Method Actors

Zach Cincotta is an entertainment and business attorney representing awesome bands, record labels, and other small businesses. You can contact him here and follow him on Twitter here.

los Mumlers, dos.

2010-04-04T18:04:00.000-07:00

Easter Sunday grew darker & colder all morning long until finally it pissed rain, all on into the night. It was cool with me, I was getting myself better acquainted with the Mumlers, & there was a little some vodka involved, too. Again, just like the last time (infra), the weather seemed somehow to fit the mood.

Now, I would not mean this to suggest that the Mumlers’ music is universally mournful. I mean, it’s not like it’s fucking morose or something. No. It’s warm & it’s welcoming without reservation. But there is, at bottom, a quite clear acquaintance with sorrow stirred into even the most upbeat of these songs. I mean, shit it’s the blues right? OK, I’m stating the obvious. But, Hear:

Raise the Blinds - The Mumlers

99 Years Ago - The Mumlers

I’m happy to have stumbled onto the Mumlers last Tuesday night, just in from the rain. Their album, Don't Throw Me Away appears to be available all over, but I note that it's on some kind of short-term special (6 bucks) right now at iTunes. The songwriting is solid, the instrumentation is variegated & imaginative (clarinet! accordion!), & onstage these guys are immediately charming. The bonus to all of that was when the Mumlers turned out to be a local band (San Jose, that counts), which tends to yield opportunities to get out & see the Mumlers some more. For starters, I see shows coming up on May 7 at the Uptown in Oakland (for free), and May 26 at Bottom of the Hill.

If we’re lucky, maybe it will rain.

Color Your Life.

2010-04-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

Twin Sister: their songs are pretty, they’re light, they’re very airy. &, but actually, No they're not. Because they can also be kind of angular & dark & dissonant, even. In fact Noisy enough, on at least one occasion, to have provoked actual controversy in my household. Oh, & but don’t forget bouncy. Frequently, they’re bouncy.

On the new EP, Color Your Life, Twin Sister’s songs continue to follow actual trajectories. They start out in one place, & then they go & they end up somewhere very much else. There’s really no predicting where they’re going to go along the way. &, actually, I’m not always immediately certain of where they’ve just been. So: Replay.

Earlier, I have said that Twin Sister makes (maybe deliberately) imperfect Pop. It occurs to me now that there is a fundamental, uh, inefficiency to these oddly-timbered & meandering songs. Which are therefore sort of the polar opposite of Pop. Ok, candidly: I’m not sure I understand yet what this music is or is trying to be. I’m not sure the band has a clear handle on that yet, either. To my ears, this music continues to teeter on the edge of coalescence. It hasn’t yet settled into whatever it’s going to be.

By way of a digressive (& admittedly oversimplified) analogy, I will cite to Talking Heads, circa 1977. From the perspective of the music they emulated (which was Funk), their efforts were clumsy, rudimentary, unsuccessful. Along the way though, they made something wholly fresh & genuinely thrilling. That's what I'm trying to get at when I say that the best feature of Twin Sister's version of Pop is that it's done sort of wrong.

At this point, I can’t always clearly discern where Twin Sister are coming from or where they’re going. But they’re evidently getting very busy, & I think they’re going to do some very interesting things. I’m on the edge of my seat.

In the meantime, Color Your Life is eccentric, surprising, fun, & (for now) free. For the next week or so, the download is gratis at the band’s website. But I can go ahead & start you off right here:

TS - Milk & Honey (mp3)

The Mumlers

2010-04-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

If, just hypothetically, one were going out to a show on a Tuesday night (a very stormy, rainy Tuesday night actually), & if there were three bands on the bill of the aforementioned show, then, Well. It might be reasonable for one to not be in such a hurry to get there, right, since the headliner won’t go on until like, what? Ten o’clock?

“One” in this particular instance being (hello?) Me, & “the headliner” here being Morning Benders, and “Tuesday” I’ll just go ahead & tell you was the night before last. & so anyway, I waited out the rain (& the hail, Jesus!) for a little while there before heading on out. Because (let’s face it) probably the first of 3 bands on the bill will be something to just endure while spending all your cash on beer, waiting for the show you came for to come on & get started already. (& I’m on my feet here, right?) I mean, probably you won’t miss anything good that early. Right?

I knew what I was doing, I took that risk.

I don’t know much of anything about this band called the Mumlers. I don’t know how long they had already played before I got there. I think I heard about 2 and one-half songs, something like that. But Wow I really wanted to hear some more of that. It was a Bluesy, countrified thing with lots of horns so –like a New Orleans sort of deal, I guess. The singer is a gangly youngster with a “bad” haircut (is homemade the new chic?), & a graveled, soulful voice sounding older than his fresh face looks. It wasn’t my usual thing. But I really should’ve gotten there on time, this time.

I’m going to have to check out this band the Mumlers. I’m going to start right here & here, & then I’m going to get back to you on this.

Good Morning.

2010-03-31T14:46:00.001-07:00

The Morning Benders

The Independent

San Francisco, CA

March 30, 2010

If so inclined, one could find reasons to quibble. i.e., the set was barely an hour long, consisting essentially of the Big Echo album, w/song order shuffled. No encore either, it was pretty much wham-bam thx & goodnight.

Honestly though: it was a great show, & it was a good hour later before I even thought to get critical like that. The Morning Benders have quickly matured into a very sharp & very satisfying live band. Still centered around the original & efficient trio, they’re currently touring as a 5-piece. The new songs, so richly & lushly produced on the album, were fleshed out beautifully onstage. All of the playing was fresh, exuberant, totally fun.

Of course, this was something of a triumphant return: the album is a big hit (in indie terms), the tour has been selling out left & right, NY, LA, & SXSW all went well, Hey life is looking good for the Morning Benders. This hometown show was all sold out, & the mood appropriately festive.

As per my usual preference, I stood right up in front of the stage. That put me amidst all the girls, sighing & fawning all gaga for Chris Chu. What a heart-throb, what a dreamboat. Which ought not to suggest that Chris is just a pretty face, no way that. He is waifish & mignon, yes, but he’s also a man all in charge of his destiny. The sweetness is there but it’s plenty balanced; there were portions of actual ferocity. It’s a rock & roll band, after all.

& I have commented before about Julian Harmon’s drumming, of which I am an unreserved fan. But I’m not certain I’ve ever been fully appreciative of Tim Or’s bass playing. Like every truly great bassist, Tim’s grapple against those unwieldy blocks of sound is undertaken w/grace, w/fluidity. He constantly does difficult things & he makes them all look inevitable.

The closing number was “Excuses,” accompanied by a string trio & members of both opening bands. I think I counted thirteen people on the Indy’s little stage. Nicely done, that.

New Video by the Gossip.

2010-03-26T16:23:00.000-07:00

I love this band. The current tour brings them back to San Francisco (again, already!). April 19 at the Regency Ballroom.

Holy Fuck.

2010-03-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

Holy Fuck.

That’s the band name, it’s Holy Fuck. OK, I’ve said it three times now I won’t belabor it. (Yeah, not much!) Not every band has a central conceit but this one here evidently does, which is as follows: they make electronic music, but not by the “usual” methods. & so, the typical tools –the sampling, the looping, the programming, & cetera– are actually not among the key ingredients here.

On first listen, you may find that surprising. Because, texturally, this music does sound pretty-well synthesized. & even rhythmically, you’ll hear a kind-of-a-sort-of-a mechanized groove. But. Not so fast bc something else is going on here, which entails a degree of looseness, of –I don’t know– warmth or something. & sweat. Not incidentally, you’ll perhaps notice the drumming. Which is not performed by coded lines of software, but rather by human arms & hands holding wooden sticks. Sticks, I say! (Also, I understand that HF deploys old analog instruments, non-musical noisemakers, & sometimes toys.)

It’s a kind of a balancing act, this music made by humans, yet all dressed up to sound like it’s made by machines. The new album’s (probably-incongruous) title is Latin, & it is set for release on May 11. Holy Fuck’s management has thus far ignored my polite request for an advance listen, but sometimes these things do work out. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, download the advance track here:

HF - Latin America (mp3)

New Lykke Li Video

2010-03-22T21:28:00.000-07:00

You probably already know about Lykke Li, yeah? 24-year-old Swedish singer, her debut album Youth Novels drew some attention in 2008. She played Coachella last year. She's got a cool name. Anyway, "Possibility" is the first bit of the new album that, I gather is still in progress & has no official release date targeted yet.

Intriguing.

Go, go.

2010-03-22T20:27:00.000-07:00

Check this: “All around and Away We Go” is an early leak from Twin Sister’s upcoming mini-album on Infinite Best Recordings, to be called Color Your Life. Once again, this is a band that delights in coloring outside the lines.

OK, so I get now that I should expect to be surprised by Twin Sister, but still: I did not anticipate this post-proto-disco-techno vamp référant w/the airy-sexy vocal. & after getting my sea legs on that, I certainly did not expect the little feedback interlude at ~2:20, punctuated incongruously by what I had already sussed was not some stranger’s errant ringtone. That 22 seconds of ambient whisper at the ending ices the cake nicely, nicely.

You just may have heard it first here:

TS All Around & Away We Go (mp3)

oh. MAN.

2010-03-21T20:34:00.001-07:00

I notice that my mp3 software (pointedly-unnamed, right, bc what am I: some kind of corporate endorser?) has a Play Count indicator. It’s no big deal I’m sure yours does, too. My point is I’m seeing that I’ve now played that MAN/MIRACLE album over 50 times since I wrote my valentine to the band last month. Which I’ll just go ahead & tell you works out to one-plus times per day.

It has not grown old, it has not grown thin. This is a little surprising to me, if only because THE SHAPE OF THINGS was so immediately fun from the very first listen. Look, I’m not proud of being a snob but here’s the truth: when music is that catchy, is that suddenly enjoyable, it usually tends to mean there’s not a lot of depth there. It’s a trade-off. The music that does keep on yielding new surprises long after you think you’ve got it is –often– the stuff that took a little time to get into in the first place.

M/M has not seemed to work that way, though. I loved it right away. I did. I thought it was poppy but edgy & very catchy & just fun as all hell. I keep on listening though, & my appreciation continues to broaden & to deepen. This I had not anticipated.

One thing (among many) I’m really into right now today is the way that “ALWAYS, JUST” deviates so far afield of the tight, sharp paradigm of this album into a noisy monolith of monster chord feedback & crash cymbal, only to whip right back to tasty, arpeggiated “BACK OF THE CARD.” Which, in turn, itself see-saws from high-hat sophistication back again to a raucous, chaotic wash. But don't start there if you're still new to this band. Start with, e.g., "UP":

Up - Man/Miracle

M/M are currently opening for Rogue Wave, on a sort of Western tour that culminates at the Fillmore on April 30. I will predict that, some time later, you will want to be able to say you saw them way back when.

Pearl Harbor

2010-03-12T13:17:00.000-08:00

Pearl Harbor is the name of yet another southern California band of ladies, very young & plainly very talented. Something About the Chaparrals is the title of their 4-song EP. Initially released, anachonistically, as a 12-inch which then promptly sold out. (I do realize this is like the current hip thing now, but teenage bands in 2010 making actual, vinyl records? Odd!) Anyway, you can download it all for 4 bucks & I think it's pretty cool stuff.

"Luv Goon" is the song that's been circulating for a little while already on the web. It's nicely exuberant & sunny, w/close harmonies & a perky, sliding bassline. I won't link to the other songs, since there's so few of them, but there is some healthy stylistic range here. I like "High Road," which is kind of trippy/dreamy, almost spooky in a way that reminded me of Warpaint.

There's more info about the band here, here, and of course here.

Download:

Luv Goon PH (mp3)

Sister, Sister

2010-03-08T14:49:00.001-08:00

First off I’ll just go ahead & ask, rhetorically, how anybody could not love this album cover.

Vampires with Dreaming Kids is a 4-song EP from NYC band Twin Sister. Some very interesting, very quirky songs here, & the band’s website makes a lot more material available for quick & easy download. So check that out.

I enjoy Twin Sister quite a bit. These are Pop songs, yes, but they are (& this is definitely a Plus) highly-imperfect ones. As with a lot of young(ish) bands, one can’t reliably discern whether they’re deliberately flouting the conventions, or simply missing the mark. Either way, the net effect here is novel, delightful. The songs are clever & surprising.

e.g., “I Want a House” starts out murky & plodding, only to shimmer inexorably up & out from the gloom. By two minutes in, the song is nothing but sunshine, floating & bouncing, daring you not to turn cartwheels.

download here:

TS - I Want a House (mp3)

New EP From Jetpacks

2010-03-08T14:15:00.000-08:00

A new 5-song EP from We Were Promised Jetpacks comes out tomorrow. Two of the songs are remixes of stuff that’s already out on last year’s LP, but I’m not complaining. I’ve got a hunger for this band right now, so any little snack is welcome. It’s been like two weeks since I saw the Jetpacks show in SF, & that night has just continued to haunt me. It was over far too soon, & I’m still ready for more.

Download here:

WWPJ - A Far Cry (mp3)

Big Echo

2010-03-03T13:40:00.000-08:00

When I first got myself all excited about the new Morning Benders album, I had heard only one song, “Promises.” I just immediately loved the start/stop rhythm, the interstitial beer bottle percussion, the breathy verse vocals, the sudden belting of the chorus. I loved the dense layering of sounds. All of that. I loved.

To be perfectly candid, I was not so automatically sold on the rest of the album when I first heard it. I’ve come around now, but initially this record didn’t always make sense to me. The songs here are very Pop; they’re plainly solid & satisfying, yes, but the production choices are not obvious ones. & so at first I was confused. See, there’s real subtlety and complexity to Big Echo; this album wants repeated listens. & it dispenses its rewards patiently.

First, the Morning Benders are having like a crush on 1960's Phil Spector. You’ll get right away that this is a wall-of-sound-type of production: the instrumentation is piled on baroquely, there’s enormous reverb throughout (hence the name, right?). Not to suggest that this is a historical re-enactment project (see, e.g., Gigi). No, this is a new thing all its own.

Significantly, the hierarchy of sounds in the mix here is dynamic, not static. Meaning: usually when you listen to a song, you’re basically instructed by the mix what to hear as foreground & what’s supposed to be background. There are “lead” instrument(s) placed in relief, & then other, “supporting” elements more or less behind & underneath. Probably too often, those production choices are driven by convention. i.e., You typically expect to hear the vocal out front & the bass behind &, by golly, that’s what you usually get fed.

Not so, here. On Big Echo, that hierarchy is a fluid thing. You don’t always get to settle in lazily & hear these songs the way you think you oughtta. bc the M. Benders feel strongly that what needs to be at the forefront of your attention right now might be, e.g., the rattling, reverbed tambourine jinglers (“Pleasure Sighs” @ ~1:07), or the swizzling ride cymbal (“Mason Jar” @ ~2:10), or even just a handful or two of disembodied distortion fuzz (like, all over). Meanwhile, the expected “lead” instruments (e.g., the guitar, the voice) wander in & out of the foreground, following an aesthetic logic that is sure-handed but unapologetic to (y)our expectations.

For any number of bands, this approach to the recording & production would be all de rigeur, right? I mean, if a band telegraphs itself as capital-E Experimental, then we know in advance to expect the unexpected. Our minds are open before we even press Play. But where, as here, the song-writing is so Poppy-peppy, we might anticipate easing into something more conventional. Well, I did anyway. & so I found myself a bit at sea, at first. Yet it was the ineffable charm of the songs themselves that kept me coming back for more listens. & now that I’ve spent some time with it, I am genuinely a fan of the Morning Benders, and of this fascinating album.

Big Echo comes out officially on March 9, & I think buying it is a very good idea. For the next few days though, you can stream the whole album right here:

The Morning Benders are a local band, if you didn't know. They are touring nationally even as we speak, & will stop in to play the Independent on March 30. Meanwhile, you can always check them out here.

Jetpacks @ Noise Pop

2010-02-28T19:06:00.000-08:00

We Were Promised Jetpacks
SF Noise Pop Festival
Slim’s
San Francisco, CA
February 27, 2010

Turns out we won’t actually be needing those jetpacks after all. I mean, there’s just not much in the way of thrills that can top what this band We Were Promised Jetpacks delivered on Saturday night at Slim’s. Turns out that this band itself actually is a machine from the future, one whose whole purpose evidently is to make your heart pound hard. Hey, don’t take my word for it, just ask these guys:

Based on the album, I had my own idea –call it a hope– of what this band might actually sound & look & feel like live. Because as exciting as the record is, it’s also pretty cleaned-up, yet constantly it hints at edges that are substantially rougher, dirtier, more dangerous.

& damn if that isn’t just what we got at Slim’s on Saturday night! It starts with Michael Palmer’s right hand just pummeling the strings on his black Telecaster fast as faster as fast as that arm can drive it, force feeding his Marshall half stack, feeding back & feeding it some more. Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Adam Thompson, we already know that he’s a deep-chest shouter, but holy shit in person the man just roars.

OK, so this music is noisy it’s dense & that’s enough already to make it a beautiful thing. I mean, IMHO. But wait, there’s more! There’s a real brilliance here in the way that Darren Lackie (drums) & Sean Smith (bass) are able to channel all the noise, efficiently & precisely, into the compact parameters of the songs. There was no real stretching out here. This band gets in, winds it up tight & hard, & then gets the hell back out. There’s no screwing around, they’ve got some shit to do & that’s what they get done. Fantastic.

Atlas Sound @ Noise Pop

2010-02-27T15:03:00.000-08:00

Atlas Sound
SF Noise Pop Festival
Great American Music Hall
San Francisco, CA
February 26, 2010

I have already gone on record w/my strongly-held view that Bradford Cox is one of very few actual geniuses working in popular music today. A few months back, I was delighted to learn that he’s also a warm & engaging performer. Both aspects were again made plain on Friday night at GAMH.

This current iteration of Atlas Sound was “just” Bradford, solo, w/acoustic guitar, his (still-incongruous) harmonica, & about a dozen effects pedals & loopers. From these ingredients, Bradford crafted his sound-sculptures right there in front of us, he built them up & then he broke them back down. This music was rich & layered & sonorous & deep. Except for when it wasn’t. Because the lush, processed artifice could switch off in an eyeblink, leaving only the reedy voice, the minor chords, the harmonica whining. On a dime, this guy all alone can turn from Atlas Sound into Neil fucking Young. & when that shift happens, it’s dynamic, it’s poignant, it’s goddamn masterful. Bradford Cox whipping up High Art in real time; he’s like the iron chef I swear to god.

& yet all the while, he makes it look so easy. Bradford onstage is unassuming. He is chatty, spontaneous, just steadfastly genuine. He’s telling little stories, cracking jokes, taking requests (including mine, yay!). He’s plainly reveling in the singular moment of Now, & we are there in it with him. That feels like some magical shit. & when, late in the show, there are scattered outbursts of affection from the audience well, that feels appropriate. Because Bradford is sharing the love, & only some kind of an asshole would fail to reciprocate. I mean, right?

It was in that rather glad aura that I actually forgot to be taking notes. So I’m going to be a bit shy on the actual details here. I’m pretty sure he played for about two solid hours. I remember “Sheila” & “Walkabout,” but also a lot of songs I didn’t know, so they’re probably new. Um, he played “An Orchid.” Oh, & his dad was there.

It feels like he played about ten songs for the encore, although it may have been substantially fewer. He did play “Quarantined,” (that was my request), and he played something that we’re not supposed to tell anybody he played. (bc Lockett will get mad, so that’s all I’m gonna say about that one!) He closed out with “Kid Klimax,” and then “Logos.”

I understand that Deerhunter is about to get busy w/ new projects again, including the opening slot on Spoon’s tour. That particular circus comes to our town on April 13 at the Fox in Oakland. You going?

Burning Bright

2010-02-26T10:51:00.000-08:00

The Ghost of a Saber Toothed Tiger

If By Yes

Consortium Musicum

SF Noise Pop Festival

The Independent

San Francisco, CA

February 24, 2010

Sean Lennon is full of surprises, & this is a very good thing. I’m quite sure Sean can have a huge, commercial career in the music industry if he ever decides to want that. On the available evidence though, he’s much more interested & engaged in just playing with his friends in fluid, interchangeable band lineups. He played with each of the three nominal bands onstage at the Independent on Wednesday night. I couldn’t discern if any of them are actual, ongoing projects, or if this was a Just For Now kind of thing.

It didn’t really matter. Because, somewhat surprisingly, Sean Lennon actually fucking rocks. Best part of the night from my perspective at the edge of stage-left was the 20-minute Noise Improv Jam between Sean on (mostly) guitar & Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier on drums. Which just killed me.

After that was If By Yes, fronted by vocalist Petra Haden. Later still, Sean fronted the Ghost of the Saber Toothed Tiger. Both bands included all 3 members of Cornelius, & also Yuka Honda (all of whom had backed Yoko Ono the previous night).

Between songs, Sean is fey & deadpan & devastating with his foppish hair & his admiral overcoat. He’s Oscar Wilde w/electric guitar. He is hilarious & charming.

Sean’s playing is all butch, however. Make no mistake about that. He is confident, he’s aggressive. He plays raunchy, even when the song is sweet. Somehow he seems to make those disparate components fit into a single puzzle. I wasn’t the only one getting a thrill out of that.

Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band

2010-02-24T17:04:00.000-08:00

The Fox Theater

Oakland, CA
February 23, 2010

First off, I missed Deerhoof altogether due to initial delay, then traffic, weather, & plus their set was pretty short, so there was that disappointment. I don’t want to talk about that.

Happily, I thought Yoko & co were quite awesome, I really did. The backdrop animation loop during the setup, birds flying out from Yoko’s mouth w/chirping soundtrack, that was cool:

Then there was a little 15-min documentary film re: Yoko’s entire career as provocateuse & media manipulator. Quite a whirlwind tour, that: the scissors dress, the buttocks film, the Yes paintings, then Lennon, then crazy concerts, the bed-in, the hair peace, Grapefruit, John & Yoko’s actual naked sex, all so groovy, then the eyeglasses on the windowsill one lens caked in blood, fuck, Yoko & little Sean accepting the Grammy, the peace advocacy, the flashlights flashing I. Love. You.

So, wow.

& only then does this little 78-year-old lady in the tracksuit & the jaunty white hat strut out, exuding nothing so much as sweetness & lightness & utter lack of guile.

There was something so abjectly unaffected about her stage presence: sort of like there wasn’t actually any public persona there even as, of course, you know there so totally just is. Sort of like this was just your own old auntie come out to say hello, sing a few ditties & dance a brittle, fragile little dance. & the ditty & the dance just happening to consist of gorgeously-wretched staccato shrieking & wailing over a huge, brawny Funk groove. When has anything so patently odd as this ever felt so obvious & normal? & charming, hey!

It certainly helped that the core 5–piece band was a work of art unto itself. Our little Sean Lennon, he’s all grown up now & was very clearly in charge of the music, visibly cueing transitions in the long ensemble improvisations. Of which there were several.

Additional players wandered on & offstage, some rather exotic instrumentation was deployed. It got pretty capital-G Groovy at times, but it was sharp too. The playing was never mushy or lazy so the longish jams, when they happened, stayed interesting, focused & fun. Sean delivered several old-school style rock god guitar solos, & he did it w/conviction & w/credibility. I got pretty excited by it all &, I have to say, the crowd devoured it. Go figure.

left to right: sean, fly, nipple, yoko

Bend It.

2010-02-20T12:21:00.000-08:00

A couple of free download tracks are circulating around the web from the new Morning Benders LP, Big Echo, due out on March 9. I'm getting kind of excited about that, & am attempting to get my hands on an advance copy even as we speak. So stay tuned for that! Meanwhile, this is a kewl video I found on the band's website:

Yours Truly Presents: The Morning Benders "Excuses" from Yours Truly on Vimeo.

BSS D/L

2010-02-20T10:24:00.001-08:00

New free download here from Broken Social Scene. I hear the new album is coming out in May.

BSS plays the Fillmore here in San Francisco on May 1, FYI.

Malachai

2010-02-17T16:11:00.000-08:00

I thought I should post at least a few tracks from this band, just to give a sense of the rather wide stylistic variety in play. I finally had to conclude that, to get the full range, you have to pretty much hear the whole album. There’s just an awful lot going on here.

Which then got me curious, & so I went hunting for a little info on these guys. Only to turn up actually not very much. Here’s a hint for you, though, if you go looking: what you’ll find is some references to Malakai, but now it’s evidently Malachai. It is the same band, so I can save you that step. My thought on that is if you’re a band, maybe you don’t want to go around changing the spelling of your name. I mean, if you want to get noticed. If you like, actually want people to find you on the internet. So I’ll just put that out there. But hear:

Warriors - Malachai

So. But the album is called Ugly Side of Love, & it’s pretty fun stuff I'm here to tell you. Rhythmically, there’s a lot of Right-Now-This-Minute going on, but texturally we’re in yet another facet of the Capital-R Retro realm that seems to keep on cropping up all over lately. So, e.g., hip-hop beats over Hammond organ. Or, then again, vice-versa: Because it totally depends on the song. So, in the alternative, it's sometimes the drum-slash-bass that connotes the old school, albeit juxtaposed w/samples spinning. Mash mash mash.

I definitely hear a lot of a nineteen-sixties flavor here, even if I can’t always seem to identify why exactly. The 1st track, “Warriors” did strike me as kind of a butched-up West Side Story kind of thing for a minute there. By the time I got to “Snowflake,” I was thinking Psychedelic, like as in Disraeli Gears or something. Which I’ll just go ahead & link to for the benefit of the youngsters in the house who have no independent recollection of E-major chords wielded like blunt hammers by so-stoned bad boys in creepy paisley silk. Yeah. Just let that settle in for a moment. Then hear this:

Snowflake - Malachai

OK, but then, just when you think you have this band figured out, there are also all of these Trip-Hop-ish sort of Portishead-y bits.

Fading World - Malachai

Which I love. & so, I'll say that the segues from one song to another are frequently incongruous. Almost, sometimes, like listening to a mix tape but of course you’re not. & the common thread, to the extent there is one, is just this sort of broadly-sketched, um, trippiness.

Now, I can’t claim to have listened to any Sixties Psychedelic Music in recent memory (I could have done before writing this, if only I had actually wanted to, which I so didn't), but my recollection is that SPM (as I'll now call it) could never be nearly as sexy as it so obviously wanted to be. & why? Because the drumming (I am sorry) just didn’t swing. It marched. Lockstep. The critical difference here between then & the Then being referenced here now is, not surprisingly, the respective foundational rhythms. So here is Malachai re-imagining that earlier, simpler (yes, I am being ironic, hello?) time, but the maybe Key difference is that hip-hop has now occurred in the interim. &, antecedently, so has Funk. Not that this music is explicitly either, I'm not saying that. But the points of reference are well & clearly laid out. & Malachai swaggers hugely, right down the center of the aisle.

Not Done.

2010-02-13T12:51:00.001-08:00

I spoke too soon about Sam Amidon: Monsieur Sam’s label finally got back to me after all, & w/a top-secret download code for the whole album. So I got it now. As anticipated, I See the Sign is an interesting collection of sort of re-imagined archaic-American music pieces. Folk songs. But not really.

Most of the songs on the album are credited as traditional, public domain, albeit “recomposed” by our Mr. A. Except, notably, for the R. Kelly cover (“Relief”), which believe it or not meshes pretty seamlessly with the extemporized ballads, hymns, shanties, & (I think) jump-rope rhymes here.

Sam’s arrangements are satisfyingly spare; he leaves a comfortable amount of breathing room around & w/in the songs. At the same time, his instrumentation draws from a fairly broad palette, adding narrative emphasis to the sung stories, & adding harmonic richness to the sometimes-skeletal melodies. There are some almost-lush string & woodwind textures here & there, surprisingly evocative of Aaron Copland, of all things. I didn’t expect that! Here’s why I think that’s interesting: Mr. A is actually straddling a couple of very different artistic traditions here.

On the one hand, he positions himself as a Folk practitioner. Which, to my understanding, makes him an inheritor of (mostly) oral traditions, a performer of songs handed down w/out clear provenance of authorship, & whose structure is collective, fluid, fairly open to interpretation.

On the other hand, “serious” (i.e., academically-trained) composers have their own longstanding “tradition” of helping themselves to the local, rustic musical dialect, extrapolating freely from it, & creating “high” Art.

Sam Amidon seems to me to engage in both of these realms, maybe w/out fully inhabiting either of them. So, is he the country mouse or the town mouse? The lack of an easy or comfortable answer to that question is, itself, reason to find this artist interesting.

Man / Miracle

2010-02-10T13:34:00.001-08:00

Can anybody really explain matters of the heart? I mean, hey, sometimes you just fall in love. Who can predict, who can explain? I have attempted for a couple of days now to talk myself out of it, try to maintain some modicum of bloggalistic objectivity or something. But, no: I have been completely 100% sold on this album right from my very 1st listen. Which as of now is, like, ten listens ago. All in the span of I think 3 days. Yeah. Compulsive, me. I truly cannot seem to help myself, I’m just that into it. So yes like I said: It’s Love.

Man/Miracle is the name of this local band. Or, excuse me, it’s: MAN/MIRACLE because these boys are evidently all about the ALL CAPS, as if the band name & song titles must ALWAYS BE SHOUTED or something. OK, but who cares right bc this here band is the goods. THE SHAPE OF THINGS is the name of their debut long-playing endeavor. Go ahead & shout it if you like, I’ll wait.

The band is, first off, crisp & sharp & tight. But not uptight. See, the collective rhythm chops are very solid, & the drumming in particular just exemplifies finesse. But. M/M will still go right ahead & cut loose sometimes w/the big raucous distortion feedback thing just because, Hey that’s fun. & then, they go ahead & change it up. & then change it up again, a new dynamic shift, a new time signature, a new stylistic reference, it’s quick & surprising & just relentlessly smart. (Kind of like the Minutemen, sometimes, if you can believe that (all pause & bow heads now)). A lot of the lead guitar parts are in a sort of spectacular quasi-Afropop mode, throwing down riffs that are simultaneously rhythmic & melodic. Oh, & gorgeous, I hasten to add. (I mean, since I’m in love & all.) Did I mention that it gives me a thrill.

Look, the whole musical package is just ebullient & fabulous & I really think you need to check it out. Go here first to listen, and then go ahead here for the buying part.

Enjoy.

What About Sleigh Bells?

2010-02-09T06:54:00.001-08:00

It seems a lot longer, but I guess it’s only been since October. At CMJ in NYC last year, there was evidently all manner of buzz re: this duo called Sleigh Bells. Consisting of this guy Derek Miller (ex-of hardcore band Poison the Well, currently now thrashing sometimes guitar sometimes drums) & lavishly tattooed schoolteacher Alexis Krauss (who sings), both sharing the stage with, I gather, an iPod and/or laptop or somesuch, loaded full of samples & tracks & all.

Anyway, Stereogum was all hot & bothered about Sleigh Bells at the time, I saw a little sidebar writeup in the New Yorker of all places, discussions ensued. There was, you know, hype. There were (& remain) four recorded Sleigh Bells tracks readily available on the internet, each offering a wee taste of the various directions this nascent band might head if it ever became a going concern. Post-initial buzz, the trajectory of responses followed the familiar bell curve: (1) Intrigue (2) Backlash (3) Apathy. It was lightning quick. But I thought their stuff showed some promise, & I was curious.

Meanwhile, is the other shoe still ever going perhaps to drop? It looks like they’re playing gigs still (including the opening slot on the Yeasayer tour), but no album out yet. From time to time, I wonder & wait re: Sleigh Bells. You can still hear the original four tracks on Myspace.

Bring the Noise

2010-02-05T20:00:00.001-08:00

2^nd Thoughts Dept.: OK, I shouldn’t ought to have been so harsh & reductive talking about MBV wannabes the other day. That wasn’t nice. I mean, I have a deep & abiding affection for that kind of dense, distortion-slash-reverb guitar Noise. It’s nice to find it wherever it can be found. e.g., I was listening to No Age this a.m. in the car. It was loud & it was luscious & it made me very happy.

Teen Creeps - No Age

Errand Boy - No Age

This kind of music is, for me on a good day, downright liturgical. It’s transcendent, it’s transcendental. Uh, it takes me outside of myself. To where my brain can finally shut the fuck up & there is only Sensory Experience. Like floating in the warm ocean at night & it’s nothing but the stars, the stars.

Heh. OK, so I’m exaggerating a little. I mean, I still managed to keep on driving & all during my own personal little rapture there. So. But anyway, there is a certain mode of music-making that (for me personally) is the alchemical real deal, the metamorphic whole greater than the sum of its parts. There are a lot of practitioners in this mode, particularly along the ostensible “rock” end of the musical spectrum. (Not to give short shrift to the more “serious” composers like Glenn Branca, La Monte Young --badass motherfuckers in their own right.) I tend to think they’re all chasing sort of the same thing, something that is elusive, not at all easy to define. Something transformative. It’s like there’s a point of stillness somewhere inside of the chaos, the noise.

I can’t ever seem to explain why this kind of thing makes me so damn happy, but it really really does.

Sam (I) Am.

2010-02-03T17:01:00.000-08:00

So, here's this guy Sam Amidon. He does like a Folk Revival kind of thing that wouldn’t necessarily find its way onto my radar. You know: banjo, Irish fiddle, “traditional” music re-iterated, that sort of deal.

Anyhoo, this here Mr. SamAm has got a new album coming out in March, & I’m quite intrigued about it, solely on the basis of this one song that’s circulating now, called “How Come That Blood.”

Hear:

We’ve got a syncopated rhythmic foundation here, sort of gently percussive, but also sort of droning. What sounds, at first, a bit loopish to me is probably just quick arpeggios on (I‘m guessing) a mandolin? & then shortly there’s violin, though pretty clearly not in any real sort of “fiddle” mode. & then as things progress we get some rumbly bass synthesizering, right? Overall, it gives off a sort of electronica vibe that, on closer listen, isn’t actually there after all. Suffice to say that, musically, it’s a bastard stepchild, pretty far afield of any Folk paradigm of which I’m aware.

All of which just does a great job of (a) catching my interest, and (b) reeling me in. & then I’m all defenseless against the truly dark & creepy lyric re: some kind of brutal fratricide, made all the more chilling via its deadpan delivery. Is it just me, or is this some haunting shit?

& plus, I had no idea if this was, given Samamidon’s pedigree, an actual “Traditional” song (which I sort of doubted, right?), or just made up to sound like one. Shows what I know. Turns out this song has been making people’s skin crawl for, like, a hundred years.

Anyway, I won’t further embarrass myself trying to actually identify the (to my ears) countrified vernacular in use here. But we are clearly in an unfamiliar territory, linguistically speaking, right out of the gate. The lyric is as ostentatiously archaic as the music is self-consciously contemporary. Which makes for just the sort of cognitive dissonance sure to make my pulse race every damn time.

Meanwhile, the singsong, repetitive structure might be reassuring, soothing even, in another context less preoccupied with, um, blood. It only takes a minute & ½ of obfuscation before our narrator owns up: “It is the blood of my / Own dear brother / Whom lately / I have slain.” I get some chills there, I don’t mind telling.

Anyway, that’s the one song we can hear for now. I did try to obtain an early listen to some more of the album, & I got a very courteous email from Mr. Sam himself, who (alas) directed me to inquire directly to his label. Who then ignored me altogether big surprise, so no advance copy for me. March 1 is when I See The Sign comes out.

Warpaint

2010-02-02T08:30:00.001-08:00

Speaking of nuevo iterations of the old Girl Group trope, there’s this band out of L.A. (well, Hollywood actually, I think) right now called Warpaint.

Knowing exactly nothing about the band, I came across this song of theirs called “Elephants,” & I rather liked it & listened to it for a couple of days. I liked the simple guitar figure & its rounded tone, I liked the way a new processing effect got thrown on the vocal every verse or so, I liked the random tempo changes.

Anyway, Warpaint turns out to be like a chick band kind of thing, their original drummer evidently having departed on account of her abject hotness impelled further pursuit of being a model or actress or some such. So that’s the backstory there. Warpaint has an EP out, called Exquisite Corpse, and it’s pretty good.

Elephants - Warpaint

Not Now.

2010-01-31T15:26:00.001-08:00

Maintenant is the rather jaunty name of this new album from a band (term used very loosely here, since I count approx. forty “members”) operating out of Vancouver, B.C., name of Gigi.

The joke here being that mainentant is French for “now,” while the whole idea was actually to make the music sound like “then.”

“Then” in this instance meaning early 1960’s pop musique à la Phil Spector & cetera, that kind of thing. So, among the first things you’ll notice is the pervasive & distinctive giant-room echo, & then the spiffy vintage girl-group-style harmonies directly out of the Shangri-Las or the Ronettes or what have you, & of course the brass accompaniment whose verb tense is decidedly past conditional, sounding not so much like any music anybody makes today.

It’s a fun experiment, done pretty much straight up & w/out irony. Unless you count the perpetual dissonance between the sunny, perky demeanor of the vocals versus the bleak, existential darkness of the lyrics. e.g., the words are constantly along the lines of “In love w/no one & no one in love w/me,” & "crying my eyes out for the 100th time," yet you can actually hear the grinning in the singers’ delivery.

No, My Heart Will Go On (Choru...

The More Things Change.

2010-01-22T23:23:00.000-08:00

The new Spoon album has been out for several days now, & so probably I needn’t point out how good it is. I’m just going to have to assume you’ve heard it by now. Can we first agree on the following? That the songs are peppy, are poppy; that the sound is as meticulously & lovingly crafted as on any of Spoon’s numerous past albums. Would you also agree with me that, despite its consonance with prior work, Transference has a sound & feel all its own, & that “new” & “surprising” are among its apt descriptors?

So, the new Spoon record is the same & it’s different, I guess that’s my thesis.

Maybe the key is Britt’s voice, which has always carried a certain rawness even as, on balance, the music was pretty slick & pretty smooth. When I think of Spoon, I think quintessentially of the Girls Can Tell album (great title, btw), where there’s a constant sort of tension between the sheen of the production versus the grit in Britt’s voice.

“Grit,” now is a more prominent flavor on the new album than on previous ones. Rough, Raw, & Brash are other adjectives that came to mind on my first listen. (Oh, also: Chunky.) So there’s a new, rougher edge to this music that nonetheless fits seamlessly with the rasp that has always characterized the singing.

OK, but it’s still a Spoon record & so: meticulous attention to detail continues to define all sounds & all combinations of sounds. Nothing is permitted to be haphazard, even as a lot of reference is made here to a slapdash approach. Notice all those parts that seem, randomly, to just peter out or cut off abruptly, even at the expense of completing a chord change, or a lyric. Notice the deliberately graceless segues, into silence or into the next sound, the next song. It’s an interesting strategy, this feigned clumsiness in a work that was so clearly labored over, so plainly perfected. Overall, the impression is of a work that’s bursting with novel ideas, and tripping over itself (interrupting itself) in the service of just getting them all OUT goddammit.

It’s an exciting listen, it’s very fun. &, not incidentally, the whole thing just sounds delicious. One nugget among many that has my attention is how, in “The Mystery Zone,” the slow-decay echo on the guitar chords counterpoints the spunky bass line, whose sound is sharp, immaculate, & satisfyingly fat. The juxtaposition between those two instruments (& between their respective sound-textures) is incongruous, hence compelling to the ear.

Spoon-Mystery Zone mp3

Now, I realize that most people would regard this as a tangential point, but when I talk about how recorded music is now generally explicit in emphasizing its own artifice, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Obviously, there are no samples, loops, & cetera on this album, this here is not a disco thing or a techno thing or hiphop or whatever. It’s not an Experimental recording in any kind of overt way. This is (“just”) the new album by Spoon, which as we know is (“just”) a four-piece, straight-up rock band. (With, now, a fantastic bass player, it bears mentioning.)

& yet, repeatedly & emphatically all over this collection, the point is made that these are studio recordings, constructed piecemeal from disparate components. Some bits are apparent leftovers from the original demos, & are then combined with the slicked-up “professional” parts. So, a particular rhythm guitar part might sound like it was, e.g., recorded on an answering machine in the bathroom –all tinny & flat & faraway. & then that’s juxtaposed with, e.g., a close-miked drum part whose sound is processed rich & full & all state-of-the-arty. I’ve described elsewhere how musical & dramatic impact can derive from the combination of sounds that could not have existed together in the real, physical world. Transference is just a great illustration of this; frequently & expertly on this album, sounds that plainly don’t belong together are combined & provoked into making music with each other.

Yes. (Breathe)

2010-01-12T09:13:00.000-08:00

Don’t be scared.

YO-Don't Worry Kyoko mp3

Just go ahead & press play on this link. Hear some of it while you read. This is, first-off, a cultural artifact. 1969 in Toronto. At, somewhat incongruously, some sort of rock&roll “revival” event. The guitar players are Eric Clapton & John Lennon. The banshee-squealing is by (who else?) Yoko Ono. Maybe you’ve heard this before & maybe you haven’t. Either way, you probably come to this with a whole a lot of preconceptions, right? Try, please, to forget them for a minute, & just hear.

A couple of pedestrian observations, right off the bat:

1. You’ll wait in vain here for a chorus, bridge, or other meaningful variation of the riff. I submit that the arrangement is, functionally, a Loop. A proto-sample, even. I think that’s interesting, historically speaking.

2. Yoko is not tentative, not hesitant, not even slightly deferential to the heavy hitters on stage with her. She is confident. Shit, she’s ferocious! Her performance is not haphazard; she very clearly knows what she’s doing.

So, but this is some weird shit, yes? The full title of the song is actually “Don’t Worry, Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow).” I daresay that nobody in 1969 in Toronto had ever heard anything like this before. But now it’s forty-plus years later. & I think we ought to not be quite so taken aback. I mean, how many different flavors of weird have we enjoyed, even wholeheartedly endorsed, since then? We have long ago processed & assimilated, e.g, Kate Pierson. & Lene Lovich. Nina Hagen. Kathleen Hanna. & cetera. I mean, now, we have Molly Siegel, now we have Satomi Matsuzaki. Shit, now we got Karen O. I could go on the list is so long, but my point being: Just the bare fact of Yoko Ono ululating & shrieking & Oh, it’s not pretty & it’s not polite & it’s not very nice should no longer give us pause. I mean, right? We should be able to just hear it.

& yet: Yoko & co are coming to town next month & I have been delivering that news to WOW quite a mixed bag of reactions from the people I know. What exactly is it about Yoko that can still spark such reflexive aversion? Such rancor, even? I merely pose the question; it’s not something I’m going to try to explain.

Anyway, Ms. Ono does what she does. She’s an experimental artist, & she expects you to do your share of the thinking. She’s not necessarily going to just feed it to you. She provokes. She works in a very wide variety of media, & right now evidently she’s working once again in music. She’s got a new album out, called Between My Head and the Sky. When it succeeds, it’s really kind of a thrill:

YO-Waiting for the D Train mp3

As with any mad scientist, not every experiment of hers is a successful one. I won’t lie: There are some songs here that are campy in a way that is, I’m sorry, totally unintentional. Wince. But I have a lot of respect for the reaching, the naked risk-taking. & I just have nothing but affection for the unshirking & well-earned positivism that lies at the heart of all Yoko’s work. This is somebody who has faced the fucking heart of darkness more than once. Yet, what is her ultimate message? It’s pure & it’s sublime, it’s: Yes.

It’s: War is Over, qualified by nothing other than If You Want It.

Anyway, the new album: Yoko once again shares the stage w/some heavy hitters (including Sean Lennon), albeit this time maybe not the best-known ones around. One reason I personally am excited to see Yoko Ono is that Yuka Honda is in the band.

Yuka Honda was, once upon a time, ½ of Cibo Matto. Do you remember their first album, Viva! La Woman? That was some seriously brilliant shit, & it made a significant splash back in, uh, nineteen ninety-freaking-SIX (jesus). OK, I’ll just go ahead & assume for the sake of discussion that you don’t remember that one, so here’s a kind of a Whitman’s Sampler of Cibo Matto for you:

Theme - Cibo Matto

Fun, right? See, that’s the thing that I now think: shit has to be fun. It’s experimental OK but it doesn’t have to be like taking your medicine all the time. People want to impose every damn kind of hierarchy on the music of the world. The older I get, here’s the one question I want answered correctly: Am I having fun when I hear it?

Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band are playing the Fox in Oakland on Feb 23. It's exciting to me that I have no clear idea of what to expect. This is yet another episode of the SF Noise Pop fest. & just to put a cherry on top of the whole deal, Deerhoof is opening!

Yes.

Love / Loveless

2010-01-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

It’s been almost twenty actual years since My Bloody Valentine, virtually appearing from nowhere, re-in-fucking-vented music with their album Loveless (1991), & then more or less just disappeared. Leaving all subsequent tomb raiders the task of sifting through the ashes & sand, the fossils & the pottery shards.

Have you taken the time to hear this anytime lately? Here, cancel all your commitments for the next five & one-half minutes. You owe it to yourself:

MBV-What You Want mp3

It’s beautiful when a brilliant idea can be expressed very simply. To my ears, what Kevin Shields & co did here was to start with the big-room reverb & distortion combination that had sonically defined the Jesus & Mary Chain’s Psychocandy (5 or 6 years earlier, already by then an artifact in pop-culture’s merciless time zone), and thicken it. Uh, densify it. With multiple uberdubs, redundant microphone strategies, and a bunch of obscure & cryptic samples. Every last speck of potential silence is filled here: talk about yer Wall of Sound, this shit is monolithic. There are other ingredients here (Bilinda Butcher’s breathy vocals key among them), but the density of the guitar noise is what defines this album, & defines the countless (countless, I say!) subsequent instances of its influence. There have been an awful lot of wanna-be MBVs out there since 1991.

In the song above, I have always loved the way it comes to a halt at ~4:20, as if it had just sprinted a mile & so then needs to stand still panting for air for another full-plus minute. Except that the standstill-panting part is actually a rather handsome little tapestry of its own. Woven from a couple layers of, I think, a single processed sample of a flute. & now, nineteen-plus years later, I remain on the verge of identifying the source of that sample. [Other samples on this album I got. I recognize that “Blown a Wish” uses “Cherish” by the Association, circa 1966. I know that “Touched” lifts straight up from Adrian Belew’s 1st solo album Lone Rhino, 1982. I still can’t quite put my finger on the What You Want sample, though. Anybody know it?] So, thousands of listens later, Loveless retains for me some mystery.

Anyway nowadays MBV is canonical, & we don’t so much get all excited about it any more. However much we may love Loveless, it’s Old News.

Continuing over to Aisle Two where we have New News, you’re still likely to find inter alia Deerhunter (merciless time zone notwithstanding). Microcastle has been out since Halloween 2008, & I have taken the opportunity to hear it frequently & to listen deeply to it. Early in that process, I recognized that, yes quite obviously, Bradford Cox is well-acquainted with MBV. [This is in no means intended as derogatory toward Mr. Cox, whom I regard as one of very few actual geniuses working in the realm of “popular” music today.]

Any number of Bradford & co’s songs in Deerhunter & in Atlas Sound carry what I perceive as an obvious flavor of MBV, of J&M Chain, & (not the slightest bit incidentally) of Velvet Underground. This is just one of the musical traditions in which Bradford innovates, & upon which Bradford implicitly comments in his own work.

So, even after having recognized the quote-unquote influence at work there, I was still startled one day to wonder if Deerhunter’s “Neither of Us, Uncertainly” was actually, secretly a cover of MBV’s “What You Want.” & the surprising & incongruous thing that made me wonder that was actually the uncanny similarity between the respective codas of each song. Because “Neither of Us, Uncertainly” also has a standstill-panting part that really sounds a lot (a LOT) like the end of the MBV song. Hear:

DH-Neither of Us, Uncertainly mp3

Isn’t that just kind of cool? I mean, on further listening OK, one song is very clearly not a cover of the other. While the two definitely share (at minimum) a textural approach to the guitar sound, the DH song is just in a whole other realm rhythmically. The MBV is in lockstep 4/4, while DH is actually waltzing (listen, count it!) in threes. So there’s that very fundamental distinction. But the ending bit is, despite different instrumentation, so similar that I now can’t hear it as anything other than a clear & enthusiastic shout-out. Bradford & co giving props to them what went before.

Incidentally, Bradford & Atlas Sound are coming back to town even though they were just here. I don’t think I can stand to miss it.

White Rabbits, & cetera

2009-12-30T10:15:00.000-08:00

Somewhere out there is there a satisfactory definition of the Pop Hook? I don’t actually have one yet, but my working version goes something like this: a Hook is where the song sets up a formal expectation, & then immediately resolves it, sometimes in a surprising way. It’s often an aspect of the melody, but a Hook can entail any facet of the song, from snare-fill to chord-change to piano riff to lyric, wherev. Actually, not knowing where the Hook is coming from next is often key to its success. Hooks can get hackneyed, & if you see them coming they’ll just fall flat. So, surprise, immediacy. These are important elements.

Oh, & perfection: that’s the thing about the Hook: it just satisfies. It feels perfect.

& then it keeps walking right on by. Because also key to the successful Hook is that, in the time it takes you to notice & appreciate its clever brilliance, the song has already moved on. Hooks by definition do not stand around waiting for applause. The Hook’s abject nonchalance is its sole irreducible ingredient: the Hook is brilliant & perfect without ever breaking a sweat.

Speaking of which, the new album from Spoon comes out in just a couple of weeks, & so I’m sure we’re all very excited about that.

In the meantime, it’s the end of the year & I’m lurking my way through the sundry “best of” lists of bloggers far more au courant than myself, & I’m seeing everywhere this band called White Rabbits. Which, when I check them out they turn out to be awfully hard to put back down. Is it just me, or does this just immediately
make you want to hear some more?

Percussion Gun - White Rabbits

It does not come as a complete surprise that It’s Frightening was produced by Britt Daniel of, yes, Spoon. There’s a certain sort of crisp efficiency to the sound of this album that’s very Spoon-like. There’s no grime there’s no mud. &, as much as I have waxed enthusiastic elsewhere about grit & dirt & noise, the squeaky-clean sound here is the right choice. Because there’s just no room for clutter inside of these songs. Which are laden, laden with hooks. Much like Spoon, White Rabbits are all about the Hook.

Incidentally, the drumming in “Percussion Gun” sounds to me just like a Burundi rhythm. Bow Wow Wow used it extensively, a very long time ago, but it’s actually a traditional motif from Central Africa. Hear:

C30, C60, C90 Go - Bow Wow Wow

Live At Real World (Live) - Th...

Promises, Promises

2009-12-23T18:09:00.000-08:00

Well, here’s something.

We Were Promised Jetpacks is the cheeky name of this band from Glasgow, & I’ve been spending some time with their debut album, These Four Walls. With admittedly nothing to go on other than what I can hear here, I picture brawny bad lads somewhat spiffy for job interviews or for church, but reeking yet of booze & maybe still bruised up from brawling. Yeah, that.

The first & primary impression here is of singer-slash-guitarist Adam Thomson: he wants your hands off his chest, is conducting electricity, thinks he’s solving crimes, & cetera. These are his tropes. It's all delivered from deep in the bottoms of his lungs, emphatic & earnest & delectably (b)roguish. Reminds me at times of a certain Irish singer name of Mister Vox. Now, I know that not everybody who cares about music nowadays can even remember that U2 was once actually raw & dangerous (or even that Bono had 2 names), but you’re going to have to trust me on this one. End of digression.

Anyway, this here Adam Mister Scotch T can wind it up well & truly something fierce, can scream it out good, & then the whole band will just pummel the crap out of you for a good 6 or 8 measures before catching any breath at all. The Sunday-spiffy part, though, is that somebody has gone & reamed a lot of the grit, gravel & noise out of this music, presumably for record release purposes. OK so fine, they’ve made it in through the front door now. My strong suspicion is that We Were Promised Jetpacks is a far less solicitous proposition once this band gets going in the live, onstage realm.

I’m hoping to be proven right on that point in a couple of months. These guys will come through town for our local Noise Pop Festival. February 27 at Slim’s, specifically. I’m there. See, hear:

Ships With Holes Will Sink - W...

Short Bursts - We Were Promise...

Light, Bright

2009-12-17T11:10:00.000-08:00

You know that part in that Girls song where Christopher is all exuberant & he goes Oh, I wish I had a suntan/I wish I had a pizza & a bottle of wine? Man, I am so there right now. (&, at the risk of completely changing the subject, am I the last person in town to know about the hardcore version of the video for that song? N(even remotely)SFW, btw.)

Anyway, I had my sunglasses on briefly this a.m., for the first time in like a week. bc it’s been raining here, yeah. In the wintertime here, the world gets gray & heavy & it gets good & wet. Plus there’s that whole getting-out-of-work-&-shit!-it’s-already-dark-out trauma on a daily basis. Sigh. Maybe that’s why all the music I seem to want to hear lately is bright & light & clean & nice.

I picked up Real Estate a couple of weeks ago, before all this weather started up. I liked it, but then promptly forgot all about it. Now all of a sudden it’s tonic for what ails me. It just puts me poolside, drinking rum & it’s not even lunchtime & oops it looks like I’ve gone & gotten myself a little bit drunk already but that’s OK I don’t have to be anywhere for hours & hours & damn the sunshine feels good on my face & yes I do think another round would be nice, merci beaucoup.

Yeah, it puts me right there:

Pool Swimmers - Real Estate

Beach Comber - Real Estate

So that’s nice. But you know what’s really grabbing me right now all of a sudden is the XX. I had heard that the XX were some kind of bfd at the CMJ this year, so whoop-de doo was my initial response to that. They’ve come through town here a couple of times lately now, opening for other bands, but I didn’t make it out to see them, & I really was not understanding all the fuss to be perfectly honest.

I mean, you hear the XX & you get it, more or less instantly. You think Yeah, I got it. Because this music is pretty simple, & it’s really pretty stark. Listen to any of their songs for roughly 60 seconds, & you have effectively heard every single sound in the musical palette of the XX. There’s no bombast here, no deep layers of sound that you only notice on the tenth listen, no sudden upheavals in tempo, dynamic, or volume.

VCR - The xx

Heart Skipped A Beat - The xx

Surprisingly now, though, I actually am on more or less my tenth listen to some of these songs. I’ve warmed up to the XX. Or maybe it’s just that the XX have warmed their way up to me, now that the season's weather outside is all, you know, frightful.

See, listening to summery music like Girls & Real Estate might put me momentarily in a fantasy place I’d like to be. & that’s nice, sure. But maybe the XX are putting my feet on the ground right here where I actually am. Here, where it’s warm inside while it’s cold out there. I can feel the cold in the music of XX, but it’s all outside, over there, while we are here, inside. Warm & dry & cozy. Oh yeah: & sexy. That’s what it took me all those listens to actually get: that the XX have, you know, a certain sort of something that's sexy.

So I'm listening to the XX & now I'm all Let It Snow.

Represent, Two.

2009-12-12T11:02:00.000-08:00

Well, it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell...

So, we were talking about the Jasper Johns painting, “Flag,” & how I can’t quite figure out exactly what it is or what it does or what it says or what it means. At the end of the day it just sits there Sphinx-like, posing riddles.

(&, I know this is not normal, but: I get a genuine thrill out of this kind of shit. The longer I ponder the paradoxes implicit in this painting, the more excited I get. I can’t help the way I am.)

oh, & btw, I fully realize that nothing I’m saying here is the slightest bit original, right? I mean, the intellectual resources of entire graduate departments are daily devoted to just these kinds of semiotic inquiries, of which I’m presenting only my own little thumbnail sketch, no doubt full of holes. I’m not undertaking a comprehensive review of the critical field here, ok? I’m just thinking aloud is all. Hence, no footnotes.

OK so Music, right, we’re talking about music. & more specifically right now: audio recordings of music. Which, to my ears, can be ambiguous & paradoxical much like (spoiler alert!) the Jasper Johns painting. I do listen to an awful lot of music. & a lot of what I hear amounts to a capital-M Modern subversion of Art-as-Depiction, or Art-as-Representation kind of deal. Because (obvious exceptions aside), recorded music no longer purports to re-present any particular performance, fixed at any point in time.

As a pre-Modern point of reference, here is the recording of Robert Johnson performing his song, “Love in Vain.”

RJ-Love in Vain mp3

Beautiful. Brilliant.

This recording is a documentation of a particular event that occurred in the history of the universe, in Texas, & that lasted for about two & a half minutes on one particular day in the year 1937. It’s a snapshot. It’s a historical record of something that once actually happened. This is what recorded music was, exclusively, for a substantial period of time: an audio photograph, a record (a record) of a single performance that otherwise would have existed only in its own present, ephemeral moment, & then afterward only in the unreliable memories of whoever was there. Now having been recorded, it’s a regularized (institutionalized) memory of that one past event, rendered communicable to anyone & for all future time.

OK, now compare: Fire up your iPod or whatever & hear Beyoncé Knowles. You don’t even need me to post the link, right? “All the single ladies! All the single ladies!” & we’re off: that song is stuck in your head for the next 45 minutes, am I right? I’m using Beyoncé as an emblematic example here, just because I know you know the song. But here, hear:

BK-Single Ladies(Put a Ring On It) mp3

What is this music constructed of? Primarily I guess it's a Voice & a Beat, but there's a lot of spice here in this Ratatouille. The squealing synthesizer loop; the funk drums chopping so seamlessly into the bass that I can't always distinguish between them; vocal harmonies processed through a super wet flange & chorus combo; reverb repeatedly inserted then extracted with precision. All of it exactly coordinated, calibrated, all of it enmeshed & all of it in motion. A complex & very finely-tuned machine; a miracle of modern engineering. Oh, & I almost forgot it's fucking great music! (No comment on the lyric, though.) Most of the vocal is a series of interlocking chants, but Ms. Knowles does also make a point of demonstrating that (hello?) she can sing. e.g., listen to her navigate that key change mid-way through the bridge (~2:20). But then also hear how the song quickly reasserts its own recorded artifice when the vocal grinds to a quick halt like a busted loop, & then immediately recovers (~2:40). & just btw, if you can hold your hips still during any of this, well, somebody ought to check your pulse.

But here is what I’m getting at: a recording made today no longer constitutes a documentation of a past performance of that music. No. Now, the present moment is self-actualizing, self-perpetuating. It’s a continuous & perpetual present moment, now. There is no longer any reference made to any then-present, now-past moment. All there is is Now.

Initially & substantially, this is a by-product of overdubbing. Just from the mere fact of different instruments being recorded at different times, we’re already outside the realm of documentation, of re-presentation. The actual, present moment becomes a fiction. The end product is an artifice; it may connote a single musical performance, but without documenting any event that ever actually happened.

Early on, overdubbing is just a benign sort of “cheating,” right? You go back & “fix” that one part of the guitar solo or whatever, but the record still operates as a representation of the band playing the song, more or less. Later, artists begin making music that deliberately calls attention to this technical aspect of itself. Sounds & individual performances that physically could not have occurred together are juxtaposed for deliberate effect, dramatic & otherwise. Music starts getting described in cinematic terms, because it’s so clearly & deliberately constructed & edited in ways calculated to draw attention to its own artifice. Now, entire pieces of music are built from this aesthetics of juxtaposition & incongruity.

You know what I mean, right? Every single piece of music that uses sampling is an obvious illustration of this. The sample takes a piece of some other sound, song, spoken text, bass line, whatever --& combines it incongruously. Dramatic & musical effects are constructed from the bare fact that the recorded elements do not really belong together. &, as a whole, the recordings operate as recordings: Each calls attention to itself as a recording that deploys part(s) of another recording; it is not a document or a “record” or a re-presentation of a past event. At most, the recording re-presents the past fact of another recording –mirrors reflecting other mirrors.

The use of sampling is a clear example of this distinction, but not an exclusive one. Beyoncé’s song is not built around samples in any obvious way. But neither does it refer to, or re-present any event outside of its own intrinsic present. The instrumentation is, obviously & aggressively, an amalgamation of studio-generated sounds that are looped, spinning tight cycles in a way that evokes (without directly operating as) hip-hop samples, all in a way that insists, again, on the fact of its own artifice.

Listen to the Robert Johnson, & you know & understand that you’re hearing a record of a historical event. Listen to the Beyoncé Knowles, & what you’re hearing is that song, timelessly. You’re not trying to fix it in any particular place or time. At most, you might be picturing the video. (Itself, incidentally, re-presenting no time or place at all, as dancers are suspended surreally in shifting tones of white, gray, no floor beneath, no walls around.) “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on it)” never actually WAS; it just IS, as long as you’re hearing it. On your iPod or in your brain.

Anyway, here’s where I’m headed. I think the Robert Johnson is the Mona Lisa: there, you’re looking through that window, taking in the scene, & understanding that it’s a depiction of a then-present, now-past historical occurrence. The Beyoncé is “Flag”: it’s all icons & emblems & cultural signs, steeped in context & meaning & adding up to a physical object operating on your senses, a Modern piece of Art.

& I think this matters, why? Because there obviously still IS such a thing as live performance of music. & it’s frustrating to hear music so often performed as an effort to re-present a recording. That’s a failed strategy, dead on arrival & ass-backwards. Live music is exciting & alive to the extent that it can accommodate surprise. Live music should entail not actually knowing for certain what’s going to happen. More about that in future postings. For now, my point is just this simple: a recording of music and a performance of music are DIFFERENT from each other; they are not the same thing.

Grand Lake

2009-12-10T11:43:00.001-08:00

OK, so back in the Department of Right Up My Alley: I heard recently from Caleb Nichols, ex-bassist for Oakland indie band Port O’Brien. His new band is just now reaching its own cruising altitude.

Grand Lake is the name of the new project. This is a rock trio that does fun things with electronics &, well, noise. & so, Noise being pretty much my favorite flavor, yup, I’m listening right now to some selections from their new 4-song EP. The title track, “Louise,” opens up with a quick little feedback meander before getting down to some serious business in the land of chunka-chunka. By then I’ve already been sold bc, guys, you had me at scrrreeeech. Heh.

So yes feedback gives me a thrill, everybody knows that. But what I’m really liking here are the sharp dynamic shifts, now raunchy, now sinuous, now pounding, now howling. (Oh, & is that actually a sort of proto-disco rhythm, completely incongruous, at the beginning of “Black Cloud”? Can’t you just for a second almost hear Donna Summer singing “I Feel Love” over the top of that bass line? That’s just hot, I don’t care who you are!) Anyway, Grand Lake can turn on a dime & I think that’s important in a 3-piece band. With so few elements in the mix, each player needs to be right on top of his (her) game at all times. Based just on these couple of tracks, what I hear here is some very heavy hitting from these guys. & they’re just getting started. Right now I think they’re still figuring out the exact parameters of their sound, but this is going to be a band to watch.

You can pay Grand Lake a visit on their myspace page, or on their own blogsite. I’m told a full-length album is targeted for Spring 2010, & my curiosity has been officially piqued. It looks like a couple of local gigs are scheduled in the meantime, including one at Café du Nord on January 6. Which is now in my calendar.

In ink.

See you there?

The Shants

2009-12-09T11:38:00.001-08:00

I think that’s a cool band name, the Shants. Singer Skip Allums is coy about what it actually means, offering a couple of explanations. One, evidently, is British slang for getting drunk (e.g., “fancy a shant?”). I had not actually heard that term before, & have not yet independently confirmed its correct usage. So caveat emptor on that one, party peeps. Anyway, I just like the way it rolls off the tongue: the Shants. The Shants. So there’s that.

The Shants are a newish band, based in Oakland. Which seems to me like a funny place from which to launch this nouveau-retro-Country-type project. But what do I know, since this is clearly not my usual cup of tea anyway, right? See, at first I was all: yeah yeah, pedal steel guitar, nice, whatev. But here’s the thing: the Shants & my iPod have been carrying on a torrid little dalliance for a few days now. & I’m surprised to find myself getting actually kind of infatuated with these here Shants.

Submitted for our consideration is an 8-song EP entitled Russian River Demos, evidently recorded live in a cabin among the redwoods. & it feels like that: kind of languid, kind of sexy. Nobody’s in a hurry to get anywhere. Skip’s singing is, well, pretty. But it’s also delivered with the quiet confidence of somebody who’s strong enough to never need to shout. OK, I guess that’s a lot of words just to say he’s understated. Anyway, I like the singing & I like the songwriting, too. I like the frequent drifting into a minor key, just to keep things interesting. The clear signature here is the aforementioned pedal steel, wielded craftily by Samuel Tokheim. & that’s what really drew me into these songs. Samuel plays with finesse, with wit, & with a poetic sense that makes these good songs kind of great.

I like the Shants, & you might too. If you go to their myspace page, check out “Tired of Everyone,” and “I’m a Ghost.” It looks like they have a couple of San Francisco gigs coming up next month. You can buy their EP at a show, or on their site for 5 bucks. That's sweet.

Represent.

2009-12-06T10:24:00.000-08:00

"Flag" -Jasper Johns, encaustic, oil, and collage on wood, 1954-1955

Long about the 3rd bottle of wine, my pal D was chuckling at something or other I had just slurred. We were probably playing the Clash. Or maybe the Buzzcocks. Anyway, D was far less impaired than I was (that's typical), & her claim is that she then texted me, quoting what I had just said. You know, for posterity & for hilarity. So I could see in the morning what nobody would otherwise remember. Here's the message I found on my phone next a.m.:

"I think really hard about things that no one cares about, thats whats wrong with my life."

It was actually pretty funny at the time. In context, I mean. I had been going on for a while about (big surprise) music. Recorded versus live music, my view of certain substantial & critical distinctions between the two modes, and what I see as analogous developments in early-to-mid Modern-era visual arts. In America.

I know, I know, I can't help it.

I just get that way sometimes. True story: I really actually do think about this kind of stuff pretty much all of the time. I mostly try not to talk about it unnecessarily when people are trying to just have a drink & a little fun. But D's been to art school & so I figure she's more used to geeks of my particular stripe, & I guess I gave myself license to be self-indulgent that night. More than usual, I mean.

Anyway, what I remember is that we were jamming some old-school capital-P Punk, & I was talking re: Warhol, de Kooning, & Jasper Johns.

i.e., a painting is a picture, right? It’s a depiction, a virtual window into a “scene” that we, as viewers, have to agree to believe in, to some negotiable degree. Right?

A painting is a picture. It’s a picture of something, someone. Some where. Some when. It’s a representation. A re-presentation, as in setting forth an artificial “present” moment, & asking us to be complicit in believing it’s real, & in believing it’s now. That’s pretty much the pre-Modern consensus on Western pictorial art, yeah? When we look at the Mona Lisa, Mr. da Vinci is asking us to pretend to believe we’re looking through a window at that nice smirking lady, comfortably placed in the foreground of a receding perspective scene. & we’re saying Yes, sure we’ll pretend to believe we see Her (& see her There) & not just smears of crackling sepia paint here, on an old piece of wood.

Then, in the capital-M Modern era, capital-A Art fucks with that consensus in a big way, right? It says, Whoa, not so fast. Let’s do look at the paint on the board (broadly defined). Let’s no longer pretend the painting is a magically-frozen present moment of some OTHER when/where/one/thing. No. The painting isn’t a picture at all any more. A photograph is a picture, yes. A photograph is a documentary event. Of an actual past moment, frozen now in an eternal present. But a painting is a painting: it's a physical object existing nowhere but the physical space in front of your eyeballs. Here. & occupying no present moment other than the one you’re alive in. Now.

Except. Maybe we're not always willing to go along with that. Maybe just because we’re human beings &, as human beings, we’re (maybe innately) inclined to invest physical objects (particularly objects created by ourselves) with significance. With meaning, even. We don’t want the painting to just be painting, or "a" Painting, no; we want it to be a picture. We want it to mean something. We want it to stand for something, for something other than what it plainly just is. We want it to depict, we want it to represent, we want it to re-present. We're inclined to want all of that.

I think these are the ideas that Jasper Johns was exploring when he made this painting in 1954, and called it “Flag.” It’s a super provocative piece because: What the hell is it? Is it a picture of a flag? Is it a flag? Actually, functionally a flag? & what, by the way, IS a flag? (I mean, speaking of physical objects invested with significance & meaning?) So, is this painting called “Flag” supposed to have the exact same significance & meaning as that flag on the pole at the Post Office across the street? Um, no? First, this thing is just different –it’s constructed of different materials, & it occupies a different physical context. Ok, but just because it’s made of wax & paint & wood & it’s hanging on the wall at the MOMA, does that actually mean ipso facto that it’s a picture? &, if so, of what? & what does it depict/mean/re-present?

Just by way of comparison, this is not the picture of Marines raising “the” flag at Iwo Jima, right? We know what that picture is, & what it connotes, & how it’s supposed to make us feel & think about “the” flag. But this thing? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what, if anything, it says. At least, I don't know what it says about its apparent subject matter: "the" flag.

Do you? I imagine you (reader), opening this page, seeing that picture, & forming immediate expectations based on that picture. & then I imagine you shifting your expectations as you understood we’re only talking about “Flag,” & not about “the” flag. Of course, by now what you’re really wondering is what ANY of this has to do with music, the stated subject matter of this blog.

& I will get to that.

Take It From Me -- Track # 18 -- Son Lux

2009-12-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

“Stand” by Son Lux
from At War With Walls & Mazes
March 2008

With this, our compilation closes out for better or worse. & this here is really JUST the kind of pretentious, arty shit that I tend to have a very high tolerance for!

The lyric repeats well past the point of stridency, the drum machine collides full-on with the opera-style singing, it’s all histrionics, electronics, & angular juxtaposition. Nothing even remotely, uh, punk about it, & yet it’s downright ostentatious in its audacity. It’s lush, it’s luxuriant, hey damn it’s gorgeous! The whole album is crazy like this.

Many, many people will dislike this, but shouldn’t everybody give it a try just once? Like escargot.

Stand - Son Lux

Take It From Me -- Track #17 -- Bon Iver

2009-12-02T18:40:00.000-08:00

“Woods” by Bon Iver
from Blood Bank
January 2009

For a little while last year, Bon Iver was one of those bands where you think you’ve discovered something really esoteric & you think it’s going to be like your own special thing.

& then suddenly you find that everybody’s getting into “your” new band, & there’s a moment of readjustment there where you have to decide if you’re still going to be that into a band that’s that ubiquitous.

So, everybody knows the story now, how Monsieur Bon Iver (Justin Vernon) got his heart all broken & he went off to a cabin in the woods of Wisconsin (hello?) all by himself & didn’t come back until he’d recorded For Emma, Forever Ago. The album is really quite beautiful, but it was just everywhere for a while there & I finally had to take a little break from it. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

& that’s a commercially dangerous place for an artist to be, right? I imagine it’s all terrific & exciting to be this year’s Big New Thing. But from there, you can go where exactly? Because you do NOT want to be reduced to, you know, Last Year’s Big Thing. So, some strategic thinking might need to enter into the artistic decision-making. Not to be overly mercenary about it, but music undeniably is --among many other things, duh-- a commodity in the marketplace.

So anyway, Blood Bank was a four-song EP that Justin put out early this year, pointing in a couple different directions & maybe just trying to figure out where exactly he wants to go next. Because it’s not exactly obvious how to follow up on something so unique (& uniquely personal) as that 1st album.

For now, I think he punted. What is, functionally, this year’s Bon Iver album is, nominally, a side project: Unmap, by Volcano Choir. Which, when you listen to it, really actually is the new Bon Iver. It’s a shrewd move commercially, and it’s a perfectly satisfying move artistically, so win-win. If my 2010 year-end compilation ends up including selections from 2009, something from Volcano Choir is likely to be one of them. It's some good shit.

But anyway, here we have a current-year selection from the EP. “Woods” consists of nothing other than voice, processed through that god damn Auto-Tune thingie. btw, there actually is another version of this song on the Volcano Choir album. There, it’s called “Still,” and it’s a much fuller arrangement.

Here in this version, a single lyric repeats, & the harmonies evolve. & that’s pretty much all there is to it. I guess it’s really just a novelty track, but I still find it oddly compelling.

Woods - Bon Iver

Take It From Me -- Track #16 -- BLK JKS

2009-12-01T20:00:00.000-08:00

“Lakeside” by BLK JKS
from After Robots
September 2009

I don’t know a lot about this South African capital-R Rock Band called BLK JKS. I’m hearing a lot of really interesting ingredients in this music, but they can get lost under the sheen of all that prog-rock production. The mix is overly-homogenized; it’s like they stirred too many lumps out of the batter. Do you ever make pancakes? The batter has lumps in it, & that’s OK. In fact, it’s pretty important that you don’t over-stir the batter. Because in the course of stirring out all the lumps, you also stir out all the air, & then your pancakes won’t rise when they cook.

Anyway, I’m very curious to hear this band live, if an opportunity should arise. In the meantime, I’m intrigued but not yet sold.

Your thoughts?

Lakeside - BLK JKS

Take It From Me -- Track #15 -- Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson

2009-11-30T21:42:00.000-08:00

“Woodfriend” by
Miles
Benjamin
Anthony
Robinson
from Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson

June 2008

In this day & age, can there still possibly be anything of interest to be wrung out of the whole singer/songwriter schtick? Why, yes, it turns out that there sort of perhaps can!

I understand Mister Robinson to be a fairly young (mid-20s) guy who’s been kicking around Brooklyn for awhile now. The songs here succeed largely on the sheer iconoclasm of his artistic Voice. I wouldn't have thought that could still really happen any more nowadays, but there you have it. This song is more raucous than most of the album, but it’s all quite good.

He now has a new 2nd album out, that I have not heard yet. I understand that he made kind of a splash at South by Southwest this year. Q: When am I going to finally go to South by Southwest? A: Shit, I still don’t actually know.

Woodfriend - Miles Benjamin An...

Take It From Me -- Track #14 -- Of Montreal

2009-11-27T22:04:00.000-08:00

“Women’s Studies Victim”
by Of Montreal
from Skeletal Lamping
October 2008

& then maybe we can use a little comic relief, yeah?

Ok so, wow, where the hell was I while this band called Of Montreal was putting out an album almost every year since 1997? In the dark, me!

This is what we used to call a “concept album.” i.e., all the songs are organized (very) loosely around some sort of a story/character/theme. I’m not really actually following the story/character/theme all that well in this instance, but hey: Everything on this album is rich, charming, hilarious, full of wit, & (bonus!) gratuitously filthy. This song is a great example of all of the above.

& yes, you heard that lyric correctly.

Women's Studies Victims - Of M...

Take It From Me -- Track #13 -- The Antlers

2009-11-26T08:07:00.000-08:00

“Two” by the Antlers
from Hospice
August 2009

I don’t actually know much about this band.

The album is an extended narrative about taking care of a loved one with a terminal illness. It’s really very good but, you know, not so uplifting. Insert appropriate emoticon here.

I rather like the slow dynamic buildup over the course of this longish song, the lyric is very strong throughout, & then that long, ethereal moaning whoosh for a full minute at the end is a very satisfying coda.

Two - The Antlers

Take It From Me -- Track #12 -- the Kills

2009-11-26T07:57:00.000-08:00

“Tape Song” by the Kills
from Midnight Boom
March 2008

Time ain’t gonna cure you honey
Time don’t give a shit
Time ain’t gonna cure you honey
Time’s just gonna hit
On you, you got to
[thump! thump-thump!] Go straight ahead…

If you don’t like this, you just hate rock & roll. The Kills fucking rock.

Tape Song - The Kills

Take It From Me -- Track #11 -- Atlas Sound

2009-11-22T10:45:00.000-08:00

“Quarantined”
by Atlas Sound
from
Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
February 2008

Yes, I am again pulling from the 2008 album (see track 3 on this mix).

The signature sound here is that popping, wet reverb on the vocal consonants –it makes my skin tingle!

As discussed elsewhere here, I was fortunate enough to see Bradford & co, on November 3, & this song was a highlight.

Quarantined - Atlas Sound

Take It From Me -- Track #10 -- Deerhunter

2009-11-22T10:31:00.000-08:00

“Operation”
by Deerhunter
from Weird Era Contd.
October 2008

Well. Not for the 1st time, I’m in love with a band with a kind of stoopid name. This album was released simultaneously with Microcastle, they’ve got a couple of albums earlier than those & also some later stuff, & plus Bradford’s solo band has at least two albums out + some EPs, so, yes, these are some very prolific boys. I could easily have filled this whole CD with their excellent & variegated songs. & yeah, I thought about it.

Anyway, I love love love the way this song ostensibly ends, only to reprise itself & then quickly disintegrate into a distorted auto-reflection before wrapping up for real. Hot!

Operation - Deerhunter

Take it From Me -- Track #9 -- Thurston Moore

2009-11-21T18:04:00.000-08:00

“Off Work”
by Thurston Moore
from Trees Outside the Academy
September 2007

This is the oldest selection on the mix, I promise!

From Thurston’s last solo album. I like the juxtaposition between his Sonic Youth guitar & the electric violin that’s featured throughout. It’s noisy, it’s pretty, it see-saws back & forth. The combination sometimes works in a very satisfying way, as on this track. Here, I also enjoy how that weird hissing, vaguely-industrial sound insinuates itself into the middle of the song, practically taking over the whole show only to abruptly disappear, leaving the chord structure sort of inverted in its wake. Not everyone in my house appreciates that, but I think it’s nice.

btw, a chronically-underappreciated treasure is Thurston’s 1995 solo album, Psychic Hearts, which improves with age & is almost uniformly brilliant from start to finish. Seriously. Although, you may want to debate me on that. If so, buy it, listen to it one hundred times, & then I will buy you a drink. Or, you know, one hundred.

Off Work - Thurston Moore

Take It From Me -- Track #8 -- Grizzly Bear

2009-11-21T07:13:00.000-08:00

“Dory” by Grizzly Bear
from Veckatimest
May 2009.

Well, here’s a switch.

Grizzly Bear is now a band that makes pure, unadulterated capital-P Pop Music. I can’t help but hear the Beatles all over this album (see also, In Ear Park by side project Department of Eagles), e.g. especially, the single “Two Weeks,” which you might have heard a lot of last summer.

What’s curious to me is how little this resembles their earlier music (e.g., Horn of Plenty –noisy, electronic, often interesting, not always listenable). A curious evolution, & my general preference is for a little less sugar w/the medicine.

I do like this song though; it’s a kind of a suite, & I find the lyric genuinely poetic (“wo-wo wo-wo-wildly cohering in a watery deep,” etc.), which is rare let’s face it.

My usual music hosting site has let me down on this one; this album is inexplicably unlicensed there. You can still check it out here, or here, or wherev. Also, here is video of them performing the song live in an orchestral setting, which is kind of cool.

Take It From Me -- Track #7 -- Sonic Youth

2009-11-15T15:24:00.000-08:00

“Malibu Gas Station”
by Sonic Youth
from The Eternal
June 2009

I won’t try to explain here all the reasons why Sonic Youth still occupy such a warm & special place in my heart. But it’s not difficult to get me started on the topic over beers, just FYI! I saw SY at the Fox this year, but I missed the “secret” show at the Independent (tickets sold out online in two minutes flat).

Kim’s vocals (can’t always call them “singing”) are not typically my favorite ingredient of SY music. I like Thurston’s crisp & precise rhythm playing on this song (e.g., at ~2:00). It's not virtuosic or anything, but just a tasty little surprise, an indicator that this band is still reaching, still growing. The obligatory degeneration into noisy feedback is obviously their stock in trade, & handled particularly well on this track, I think.

Malibu Gas Station - Sonic You...

Take It From Me -- Track #6 -- Rain Machine

2009-11-15T15:17:00.000-08:00

“Give Blood”
by Rain Machine
from Rain Machine
October 2009

This is Kyp Malone’s solo project (&, here again, the band’s name doesn’t do anything for me. Just saying.).

Not all of the songs on this album compare favorably to TVOTR, but there’s some very good & interesting stuff going on here. I do like the way Kyp’s singing just seems to drift in & out of falsetto, often more for dramatic than strictly musical effect. On this song, it’s the click-click-click percussion & the throbbing, raunchy fuzz-tone guitar that I find very tasty.

btw, I had a ticket to see Kyp’s new Machine play the Independent in October, but had to miss it when I couldn’t shake a pounding headache. I’m still mad about that.

Then Kyp & Co. opened for the Pixies at the Fox. Which I skipped. bc as much as I love me some Pixies, I just wasn’t going to pay out 65 bucks+ for ye olde reunion tour (see my snarky comments elsewhere here re nostalgia events masquerading as rock concerts). But I digress.

Kyp is a smart guy making smart music. Here, hear:

Give Blood - Rain Machine

Take It From Me -- Track #5 -- Dirty Projectors

2009-11-15T15:09:00.000-08:00

“Useful Chamber”
by Dirty Projectors
from Bitte Orca
June 2009

OK, back in the current year.

I had never heard of this band before seeing them open for TVOTR this year. I just have to say first: Dirty Projectors is a crappy band name, evocative of nothing, clumsy to say, & just really nothing much other than dumb.

So there’s that.

Still, it took me all of 15 minutes to fall irrevocably in love with the music. Dirty Projectors have evidently been on extended tour all year, & they keep passing their way through SF, so I’ve now seen them live three times, as discussed elsewhere here.

David Longstreth is the main guy in the band. From what I can tell, he is young, probably pretty pretentious, & is maybe even full of himself. I’m actually cool with that, since he’s a genuinely brilliant composer & a fascinating guitar player. I have heard comparisons between this band & prog-rock excesses of yore, & that is maybe fair, but only to a point. What I love most here is the arch sense of musical humor that permeates these ambitious & very quirky songs.

Useful Chamber - Dirty Project...

Take It From Me -- Track #4 -- TV on the Radio

2009-11-15T15:04:00.000-08:00

“DLZ” by
TV on the Radio
from Dear Science
September 2008

I have to admit I was a little slow to catch on to this group, & I really have no excuse since they have THE BEST band name since, like, Talking Heads.

That alone should have clued me in, right?

Happily, I saw TVOTR play at the Fox in Oakland this summer, & the show left me very excited, very interested. Their music is not exactly rock, or jazz, or funk, or hip-hop, or techno, or doo-wop, or high-concept performance art, or etc. But it seems to me to connote all of those things & more. Oh, & it’s overtly & aggressively political, too. There’s just a lot going on inside of there, & all of it is (most importantly) very fun, danceable, & yeah, sexy.

I understand the band is now on a 1-year hiatus while Kyp Malone pursues his solo project, but I’m expecting a long & fascinating career ahead from these guys. In the meantime, I can recommend this album without reservation, as well as Return to Cookie Mountain (admittedly weird title), from 2006.

DLZ - TV On The Radio

Take It From Me -- Track #3 -- Atlas Sound

2009-11-15T14:57:00.000-08:00

“Ativan” by Atlas Sound
from Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
February 2008

Like I said, I’m still working my way through last year. This year’s Logos is also excellent, & may well appear on next year’s mix. So.

Anyway, usually the 1st thing that hooks me into any bit of recorded music is some flavor or texture in the way the thing is produced. e.g., I most certainly do love the swirling, sonic smear of Atlas Sound, solo project of Bradford Cox (of Deerhunter). Often, a song’s lyrics are the last thing to get my attention, but the opening lines here (“I slept til I threw up.”) are, um, kind of arresting yeah?

That said, I really just love the big, lush reverb that pervades this album. This music has direct antecedents in My Bloody Valentine, Jesus & Mary Chain, Velvet Underground (in reverse chronological order), all of which I will almost certainly address in future postings here.

Ativan - Atlas Sound