Immortal - At the heart of winter

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.

Gert Wilden and Orchestra - Schulmädchen report

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???

The Boo Radleys - Giant Steps

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.

Vivian Girls

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.

Michael Jackson - Off the wall

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.

Van Halen - Van Halen II

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.

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

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

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.

Air Miami - Me me me

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.

Ween - 12 golden country greats

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.

Life is life

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".