YMO - Solid state survivor

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!

,


















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

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

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

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

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

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.