Bottle of hair

RIP Alex Chilton

2010-03-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know I'm late to this party, and it's not breaking news a week on, but he was one of my favorites and he deserves his nod. Surprisingly, and deservedly, he was eulogized in the hallowed halls of the national capitol.

There's not anything I can add to what's been said about the guy, so I'll just say that I'll miss him and keep enjoying his music, and be thankful that I at least got to see Big Star once in my life. I'll leave you with The Replacements' fine tribute to the man.

HATE IT! Part 13 - Surrealistic Pillow

2010-03-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

Again I've gone to the slop trough that is the Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest albums of all time to elbow the swine of classic rock to the side and pull out a scrap of rotten food undeserving of its accolades. Honestly, what the fuck were those hippies thinking when they listened to this crap and thought it sounded good? Grace Slick could never sing for shit, none of the members could really play all that well, and how many fucking songs about drugs did they need to listen to anyway? "White rabbit" in all its jackass allegory can suck the corn out of a bum's diarrhea pants. "Somebody to love" was really nothing new when it came out, it was just shriekier than the other, poppier schmaltz of the time. Jerry Garcia produced it, but even he didn't seem to like these guys too much. If you watch "Gimme Shelter", there's a great scene where Hell's Angels punch Marty Balin in the face and knock him out, then when Paul Kantner steps up, they beat his ass too. Then we see the Grateful Dead show up and someone tells Jerry that Balin and Kantner got their asses kicked, and Garcia is standing there with this giant shit-eating grin on his face, saying "oh, bummer, man." Yeah, he was as stoked as I was. Why? BECAUSE THEY FUCKING SUCK. THEY SUCK SEVERED PENISES FILLED WITH PUS AND TOPPED WITH SHIT, LIKE SOME KIND OF VILE, DISEASED ECLAIR. Then eventually they wrote "we built this city" about how they fucking invented rock in that town or something, which ironically was the opposite of a song that rocks. So fuck 'em and fuck the RS person who put this pile of shit on the list.

The Sword - Age of winters

2010-03-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Henry turned me on to these dudes. He knows I like metal and stoner rock and Vikings and stuff, so he made me listen to it and it pretty much rules. It spends a lot of time being pretty much what you'd expect for stoner rock, lots of sabbathy sounds and there's some Kyuss in there too. But it's still a lot better than most. It's got lots of lead breaks instead of solos, ride-heavy drumming, bla bla bla, songs about Freya and stuff, fantasy themed riff rock. Awesome. But dudes, when "Iron Swan" came on, I just about shit my pants because it was just fucking sick. It's mostly worthy of a good solid B, but there are a couple of real standouts where they do less sludging and just play fucking fast and crazy and the album just rules. Get it. Especially you, Bryan.

Gigi - Maintenant

2010-03-04T21:12:00.000-08:00

So for the last while, I've been having some serious envy issues toward Canada. You see, they have CBC whereas those of us who live in the Benighted States of America don't generally get such quality broadcasting. I used to enjoy CBC when I was younger and lived just this side of the
border, but I have since moved too far south to pick up their broadcasts. Some of the advantages are (for TV) Hockey night in Canada, which means a look at Don Cherry's sartorial choice of the week, which by itself is reason enough to emigrate north. It's like in the 80s when we'd all watch the Cosby Show to see what kind of ridiculous sweater Cliff would be wearing this week. Except better. Plus hockey. Anyway, and more to the point, CBC radio plays a metric shitload of really good music. Over the internets, I can really only pick up CBC 3, (which I am pondering fixing by purchasing a device which will let me listen to CBC 2 at night, which is a magical time when even unicorns cannot help but fucking go apeshit and gore people on their horns because the music is so good on CBC 2 at night) and so there I was. Listening to CBC 3 and this song came on. It was "Won't someone tell me" by Gigi. So taken was I, at that magical moment, that I decided on the spot that I must have this album. SO I GOT THE THING.

So, then. What's the deal with this band? Apparently some Canadian guy got his mitts on a couple of old plate reverbs like Phil Spector used to use to create his "wall of sound", and so he decided to make a Phil Spector record minus the murder and 3 foot high spaceball wigs. So over the course of a few years he wrote these songs and recorded them with whomever was around at the time and interested. The result was that he hit it out of the park. Not so much in that it sounds like Phil Spector produced it in the 60s, because it doesn't, or that the songs are derivative, because they're not, the greatness is in how he took this decades-old set of musical conventions and made them fresh again. That sound of old is just the thread that runs through these topically fairly modern sounding songs. I guess you could compare it to one of those new refrigerators that look like they're from the 50s, but without the kitsch. The songs are just good. Even though the songs were recorded over several years by a huge cast of people with a zillion different people singing, they mesh really well together. There's the plate reverb "air" sitting in the mix of course, and plenty of beats and arrangements contemporary to the 60s. The song structures aren't necessarily simplistic, and the lyrics aren't dumb. It draws stylistically, in fact, from a lot more than Spector's catalog. If Cruising with Reuben and the Jets is Zappa's reverent fun-poking at the cheesy music he loved when he was young, this is reverent evolution of AM radio gems. 15 tracks, 13 of them excellent. 2 I skip, and those are the 2 at the end. If you like Spector, or Bacharach, or Hugo Montenegro, and you don't get this album, you are a fool.

Paul Stanley - People, let me get this off my chest

2010-01-14T22:34:00.001-08:00

I've seen KISS 3 different times. Every time was fantastic, of course, but I'll bet 1/5 of the shows consisted of Paul spouting off the corniest shit you ever heard while the rest of the painted fogeys caught their breath. The thing is, it's a great ploy, and the things he says/sings/caterwauls are some of the most hysterical things you've heard in your life. Now I do recall some of the banter being the same from show to show, and of the 70 tracks, there's plenty I heard in person. No matter. What's important is that years after the shows, it's Paul yelling out "I BEEN TO YAKIMA!" that my friends and I recall the most fondly. That and his remark about some woman's bared boobs: "Ooh, you could store a lot of milk in those! I need some vitamin D!" And here some smartass lovingly combed through a bunch of live recordings and picked out some winners, then released it to the internet to the applause of all. Because this stuff is pure comedy gold. His intro to "Love gun" has him talking about how he's packing a pistol. His six-shooter of sex. His Uzi of ooze. His LOVE GUN! When delivered as only Paul can, it becomes apparent that he's some kind of comic genius, blessed at birth with the gift of perfect delivery. You're laughing at him. You're laughing with him. Only Steve Martin can get laughs with the arrow through the head gag, and only Paul can pull this stoopidness off. And boy, does he ever. You can find it for free on the infernets. Get it, you got nothin' to lose. (hee! I made a KISS joke!)

YMO - Solid state survivor

2010-01-14T18:43:00.000-08:00

It's 2010, let's kick this off with a past look at the future! Who are these dudes and what is this shit? Well, they rose to prominence in the late 1970s as Japan's premiere synth group. They're pretty well regarded world wide, and with good reason. They're all top notch musicians and songwriters. They launched a style of music in their country almost singlehandedly. They mapped out a new way to write pop music that was weird. And unlike the pop music from Japan pretty much since, they sound unmistakably ethnic without being obtuse. This is the band that launched Ryuichi Sakamoto's career, and he's gone all over the place with his movie scores, avant-strange compositions, and general enthusiasm for the new. So what's this sound like, then? Awesome is what it sounds like. It opens with "Technopolis" and its thumping disco bassline, then the many synthesizers come in playing what you don't expect them to without ever playing anything out of place, though it goes from vocoders to weebly squiggles to ringy fancypants twiddles to triumphant horn sounds. Just YOU try to make that shit coherent. These guys do. Also, Yukihiro Takahashi. You'd swear the drums were programmed, but he just plays tighter than a nun's cunt, and does most of the singing while he's at it. The next track isn't that hot, but "Rydeen", one of the band's signatures, is a completely awesome, hard-driving piece of cheese. "Castalia", the next track, is slower and atmospheric, a deconstructed composition of the same kind you hear a lot in Sakamoto's solo career. "Behind the mask" somehow sounds like a robot rollerskating through a park on a sunny day with its choppy rhythms and laid back feel. They cover the Beatles' "Day tripper", then get cinematic again before they close it out with the title track, which probably gave Mark Mothersbaugh a boner. These guys are hugely influential, and even if early synth driven pop music isn't your thing, it's an interesting glimpse at the evolution of music, drawing from any sources that sound good. They STILL pack the house when they get together and play, which is only right. This is what the future will sound like when we finally get those fucking flying cars and silvery jumpsuits.

Puffy - Bring it!

2009-11-08T16:45:00.001-08:00

,

My abiding love of Puffy is one of those things that people don't seem to understand. Why do I like these 2 silly women singing silly pop songs, who got a silly show on Cartoon Network? I dunno, they're a hoot? Can't that be good enough? Yeah, they can be incredibly derivative, (Their second album rips off The Who and Black Sabbath so hard it's crazy) but so what? They aren't trying to be anything they aren't, just goofy and fun. So 13 years of silliness into their careers they've put out this album, and like the rest of their albums it's full of great songs and horrible ones. A couple of the great songs were written by Shiina Ringo, who is incredibly prolific and talented and plays in any genre she wants to with aplomb. She's a great source of material. Unfortunately though, 2 of the songs were given to them by Avril Lavigne. Enough said about that. A fair amount of the album skirts pop-punk territory, unfortunately, but there's enough good stuff on here to make it worthwhile. "Anata to Watashi", for instance, could easily fit in on Todd Rundgren's "Something/anything?". It's a perfect catchy pop song full of great devices. Through the whole album, their voices, as always, blend together perfectly. And the last track, "Wedding Bell", a cover of an old song by the Japanese pop band Sugar, is just fantastic. It's a snark filled story of a woman going to an old friend's wedding, alone, feeling totally inadequate, and hating it. So she wants to just say "Fuck you, amen" to the bride. It's a very catchy tune, and Puffy really padded out the arrangement with flutes and chimes and strings, which makes the contrast to the lyrics that much better. Still, the overall album is flawed, so its rating must reflect that. And here's a video they made for "Wedding Bell". Hope you understand Japanese.

HATE IT! Part 12 - the assholes who live behind me

2009-11-04T13:53:00.001-08:00

I don't know what they call their band and I don't care. All I know is that scarcely a day goes by that they don't practice, and they generally go for 4 or 5 hours at a stretch, stopping just before I can finally call in a noise complaint to the pigs, which is the ridiculously late hour of 10. The sound comes right in through my walls and I can hear every sound like they were in my living room. This also means every mistake. You see, they are abysmally bad. They sound basically like Coldplay farted out some jingles for walmart commercials and some high school kids just learning their instruments got asked to play the songs. And they only have 5 or 6 songs. For hours every day. A couple of times somebody has tried to take a guitar solo, which is unfortunate because he obviously isn't familiar with the concept of "key signatures", or even of "scales". And while they all suck at their instruments, the bass player is the worst of them all. He can't play outside of a 4/4 time signature, thumping the root of whatever the guitar's playing. But he can't play inside of a 4/4 time signature, either. In fact, I can play all of their instruments better than they can, and I'm not saying that to boast. No amount of practice will ever help these guys. The most musical they're ever going to get is when I finally snap and kill the lot of them, and use their ribcages for xylophones.

GOD DAMN IT ALL TO HELL.

Immortal - At the heart of winter

2009-10-20T23:29:00.001-07:00

You know, Immortal gets a lot of shit. They get shit for looking ridiculous, get shit for just being a black metal band, and get shit for being probably the best-known/most accessible black metal band out there. Well, fuck the haters, man. Sure they look ridiculous. It's fun to look ridiculous, and they like to do cheesy shit. There are some great guitar instructional videos you can find on youtube featuring Abbath Doom Occulta showing how to play some of his riffs. He's drunk and wearing cheesy shades instead of corpse paint and anytime he pinches a harmonic, he intentionally makes the goofiest rock face he can muster. They aren't always just grimness and icicles, you know.

Anyway. This one is sort of a turning point for the band, as guitarist/lyricist Demonaz had to give up playing due to some horrible tendonitis. Abbath took over the guitar duties and Demonaz had to take a less hands-on approach to making music in Immortal. And I'm not trying to take a swipe at the guy, but this is my overall favorite album of theirs. They were over their love affair with lo-fi recording, they had their best drummer yet, (Horgh fucking rules, dudes) and the riffage was the grimmest and most apocolyptic it had ever been, due in no small part to the incorporation of some thrash influence. Naturally, the lyrics were about their made up fairy-tale frostbitten and war-torn kingdom of Blashyrkh and its sovereign, THE MIGHTY RAVENDARK. Fuck you, I know it's corny. But it's pretty hard to understand anyway, in Abbath's gravely growl that sounds like "GROARGH GROARGH GRIMNESS GRAAHR RAVENDARK BLARGH RARGH BLACKNESS AND COLD" which is awesome, so it really doesn't matter that the subject matter is easy to mock. It just sounds cool. Oh yeah, Horgh. Horgh's drumming really kicked things up a few notches. Blast beats aplenty, but he plays with a lot more groove than their other drummers and is generally just a lot more interesting to listen to in addition to keeping better time. Abbath had played drums on their other records prior to Horgh's joining, and they had touring drummers, but really Horgh is zillions of times better than they were. Abbath played everything else on the record, which is the guitars and bass and the synthesizers they added in an intro or two, and in the middle of a couple of songs for that classic european glorious "AAAAHHHHHHH" sound like when the sky opens up and something is revealed. There are lots of changes in all the songs, lots of good riffs and apocalyptic heaviness. This is the Immortal album I usually listen to. Every single song is fucking rad, every fucking note is great, and coming from a frozen land myself, the winteriness of it makes me happy. Immortal just came out with a new one a couple weeks ago. I need to pick it up. Carry on, Abbath, Demonaz, and Horgh. You guys rule.

KARP - Self titled LP

2009-09-25T16:38:00.001-07:00

One of the things people don't get is that it is actually called "Self titled LP" and not "KARP".
KARP stands for "Kill All Redneck Pricks", since the band was from Tumwater, WA, and there are tons of rednecks in that vicinity. They formed in the early 90s and kicked ass until the end of the decade, when Jared went on to sing for the amazing TIGHT BROTHERS FROM WAY BACK WHEN, hooting and hollering and proudly shaking a tambourine. But back to KARP and the album at hand, here. It fucking rules. It is sludgy playing with crispy guitar tones. The drumming is fucking crazy double bass drum shit kickery. Wish it were clearer in the recording, though. Damn low budget studios. This album is sludgier than other stuff they did, in a Kyuss sort of vein. It's a whole lot less laid back, though, and it's generally aggressive and crazy and awesome and it starts off with "Bacon industry", which is just amazing to hear as it gets rolling and then the cries of "we're coming after you all" which sets the stage for all the awesomeness that follows. It's easy to imagine these guys dismembering rednecks and burning down their trailers like a bunch of stoner vikings when you listen to this.

THIS IS SOME FUCKIN' RAWK.

Gentleman Reg - Jet Black

2009-09-08T20:36:00.001-07:00

I heard this really swell song on the CBC radio 3 weekly top 30 podcast a while back and it was this song called "How we exit" and it had a pretty good tempo and all that and a good hook and the changes were pretty good and it was one of those "I should investigate further" sorts of deals. So, one investigation, several listens, and one very run on sentence later, "Jet Black" is a towering triumph of and monumental tribute to the word "meh". Man, how fucking underwhelming can you get? "How we exit" is pretty good and I can see why it was a single. There are a couple more songs that honestly sound like hand me downs from Aimee Mann, and those have their good points, though I wouldn't call them great. Then there's "We're in a thunderstorm" which starts out with some guitar harmonics in a neat sort of pattern and then it turns into REALLY REALLY blah disco. Those are the high points. The rest is as ignorable as a crumpled paper cup sitting on its side next to an overflowing trash can. You never notice the traces of coffee left or even the smear of lipstick around the edge. It's just some crap, why should anyone care?

HATE IT! part 11 - The tragically hip - Road apples

2009-09-02T19:00:00.001-07:00

Wow, this is my 3rd go at getting this post up. I guess someone at google must really like these guys. I think there are too many warm fuzzies floating around this blog lately, so it's time to call shenanigans on some garbage. Well, these guys set the bar awfully low when they called their album "Road apples", but they didn't manage to live up even to that. According to Wikipedia, "The album is often cited by fans and critics as the band's finest work." I remember when this came out the critics were all stoked on it. Then I heard it and I couldn't for the life of me understand why they thought it was so good, or how anyone could get a job as a critic when they had such obvious defects in their judgement. This is the worst album of 1991. Think about that. Think about what came out in 1991 and Gerardo and Color me badd and everything else that happened (isn't that when Celine Dion made the scene, more or less?) and drink that in for just a minute, and then think about what it means when I say this is the worst album of 1991. Just think about what that means.

Gert Wilden and Orchestra - Schulmädchen report

2009-09-02T15:55:00.000-07:00

OH man oh man oh man. This. This record, man. When it first came out in 1996, the local college radio station got a copy which it never played, but since I spent a fair amount of time over there, I was able to give it a listen and it was glorious. I eventually put it out of my mind and years later it popped into my head. "Oh! You need this! It's soooo good!" so I did, and again promptly forgot about it for the most part until today. So now a little backstory about this: Gert Wilden is (was?) a pop-orchestra leader in the vein of Hugo Montenegro back in the 60s. He was hired in 1970 to provide the soundtracks for a series of teen sex exploitation films known as "Schulmädchen Report". They made their way to the states eventually, playing in grindhouse theaters and eventually getting banned because some of the 16 year olds getting exploited were actually 16 year olds getting exploited. 20-odd years later some awesome purveyor of awesomeness awesomely awesomed his awesome way into putting together an awesome compilation of awesome music from this awesome series of awesomely sleazy sleaze. It's a little heavy on the blues, which usually will make me shake my fist at the heavens and scream vulgarities until my voice gives, but here it's appropriate. There is a lot of fuzz-laden guitar and shit-hot organ. String sections and harmonicas. Horns and drums. A lot of the fun of this album is listening to it and trying to imagine what kind of grainy looking filth it accompanied. The second track, "Follow Me", is pretty much what you'd imagine a room full of naked stoned teenage girls would sound like if it were music. Title theme (II) is lovely elevator music with wistful voices going "aaaaahhhh" over a seductive trumpet with some harp thrown in for good measure in some spots. "Dirty beat" has some awesome dirty guitar work and a strutting sort of groove that makes me imagine some girl getting fucked by a guy in a chicken suit. He's got his hands on his hips and he's bobbing his head. Don't ask me why this is, but I swear to god it makes sense if you hear the song. "Getting blue" is sleazy and greasy with great stink-guitar. "Dirty boy" is great. "Ecstasy blues" is jazzy and cheesy in all the right spots. "Sexy girls" could almost be an Enka song. "Hot dance" is great go-go music. "Dirty dancing" is pure toe-tapping cheese with moaning over the top of it and some flute for good measure. Finally, "Little girls" is pure cheese with harmonica and "la la la" going on and you listen to it all "Man, did he REALLY call this 'Little girls'? I'm kind of bummed but it's actually really awesome that he did". The arrangements are brilliant, especially when you imagine them with the tits added the way the music was meant to be enjoyed. The tits and the orchestra together cause the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. Overall it's 19 tracks of grandiose german porn music from the 70s. HOW CAN YOU LOSE???

Ass burners - Blasting poo armageddon

2009-07-21T02:12:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me would know that as soon as I saw this I was bound to give it a listen and a review. Obviously, shit-themed metal is going to tickle my fancy. It should come as no surprise that this is "novelty" music. But since it's pretty much all in french, I could pretend it isn't... except for when it goes from some seriously righteous riffage into a fucking polka. I mean, on the one hand I don't think there's much room to be disappointed by that, and they actually do it pretty well, but on the other hand, I was just rocking out and digging it and only understanding every 4th word and it was fine until it changed. So I dunno. With such fecal gems as "scheiße wurst", "Proctologue", "Tout dans l'anus", and "Anal speed dating", you pretty much get what you expect. The riffage is great, these dudes are a surprisingly good metal act. They throw in their "other genre" bits with a fair amount of sophistication, though I still don't care for that. Hearing shit metal in french is pretty cool. Check 'em out if you're feeling sophomoric and not too picky about things. It's kind of worth it. Kind of.

Happiness - Tar... Feathers split

2009-07-09T03:42:00.000-07:00

Well, I didn't expect this to happen. I was directed to a website where musicians put their stuff up for free download. It has a searchable database, but mostly you have to poke around and click on links and stream things to see if any of them are worth checking out in further detail. I clicked on this one because the site shows you a little flag where the band is from and this flag was Swedish, and I feel like there's just something in the water in Sweden that makes for good tunes, so I went ahead and just downloaded this. It's a 4 song EP. So 3 of the songs I like pretty well. The odd one out, called "The C.I.A." has a lot to be said for it, but it ends up running too long and is kind of overwrought in a "Indie flavor of the month" sort of way, so the good sort of comes up short. However, comma, the rest is pretty decent. The first song, "Look at that rabbit go", sort of shows us what to expect throughout: Early 80s synth-pop/new wavery with guitars, and it's a pretty decent tune with a nifty drum line and good interplay between the guitars and keys. The 2nd track is kind of too much, and the 3rd, "Neighbourhood", is a nice shuffly song with a good synth hook and good guitars. The last cut, though, "Feet fail me again" is the best on the EP. It has an awesome guitar intro that sets the tone perfectly, then it turns into what could easily fit on a Talk Talk record with its moodiness giving way to burbly synths then back to sullen guitar parts with Cure-ish singing throughout. I can think of a couple people I know who read this blog who will think I'm way off the reservation on this one, but whatever. Listen to it here. It's no skin off anyone's ass if you do. I hope I hear more from these guys.

Takako Minekawa - Fun 9

2009-07-03T02:45:00.000-07:00

This is a really good record. It's one of those deals that you either love or hate, though. She's said to be part of the "Shibuya-kei" scene, although that moniker never really did a lot to describe any of the musicians ascribed to it. She's a synth player who writes songs about cats and numbers and stuff. Usually her songs are driven by some old-fashioned drum machine, and have layers of synth come in and maybe some reverby guitar or something. More often than not she sings in a very childishly high register, so a lot of people will be turned off right there. Whatever, I say. It's all part of her charm. She's just not interested in adhering to any conventions at all, so she whips up some bleepy soundscape and sings about something weird, and the best part of it all is that at the end of it all you notice that you've not only been entertained, but that you're very relaxed. The first track, "Gently waves", is 2 minutes of multitracked a capella with no lyrics, and which doesn't feel a capella at all. Then she takes you through textures and the occasional more structured pop kind of song, but nothing is ever derivative of anything. She plays with the stereo format in ways most musicians forgot you could. It's a great album for headphones. The album ends with "Fancy work funk" which is not funk music, nor is it suited for work. This album is like rolling around in some clouds for a while and then landing in your bed with a bag full of candy. Drugs just make it more so. It floats in, plays with you, and floats away again, and you say "I shall check out more of her music" or else you just say "what the fuck? That is unlistenable" and put on Bob Seger while I tell you that I have met many people in my life, and that you are not among them. True story, ask Ira about it.

The Boo Radleys - Giant Steps

2009-06-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

Man, I just dusted this one off for the first time in at least a decade, and now I remember why I loved it so much when it came out in 1993. It's awesome! The Boo Radleys were a british band who started off as a shoegaze outfit, making washes of sound, but who ended up a fairly upright britpop sounding group. The beauty of this album, which is by far my favorite of theirs, is that it came out when they were in between their phases, or before they stopped doing drugs, but were beginning to see the value of a sober head. Whichever. Giant Steps, instead of being a bunch of trippy washes of sound, or a bunch of composed, neat packages of pop music, is a bunch of together-enough pop songs vibrating and squooshing and zooming around all trippily without ever fuzzing out into bullshittery. It is the happy medium that doesn't compromise for either side. It is the golden ticket. It is tuneful pop with reverb drenched distortion giving way to trumpets and dub tricks and the occasional electronic texture. Their next album, Wake up, had all the fun bits shorn away save for the trumpets here and there, and while it was good, it was clear that what made the band great was now mostly missing. So if you like your 90s brit stuff, listen to this. It's like putting peanut butter on your chocolate ice cream. It's that eye-opening and delicious. Yes, "Lazarus" is magnificent, but so's the rest of it, and "Rodney King" mixes influences like few songs have ever managed to. There are 17 tracks on this, and all of them are well worth your time.

Architecture in Helsinki - In case we die

2009-06-10T19:27:00.001-07:00

If Arcade fire tried to be a prog-rock band, they'd be these guys, and they'd still suck.

Vivian Girls

2009-06-10T17:02:00.001-07:00

Oh, man, am I glad for this band and what they do. I can't say that they're the first batch of musicians to sound the way they do, and they probably won't be the last, but they cater to an underserved market: Me. Me and my ilk. People who like Throwing Muses and Unrest. People who like reverb-drenched guitars and a rhythm section that percolates. People who like a band that sounds perfectly lovely when they record sorta lo-fi. People who got the shit end of the stick when "college rock" turned to "Alternative" and the creativity was mined out of the genre (such as it was).

"So what do they actually sound like, bubba dean?"

They sound awesome. They are 3 ladies who write short, simple pop songs and then they play them. Thing is, they are at once ethereal and raw, bubbly and melancholy. It's sort of hard to nail down. The drums are punkish but not abrasive, the bass is simple but not slouchy, and the vocals are gentle and layered. The guitar has lots of reverb jangle and is both raggedy and amorphously smooth. Everything about the music is an exercise in opposites. It's a throwback to music 20 years old and at the same time, it sounds fresh because music like this was always sort of a niche market.

"So what do they actually sound like, Ramon?"

Fuck, they sound pretty damn good to me. Get the damn record and see for yourself.

Robert Savage - The adventures of Robert Savage Vol. 1

2009-05-17T18:29:00.001-07:00

OK, guys, sorry for being so absent lately. Laziness makes me not do stuff. Anyway, on to the task at hand. Robert Savage, if the very brief wikipedia article is to be believed, is quite the anomaly. So how do anomalies sound? Well, in a lot of places, this one sounds a lot like ZZ top did on Degüello, guitar wise. Vocally, and at times in terms of songwriting, it's a kind of standard psychedelic blues-rock album, but it breaks out of that hippie mold enough of the time that it doesn't matter. Frankly, if you like "the stink of a too-loud electric guitar", in the words of Frank Zappa, you will like this album a lot. I am personally beside myself at the guitar work on this record, having peed in many a pair of pants at its stinky, greasy strains. There's just a beautiful sleazy swinging groove through the entire record, and the bass and drums are extremely well-played and push and pull with the guitar wonderfully. And at times, they throw in odd-time abstractions to keep you on your toes.

My favorite track on it is "Save us from the cyclops", a song that seems inspired by the old Ray Harryhausen Sinbad movie and goes "There's a giant CYCLOPS, and he'll TERRORIZE YOU".

Track this down.

Stereo Total / Leslie and the LYs - Wonder ballroom, Portland, OR, 4/1/09

2009-04-02T00:54:00.000-07:00

Holy shit, dudes. I got invited to go see the Stereo Total show. "OK," I said, "I like those guys well enough, that should be fun." And it was. Stereo Total played a fun set full of the kooky songs they're known for playing, and played it well. Now, I'd been led to believe that they were the headliners, and the ticket reflected this with "STEREO TOTAL" on it in bold type. In fact, another band took to the stage after them. It was Leslie and the LYs, whom I hadn't heard of before, but I had seen a picture of singer Leslie Hall in an amazing gold spandex suit before. So she took to the stage with a couple of backup singers dressed as white tigers and videos of her songs projected onto a screen behind her. No words I can put down will ever do this show justice, but suffice it to say that it rocked the shit out of my fuck. She sings electro songs about gem sweaters and does karate chops. She dedicated a song to Madmartigan and proceded to sing the plot of the movie "Willow". She sang a song about shooting zombies in the head, and on the record it's a duet with Elvira. Fuckin' Elvira! She burned the motherfucker down and closed it out by breakdancing to Shania Twain. She reinvented fun in the form of spandex pants and hideous sweaters covered in rhinestones and puffy paint, high kicking and making bird noises. Look her up on YouTube, and you'll be able to watch the amazing videos she made and showed projected behind her. Also, here's a clip of her performance in Vancouver, BC the night before I saw her. It's amazing.

HATE IT! part 10 - Mick fucking Hucknall

2009-03-17T18:54:00.001-07:00

THIS fucking asshole. He's given us a quarter-century of pure garbage, and in the process has gone from licking up Sade's sloppy seconds from the studio floor to resorting to using samples of Hall and Oates. That voice of his is front-loaded as hell and used for evil. Always one to attempt blending the latest in technology and musical stylings with "Northern soul", (a combination doomed to sound horrible) he has failed to create anything good and has left little but annoyance in his wake. His defenders would call him a voice for the ages, but I think "wrinkled ginger cunt", to use british parlance, is more appropriate. Eat shit, Mick Hucknall. The face he's making in this photo is the exact face he'll make when my dream finally comes true and I kick him right in the nuts.

Neko Case - Middle Cyclone

2009-03-09T21:39:00.000-07:00

So, this one's been out for a week now. I got to hear it streaming on NPR for a week or so prior to its release, and dutifully went and got my copy when it came out. Neko Case has made a trend of her albums subtly improving from one to the next, while all being excellent. I guess it's a pretty fine distinction to make between being disappointed and feeling let down, but let's say this is a bit of a letdown when viewed against the fibonacci-like thread of her entire catalogue up to this point. Don't take that to mean I don't like this, though. Like I said, I dutifully got a copy as soon as I could, and I did so because it's still a fine album. I listened and listened again, and when my feelings on the matter were clear, I decided this: Her strength in performing is at its peak when the songs aren't too slow, and this is a slower album than the perfect "Fox confessor brings the flood". Of the 15 songs, 4 of 'em could have been on her last album. 2 of 'em were covers, (a first for her) Sparks' "never turn your back on mother earth" and Harry Nilsson's "don't forget me", which I saw fit to turn my back on and forget, respectively. One is a field recording of frogs croaking at night and lasts for a half hour. I really like that one, actually, but I also like the sound of Sonic Youth plucking bedsprings in Wharton Tiers' basement, so be advised. The remaining songs are all quite good. The remaining songs are all too slow for me. Almost all of them pick up at some point in the song, which I like. A couple don't, which is meh.
The title track sounds almost like a lullaby, and then a damn music box comes in. Don't try so hard to put me to sleep, Neko! Still, it's a good song. Everything she wrote for this album is good. It's just a whisker too slow to be truly great to my ears. This one straddles the razor's edge of A and B material for me. What to do? Oh, I'll give it two letter grades. That'll work.

HATE IT! Part 9 - Bonfire Madigan

2009-03-03T23:17:00.000-08:00

I think this photo does a decent job of capturing the shittiness of Madigan Shive. "But who is she," you may ask, "and why do you hate her so?" The answers are simple: She is an excremental and talentless "cellist" who writes music so hackneyed and rudimentary, every bunch of high schoolers who have played loud instruments together in the last 45 years have cast aside the very same riffs she plays (poorly) on her cello because said riffs just weren't up to their own low standards, and I hate her because she is not only a prime perpitrator of feculence, but she is also head over heels in love with herself. Behold the bio from her own website: cackle at her incessant name-dropping and sad attempts to boost her own credentials as someone of import. Lady, shut the fuck up about yourself. You wheedle away incompetently on your oversized fiddle while screeching inanely about your vagina. I couldn't care less about your views of the world, gender, and patriarchy; you haven't got the lyrical ability to make your ideas interesting as songs. You do too poor a job at what you do to capture my interest in what you have to say. When I want to hear ranting over noise, I usually just put on a Crass CD. YOU CAN'T MAKE MUSIC FOR SHIT. You're just rehashing Ani DiFranco's trip but without the instrumental, lyrical, or songwriting ability and substituting yowliness in its stead. That's not cool at all. What might be cool is if you wrote your thoughts out as essays, if you can pull off the verbal articulation thing, and judging by your lyrics, I have my doubts. I might find essays you write to be interesting to read, or even good. This shit, though, makes me want to puke in your face and fart on your dinner. Kindly stop. You're withering my stirrups and anvils, and making a colossal fool of yourself in the process.

I hesitate to pepper a review (even in HATE IT!) of such overtly feminist music with terms such as "screeching" and "yowly", because many women take umbrage to anything feminism-related being associated with the word "shrill". I'm not just dismissing her as some harpy with hairy pits. This is legitimately awful stuff, and the "shrill" shoe fits it perfectly. Cope. When Madigan Shive makes music, the whole world loses. Anyone with two good ears dies a little when they hear this trash, and only the blowhardiest of the blowhards can ignore the pathologically inept and criminally poor execution of her music to actually get around to caring enough to align themselves with it. This fuckery gives even Ida a run for its shitty money. A resounding "FUCK YOU" to this nonsense, I rate it "Piss poor minus".

Kaki King is not touring anyplace near where I plan to be for the forseeable future

2009-03-03T22:32:00.000-08:00

And It makes me oh-so sad. She'll be playing Bonnaroo in June, but big schmeal. I'm not going to Tennessee to simply stew in a crowd chock full of annoyances with two legs each. Bumbershoot made me swear festivals off forever. My last ever was in 2001 and I only went because of David Lee Roth. If you happen to be in the vicinity, though, by all means, go see her. If you're in Australia or Europe, she can be seen throughout march. Check the listings here.

Otherwise, here's a semi-asinine "interview clip" to look at. It features her music, which is superb.
I include this in hopes that people will hear it and want to buy her records and go to her shows.
I tried embedding it, but it's too wide for this blog's rather restrictive layout and I didn't want to fuck with it. I don't get paid to. Click on the link, dude.

Finally, here is one of her concerts, in its not-quite entirety. Here is a review of that very show. My own opinion is that she was at the end of the tour, worn out, had an off night, and was under such a time constraint that she never got to loosen up and hit her stride. That said, it's still well worth a listen. She's fucking amazing.

More love for Neko Case

2009-03-01T20:34:00.000-08:00

On Sound Opinions on Chicago Public Radio, there's a podcast with Neko Case talking and playing some songs from her new album, Middle Cyclone, which comes out in a couple of days.

If you want to just download it and listen at your leisure, you may utilize this conveniently provided link.

If you'd like to listen to streaming tracks from Middle Cyclone, you can accomplish that by clicking here.

If you want to hear her play a full, awesome concert, click here.

If you like what you hear, go buy her stuff. Don't be a cheap ass and download it, either. She deserves to get paid.

Michael Jackson - Off the wall

2009-02-22T20:00:00.000-08:00

This record fucking rules. Even the couple of tracks that don't totally rule still have redeeming qualities. Usually, when someone thinks of "the good old days when MJ was still awesome and still black", they think of Thriller. And Thriller is great! But this is the first of his great albums. Thriller was tragically the last. He'd done a handful of solo records before, which sucked. This one was his first with Quincy Jones, which made all the difference. Jones brought in all the awesome studio dudes who got busy awesoming out, especially Louis Johnson on the bass. Anyone who knows bass players knows that he's the funk master whose shoulders dudes like Norwood Fisher stand on. He's all over this shit, too, thumping and popping and making you shake your ass. This album is just what disco ought to be: danceable, infectious, and fun. There's a lull toward the end, which is the couple of tracks that don't rule. Still, Stevie Wonder wrote one, and the other one is about getting dumped by Karen Carpenter, so I can appreciate the former and cackle about the latter, because I have a morbid fascination with all things Karen. Then MJ picks shit back up and hits you in the head with it like a big slimy fish on "Burn this disco out".

If you can't enjoy this, you are Jesse Helms.

Kate Nash - Made of bricks

2009-02-17T01:00:00.001-08:00

So I decided a while back to hear what was happening in the world of music. I had a subscription to SPIN I don't even remember how, but I had it and it talked about stuff and said that some of it was good and some of it was bad. With a skeptical heart and low expectations, I picked the glowingest review that month and decided to give the album in question a listen. And thus I came to hear Kate Nash's album "Made of bricks". It should be called "Made of bricks of shit".
SPIN raved about how this 20 year old songstress crafted songs on a piano and sang about 20 year old stuff but did a really good job of it. Well, the songs were really just crafted by her producer. The piano playing that happens sounded like she was reheating "heart and soul" and let's face it, we all got sick of hearing that one at school assemblies when we were like 8, so no props there. There really isn't that much piano, because she can't really play it very well, so the producer threw together some "hip" and "retro" styled synth parts to carry much of the album. Oh, hooray. Lyrically, yeah, it's a 20 year old singing about 20 year old shit. Not particularly well, not particularly poorly. The 20 year old ship has long since sailed for me, so I couldn't care less about anything she has to say. Even "Shit song", which one might rightly assume I'd be intrigued by (and I was, until I heard it live up to its title) was a vapid song about how 20 year old dudes are relationship idiots. Doye, Kate, but so are 20 year old women, so shut yer gob, already. Pretty much every song has 8 bars somewhere in it that sound good. And she has a pretty good voice, to be fair. But the only tune on the record I can listen to straight through is "Foundations". It's kinda good, but way too slick, and you know she didn't do anything more than sing over whatever her producer told her to sing over, so it's hard to cut her a break for it. It's funny to me that SPIN purveys this stuff as the hip, indie, alternative, smart thing, when it so plainly just isn't. Whatever. I guess that's why I never noticed when my subscription lapsed.

Neko Case - Fox confessor brings the flood

2009-02-10T01:08:00.000-08:00

How the fuck? Seriously, how the fuck can one person be this fucking good? I'm not even going to try answering that, but suffice it to say, she sloughs off more talent when she scratches her head than most musicians (even good ones) can manage to muster at any single point in their lives. My little love affair with Neko Case started back in the early/mid 90s when she played drums on the first Cub record. She quit after that, but I knew who she was at that point. She dropped off my radar for a couple of years, and all of a sudden she was in town playing country music. Turned out she'd spent summers with her grandma listening to Loretta Lynn records, just a few miles down the road from me. When she started coming to town playing her country, I'd just rediscovered my own love of the genre by scoring Conway Twitty LPs from the free bin in front of the record store across the street from a bar I frequented. I'd scoop 'em up drunk and take them home for a listen. She was headlining shows in short order, and her reputation was growing fast. Like, really fucking fast. Sure enough, I went and saw. She was fantastic. But you know what? She was just learning to fly at that point. Fox confessor brings the flood, compared to her earlier, wonderful stuff, is kind of like a unified field theory as opposed to the earlier work's discovery of the mechanics of gravity. Her lyrics are on par with any of the greats, and the music is a cut above most of those same greats'. It has its country twang, sure. I'd really hesitate to call her music country at this point, though. It's at once accessible and familiar, but while you can point out elements of any number of styles, it would really be a disservice to categorize it. Her voice is amazing and she belts shit out, and the overall effect is that you're dragged through melancholy and she makes you love every second. Her device is storytelling, and that's something you don't hear in music enough anymore. The album starts with a strange story, and becomes sadder as it progresses through the songs, ending with a really sad about coming back to Tacoma, WA. If you know that area, the whole atmosphere of the song actually becomes a tangible thing. She can make you see, hear, feel, taste, and smell every single fucking thing she wants you to, and leaves you humbled for the experience. There's a richness in her music that's seldom encountered, and I really think that you have to have spent time in the northwest to fully get the impact, which I personally love. It's like being privy to a juicy secret that's out in the open but nobody can see. Don't let that discourage you from buying everything she's ever recorded, though.

I love this album so fucking hard. It's in my top 5. Maybe even top 3. She has a new album coming out in March. I won't even be surprised if she tops this one.

HA HA! part 3 - Dear every girl I went through the 6th and 7th grades with - I win

2009-02-05T23:07:00.000-08:00

(Originally posted in a somewhat less refined form on my Facebook page.)

HA! In your face! I told you! I knew it!

Remember when you were all "George Michael is dreamy!" and I'd come along and harsh your mellow by going "Aw, he's gay. You're wasting yer time"? And remember how you'd get all mad and throw stuff at me? And then remember how years later, I was right? Remember that? Because I do.

OK, so remember when I was all "the new kids suck" and you (all of you said this. ALL of you) were all "You're just jealous!" (which was ridiculous) and so I said "no I'm not, they suck. Plus they're totally gay"? Well, HA HA HA on you! Jonathan Knight IS gay! He has been outed! True, the Enquirer announced it, but note the salacious display of voyeured faggotry above, which I shamelessly swiped from them. SO: I was right! We rotten boys were 100% right. Every time we called them the "New fags on the block" we were speaking unfettered truth. Yes, Joey McIntyre was the chief whipping boy/lightning rod for unsubstantiated rumors of having semen pumped out of his stomach. Still, in the name of the 12 year olds we were, I claim this as a victory and a vindication 20 years overdue. "New fags on the block", implied homophobia be damned, is hereby declared legitimate. By me. Just because the shoe fits. Boy, does it feel good to declare that. Interesting note: Apparently he "realized he was gay" (meaning got turned gay) after dating Tiffany. OK, that was mean of me. But I have the feeling that he's not the only boy Tiffany helped to realize he was gay. And by that I refer to fey little boys singing "I think we're alone now" in their rooms when there didn't seem to be anyone around.

Learn this lesson well, and pass it to your daughters: When some rotten boy comes along and calls your little teen idol gay, HE'S RIGHT. He may just be saying it to be rotten and make you mad (in my case at least), but he's right. Best just to accept it.

PS

HA HA HA!

PPS

That goes double for you, NICOLE COOPER.

Shuggie Otis - Inspiration information

2009-01-14T19:02:00.001-08:00

Aw yeah. Who's this dude? He's a mostly-forgotten funk wunderkind of the early 70s who took too long making this album and was subsequently written off by the music industry as a prima donna. He's the son of the noted blues and R&B bandleader (and sometime politician and pastor) Johnny Otis. He played bass for Frank Zappa on "Peaches en regalia". He played almost every instrument on this album. He is pretty awesome. Anyway, the album. This is the re-release of "Inspiration information", his 1974 opus, with a handful of tracks from his previous offering, 1971's "Freedom flight" thrown in for good measure. So what's it sound like, then? Well, it's lazy, lounging, weed-smoking funk for a sunny afternoon. Sometimes it sounds cinematic and sometimes it sounds, well, rural somehow. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a Hohner organ in the living room, the kind with footpedals and all kinds of switches and a rudimentary drum machine with preset rhythms like "beguine" and "waltz" and a tempo knob. I figured out pretty early on that you could get some crazy beats by pressing down more than one button at a time, and so did Shuggie Otis. Several songs have these crude early drum machine beats. Many have the "living room organ" sound all over them. In a way, he was making the lo-fi electronica of his time. He dabbles in jazz and plays drums and really makes the bass sound good. There's some electric piano too, but just for some atmosphere in places. He does funk on an acoustic guitar. It makes sense when you hear it, but who'd have thought to do it like that? This album was way ahead of its time. He basically invented ambient electronica on acoustic instruments and and slipped it through in a wrapper of experimental funk, like you'd hide your dog's worm pills in some peanut butter. Pick this one up and give it a listen.

Also, he played in "Snatch and the poontangs" when he was a teenager. With his dad the pastor. People need to know that because it's awesome.

Lastly, here's his song "Ice cold daydream" set to some great old stock footage.

Grammar rant

2009-01-12T02:02:00.000-08:00

You know what bugs me? People who can't wrap their heads around their own native language bug me. It drives me nanners. To wit: "Xavier". Why is it that I've only ever met maybe 2 people who have demonstrated the correct pronunciation? I once worked for a Mr. E. X. Harkins who mispronounced his own middle name. I knew a guy who named his kid Xavier and didn't know how to fucking say the name. So I'll put it here. For the record. To be immortalized just so somewhere out in the ether of the internet, a glimmer or truth shall shine. It is not pronounced "Ex-savior", like you just told Jesus to take a hike because he's not welcome around these parts anymore. It is pronounced just like it's spelled. "Zavier". You know how "x" sounds like a z at the beginning of a word? Like "xerox" or "xerxes"? Yeah, that's exactly how it works. Compare it to pronouncing "Robert" as "Arr-obert". Same thing. You couldn't figure that out, huh? Too bad. Perhaps you ought to be permanently institutionalized with others who are hoplessly, helplessly retarded to the point of being unable to function even minimally when so much as exposed to society even for a trip to the zoo. You're too stupid to see the antelopes. You don't deserve to. Now we can move on to the difference between "you're" and "your". Also, "there", "their", and "they're" causes people problems, as do "its" and "it's". I'm not actually gonna go into that shit. Here's the rule of thumb: If you've reached double digits in age and you aren't sure which to use, cover yourself in gas and set yourself on fire. See, it's simple. And if you pluralize nouns by adding an " apostrophe ess " (or " 's " , as it's [Please note proper use of "it's", the contracted form of "it is" or "it has" as opposed to "its" which is the posessive of "it". Also note proper bracketing technique.] known) you may send me the entire contents of your bank account(s) before proceeding to climb into a woodchipper while on fire. I'm only trying to help.

Van Halen - Van Halen II

2009-01-08T16:56:00.001-08:00

So they went and did it. They blew the roof off of the faltering rock scene with their whooping displays of showmanship, virtuosic riffage, Michael Anthony's fantastic background vocals, and a whole bunch of really tight pants. So what does a band do next? This! This is what they do next, they do much the same thing, only this time it's even more of a party. Plenty of hard rockers on this one, and Ed responds to "Eruption" with the classically tinged "Spanish fly". It's cut from the same cloth as their first, but there's just a bit more in the way of pop sensibility that comes through in the bridges and stuff. "Dance the night away" is just a try at writing a song that girls will like but that has enough rock in it not to get heckled. It works. "Somebody get me a doctor" is one of the rockingest riffs you've heard in your life, has an awesome solo, a crazy harmonic run, and is the very song that came on the radio immediately after I signed out of the army and played as I sped away off-post, never to return again. Talk about your life-affirming moments. "Beautiful girls" is stupid in all the right ways and everyone loves it no matter what. "Out of love again" features a second vocal track strictly for Dave to go "Woo!" on. Beautiful. Every song on this is solid. It's their best as far as I'm concerned. I used to ride around with my friend JJ in his van (that had a tuck-and-roll interior and a mirrored ceiling) listening to this album, mooning people and honking at girls and throwing our empty beers out the windows while smoke billowed out as well. There is no better soundtrack for that sort of thing, although ZZ Top's "Deguello" comes close. And no, I'm not even remotely making the Spiccoli high-jinks up. It happened.

!!!!!

2009-01-07T23:34:00.000-08:00

I came across this video on the Rad Dudes blog. As awful as it is, it's rather mystifying and I find myself quite impressed with this gentleman by the time it's over.

HATE IT! part 8 - Combat Rock

2009-01-06T23:29:00.001-08:00

I know, I know, I'm kicking them when they're down. 2 "hate it" posts in a row, about 2 Clash albums in a row. But Jesus, Mary and Sammy Hagar, Everything this band did after "London Calling" was just gawd-fucking-awful. This album alone has "Should I stay or should I go" and "Rock the casbah" on it, 2 of the stupidest songs in the history of creation. Like, stupider than anything Sam the sham and the Pharoahs with their "woolly bully" or Frankie Lymon and his teenagers ever released. And The Clash took those songs seriously. Seriously enough to try singing about the Iranian revolution, anyway. And those were the hits. In ancient China, there was a (quite righteous, actually) movement to destroy confucianism shortly after confucius croaked. It almost succeeded, but some wiseguy had a handful of scrolls tucked away inside a wall, and once the coast was clear, confucianism regained its footing and subsequently decimated eastern asia, and has deleterious effects there to this very day. I say let this album be the modern equivalent of those scrolls. Destroy every copy. Delete every file. Kill the surviving members of the band by burning at the stake, burn the sheet music and tablature. This fucking album is every bit as horrid as any offering Richard Marx or Desmond Child ever shat out. And look at what was happening in music then: Diamond Dave was singing for Van Halen. How could anyone willingly put themselves through this circle-jerk when they could listen to stupid music that didn't take itself seriously and was infinitely more fun? Clash fans in 1982 should have been thrown in a gas chamber. Stupid is supposed to hurt. 2 minuses on this F.

HATE IT! part 7 - Sandinista!

2009-01-06T17:16:00.000-08:00

Oh, The Clash. Now here's a band I can sink my fangs into. My hollow, venomous cobra fangs.

"Gee, why do you hate The Clash so much?"

Really, I don't, strictly speaking. I have always had a real problem with them being labelled a Punk band. They damn sure started that way, but by the 3rd album the punk had been worked out of their systems and they had gotten down to the business of just making good rock music. Somewhere after that, however, they started believing their own press and bought into the whole "only band that matters" label. What did that get us? A triple-album. OK, people look back to the 70s and groan at the self indulgence of double albums (especially live ones) and wonder what the fuck went wrong. Now how the hell can anyone justify a triple album? Not even from Frank Zappa will I put up with that kind of shit. Especially when it's largely political bla-de-blah. I almost never will stand for politics in my music, whether I agree with said politics or not. Perhaps the greatest crime committed here, though, is the fact that "Police on my back" is the one and only good song to be culled from one hour, fourty-four minutes, and twenty-nine seconds of what is otherwise an exercise in self-indulgence, masturbation, and enjoying the smell of one's own farts. And it's an Eddy Grant cover. At 3:15, that leaves 1:41:14 of pure, unequivocally feculent trash. How into yourself do you have to be to do that to people? And guess what? They never lifted themselves back up from their slide into shitsville. This album is a headstone for what this band used to be as much as it's a triple-sized monument to their own willful failure. Queen had naked midgets with mountainous trays heaped with coke strapped to their heads, The Clash had the pleasure of listening to themselves bray about politics for almost 2 hours. They couldn't even get extravagance right. Fucking assholes.

A Charlie Brown Christmas - The Vince Guaraldi trio

2008-12-22T20:36:00.000-08:00

Yeah, more Christmas stuff here. So what? I have a couple of Christmas music favorites, one of which is the Beatles' 1967 fan club christmas record, (the super long, weird version with the game show and commercial jingles) which is nothing short of aural dadaism at its finest. I also like that "Sleigh ride" song. Sue me. But Vince Guaraldi's music for the Charlie Brown Christmas special is by far my favorite, and it's a whole album as opposed to the odd song here and there. Why do I like it so much? Well, I know you've heard it. Everyone and his cat knows "Linus and Lucy" and "Skating". There are some standards, such as "O Tannenbaum" and "Greensleeves" and "What child is this". And his interpretations are fantastic. I don't care much for " Für Elise", but that's what Schroeder was playing, so it was included. I really like "Christmas time is here", which has several versions on this remaster. I like the one with the chorus the best. It's the most Charlie Brown-y. And I do like me some Charlie Brown. Really, it's just nice to hear the understated jazziness of Guaraldi's playing come across in a genre that includes barking dogs and Kenny G's insistent ejaculations of schmaltzy smoothitude, and that usually tops out quality-wise with Bob and Doug McKenzie's 12 days of christmas. I mean, would you rather hear something good, or another asshole singing "someone please kick my ass bah-rum-pum-pum-pum"? I also reccommend his other fine work, lovingly played with horn-rimmed glasses and a fine bandito mustache. More than just merely unoffensive, this is some really good stuff. Would have been an A, but all those alternate takes on this remaster lose my attention.

Christmas cheer

2008-12-20T17:07:00.000-08:00

I generally don't like Christmas. I used to be really into it, and I have realized that what makes the difference to me is snow. Well, it's been snowing like a sonofabitch lately, and so I've been generally more accepting of the seasonal cheese. In honor of that, here is one of my inexplicable guilty pleasures. Feel free to throw verbal tomatoes in the comments, I don't care. Enjoy this Newport cigarette commercial set to the incomparable voice of the inimitable George Michael accompanied by "the other guy", Andrew Ridgeley. No, I am not ashamed.

Alice Cooper - Killer

2008-12-11T08:51:00.000-08:00

What a great album. Can you imagine being a 14 year old in 1971 and picking this one up? With its greasy looking cover and a song about dead babies. Man, what fun. Anyway, it opens up with "under my wheels" and the only time is slows down is on "desperado" which is allegedly about Jim Morrison, but is still pretty good once it gets going. 8 tracks, 5 of which are classic Alice, but there are a couple of rock suites, namely "Halo of flies" and "Killer". They were dabbling in prog, and neither make for very good prog tunes, but fortunately the band was so ill-suited for it that they both come across as "let's play with some stuff that sounds cool". This being the early-ish days of stereo recording, people played with that format a lot more, and they did it to good effect here. Bob Ezrin produced this, which kind of shows, but in a kind of "tried to wrestle control away and was overpowered" kind of way that plays out well in the capable hands of the Alice Cooper band. This is one of those non-classic rock radio, non-hipster co-opted, Non-critically acclaimed, under the radar, old, good rock records that if you ever see a cute girl buying, grab on to her and don't let go, because she just passed the litmus test with flying colors.

The greatest music video was one of the first

2008-11-14T01:24:00.000-08:00

We've all seen it, and most likely some of us have forgotten it completely. There are several versions, most shorter than this one, but I like this because it has the most jazzy solos, the most psychedelic scenery, and also "ee-levennnn". It kind of makes me wish I smoked dope. Let's face it, there were times when Sesame Street brought the funk, and this is some fine ass funk indeed, courtesy of the Pointer Sisters, of all people. Anyway, enjoy.

Since I'm talking up Sesame Street funk, here's the feelgood king of them all:

Yeah!

Supergrass - I should coco

2008-11-13T02:20:00.001-08:00

Man, I played the shit out of this album for the first 2 years I had it. I've hardly listened to it since, but decided it deserved a dusting off and reevaluation. The verdict is "I still like this album lots and I can see why I played it so much". Basically, it's a 40 minute long PhD in hooks and lovely rambling bass lines. I hear the Jam in it. I hear the Kinks in it. I hear snotty kids writing snotty songs in it. But most of all, I hear good, fun, catchy music played well. "Caught by the fuzz" has a nice freaked out feel to it, appropriate to the subject matter. "Mansize rooster" rocks, and has a good title to boot. You've heard "Alright" in commercials for universal studios, but after the first verse it starts being about smoking cigarettes and getting laid, so it's forgiven. The twee delivery of a song about being scuzzy is perfect. "She's so loose" kinda doesn't make sense, but it's evidently about blowjobs and how slutty some woman is, so that's pretty good, and the music's good. Speaking of blowjobs, you probably noticed that I put a pic of the back up instead of the front. This is because I've long held a theory and secret hope that Danny Goffey, the one in the middle, is getting his knob slobbed by some 16 year old girl just below the frame, and is considering tipping his beer out over her head. The other 2 just don't want to look. I'm just going by the expression on his face, but I think it's a plausible theory. Anyway, if you feel like listening to something british, snide, uptempo and well-done, put this one on for a spin.

The Tight Bros from way back when - Runnin' thru my bones

2008-11-05T21:38:00.000-08:00

Since I feel like continuing the theme of dumb, fun rock n roll, here's one for you. The late, lamented Tight Bros were some guys from Olympia, WA who got excited about playing exciting music, so play it they did. They put out a couple of really good albums too, before they stopped being excited about it and stopped. So what does this sound like? Awesomeness, that's what. Because they played simple rock music, they were inevitably compared to AC/DC, which was pretty inaccurate. They sounded like the drunk teenagers down the block that would play in the garage and that you were scared of when you were 12, except that they knew how to play, how to rock, when to shout "HOO!", and how to strut around shaking a tambourine and actually look cool doing it. They also knew how to pull off wearing a pilgrim hat, how to get people stoked, and most importantly, how to write a perfect, unpretentious, noisy, fun rock song that makes you want to jump around like an idiot, make rock poses on the furniture, and then go flush cherry bombs down a toilet. This album is full of just those kind of songs. IT IS EXCITING. If you can listen to "Hayseed rock" without turning into Ted Logan and playing some air guitar with a stupid look of excited bliss on your face, you are officially a human beer fart.

UPDATE: Listen to 'em here.

KISS - Destroyer

2008-11-04T14:39:00.001-08:00

Destroyer. The classic, quintessential KISS album, or so some would have us all believe. My opinion is that it was actually named for its producer Bob Ezrin, who had a hand in writing the worst songs on the album. So what's good and what's bad here? Well, it has some undeniable classics like "God of thunder", "Detroit rock city", and "Shout it out loud". "Do you love me" and "King of the nighttime world" have their places in the KISS canon. But you can't let this overshadow the fact that "Flaming youth" and "Beth" are 2 of the worst fucking gawd-awful piles of dog puke ever written. And Ezrin wrote them. He also helped write "Great expectations", which is a pretty rotten song except for the line "you see me play my guitar, and you see what my fingers can do/ and you wish you were the one that I was doin' it to", which is pretty awesome and I'm pretty sure that was all Gene Simmons. The only song left is "sweet pain" which is blah. So we have 5 good songs and four bad ones. The problem with KISS is that their bad stuff is far worse than their good stuff is good, and their good stuff is pretty fucking great. It's kind of an essential album, but people should listen to Love Gun instead.

HA HA! part 2 - Tampa Bay Rays

2008-10-29T19:30:00.000-07:00

Eat a scabrous death-dick, florida, you fucking lost! And then when the phillies' manager congratulated you on having a good season, (because he kind of has to be gracious) 40,000 people booed your cold, wet, miserable, game losing asses. I bet if he weren't being held to any kind of politeness standard, he'd have mooned you in front of god and everyone. I'd have gone and pissed on you.

HATE IT! part 6 - Led Zeppelin comes back up the U-bend to haunt us all

2008-10-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

Really? Are you guys really going to do this? According to what I heard this morning on the BBC, Zep is going at it again. Ah, but here's the rub: Robert Plant has no plans to join the tour. Who, then, will be singing? According to the BBC, there's been no announcement, but the rumor mill has Chris Robinson high in the running. OK, so the guy's got a good set of pipes and he can shriek and wail as he proved with the Black Crowes. But really? John Paul and Jimmy, what are you thinking? Seriously, dude, what are you thinking? Now it would be a stretch to call my own opinion of Zep "lukewarm". Even so, Zep without Plant is like Van Halen without Roth. At best this will be another Van Hagar, and more likely would be a Van Cherone. When Queen toured with Paul Rodgers, they at least called it "Paul Rodgers and Queen", and said "No, he sounds nothing like Freddie, and we don't want him to. And we're playing some Bad company songs too. It's a different deal." But there's just no way you can have Zeppelin without Plant. One of the things many Zep fans keep saying is that they knew when to pack it in and bow out gracefully. I say they should have pulled the plug after "Presence" that we may have been spared from "In through the out door". Now this? Why? This is as bad as KISS with scabs dressed as Ace Frehley and Peter Criss. Maybe even worse. I know they don't need the fucking money. Why on earth would they drag one of the most venerated musical franchises in history through the bog? No good, dudes. No good. This will go over like the "lead zeppelin" mentioned by Moonie 40 years ago. Actually, this will be more like the Hindenberg, but much, much funnier. I hope the plug gets pulled before you do this. And if not, I hope your reputations never, ever, ever, ever recover.

Slayer - God hates us all

2008-10-28T15:58:00.000-07:00

It's time I reviewed some metal on this blog. I'm gonna review this one. The first time I heard Slayer, I was 13 and playing "skate or die" on a commodore 64 at the local Boys and girls club. The guy who ran the computer room there was just a few years older than me, and while he always had some good tunes going in there, this time he was playing the coolest unholy metal ruckus I'd heard. "What is this?" I asked. "It's awesome." "Slayer," he replied. I don't remember which album it was, but I made it a point to listen to them after that. Most people agree that after "Reign in blood", things gradually became not as good, and this went on until This fucker was released on 9/11/01. I heard it 2 or 3 days after it was released, and I couldn't believe my fucking ears. This album has the honor of being the only album in my memory that actually caused my jaw to drop. That's how fucking good it is. I ran around waving it in the air, making everyone I knew listen to it, and every single person who listened said "WHOA." In fact, this is my favorite of their albums, even better than "seasons in the abyss" and "reign in blood", with all their classics of the Slayer canon. To me, this is their most solid album of all. Every single song on there is fucking great. If you graphed it out, there'd be no peaks or valleys in how good the songs are. Just a straight fucking line across the top of the paper, with a little peak for "Exile". If you could pour hate into a pan and clarify it on a stove, you couldn't get it as concentrated as it is on this album. Or as fucking delicious.

Baseball

2008-10-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

This, for the first time in all the 22 years I've given a shit about baseball, has the potential to be the darkest point in the history of the sport. I don't care about the steroid scandals, Canseco's douchebaggery or even Lou Gherig. For that matter, this is the first time I've ever found myself rooting for an NL team. I'm rooting for the Phillies because IF THEY LOSE, it will be worse than 1,000 Bill Buckners a-fumble. It will be worse than hooligans shaving off Rollie Fingers' mustache and feeding it to him. It will even be worse than a paradigm shift in stadiums, where you couldn't trust the people in your row to pass the money down to the peanut guy without keeping it. A florida team simply cannot be allowed to win. If they do, it will mean that FL teams in both leagues will have taken what is rightfully not theirs. 2003 was an absolute abomination. I could scarcely believe the shift in momentum when that asshole fan snatched the ball and scuttled the Cubs. It was a complete travesty of justice when the shittiest man in sports went to the series. I was beside myself when he was traded to the Red Sox, whom I can no longer root for until he's been traded away (but not to the Mariners, for the love of all that's decent, or I shall probably die), booted out of the game (a better option), or horribly maimed and crippled, which I sincerely hope happens. Beckett's a talented pitcher who plays like a pussy and happens to be the most colossal shithead in the history of the sport. I hope he gets sodomized with a splintered bat and dies. Enough of that tangent. The problem is florida. There is no state in the union I've ever had such antipathy toward. I loathe it. I fantasize about airplanes dusting concrete mix into the everglades, thus paving them. I want to see disney world burn to cinders. I want to see miami with all its tacky fucking people suffer the same fate as Dresden and Tokyo in WWII. Only more so. A nuke would never do, because it's too fucking merciful if you're close. I guess you could Drop nukes other places so everyone in miami just dies of radiation poisoning, which is a pretty awful way to go. The radiation kills all your white blood cells, and the bacteria that naturally live in your body go ape: you begin to rot from the inside out. your hair falls out, your skin turns purple, and you bleed to death from every orifice, ebola-style. That would serve florida right. It's almost not enough, but let's be fair: florida gave us skynyrd, and skynyrd is pretty fucking awesome. Anyway, as you can well see, I cannot stomach the idea of the rays taking the series. I don't care that it's a fairytale rise from worst team in the game to first winning season to first postseason to first series, all in one year. Fuck them. Fuck them in the ass with a non-alloyed iron-bladed chainsaw in hell. And on the other hand you have the Phillies, the losingest team in the history of any sport. This is no clash of the titans, it's like watching the "cripple fight" episode of south park, but not funny. Here's the good part though. The rays will have to travel to Philadelphia. And fans in philly are the meanest fuckers on the continent. They boo anything. They fucking booed santa claus. They booed little kids looking for easter eggs. They would boo puppies if they had the chance. How do you think they'll respond to a gaggle of shitheels from florida trying to take what rightfully belongs to the Phillies?

They are the only reason I may watch a game of this series. To see them throw shit at the rays and give them the abuse they so richly deserve. Maybe a rays fan will make it up to philly and get put in the hospital. I hope so.

Kaki King - Wonder Ballroom, Portland OR 10/21/08

2008-10-21T22:00:00.001-07:00

Oh, man. This lady is just so fucking great. Whether she's doing acoustic instrumental stuff, making ethereal stuff with vocals, or just rocking out, she does whatever she chooses to do much better than someone else in the same position would be able to. As she usually does, she took to the stage solo and began "Bone chaos in the castle" as the rest of her band came in and began playing one by one. I made sure to get a good spot so I could watch her ten dainty fingers bombastically crushing and wrestling the strings into making some of the most original sounds to come from a guitar in years. One thing I hadn't noticed before is her use of the palm-bopping thumb-slapping chicken-pick. How the fuck do you even coordinate that? I don't remember exactly what the set list was, but I'll try:

Bone Chaos in the Castle
So much for so little
Life being what it is
Sad American
Goby
Playing with pink noise (she said this one was in the contract)
Jessica
Pull me out alive ("this is a song about spies!")
You don't have to be afraid
Open mouth
Saving days in a frozen head
Montreal
2 o'clock
Can anyone who's heard this music be a bad person?

and of course, a Bubonix cover. This time it was "Dogs and horses".

Her between song banter is always fucking great. She introduced "2 o'clock" as "a song about what a complete dickhead I am" and "so much for so little" she said was a question both posed and answered in Portland. Yay. This town loves her, and she loves it back, which is pretty cool.
Obviously to anyone who's heard her phalanges bring her many guitars to their knees, she does shit almost no one else does or can, and that the lauded "heroes" of the instrument scratch their heads over and give up trying. that makes for a couple of pretty rad hours of entertainment. Her bandmates deserve some props too, though. There were moments where the drummer absolutely channeled Stu Copeland. The keyboard/bass guy did some really nifty and well placed prog-style filter sweeps. The other guitarist (whom I kind of feel bad for, playing a guitar next to Ms. King night after night) makes ambient noises as well as anyone has with a guitar. And there was a wonderful moment during "You don't have to be afraid" when the stereo set up in the venue did something I've never experienced at a live show before: I got different sounds coming in each ear. They were airy, tinkly sounds and it was like Kaki sucked the crowd into a freshly shaken snow globe. It was really, really cool. Then she topped it off with a perfectly stupid cover song and retreated backstage. The only thing missing tonight was the lap steel. Can't have it all, I guess. Next up were the Mountain Goats, but I'm not really a fan, so I headed home to smoke and take care of a couple of things before I headed back. I headed back because Kaki and the Goats put out an EP together, so it was pretty obvious she'd be taking the stage again. I got back 2 mediocre songs before she did. She came out and played the first of the joint songs, which was good guitarwise but otherwise blah. Then a Morrissey cover, then the lap steel came out and made the craziest sounds I've heard come from strings ever. Period. And I go out of my way to find people who make stringed instruments sound weird. It was pure lovely space-rock, and then she went away. So I did too.

Mason Williams - The Mason Williams phonograph record

2008-10-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

Yeah, dude. Mason Williams is just one of those people I can't help but love. Everyone's heard "Classical gas". There's so much more to the guy, though. In the 60s, he was a writer for the Smothers Brothers' TV show, and wrote many of the songs they performed. He also knew exactly how to be self-indulgent in such a way that others could come along for the ride and be massively entertained. And if his facial expression on the cover is any indication, he ate a lot of acid. No matter. In 1966 he hired an orchestra and cut a record of pop songs he wrote, and it's fucking fantastic. Mike Post produced it, in fact, and Mike Post is awesomeness squared. But back to the album at hand. Everyone knows "Classical Gas". It's on here, but it's in with so many cheesy little musical gems it almost doesn't matter. So, being from 1966, it's pretty dated. It's got that Hugo Montenegro-esque "pah pah pah" pop orchestra choral style all over it. I like Hugo Montenegro and Pizzicato Five, so I'm all about the "pah pah" pop chorus. It sounds good to me. The album starts with an overture called "Overture", taking the listener through the musical themes of the album from start to end, announcing "the mason williams phonograph record!" and then trumpeting a little fanfare before mellowing into a lazy lull of an outro. Then it goes into its orchestral pop con queso, singing ridiculous songs about Dylan Thomas and life. One of the standouts is "Baroque-a-nova" which is perfectly titled, and "the prince's panties", the first of his five-part "dada trilogy". The trilogy is continued in subsequent albums with "the tomato vendetta" and "the exciting accident", and another two I can't remember the names of off the top of my head. The panties in the song are actually his dogs, who get pissed at him and eat him, so that the "prince was eaten by his panties". This album is just totally aces, and it's a perfect accompaniment to the ingestion of psychedelics. In fact, it's peerless in that facet.

Get this.

Local Rabbits - This is it, here we go

2008-10-02T01:31:00.000-07:00

Since I did Sloan a turn, I'll keep spreading the love for our Canadian brethren and tackle the final release from Montreal's superb Local Rabbits. Vocalists/guitarists Peter Elkas and Ben Gunning are perfect foils for each other. Their voices are very different and distinctive on their own, which plays out especially well in the song "Purple & Grey", a conversation between a penis and the brain which keeps it in check. I know, it sounds sophomoric. Trust me, it's not. In fact, it's a rollicking galloping tune with plenty of wit and a great guitar solo and a perfect drum track, though the outro could have been shorter. The band's songwriting has garnered them a lot of comparisons to Steely Dan. I hear it, but they have just as much in common with Thrush Hermit, if not more. Still, jazzy bits and smoothitude float on the surface of their terrific lyrics and tasty guitar, with some really well-placed synth and keyboards thrown under chord progressions that are well, well above the level of sophistication one usually sees coming out of a rock band. Unfortunately, this was their swan song. I haven't picked up their other releases yet, but I certainly shall.

If you're a fan of the Dan, the Halifax exposion, both, or just well-done rock music, get this.

Sloan - Dante's, Portland, OR 9/27/08

2008-09-28T04:04:00.000-07:00

Oh, yay. I've been wanting to see Sloan since the mid 90s sometime. I almost got to see them in 2000, except the show wasn't advertised until the day of, and I found out the day after. Boo! Anyhoo, 8 years later I got my chance and it was fucking worth it. These guys know how to rock. They took to the stage while the strains of "Love theme from KISS" played. I appreciated that. Mick Jagger's trademark maneuvers were aped in a loving, yet mocking way. Drummer Andrew Scott wore a T-shirt he made himself with a sharpie. They had the right attitude. A note about the venue: Dante's has shitty sound. I've heard worse, to be sure, but in a venue with a good sound system, this good show would have been incredible. So, I went hoping to remember the setlist, which totally didn't happen even a little bit. Fortunately, My friend Heather pestered singer/bassist (sometime drummer) Chris Murphy to pose for silly photos and someone tossed the setlist on our table. Here it is.

Losing California
All I am is all you're not
Witch's wand
Ready for you
Believe in me
Fading into obscurity
Emergency 911
Something's wrong
HFXNSHC
C'mon C'mon
Burn for it
Someone that I can be true with
Ill-placed trust
Take good care of the poor Boy
I'm not a kid anymore
The dogs
Down in the basement
People of the sky
Everything you've done wrong
Who tought you to live like that
Penpals
Money city maniacs

A fair amount of classics, but heavy on their last couple of albums, and certainly heavy on the rock side of their particular ouvre. I'd have liked to hear "snowsuit sound" and "she says what she means", which is a particularly rocking song with riffs a-roaring. Hey, they've got a new album to sell. I can forgive it. Especially since Chris Murphy invited us to hang out on their bus and drink their beer, which I'm still buzzed from. We ate bacon-maple bars (a voodoo doughnuts portland, OR speciality) and listened to the Who and the Faces. I'm pretty sure one of my friends (not Heather) is making out with Mr. Murphy as I write this. Can't wait to hear that story. Anyway, a sonically (fuck you Dante's) flawed but still wonderful show. The bus was gravy.

Also, the Tom Collins is a delicious drink, when prepared correctly. I discovered that tonight as well.

Ween - Chocolate and cheese

2008-09-18T18:32:00.001-07:00

Since Crack smoking seems to be a theme today, and since my ears have been accused of smoking it for liking Ween, here's some just for Chuck. Yeah, dude.

16 tracks, two of which I skip. These are "Candi" because it's terrible, and "Drifter in the dark" because it kind of breaks up the flow of the album, despite being a decent song. That leave 14 pieces of awesomeness. It kicks off with "Take me away", which is lounge music at its most exciting. Then it gives you spinal meningitis before it releases you with "freedom of 76". Then, just when you can't put your finger on it, and you cry a tear for eddie, all of a sudden, the roses are free. "baby bitch" is a great song about a shitty girlfriend, "mister would you please help my pony" is awesome if you like songs about fucked up lungs, you skip drifter in the dark most likely, and then Voodoo lady comes on and makes you tap yer toes. If you're Scott Manzo and live on Joppa road, you'll love the song they wrote about it. Even the Sunoco down at one end. Then Candi comes on, you skip it, and listen to "Buenas tardes amigo" instead, because cowboy epics with lines like "maybe I'd sell you a chicken with poison interlaced with the meat" are always good. The H.I.V. song is good, somehow, and "what deaner was talking about" and "don't shit where you eat" are a great way to wind things down. This album is fucking awesome. And for the record, neither my ears or my mouth are crack smokers. I just like music that fucks off in all the right places.

Amy Winehouse - Back to black

2008-09-18T18:32:00.000-07:00

Every so often, the mainstream, big-label music machine spends its media payola budget on something deserving. Just like Andre 3000's the love below, and its perfect single Hey ya!, They got it right with Amy Winehouse. I think it's really funny that immediately after this album's release, people were calling her "the next Aretha Franklin", since, uh, Aretha's had a career of almost 50 years and Amy's probably going to die sometime in the next two. Unless, of course, she is saved from her seemingly inevitable doom by that old-time religion. Either way, I don't think we'll be getting any more music from her, (in the first event) at least music that's any good (if she finds god).

Anyway.

Great record. I can hear the haters now: "Oh, but it's all schtick! It's derivative! Etc!" OK, It's not the most original music ever made, but then back in its heyday, motown was following a formula, and we still hold it up as being wonderful. Because it was. Schtick? Yeah, but so what. Criticizing a pop artist for schtick is a ridiculous point of contention. Is the music any good? Yes? OK, it's good then. Is it terrible? Yes? OK, it's rotten. Style doesn't matter, be it musical or wardrobe. As long as it works, and this record works. The lady's got a monster set of pipes, every song on the album is good, and a few of them are even great. Love is a losing game, Tears Dry on their own, and Addicted are just fucking amazingly good, perfect fucking pop songs. The arrangements through the whole record are all aces, and the whole package makes me happy. I just hope she has third album in her and makes it before the inevitable happens.

HA HA! part 1 - David Bazan

2008-09-17T01:21:00.000-07:00

Have you read my savaging of Pedro the lion? No? Read it here.

Now read this. Call me a mean fucker, but I'm glad he agonized and hemmed and hawed and pulled out his hair about gaining perspective and realizing that the church is full of shit. Ordinarily, I'd just be glad someone saw through it all, but his music is so amazingly terrible.

I gloat.

HATE IT! part 5 - Rage against the machine

2008-09-16T17:35:00.001-07:00

OK, this one is going to be a little different, because the lion's share of my ire isn't directed against the entire band, but at Zack De la Rocha. An important caveat. Sure, the rest of them share in the culpability for being knee-jerk blowhards, but Zack is not only the biggest of the blowhards, but the least talented as well. Tom Morello will always have my esteem for playing guitar like nobody else. That's tough to do, and laudable when someone does it. But really, what's unique about the band as a whole? Well, Mr. Morello is, and that's it. His contributions are absolutely nullified by the utter banality of De la Rocha's ranting. I've never understood why people think the guy's such a lyrical genius; "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" isn't exactly the kind of pithy political espousal that one can admire, or even take seriously. Of course, there's the use of Ernie Guevara's disgusting visage to object to as well. If these guys were half as politically aware as they think they are, they'd realize that Guevara was nothing but a bloodthirsty failure as a politician as well as a revolutionary, and that the only of his many revolutions that succeeded was the one in Cuba. This was entirely thanks to Fidel's political acumen. They'd also realize that the same iconic image they use was taken by some poor bastard who's never seen a dime in royalties, despite his photo turning up on t-shirts and posters in every pot-smoke filled dorm room in America. Equality indeed. In a 1993 interview with Deadline magazine, De la Rocha said "If I weren't in a rock band, I'd probably be a sexual harassment attorney." Or working in a head shop, methinks. How many women's studies majors did you cajole into the sack with that line, you cad? Renegades of funk? Did you give Afrika Bambaataa any royalties or even any credit for that, since you ripped that title off from him? I'm guessing no. I know it's not necessarily your fault, but how many frat boys hopped up on Schmit ice have listened to your music and pummeled some hapless computer major into a bloody pulp? I know that it's mostly Dave Matthews' and Jack Johnson's territory, but how many times has your music been the soundtrack to a date rape? You are stupid. Your music is stupid. Your fans are stupid. This is political awareness still in its training pants. They're full of shit, Zack, you'd better get them changed. Then you can fuck right off.

P.S. I'm guessing Josh Beckett loves you.

P.P.S. Your message is lost on the majority of your audience, who voted for Bush twice. Just sayin'.

Air Miami - Me me me

2008-09-14T23:28:00.000-07:00

Unrest broke up in 1995 after 10 years of making awesome music. Fortunately for the rest of the world, Mark Robinson and Bridget cross got another drummer and soldiered on together for another album. Basically, it's another Unrest record, and it's fantastic. I'm not really quite sure how to describe it to someone who isn't familiar with Mark and Bridget's thumping, strumming ambience, so I'll just say that it's a great record to listen to in the park with your friends on a sunny day, smoking pot and generally not giving a shit about anything except that you're hungry now and here comes the ice cream truck and hey, did you see that old man slip in that dogshit and fall on his ass? You're sitting on your keys so you adjust them and realize the ice cream man thought you paid with a twenty and now you've got an extra ten bucks, and then you run into a girl you liked back in high school and smoke more pot and have a couple of beers and end up in her apartment fucking, and in the morning she makes you breakfast and it's a good goddamn thing you were listening to this record or none of this would happened. This record is a solid foundation for a perfect day.

Rolling Stones - Beggars banquet

2008-09-14T03:12:00.000-07:00

One easter sunday, as on every easter sunday, a local church puts on an easter pageant. There's the usual stuff, hymns and little kids in nice clothes that are bound to be ruined before they're outgrown. But this sunday, however, a family gets up on the stage together, a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, all in their easter finest, and a large wicker picnic basket full of kittens. As soon as they take the stage, they launch into their performance, and their performance is thus: The father punches his wife square in the nose and breaks it. As she falls to her knees, gushing blood, her son pulls her dress up and starts fistfucking her from behind. While this is going on, Dad is fucking his daughter's face, holding onto her pigtails for leverage. Once Junior has punched his mom's cunt into shape, he reaches into the basket and pulls out a funnel and some motor oil. Mom gets on her back and lifts her pelvis straight into the air and spreads her legs while her son fills it with oil, making sure to spill plenty on the outside. He reaches into the basket again and pulls out a litter of newborn kittens, which he crams in mom's snatch with gusto. Little sis, now covered in semen and puke from her savage facefucking, sets her mother's cunt on fire. Mom takes aim and starts launching flaming kittens into the first 3 rows of pews. Little sis takes advantage of her mother's position by shitting into her open mouth while her brother pisses all over the pulpit with his fingers up his ass. Dad has just fished a rubber fist out of the basket and rams it up his own ass while simultaneously smashing his own balls with a hammer. As soon as his bladder has been emptied, the brother disappears stage left and reemerges with a crucified retard, whom he begins fellating while the sister cries "Look, we found the body!" Mom pulls the shitty fist out of her husband's ass and stuffs it up her melted hole while giving her son a rimjob. Sister is in a 69 with her father, sucking his mangled balls while wiping her shitty ass in his mustache. As soon as the retard jesus blows his wad all over the son's face, Mom gets elbow deep in his ass while the whole family starts singing "Oh come all ye faithful". At this point, the preacher has managed to regain enough composure through his retching to indignantly demand, "What in the name of all that is holy do you call this monstrous abomination?!?!?!!"

The Daughter sweetly replies, "The apostles."

John Valenti - Anything you want

2008-09-05T02:00:00.000-07:00

In 1976, a drummer from Chicago wrote a bunch of soul tunes and cut a record. The record made it to 51 on the soul charts, and the title track made it to #37. That drummer's name was John Valenti, and honestly, both the single and the album deserved to do better. Fast forward 30 years to a tower records in Shibuya, Tokyo, where I stumbled across this little gem. There was a whole line of CDs represented there, of obscure 70s soul music dug up and reissued by some keen Japanese music nerds. GOD BLESS 'EM! So here's the deal: John Valenti spends a good part of the record doing his god-damndest to channel Stevie Wonder. Yes, he's aiming high. Too high. The beauty of aiming that high though, is that you can fall far short of the goal and still be excellent! The end result is that on his rocket ride to Saturn, his second-stage booster crapped out over the ocean somewhere, and he crash landed on the Love Boat. The arrangements have plenty of funk, but somewhere in the string section, Isaac is pouring drinks. This will probably turn some people off, but I have a soft spot for that kind of cheese. Also, his vocal phrasing is almost identical to the singular Mr. Stevland Morris's. He does a good cover of Jackie Wilson's "Higher and higher", and the only song on the album that sucks is one called "I love her too". It's, uh, wow. It's a song to a wife, admitting his infidelity and calling for a polyamorous arrangement, but he never takes it to its potential as the cocksman anthem it could have been, instead bringing the narrative across as coming from a clueless asshole who never grew up. Maybe it was supposed to be like that, I dunno. But listening to it makes me feel like a girl who just got cheated on. Oh, actually, the song "Save me" isn't very good, either. So I skip 2 of 11 songs. Not too shabby, John Valenti.

HATE IT! part 4 - "Ten", by Pearl Jam

2008-09-03T03:21:00.000-07:00

Oh, man. These fuckers. First, let me say how much the "grunge" label annoys me. It does. It was applied wholesale at the time to any band out of Seattle. This included the venerable Young Fresh Fellows, who, as anyone who has listened to them knows, are not a "grunge" band. They are buffoons who enjoy buffoonery and write songs like "The ballad of only you & the can prevent forest fires" among other fine examples of foolish fun. Naturally, the "grunge" label was extended to Pearl Jam despite their music not fitting within that particular ouvre. Next, I will lament the number of times I saw a bunch of asshats in a "mosh pit" aping the above record jacket by putting their hands up in the air together. Furthermore, I shall bemoan the fate suffered by my poor ears at the strains of this crap. Eddie Vedder sounds like a fucking horse trying unsuccessfully to shit out the family of chinamen who were smuggled into america via his colon. Besides his voice, I don't like the music. It's crap, just like the rest of their albums are crap. This band is crappy and craps crap all over the place except in the crapper, where crap is obviously supposed to go, lest we trod in it and smear crap all over the floor, making it all crappy.

FIE!

Beastie boys - Licensed to ill

2008-08-21T03:32:00.000-07:00

I thought a return to form was in order, so once again I consulted the Rolling Stone 500 greatest albums list and picked an undeserving list-maker to bring to heel. I'm going to keep this one brief: It's puerile garbage hastily assembled and poorly produced. I'll leave the meat of this review to a photo: You can see it here.

Ween - 12 golden country greats

2008-08-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

Ahh... time to review one of my all time favorites. After the success and musical achievement of Chocolate and cheese, Ween making a country album made perfect sense. They wrote some songs, took 'em to Nashville, hired the best sessioners in town, including the Jordanaires, and set about recording the best country album to come along in 20 years. Despite the title, it's a 10 track affair full of toe-tappers, self-consciously sappy ballads, and "Piss up a rope", which happens to be the male-liberation anthem every generation of country singers tried to write, but never had the balls to do properly. Seriously, it puts even David Allen Coe to shame. The track "Powder blue" is notable in the fact that none of the lyrics make a lick of sense, despite working very well, and there's a lengthy vocal solo taken at the end by one Mr. Muhammad Ali running his mouth after a fight. This was only on the initial pressing, since Mr. Ali never gave permission for the sample to be used. "Mr. Richard Smoker" is a glorious Vaudevillian fuck you to somebody. "Help me scrape the mucus off my brain" is a wonderfully woeful ode to the morning after the night before, and "Fluffy" is a simple yet beautiful tale of a misbehaving dog who likes to sit on the porch and chew its leg. The musicianship and arrangement is top notch throughout, full of pedal steels, shit-hot piano, perfectly cheesy nylon-string acoustic solos that suck in all the right places, and lots of affection for the genre of music Ween adopts, if only for just 10 songs.

Everybody wants some! A loose interpretation of the musical genius of Van Halen

2008-08-10T19:29:00.000-07:00

I came across this one about 10 years ago, not long after it was released. Basically, it's a covers comp done by various Boston-area musicians, taking Van Halen tunes and taking them in very disparate directions. It begins and ends with Eruption. The first version is performed on a pipe organ by a priest. The second version is wanked out on a banjo by some dude appropriately named Crick Diefendorf. Of the 17 tracks, only one is Van Hagar, and it's far, far, far better than the original, thankfully. It's the Gigolo Aunts covering "Why can't this be love?" and it's actually not bad. The rest fall all over the spectrum of being whacked out. The standouts for me are "Everybody wants some", as lounged out by Talking to Animals, "Jump" by Mary Lou Lord (anybody remember her?), Fuzzy's 60s girl-pop version of "Feel your love" complete with sleigh-bells a-jingle, and "Panama" as recorded by Captain Rock. For one thing, his name is Captain Rock, and I wish it were mine. For another thing, it's all played on tubas and trumpets and trombones and stuff, and the vocals sound like they were performed by Animal from the Muppets. It's really awesome and makes you wish your high school's band wasn't completely lame, because if they had played this, booze and drugs and naked women would have fallen from the sky and the basketball games would have been way better. Also really good are Tom Leach's excellent country take on "Dance the night away" and Sam Black Church rocking the fuck out of "Romeo Delight". But for all the good, there's plenty of bad. This mostly plays out with failed experiments. The sort of stuff that might be really fun to fuck around on yourself, but that you'd never want to put on a record. There's also Jajuya's cover of "Jamie's crying", which is well done to be fair, but anything that sounds remotely latin gets shuffled in my brain to the "shit" category, so sorry guys. Mean streets got wrecked, Somebody get me a doctor got wrecked, Little guitars didn't work out so well, Atomic Punk was ruined and Beautiful Girls tried too damn hard to be jaunty and funky and came across like G-love and special sauce all taking their dicks out and waving them in your face.

So it's a really mixed bag, but one well worth listening to.

Last exit...

2008-08-08T16:43:00.000-07:00

Shortly after finding those ghost in the machine demos of Sting's, it came to my attention that his pre-police band, Last Exit, had recorded a couple of demo tapes, and that those tapes were of excellent quality. I have yet to get my mitts on them, but apparently someone did, and has put a handful of tracks up on youtube. Here's one, called "Carrion prince".

It's funny seeing how sting recycled his existing material into songs he played with the Police. I also like the Steely Dan circa "Katie lied" vibe going on here.

Now, here's another Last exit track that became a Police tune. Embedding was disabled, boo for that, but check it out. You're back? Yeah, it was better as "So lonely".

For the love of obscure Police goodies, here's my favorite track from the Ghost demos, "Don't you believe me baby":

And here's another one from those same demos: It could have been on "dream of the blue turtles".

Finally, Sting channels Billy Joel, which I inexplicably enjoy:

Yeah.

Life is life

2008-07-27T16:07:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling lazy, but I want to post. Here's what I'll do: a comparison of a cheezzzz ball song and its brilliant retooling at the hands of a group of Slovenian geniuses. First, here's the Austrian band Opus, with their 1985 (s)hit "Live is life":

I like how the thugs go in to kick some ass, but then are overcome with the "awesomeness" of the band and their music. Yes, that was pretty crappy. Next is "Life is life", so titled because that's what the lyrics were in the first place. The cheese has been restructured and refitted to become a work of genius by the Slovenian art collective called Laibach. Lo! Behold Majesty!

You can find this track on Laibach's album "Opus Dei".

Music to my eyes

2008-07-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

OK, this isn't music-related at all, but I finally saw it. Friends had told me about this whole thing going down, and how channel 2 here in portland would occasionally dust off the footage and air it, lest someone NOT get to enjoy it. Not that I'd doubted them, but I sure did want to see the spectacle. Now I have, and so shall you.

You're welcome.

Gene - To see the lights

2008-07-17T17:47:00.000-07:00

I hadn't planned on making this the 4th consecutive post with a black and white photo, but fuck it, I'm gonna review this Gene album anyway. To see the lights is almost a non-release, put out after their debut album "Olympian". This one is a collection of B sides, live versions, radio 1 sessions, and alternate takes, and is sometimes credited as being Gene's "Hatful of hollow". I don't know how I feel about that comparison, simply because Gene spent their entire career being compared to the Smiths. While singer Martin Rossiter has a croony edge to his voice much like Moz, as well as a healthy dose of lyrical snark, Gene stand on their own. Guitarist Steve Mason channels a lot less Johnny Marr than he does Steve Cropper in his playing. And what playing it is! The album opens up with "Be my light, be my guide", a brit-rock guitar fiasco of the finest kind. It moves on to "Sick, sober and sorry", again chock-full of tasty guitar bits and praise for drinking and smoking too. The album slows a bit after this and some ballady stuff comes out, which isn't really my cup of tea, but is pretty well done for ballady stuff, so I'll forgive it. Other highlights are "For the dead", "Haunted by you", and "How much for love", a tale of a young man being scandalized by an aggressive hussy. "Child's body", a song about anorexia, manages not to be too sappy lyrically, and the guitar playing just fucking rules. "I can't help myself" is totally cheesy, but does such a good job of being corny in just the right places that you end up liking it a lot anyway. The cover they do of the Beatles' "Don't let me down" is pretty blah, but between the bridge and chorus, Rossiter makes the strangest puking sound and improves things a lot. There are a few tracks I generally skip, but I'd hesitate in calling those sub-par in an album like this, since it's pretty much odds and ends thrown together for the fans to enjoy anyway. If I could take one Gene album to the proverbial desert Island with me, this would be the one. A good solid B for Gene.

HATE IT! part 3 - Damien Jurado

2008-07-13T21:31:00.000-07:00

I do not own nor have I even listened to any of his albums. I have, however, been subjected to a few minutes of his live show. How did this happen? I went to see Subset at the Break Room (now Chop Suey) on Capitol Hill in Seattle. I paid to get in. I bought a beer. Then this fucking fat pile of shit got up on stage. Subset had been canceled and replaced by this guy, this second coming of Pedro the Lion, this subliminal worship musician with a hymnal full of angsty bullshit and a pocketful of unresolving chord progressions for added "tortured" cred. Now, Subset consisted of The presidents of the USA with Sir Mix-a-lot. What kind of bait and switch horseshit is that? Is it even possible to find a replacement who's musically any farther removed than Jurado is to those guys? I guzzled my beer as fast as possible and walked up to the doorman. I pointed to the stage and said "I'd like my money back. I mean, DUDE." He glanced at the "no refunds" sign and shook his head. "Yeah, this is some bullshit. Here's your money." I thanked him and went on my way. That was 8 years ago and I haven't patronized that establishment since. If I ever see Jurado walking down the street I'm gonna throw a fucking brick at his balls. One pedro was two too many. Two pedros is like walking in on Amy Grant taking a shit in the middle of your living room floor while she plays Ida on your stereo. Then when you've tossed her out and everything's clean again, you want to go to bed but you notice she's wiped boogers all over your pillows and on your toothbrush.

HATE IT! part 2 - It's hard to find a friend

2008-07-11T15:34:00.000-07:00

Pedro the fucking lion. It's hard to find a friend, is it? It must be when you sound like this. I really hate this album, and this band in general, for 2 reasons. The first is that this album sounds like a junkie nodding off on smack. The second is that it's god-rock subtly wrapped up in some kind of late-90s hipster disguise. Fuck you, Pedro, for boring me to death, and fuck you again for springing Jesus on me in the middle of it all. Fuck you.

R.E.M. - Automatic for the people

2008-07-10T21:28:00.000-07:00

Hurgh. There was a time, years ago, when I thought I liked REM. I'd heard all their "singles", and a couple of their albums all the way through, and I liked what I'd heard. Then it was 1993, I was 16 and in my girlfriend's bedroom making out. She put this fucking CD on and my boner was CRUCIFIED. I could not conceive how it was possible for anyone to make such a collection of morosity and concentrated ick, let alone a band that I'd thought I'd liked. Of the 12 tracks on this messy platter, only one sounded good at the time, and that was "Man on the moon". I still like that song OK. But you can't help but look at this album as the piece of shit it is: "Man on the moon" is the diamond ring you've been hoping would come out the other end of your dog after he ate it. Once that's been picked out and cleaned off, what's left? A fresh turd smashed and smeared all over your kitchen table. I've debated the merits of this one with various people over the years and one of the things that keeps getting brought up and tossed in my face is John Paul Jones' contributions in arranging the string bits, as if JOHN PAUL JONES is going to somehow lend it any quality in my eyes. And if a song is terrible, will string parts somehow make it great, or at least elevate it to some level of listenability? NO. Not even in disco does that happen, and disco has a lot of strings. Of course, everyone who hates this band or this album focuses their ire on "everybody hurts" because it's obviously one of the most infuriatingly crap songs of all time, and it gets used all the time in cheesy TV and movies when some lame breakup happens between lame people, (cue post-breakup "better times" montage) which is extra annoying. It makes a convenient target because of its exposure, but the rest of the album is just as bad. Should I really get in the weeds with it? Nah, I'll just say that I don't like it, and I don't like it because it's such a downer, and that should be good enough. And when I say "downer", I mean it literally as well as figuratively. I mean, any record that can make a 16 year old's dick go limp when he's got 2 (tits) in the hand and his face in a bush is a powerful bummer indeed. An F+. The plus is for the song about Latke.

The police/Sting - Ghost in the studio

2008-07-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

Weeeiirrd. A couple of days ago, I acquired an album attributed to the Police and titled simply "Ghost in the studio". A web search for information didn't turn up much, just that it was apparently Sting's demo tapes that he brought to the band in 1980 or 81 to flesh out into the fourth Police album. Let's look at the track listing:

1. Secret Journey
2. Sprits in the material world
3. Invisible Sun
4. Too much information
5. One world (not three)
6. Hungry for you
7. Invisible Sun
8. Secret Journey
9. Don't believe in me baby
10. Don't think we could ever be friends
11. Don't look at me
12. It's never too late
13. Daytime Job

So we have a good chunk of the finished album here in rough form, and a few others that have never seen the light of day. Let's take a listen. The sound quality is pretty rough in general, and some tracks sound better engineered than others. There's a definite lack of Stew, and all the drum tracks are done with a drum machine and are quite minimal. "Too much information", in fact, features handclaps instead of drums, and "One world" has no rhythm track at all. The tracks that ended up on the actual album sound remarkably unchanged from their prototypes here, which makes me wonder if Andy Summers had a hand in the guitar parts on this demo, or if he mostly just played on the album what he heard here. The multiple versions of "Secret Journey" and "Invisible Sun" really only differ in that the atmospheric synth sounds were a bit different to each other. None of the tracks here offer any polish at all, and it's kind of interesting to hear how Sting layers his vocals. But let's check out the stuff that really had me interested: The tracks that never made the cut.
None of them could have made it as Police songs. "Don't believe in me baby" is actually pretty good as a moody british new wave song, but "Don't think we could ever be friends" and "Don't look at me" sound like Sting teamed up with Michael McDonald. Yech. "It's never too late" could have easily popped back up on one of Sting's solo records. It has that slick, butt-jazz lite feel to it. Finally, there's "Daytime Job", which is surprisingly uncharacteristic for Sting and I like it in spite of its cheesiness. It would have been a great Billy Joel song. This collection of tracks offers some interesting insight for those of us geeky enough to want to peek behind the process of making a police record. It's kind of like the "deleted scenes" on the DVD. Kinda cool, not that great, and it takes a nerd to appreciate it. I'll ignore the muddiness of the sound, and give it a C. It's an inferior version of the finished product, but it's interesting enough to be worth a listen, and has one new song that's pretty good.

Big Star - #1 Record/ Radio City

2008-07-05T18:03:00.000-07:00

Seldom is a band so influential so ignored. While they were originally around, they only released 3 albums, the first two of which were combined for this one later re-release. #1 record came out in 1972, Radio City in 1974. There was another release, called Third, that came out in 1978. This was all until a one-off reunion in the early 90s with the late Chris Bell and absent Andy Hummel replaced by Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer of the Posies joining original members Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens. The band has since released a live recording as well as a fourth studio album with this lineup, and if you're REALLY lucky, you may be in the right place at the right time and see one of their very infrequent live shows, as I did in 2000, their first in 7 years, and only the second since the 70s. But enough of this, on to the music. Simply put, it's astonishing that this music was released in the early 70s. It sounds too EVOLVED to have been made at that stage in pop music. Songs like "The ballad of El Goodo" and "Thirteen" showcase the excellent guitar interplay of Chilton and Bell, and "Back of a car" and "My life is right" are almost peerless blueprints for the elusive perfect pop song. No pop song, however, is more perfect than "September gurls", which has been held up as a holy grail for 34 years and covered from everyone from the Replacements (live) to the Bangles (on record) and anyone else with a good ear for a tune and a guitar (anywhere, always). So what's the downside? Only "The india song", the only tune penned by bassist Andy Hummel. It's the weakest on the CD, but compared to non Big Star songs, it's actually not too bad. I only skip past it about half the time. You'll recognize "In the street" as having been adapted and re-recorded by Cheap Trick to be used as the theme from "That 70s show" with the outro from "surrender" thrown in for good measure. The original is fantastic, perfectly capturing the essence teen ennui. Throw in "Way out west" and "Feel" and "Don't lie to me" and "Mod Lang" and "You get what you deserve" and every other song, then watch this and go buy the damn thing already. Two albums for the price of one. Best deal around.

HATE IT! part 1 - You are my flower

2008-07-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

In the "HATE IT!" sections of this blog, you will not find me giving an actual review of an album which I dislike, and giving due explanation of my distaste. You will simply find me abusing an album or band which I find particularly excremental. The band in this case is Brooklyn's own Ida, and the album is "You are my flower", to which I reply: "You are my nightmare." I had a roommate years ago who positively adored (and probably still does) this band. As a result, I was subjected to their pabulum strains for untold hours on end, in spite of my vocal protestations. While they do actually perform some really nifty Prince covers, the songs they themselves write can only be adequately described by pulling out one's hair by the fistful and swan diving from the aurora bridge in Seattle into Adobe software's nicely paved parking lot below. God knows I wanted to every time I was subjected to it. It is absolutely the most inane, boring boy/girl pap you will hear in your life. Period. It drives me to violence in its maddening placidity. It is anathema to life itself. This is what taking a nap sounds like. This is worse than eating a bowl of teeth and hair. This is the gentlest, most frustrating rape my ears have ever endured. It sounds like the picture on the Massengill box. This is what it sounds like when the most sensitive poet on earth makes wine from the tears of a butterfly, and then slips you a roofie and sticks both feet up your asshole while you're out of it and leaves you to wake up covered in rose petals and rancid semen. It is so drudgingly fucking slow that the music has no discernible beat or rhythm. It sounds like someone thoroughly enraptured by the process of their own slow death by a horrible disease. I would not wish this on Hitler. I would rather die than listen to Ida again, because their music just isn't worth living through. An F is far too kind, so it gets an "E", for "emetic". And the only known antidote for these guys is Motörhead.

Achtung baby

2008-07-02T14:20:00.000-07:00

Since the primary concern here is to tear into albums I find nauseating, and since my inaugural post was nostalgic gushing for a mediocre disc, I've opted to tear into something deserving of ire. To do this, I googled "greatest albums" and picked a target from the resulting list. The resulting sacrificial turd is U2's 7th album, released in 1991. Oh, boy, does this album ever sound like it was released in 1991. So much so, in fact, that it sounds like a fucking Jesus Jones album. Look at the hits: "Mysterious ways" and "Even better than the real thing" are positively dripping from the firehose spunk gusher unleashed upon it by that conveniently culpable "Zeitgeist". I remember thinking it sounded like Jesus Jones at the time, and the years have done nothing to change my opinion. Let's leave the bukkake out of this and take a slightly more objective look, though, shall we? Squishy sounding synthesizers abound on this record, which is probably Brian Eno's fault, and really doesn't suit the band. Bono is writing bouncy pop songs, probably to get it out of his system, and The Edge, who usually saves the band from sounding twee, is out to lunch on this record. The shining beacon of this album, "One", isn't a bad song, but as Johnny Cash later proved, it's not a good song for U2 to be playing as U2 plays it. If you disagree, download "Right here right now" and I DEFY you to tell me this album doesn't sound the same.

Just say yes...

2008-07-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

1987 was quite the interesting year for me. I was 10, and started realizing and noticing things that have made their indelible marks upon me. When this CD was released at the end of that year, it made quite an impression in my young and impressionable mind. Why is this? Here's the track listing:

1. Never Let Me Down Again (Remix) - Depeche Mode
2. Lips Like Sugar (12" Mix) - Echo & The Bunnymen
3. Out of Hand (Extended Version) - The Mighty Lemon Drops
4. Ya Ho - James
5. Work Is a 4 Letter Word - The Smiths
6. No Stars - Figures On A Beach
7. Young Manhood - The Wild Swans
8. Somebody Gotta Do It (Remix) - Ice-T
9. I Wanna Live - The Ramones
10. Can't Hardly Wait - The Replacements
11. Feeling, A - Throwing Muses
12. How Men Are - Aztec Camera
13. Cherokee Chief - Casual Gods (Jerry Harrison)
14. Hideaway (Remix) - Erasure

As a kid who colored his hair red and blue that summer and wore a ripped up jean vest, I'd already heard the Depeche Mode track and seen the video. But Echo and the Bunnymen? The Smiths? Ice-T? The Ramones? Aztec Camera? Throwing Muses? THE REPLACEMENTS? Fully half of these tracks turned me on to something I found amazing at one time or another in the interceding 20 years. Throwing Muses took me some warming up to, as did the white-boy soul of Aztec Camera's Roddy Frame, but for a 10 year old mind that was full of Bon Jovi, This was some revolutionary stuff, man. Revisiting it now, It's a crappy Ramones song, The Smiths track is somehow uncharacteristic, and the Depeche Mode track is like 8 minutes long, just right for a leather daddy with some poppers to put on a mix tape for his lair. But the Replacements track... Probbly the best 'Mats song to use if you're going to hook someone into fandom. The Throwing Muses track would make a fine soundtrack to a girl on LSD staring into space while languidly pulling out her hair. Not quite what you might expect if all you've heard of them is "Not too soon", A college radio staple of the early 90s as well as a fine song. I'd love to give this an A. I can't. Jerry Harrison could never hack it outside of Talking heads and Tom-tom club. I don't like Erasure. The Wild Swans and Figures on a Beach and James are all no good. But the music on this CD led me to other sources, such as Thrasher Magazine's Notes from the underground column, which turned me on to so much more... This was, for me, a seminal, if half-assed album. I love it.