The Song Of The Decade: A Pre-Pitchfork Prediction

Despite the fact that this decade is in no way over, Pitchfork Media is still going ahead and publishing their top 500 tracks of the 2000s. Though I hope that Lightning Bolt’s new album, Earthly Delights (out Nov. 13) includes at least one track that makes the Pitchfork writers sorry they jumped the gun, the truth is that there’s probably nothing left in the 2000s that will significantly affect Pitchfork’s list. Which is not to say they didn’t mess up; if listing 300 tracks without a word of description for any isn’t a cheap trick, then I don’t know what is. However, I’m not here to review Pitchfork; I’m here to beat them to the punch and name my best track of the 2000s, which won’t be bettered in the next four months and probably not in the next four years. Yes- All My Friends is just that good. Read on; For all of its virtues, Someone Great never struck me as a particularly emotionally resonant song. Something in James Murphy’s falsetto lends the song a certain archness that’s been apparent in nearly every LCD Soundsystem song, from Losing My Edge to New York, I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down. So, as good as Someone Great is, it seemed to lack a genuine emotional push, which is probably because Murphy made the music (taken from 45:33) before the words, which he probably made up on the spot. It was the “emotional” (quotation marks very important) song I expected LCD to make; musically fantastic, lyrically witty, and with a raised eyebrow All My Friends is a bit different, as it marks the point where even though Murphy references Steve Reich with the piano, he doesn’t need to make the song about Steve Reich and how he was totally into Music For 18 Musicians before you and your friends were. It’s a cutting song, but the damning lyrics are sympathetic, unlike pretty much every other song Murphy ever wrote. All My Friends is about living a hedonistic life and finding it hollow, about aging and regretting, and, despite the first person, about Murphy himself. Losing My Edge, LCD’s first song, was also about Murphy. But the difference between this and All My Friends is the difference between Rodney Dangerfield and Woody Allen. What Losing My Edge lacks is transcendent; what All My Friends lacks is the designation of best song of the decade. Coming from me, it doesn’t matter too much, but if any song represents the general mood of the 2000s (slightly elegiac, darkly humorous, emotional), it’s this one. And you can dance to it.

Elevator Music: Two New Songs

Today, I legally downloaded the first single, Boy 1904, from Sigur Ròs frontman Jónsi Birgisson’s side project with his lover Alex Somers, listened to it, and found the absolute nadir of ambient music.  

It’s easy to see why people like Sigur Ròs; it’s absurdly beautiful music that’s also essentially meaningless.  The lyrics are sung in a nonsense language made up by Birgisson, meaning uptight parents don’t have to worry about the band spreading any messages dealing with Satan, vegetarianism, or gay lifestyles, no one has to worry about getting the words wrong (it’s all phonetic anyway), and no one has to bother looking for any artistic message whatsoever.  The good thing is that this it’s pure pleasure music, and thus pretty listenable.  Boy 1904 is listenable too.  But what makes it so much worse than Sigur Ròs is that it’s pretty much the same thing they always do; anthemic melody stretched out and slowed down, but never to mind-boggling lengths.  The Ramones had more complexity than this.  There are no layers to this music; repeated listening doesn’t reveal anything at all.  

What strikes me most about it is how it’s even more meaningless than the usual stuff from the group; it features a recording of the last castrato singer, which doesn’t add anything to the song (Jónsi sounds like his balls were cut off anyway), the title doesn’t even pretend to be something in Icelandic, and worst of all, it’s treated to sound like some old record.  The song wants the air of something antiquated and epic, but it just rings false.  The album, Riceboy Sleeps should be more of the same.

Right after that song finished, my iTunes library switched to “If I Ever Feel Better” by Phoenix, which has pretty fluffy lyrics and might be just as meaningless.  But it’s infinitely better than Boy 1904, simply because it has a beat.  

 

AIR has a new song out too, from their upcoming album Love 2; like Boy 1904, it follows the same pattern, but it’s a hell of a lot more successful, simply because AIR is more fun to listen to than Sigur Ròs.  Do The Love even indulges in B-movie synths and the cheesiest vocoding effects these Frenchmen have used yet.  It’s an immensely enjoyable and lightweight track.  

3 Out of 5 Ain’t Bad: Capsule Reviews

 

Sadly, Jim O'Rourke's influence is only felt on the bizarre cover art.

In the last month or so, there have been a flurry of releases that attract lots of attention, be it because the band is famous (Wilco, Sonic Youth), the band and/or record is really, really good (Phoenix, Dirty Projectors), or because the band is really good and Pitchfork gave one of its songs a 10 (Grizzly Bear).  With all of this stuff getting released at once, you may be forgiven for not knowing which ones to pick up/which one should be first in your downloads queue.  Thus, here’s a helpful consumer guide for the age where Robert Christgau gives everything an A-.  

 

 

Wilco: Wilco (The Album): Jeff Tweedy (The Increasingly Boring Frontman) and co. serve up another scoop of vanilla songwriting, complete with cutesy lyrics (I’d like to believe that “Wilco will love you baby” has some level of irony to it) and the lack of a production job by Jim O’Rourke (The Guy Who Saved Wilco AND Sonic Youth).  In addition, the death of Jay Bennett (The Foil) probably means Wilco (The Horrible Band) will only get worse.

 

Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca: The only reason it took Dirty Projectors this long to make an album this good is because their frontman Dave Longstreth insisted on doing things like covering Black Flag’s Damaged from memory and being diverse in an ADD kind of way.  Now he’s past all that, and guess what?  Bitte Orca’s great.  

 

Sonic Youth: The Eternal: Actually, there are several good things about this album.  

1) The length of the album is not in fact eternal, though sometimes it feels like it.  

2) If you’ve ever gotten depressed by listening to a Sonic Youth album because you think you and your band could never do something as great as this, this album should be a good pick me up.

3) If you’ve ever felt bad about thinking Kim Gordon is sexy, this album should be a good cure.

4) Like… cool album art, dude.

 

Phoenix: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix: Finally, forty plus years after the Beatles and the Beach Boys, the world produced a pop band that it’s 100% cool for everyone, from hopelessly square teenage girls to tragically hip Pitchfork bitches to enjoy.  So, yeah; it’s a really fricking good album.  

 

Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest: Whenever I can’t decide whether or not I should do something, like tell you to buy Grizzly Bear’s latest album, I make a list of pros and cons.  And so…

Pros: Beautiful production, some great songs, New York band, guys in said band seem nice enough.   

Cons: Not quite as good as their last record, silly cover art.  

So the pros barely win out.  But, the cons are pretty slight.  Buy it.  

Record Review: Yesterday and Today by the Field

I admit it; I trashed the Field when I reviewed their latest single, “The More That I Do”. Now that the album it was taken from, Yesterday and Today, has been released, I find that I dislike “The More That I Do” even more, as it stands as possibly the only blight on an album that’s nearly as good as the Field’s debut, 2007’s From Here We Go Sublime. Overall, what makes the album worse is the lack of novelty; it’s so similar to the debut that I half expected Axel Willner to call it Still Going Sublime. But like the music of the Field itself, the repetition doesn’t hurt, except in the zero-inspiration cover art, which kind of sucked the first time.  Aside from that and “The More That I Do”, Yesterday and Today is damn good. First track “You Have The Moon, I Have the Internet”, sounds a little bit like the first six or seven minutes of Lindstrøm’s magnificent space disco track “Where You Go I Go Too”, though to Willner’s credit, the song doesn’t come off like a Field remix of said Lindstrøm track, though it’s just as lush and enjoyable. The Norwegian disco producer is a major influence on this album, with the last track “Sequenced” being almost an Italo disco track. Second song “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime” is notable for its use of a beat other than 4/4 time, a great step forward for Willner. But the best song on the album, hands down, is the title track and collaboration with Battles drummer John Stanier, which is, though not quite as insane as a minimal house version of Atlas would be, a brilliant track. Though Yesterday and Today contains no mindf**k Lionel Richie sample moments, as From Here We Go Sublime did (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcpoXD_TKY8), it’s an undeniably solid album. And there might be a Lionel Richie sample in there somewhere; perhaps  the annoying vocal samples from “The in More That I Do” aren’t from Cocteau Twins after all.

King Of The Dogs: This Song’s A B***h

 

King of the Reasons to Quit While You're Ahead

Iggy Pop is not the greatest singer in the world.  Yes, he is the first and foremost reason people listen to the Stooges, but what he does is not so much sing as talk loudly (as best heard on the seminal “I Wanna Be Your Dog”) or talk excitedly and scream and whoop (nearly all other songs by the Stooges).  As I see it, the only time when Iggy actually sang in a normal manner and did this successfully was on 1977’s Lust For Life, his best solo album.  

Iggy Pop does not attempt to sing in a normal manner on his newest song, “King of the Dogs”, but it pretty much sucks nonetheless.  Simply put, he sounds like a weak Disney villain cranking out his musical number.  The plausibility of this is shocking; Iggy hasn’t done anything worthwhile in years, he’s pretty much lost any aura of danger, and he voiced a baby in the Rugrats movie.  I have concluded that Iggy Pop was slated to appear in a new Disney movie until executives decided it was a horrible idea.  His next album, Préliminaires, is not an album about French philosophy; it is the scrapped soundtrack to the movie, an excerpt of which appears below.

 

THE NEW FILM FROM DISNEY: JOHNNY AND THE KING OF THE DOGS

Johnny, a nice all-American-verging-on-Aryan youth walks into a dark cave.

JOHNNY (frightened): Gee, I sure hope I don’t meet the king of the dogs!

On cue, the King of the Dogs, voiced by aging punk rocker Iggy Pop, comes out.

King of the Dogs: Muahaha!

The King of the Dogs begins singing a song, entitled “King of the Dogs”.  It should have a cheesy jazz backing track, highlight none of Mr. Pop’s talent (self-mutilation, shooting up on heroin, being ripped, being bored in a transcendent manner), and generally suck.  Lyrically it should be clichéd and uninspired, but not in any enjoyable manner.  

Johnny stands in shock.  The song finishes.

JOHNNY (confused): Didn’t you use to be really cool and stuff? And make music that started punk rock?  And make a much better song about dogs? 

KING OF THE DOGS: Well…. it’s a step up from the Weirdness, isn’t it?

 

 

If you really want to hear the song, here it is on Pitchfork Media.

The Art of the Mixtape

 

Look at that outdated technology!

From Elvis’s Presley’s “All Shook Up” to Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby”, from Big Black’s “Precious Thing” from their album “Songs About F*****g” to Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl”, popular music is largely about love; sexual, platonic, unrequited, or otherwise.  This wealth of material is what makes the mixtape a fantastic courting mechanism for all the boys and girls too shy to walk up to their loved one and begin playing the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours”.

 

However, shyness does not correspond to fantastic musical taste, no matter what indie pop bands may have convinced you of.  So, in order to help all you people who would give the girl, boy, transsexual, eunuch, whatever of your dreams a mix filled with emo, nü metal, and 90s industrial rock, I have written this guide to make perfect mixtapes, or at least ones that won’t get you a restraining order.  There are four rules to making great mixtapes, and here they are.  

1. The lower fidelity the song, the more sensitive you will appear.  Compare Spoon’s “The Agony of Laffitte”, a vitriolic attack on a A&R man, with Oasis’s “Wonderwall”, a sappy and soaring love song.  Despite all the strings and cheesily romantic rhymes (‘maybe’ and ’save me’ stick out in particular), “Wonderwall” doesn’t seem more endearing than “The Agony of Laffitte”, which is not a love song by any means.  From this we can begin to gauge the awesome powers of lo-fidelity.  Like all rules, this has an exception; badly recorded live bootlegs are not the best mixtape material…

2. …unless they are by the Velvet Underground.  Everything the Velvet Underground ever released can be put on a mixtape, except for 30-minute jams on Sister Ray.  And even that will work sometimes.  But seriously- if no other popular music existed besides the Velvets, mixtapes would still work perfectly.  From live recordings (“We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together”) to proto-shoegaze demos of songs Lou Reed would later make worse as a solo artist (“Ocean”), to the actual studio tracks, every single song is a mixtape gem.  An added note; the easiest way to make a great mix is to simply burn a CD/make a tape of the third and fourth albums by the Velvet Underground, “The Velvet Underground” and “Loaded”, respectively.  

3.  B-sides and demos are your god.  The problem with the mixtape is that ultimately, you’re going to find somebody with good music taste.  This means that there is no excuse for you to give he or she a mixtape.  But fear not- there is a way around this; the almighty B-sides and demos.  Unless your beloved has impeccable music taste, they will not have these tracks.  And neither will you.  But if you love this person and have no guts, you will get these tracks.  This of course complicates the situation; it can be tough to find the perfect b-side, when so many are filler or bad live tracks.  Demos are even worse; though I said before that lo-fi is fantastic, there may also be a point when it goes too far.  The optimal collection of demos are the one for Wilco’s 2002 album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”, which would be a mixtape staple if everybody didn’t own it already.  These demos are great for two reasons; 1) the person you are giving this mixtape to probably already likes Wilco and 2) if he or she doesn’t, these songs are probably better than the released version of YHF and should win him or her over.  Not all demos can be like this, but the closer a demo or b-side comes to this standard, the better it will be on your mixtape.

4. Resist the urge to put Belle and Sebastian on your mixtape.  Yes, they’re indie.  Yes, they’re sensitive.  Yes, they’re literate.  Yes, they’re lo-fi.  Yes, they’re Scottish.  Yes, they’re shy and you can probably identify wit that.  But please, please, please put the Smiths on instead.

The Fiery Furnaces Have Made The Best Album Ever: A Mock Review

Evidently, the Fiery Furnaces are bored with the way their new album, I’m Going Away, due to be released in July, is turning out.  Why else would they call for fans to write a mock review of the new album and then record a version of this album based on these reviews?  Yes, it’s true.  There will be two versions of I’m Going Away; the version they’ve been working on, and the version we think it’s going to sound like.  

I do not want this new album to be boring.  My review, submitted to thefieryfurnacesemail@gmail.com and reproduced here, should explain exactly how interesting I want this album to be.

I was more than surprised when I hear the new Fiery Furnaces album, I’m Going Away; the amazing songwriting and lyrics were almost as stunning as the band’s new style, a sophisticated yet raw combination of acid house, no wave skronk, and French Chanson. The title track, an absurdly different version of the traditional song, exemplifies this style; as the lush accordion begins to play over the harshly programmed 303 bassline, one may think a new height in emotional house anthems has been reached. That is, until the detuned guitars begin bashing out something rhythmic in a tribal kind of way. Strangely, these elements only complement each other and add to the emotional impact of the song; as the song gives way to an extended outro-cum-noise jam, the searing noise of the guitars becomes just as strikingly beautiful as the heartbreaking tones of the accordion. Other tracks venture into even more exotic musical territory, adding theremin and dialogue sampled from Jean-Luc Godard films to the mix; Jack Palance’s lines in Contempt are cryptic and unsettling when played over the soundscape of the opening track, which has the feel of an early Jacques Brel song played by the Contortions and produced by DJ Pierre. With I’m Going Away, the Fiery Furnaces have made a tremendous step in the field of popular music. Never have such disparate genres been combined in such a fabulously entertaining and profound way. In short, I’m Going Away is album of the year, hands down; next to it, Merriweather Post Pavillion looks like a new Jonas Brother album, Bromst might as well have been made by Kenny G, and The Crying Light is elevator music. Orgasmic.

Track Review: Tortoise: Prepare Your Coffin

I envision this song as the theme for the next James Bond movie; at the very least, I demand that Lil Wayne raps over it for Random of Solstice or whatever.  Jokes aside, the new song by post-rock kings Tortoise is made for a spy soundtrack, given its quick tempo, slightly sinister melody, and vaguely tropical air.  This means it is quite different from classic Tortoise; it’s about as pop as one can get when you compare it to tracks such as 1996’s Djed, from the landmark record Millions Now Living Will Never Die.  This is not necessarily a bad thing- I did enjoy the track- but the poppier aspects of Prepare Your Coffin may bring to light the most embarrassing aspect of Tortoise’s sound; a semi-alignment with background music.  This problem is true for nearly all post-rock, and though Tortoise’s best work (the aforementioned Millions Now Living Will Never Die, TNT) is some of the greatest music of the 1990s, there is no denying it’s as tough listening as the avant-garde sounds of 1970s noisemakers Throbbing Gristle or even This Heat.  But Prepare Your Coffin is an instrumental pop song, meaning that barring transcendence (Miserlou, Telstar, Rumble) it is disturbingly close to music solely created to play second fiddle (no pun intended).  It is perfect for a spy soundtrack, perfect for pretending one is in a spy movie, and perfect for film trailers.  But besides that… there’s not much to recommend Prepare Your Coffin.

Track Review: The Field, The More That I Do

The Field’s 2007 debut album, From Here We Go Sublime, was something like blissed out Philip Glass; the music was just as broken-record repetitive as the opera Einstein on the Beach, but instead of the stately forbidding dread Glass conjured up, Axel Willner (the sole member of the group) goes for a fantastic transcendence, at sometimes melancholic, and at other times, for lack of a better word, sublime.  

The new single by the Field, The More That I Do, somewhat lives up to the promise that the new album, Yesterday and Today, will be a more organic affair.  It’s a denser and somewhat more complex track than the stripped-down loops on From Here We Go Sublime.  This does not mean it’s better.  Over the eight and a half minutes of The More That I Do, Willner trys to indulge with a kind of melody (with glockenspiels ripped off from Dan Deacon) and “oh yeah” vocals that suggest his version of a house anthem.  This does not necessarily mean that the track will not be fantastic, but in this case, Willner’s attempts to branch out only illuminate the basic flaw of his music; there is one reason to listen to the Field, and that is because of the singular feeling of euphoria that the tracks can often create.  But The More That I Do fails at this, and because of this, it’s not that great a song.  The beat is nothing special, the melody is vaguely pretty, and the vocal samples get a bit annoying by the song’s end.  Though Willner is talented enough to make the track possible to listen to for its entire length, it’s simply not enjoyable.  This new style does not bode well for the new album, though the fact that Battles drummer John Stanier will be guesting on Yesterday and Today ensures that I will pick it up.

Nuggets 2.0

A few months ago, I posted an article lamenting the death of creativity in guitar playing.  I lamented the fact that a lack of creativity in guitar playing would ultimately lead to the end of rock and roll.  Now, as I write this, the situation seems even worse.  Critically acclaimed (at least by Pitchfork Media) indie pop band The Pains of Being Pure At Heart (Fall Out Boy song title-cum-wimpy band name) use a guitar sound perfectly ripped off from C86; it’s nearly postmodern indie pop, which tends to undercut any emotional impact the lyrics may have.   The hardest riffs of the twenty-first century were played by Death From Above 1979- on a bass.  And like it or not, No Age and Boris can’t save rock and roll by themselves.

But the difference now is that I don’t actually care about the death of the guitar, because I have seen rock and roll’s future, and it is dance music.  In some ways, this is a revival of the late 90s “electronica is the new rock” craze, but there’s a subtle difference here- now it’s “electronic music is the new garage rock!”

Yes, garage rock.  Sloppy garage rock.  Sloppy, fantastic, Nuggets-worthy garage rock.  And it’s largely because of Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Their new album, It’s Blitz, is a strange kind of departure from their previous indie rock sound.  They are now a largely electronic band. but they do not sound like obsessively programmed electronica.  They don’t even sound quite as professional as Fat of the Land-era Prodigy.  They do, however, sound fantastic. 

First single Zero might as well be the New York Dolls translated into a dance anthem- it’s primitive, rough, and near out of tune.  And this makes it absolutely amazing.  Zero is one of the most organic electronic songs I’ve ever heard, because it is a rock song, but not a rock song that could be done with guitar, bass, and drums.  This is the true dance-punk, this is the true nu-rave, this is rock and roll.

A few days ago, I talked to a member of the electronic group Bluebird Handwriting.  He told me going electronic was the easiest and cheapest way to make good music.   Sounds an awful lot like garage to me.

Years of Refusal To Make Good Music… Until Now: Morrissey’s New Single

 The problem with most of Morrissey’s solo work is that most of it is too similar to the Smiths- and Johnny Marr did it better than whoever Morrissey is working this. The major exception to this is Morrissey’s superb 1992 album “Your Arsenal”, which manages to meld the most assertively British singer of the 80s to good old rockabilly. Lyrically, Morrissey also escaped from the Smiths on this album, throwing away most of the angst and heartbreak for anti-Americanism (Glamourous Glue) and glammy declarations of… something (You’re Gonna Need Someone On Your Side). And when the heartbreak did surface (Tomorrow), the music could lift it out of a Smiths photocopy. Then Morrissey spent the rest of the 90s with mediocre albums, returned with a fairly good record in 2004 (You Are The Quarry), and made the most blandly stereotypical Morrissey record in 2006 with Ringleader of the Tormentors, which, aside from lead single “You Have Killed Me”, was largely bad, though not quite as bad as his upcoming record, Years of Refusal, appeared to be. The incomprehensible title seems to refer to abstinence or being straight-edge or vegetarianism or whatever. So it comes as a surprise that here in 2009, more than 20 years after the breakup of the Smiths, the lead single of Years as Refusal, “I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris”, is not just a solid track, not just a good track, but a great track. Honestly, folks. Yes, it seems like Morrissey by the numbers, and to some extent it is. But it’s so well done that it could be a Smiths song; the songwriting is impeccable, the production is devoid of any bombast, and (gasp) Morrissey’s histrionics are not just bearable, as they are in the best of his solo work, but they are downright enjoyable. It’s a shame Morrissey just released another greatest hits- this belongs right up front.

How To Be Cool: The Playlist

 

Let’s face it- everyone wants to be cool.  Not everyone may want to be popular, but there is a difference between “popular” and “cool”.  To give examples from film: Popular is George Lucas.  Cool is Jean-Luc Godard.  While many may enjoy “Star Wars: Episode IV” more than ”Masculin-Féminin”, no one really wants to be George Lucas.   But how does one become cool, short of making 60s avant-garde art films? The easiest way is to listen to the right music.  Books, though postmodernism is very cool, are not a social activity; though alienation is definitely cool, one has to possess a modicum of coolness before reading to be cool.  Movies are just as easy as music, but music takes less time to do.  It takes 12 hours to watch Jacques Rivette’s magnum opus “Out 1″- and when it concludes you are very cool- but it takes less than forty minutes to listen to the 1979 compilation album “No New York”, featuring some of the most aggressively painful music ever recorded.  Once the four bands on that album- James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and DNA- finish scraping their detuned guitars, shattered saxophones, and atonal keyboards all over your brain, you are cool enough to write for the Village Voice, and it took you less than an hour.  But what makes a cool band? It’s extremely difficult to judge this, as one has to take in all kinds of different factors; if the band was featured on the soundtrack to a Quentin Tarantino film, it instantly becomes cool, and even more so if featured on the soundtrack to a David Lynch film.  But it can be hard to sort through all of these different factors, especially when one is buying sunglasses to wear when one is cool.   So, without further ado, I give you the Sparknotes for cool- a playlist of the coolest, hippest tracks one can listen to- all somewhat old of course, as retro is always cool.  

1) “Go Bang! #5 (Francois K Mix)”- Dinosaur L: The first reason downtown musician Arthur Russell’s improvisational disco project  is cool is because of the name.  If anyone asks you what you are listening to, they will instantly assume you mean the late 80s rock band Dinosaur Jr.  And when they attempt to correct you, you can say “Actually, I do mean Dinosaur L.  You don’t know them? They came first”.  Snarky corrections, especially dealing with obscure New York music, are good for instant coolness.  But what about the actual song?  It’s a dance track, which is cool as long as you don’t dance to it.  Also contains references to gay hedonism.  Coolness ensured.  

2) “We Are The One”- The Avengers: The style of this song- speedy, immediately pre-hardcore punk rock from San Francisco- is cool first and foremost because of the trebly guitar that despite playing a fairly catchy punk riff, manages to still be headache-inducing, and any band that induces a headache without playing at maximum volume is pretty cool.  Most of the coolness in this track, however, comes from its lyrics- singer Penelope Houston proclaims that the band are not Jesus, fascists, communists, or capitalists- they are simply “the one”.  Vagueness can never be uncool.

3) “Secrets”- Mission of Burma: Any song by this band can give anyone instant coolness by sheer dint of the band name- it has just enough political vagueness and memorability to make it the coolest band name ever- but this song is perhaps the coolest.  Starting out with a minute and a half of one guitar chord being hammered into the ground, drums and bass backing it up solidly, the song enters maximum coolness during this first sequence; at about one minute in, the drums and bass cut out and band member Martin Swope plays the drums backwards, while guitarist Roger Miller keeps up his assault.  Instrumentally speaking, one can’t be quite as badass as that.

4) “Melody”- Serge Gainsbourg: Concept albums are definitely not cool, as they often revolve around clumsily allegorized aliens, idiotic Cold War metaphors, and those goshdarn pinball wizards.  However, when Serge Gainsbourg, French pervert second only to the Marquis de Sade, decides to make a song suite about having sex with a minor, the concept album becomes cool.  The epic subversion is prevalent on the opening track, detailing Serge’s exploits on the road, leading to him hitting Melody Nelson’s bike with his car.  It unfolds like a soap opera combined with phone sex- not cool by itself, but when tied into a concept album, cool as Clint Eastwood 

5) “God From Anal”- Boredoms: The coolness in this track doesn’t arise from the noisy, sometime a capella, vocalizing of lead vocalist Yamatsuka Eye (though it certain helps), but rather the ability to say the title with a straight face.  If you can do the same while listening to the track, you are cooler than Miles Davis.

Sound, No Fury: Huff This!

 

For rock and roll, and pop music in general, to be successful, it needs to have a modicum of volume and brutality that will stun the listener enough to forget the relative simplicity of the music.  In this case, brutality means the sheer force of the sound; the Jesus and Mary Chain, for example, are fun to listen to because of the brute force their feedback and distortion lends the pretty little bubblegum songs they write.  The menacing melody of “Venus and Furs” by the Velvet Underground is given more power by Cale’s electric viola meshing with Reed’s guitar Even half of ABBA’s success, for chrissakes, is because of the sound; the electronic disco atmosphere of “Gimmie! Gimmie! Gimmie!”, or the Nordic singing voices (you know that SOS is a great song partly because “understood” is pronounced to rhyme with “mood”).  The band Huff This! have no such successes.

Huff This! describe their sound as “eclectic collages of folk, punk, pop, blues, and country”, and indeed this is somewhat evident. The biggest problem with Huff This! is that too often, the songs are too unassuming in their sound.  The one uptempo track, Alexandra, stands out not because of an especially better melody, but because this is one of the few tracks that drives, unlike the drifting “Ode to Divorce”, featuring an acoustic guitar riff that sonically encapsulates a pencil doodle.  That particular song is kind of like Beat Happening minus the songwriting and plus actual recording equipment.  Guess which turns out to be more important.  

I’d like to say more, but these songs don’t inspire any sort of ire in me; they’re just boring, but would be pretty good as background music.  Seeing as my review here wasn’t too favorable, I doubt any other bands will spring to send me their albums, as Huff This! did, but I will listen to any album sent to me at “peteylovesramones@gmail.com”; I will give it a good review if it has the volume and brutality necessary.  Noise is welcome.

The Year of Living Musically: 2008 Winds to a Close

 

Album of the Year, by the way

Every year, the music scene brings great joys and horrific train wreck disappointments.  2008 is no different.  Read on:

JOYS

No Age’s Nouns- The key thing about No Age is that though they unabashedly flirt with unadulterated ambience, noise, and bizarre loops (Things I Did When I Was Dead is just as strange as the title suggests), they are still PUNK RAWK, unlike Sonic Youth, their biggest influence, who didn’t get quite so accessible until Thurston Moore stopped killing his idols.  Verbs would be a more appropriate title for this album; the songs ooze movement and action, and that’s why the album is punk.  If one steps back from the speed rush of songs like “Miner” and “Sleeper Hold”, one will find the most original guitar sounds of the 21st century.  Unsurprisingly, it’s also the best record this year.

Crystal Castles’ Crystal Castles- Simultaneously one of the best records this year and a great entry point into noisy dance for Pac-Man addicts.  Yes, the synths may seem a bit gimmicky, but Alice Glass’s vocals, the DFA 1979 sample on “Untrust Us”, the blurred line between remixing and sampling on “Crimewave” (with some vocals taken from HEALTH)… they all add sonic depth to 8 bits, something that millions of Kraftwerk ripoffs somehow failed to do.  And “Black Panther” is catchy as all hell.

No Wave Recordings Released- The most confrontational rock movement ever (it could happen nowhere else but New York) never was a contender for an audience.  But 2008 rolls around.  And what do I see? An affordable Mars anthology.  A complete Teenage Jesus anthology (1995’s Everything is a helluva misnomer).  All 10 minutes or so of Beirut Slump.  DNA’s anthology released on vinyl.  Finally, the available documents of the No Wave span more than an hour.  

Guns N’ Roses Release Chinese Democracy- No, the music itself is a disappointment, but the joy is the fact that they finally released it; the joy is that I, who has hated Axl Rose for god knows how long, can point to the perfectionism imploding into junk that is Chinese Democracy, and can say “See, I told you they sucked”.

DISAPPOINTMENTS

Cher Is Not Murdered- In 1998, Cher used a little vocal effect on the verse of her song “Believe”.  Her label wanted her to remove it, but she adamantly refused.  10 years later, every other hit song uses Autotune.  Cher has not yet been saved by Daft Punk (“One More Time” makes up for every vocoder abuse ever), but as the two Parisians start to make movies instead of house, Cher gets closer and closer to paying for T-Pain’s sins.

Black Kids’ Partie Traumatic- All right, no one expected this to be a great album.  But the disappointment is that this is not an absolutely horrendously cheesy album.  The appeal of “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You” is that it’s synthetic and silly, not that it’s danceable or reasonably catchy.  With Partie Traumatic, Black Kids should have gone for broke and made a horrible, self-indulgent record that would be tremendously enjoyable (About a quarter of the Rapture’s Echoes is a good precedent).  Instead, they made a semi-competent record that was pretty much what everyone expected it to be.  Why so unimaginative?

TV On The Radio’s Dear Science- TV on the Radio have always been a very distinctive band; though there are thousands of audible influences in TVOTR’s work, the sounds they draw from are so disparate that there’s really only one song that sets a precedent for what David Andrew Sitek, Tunde Adembimpe et al are doing; This Heat’s “Sleep”, from the 1981 album Deceit.  This is still somewhat true for Dear Science; there are still tons of influences, but only one precedent.  The problem is that the influences have changed from to sterile noise (think late-period Nine Inch Nails) in place of “Phil Spector as jet engine”, as the Village Voice put it, sanitized drum machine funk (think Cameo) in place of the shifting rhythmic intrigue, and Bowie ripoffs (Golden Age in particular) in place of fourth-dimensional doo-wop.  The disappointing thing about the album is that TVOTR are not using new instruments or a new producer; nothing has really changed except the quality has dropped off the face of the earth.  Sitek has lost all the intrigue of the alluringly hazy Young Liars EP; Adebimpe has lost all the soulful melodies of “Staring at the Sun” or “Province”; Malone is just a great deal more annoying.  Here is what is most telling: The New York Times compared Kanye West’s song “Love Lockdown” to TVOTR. 5 years ago, I would have cancelled my subscription.  Now, I shrug and agree. Dear TV on the Radio, thanks for nothing.

Try Me, Then Try This Record: Shut Up And Bleed

 

Every rock critic in the world needs to find a new adjective for Johnny Ramone’s guitar sound.  No, it cannot be described as a chainsaw anymore, and the release of the definitive Teenage Jesus & The Jerks anthology, “Shut Up And Bleed”, proves it eight seconds into “Red Alert”, the first song.  After Gordon Stevenson’s bass chord fades away, Bradley Field hits his lone tom in some semblance of a drum roll, then smashes his hissing cymbal, and Lydia Lunch’s guitar finds the midway point between a chainsaw and white noise.  Then, after thirty-five seconds, the song is over.  “Red Alert” surfaces in two other versions throughout the 21 Teenage Jesus & The Jerks tracks (The other eight tracks devoted to recordings of Lydia Lunch’s other band during the same time period, the strikingly weird Beirut Slump).  Each version of Red Alert is equally vicious, and that can be said of every track on this album.  Even when the basic sound is augmented with James Chance’s saxophone (for example, the earlier versions of “The Closet” and “Less Of Me”), or when Beirut Slump grinds out an oozing, melting sound, “Shut Up And Bleed” is an aural assault that somehow remains compulsively listenable.  Yes, that sounds like an oxymoron, but there are two things about Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Beirut Slump that keep “Shut Up And Bleed” interesting. The first is the focus on shorter songs; the longest track, the second version of “The Closet” lasts not even four minutes.  The second is the sheer weirdness and dark atmosphere the bands emanate; Teenage Jesus and the Jerks focus on slow dirges or quick fragments of songs that are cinematic in how they so completely conjure up an image of a torture chamber, through the haunting stop-start drums and bass and Lunch’s tormented one-note banshee wails.  Beirut Slump go even farther in their atmospherics, with Bobby Swope’s deranged vocals and lyrics (some of which are taken from the rantings of hobos) echoing over atonal dronescapes that seem like recordings of a mental patient preaching to a post-nuclear war wasteland; on the instrumental tracks, like “Staircase” and “Tornado Warnings”, the desolation and horror are overwhelming.  This is astonishingly powerful music that never refuses to be ignored as “noise  for the sake of being noisy”.  Essential.

Live Review: James Chance And The Contortions at PS1

There is nothing that makes one feel better about growing old than seeing the Contortions play live.  I’m tempted to use the cliche that the Contortions have more energy than bands half their age, but that really wouldn’t do justice to the power they show onstage, which 1) proves the Contortions were the best white funk band ever, 2) proves James Chance will probably be able to do it forever, 3) showcases Jody Harris as a strikingly forceful guitar player, and 4) shows what a group effort the Contortions are.  There are no lead guitar lines; Harris plays smashing chords or short, funky melodies, while slide guitarist Pat Place hammers staccato blocks of sound or screeches up and down the fretboard.  Bassist Erik Sanko scrapes his bass notes wildly during “Jaded”; he’s the best bassist the Contortions have had since George Scott.  Don Christensen plays alternately wildly danceable disco or lopsided stop-start beats that still manage to be spastically funky.  Robert Aaron squeals on saxophone and forcefully plays the organ lines (though he can’t beat the incredible pacing and power of Adele Bertei). And of course James Chance’s tenor sax rips holes in one’s eardrums when he isn’t singing in his voice that hasn’t changed a bit since No New York, and is all the better for it.  Before the show, an organizer said that “The Contortions still have chapters left to write”.  Before the performance, most of the crowd seemed to think it hyperbole, but as one who saw the Contortions warm up earlier, practicing “Super Bad” and “I Don’t Want To Be Happy”, I knew that the organizer was telling the truth; the performance of James Chance and The Contortions at PS1 was the best indication of what the original recording of “Buy” sounded like.  And this is thirty years after the fact.  As Sonic Youth slowly settle into mediocrity without Jim O’Rourke, the Sex Pistols rerecord Anarchy in the UK for Guitar Hero, and Pere Ubu’s horrible album covers reflect their music more and more, James Chance and the Contortions stand out as one of the few bands that still lives up to their original promise.  It’s enough to make you feel affection for the human race.

Take Me To The River, Throw This Album In: Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

I was excited when I heard that Brian Eno and David Byrne’s new album was described by themselves as “electronic gospel”, because that brought to mind Talking Heads’ Eno-produced cover of “Take Me To The River”, a brilliant moment on More Songs About Buildings and Food.  Well, it’s not really like that at all.  But I was still excited, because I love Brian Eno’s work, I love Talking Heads, and I love My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, Eno and Byrne’s first collaboration.  Well, I still love that old stuff, but I am being tested by Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.  It’s strange that Brian Eno and David Byrne described their new album as “electronic gospel”, because the term “gospel” would imply a deep emotional connection to the music, something that’s not even apparent in the way Eno and Byrne albumed the album, communicating through email and Eno making the music with Byrne coming up with vocal melodies.  Sure, this was the way the Postal Service made their album, but that was a self-consciously disposable homage to New Wave, and it comes off rather well.  However, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is supposed to be a BIG artistic statement (partly because Eno and Byrne have hyped it up, and partly because it follows the landmark My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, Eno and Byrne’s first collaboration), but everything seems a little lightweight to make this album stick.  Especially the music, which makes it even more strange that Eno and Byrne would call the album “electronic gospel”.  “Electronic” would imply lots of weird sounds, especially since Eno did most of the music.  It’s not really like that either; the music was described by Byrne as “ominous”, but it’s ambient pop in the worst sense; instead of Sigur Ros-style dream pop, it’s music that can be ignored OR listened to with the same amount of impact on the listener; zilch.  This does not bode well for Brian Eno; how did he fall from making Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain, and Another Green World in a two year period to producing Paul Simon, Coldplay, and making this crap in the same amount of time?  I’m sorry, but I can’t really say anything else about this; any discussion of the songs beyond Strange Overtones (sadly, the best track on the album) would be restating the same thing; this album sucks.

Fight The Radio With Throbbing Gristle And Other Helpful Antidotes

 

I don’t hate all popular music, but you could be fooled if I told you my opinion of the radio, which plays the safest, blandest stuff it can find. And in the wake of the Disney blitzkrieg of teen pop, John Mayer’s ubiquity, and Brian Eno’s newfound normalcy, stuff can get pretty bland.  One needs an antidote to this, and desperate times call for desperate measures.  Therefore, I present to you this list of the strongest alternative to the radio that there is.  

 

Throbbing Gristle- The Second Annual Report Of Throbbing Gristle:  This record is the first the world ever heard of industrial music.  It sounds absolutely nothing like Nine Inch Nails, to say the least.  Lyrically it deals with eating fetuses and testicles (Slug Bait), and the music is sludge without rock (especially the studio version of Maggot Death).  It drones on and on without actually playing any notes, simply generating painfully churning noise.  Highly recommended and, the perfect thing to play after hearing John Mayer bitch about the world not changing.

 

Suicide-Suicide: The most disturbing record ever recorded, Suicide’s first album is a bunch of cheap synthesizers and drum machines attempting to play rock and roll, which turns out not being comedic but utterly frightening; think Elvis Presley and the Stooges making a soundtrack for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. If musically it’s unsettling, Alan Vega’s breathless delivery and horror films screams don’t make the atmosphere calmer.  Vega adds a sense of urgency to Martin Rev’s electronics, and in “Frankie Teardrop”, the duo created a masterful ten-minute piece that is the scariest piece of music ever recorded.  The perfect thing to play after the Jonas Brothers numb your brain.

 

Faust-Faust: Not as deliberately noisy as some of the other stuff on this list, Faust’s first record consists of three tracks, all over eight minutes, but it is one of the most fractured and fast-paced recordings ever, matched only by Faust’s third record, The Faust Tapes.  And it does have its noisy moments, including the first forty-five seconds of “Why Don’t You Eat Carrots?”, featuring the Beatles and the Stones lost in a haze of feedback and distortion.  If krautrock often tends towards drones and repetition, Faust simply did anything they wanted to do.  Perfect to play after you realize that every song on the radio sounds exactly the same.

 

Mars & DNA- John Gavanti: It doesn’t seem like Sumner Crane, Mark Cunningham, Ikue Mori, Don Burg, Arto Lindsay, and Duncan Lindsay are trying to make a noise record; in fact, this is an adaptation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.  But it meanders along so tunelessly, it uses trash cans as percussion (at the same time as Einsturzende Neubauten started up), and Crane’s vocals are more bizarre than Beefheart or David Thomas.  Surreal in that it seems somewhat operatic, but it’s done in such a bizarre way it calls to mind the absurd yet ultra-realistic images of Dali and Magritte.  Perfect to play when Faust doesn’t work.

 

Whitehouse-Erector: If all else fails, put this on.  Whitehouse’s third record is the farthest noise music has ever gone; essentially, the twenty-six minute, four song album is composed of tinnitus inducing tones and William Bennett’s screaming.  There is barely a sound or a moment on the album that does not cause actual, physical pain, but the edge has to go to Bennett’s first vocal on the title track; after a few minutes of a synthesizer that sounds like a buzzsaw, he incomprehensibly screams “ERECTOR!” and high pitched feedback squeals and wreaks havoc with your brain waves.  Next to this, Metal Machine Music is for elevators.  Merzbow is New Age music.  Throbbing Gristle is rock and roll.  Erector is a noxious, suffocating album and the purest expression of noise music I know, which means it’s perfectly realized.  The perfect thing for really any problem you have with the blandness popular music; even a glance at the song titles (Erector, Shitfun, Socratisation Day, Avisodomy) will remove any unpleasant aftereffects from the radio.

Better Sides Of Sonic Youth:SYR8

 

Sonic Youth’s newest record, “SYR8: Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth”, is probably the farthest the group have ever gone into abstract noise (at least on record); it’s nearly an hour long, Merzbow appears on it, and it’s all improvised (Sonic Youth have said this is a “structured improvisation”, which is basically a safer way of saying it; think “socialist” instead of “communist”).  I do like this record; it is not Daydream Nation, it is not Confusion Is Sex, and it is not Metal Machine Music.  But I do like this record.  Yes, it was recorded in 2005, and was probably released now as a way to regain some of Sonic Youth’s indie cred before their next studio album, which will probably be even more normal than Rather Ripped.  But it is not a throwaway.  

Will you like this record?  Here are several facts about it:

• It is not as noisy as Merzbow’s 1930.  So do not buy this record if you want to clear your guests out of a party; it will take a while to get started, and some parts are rather peaceful.
• Kim Gordon’s voice varies in recognizability; sometimes it’s obvious, and sometimes it’s as hard as recognizing Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich.  So do not buy this record if you only like Sonic Youth for Kim Gordon’s singing. 
• Includes Mats Gustafsson with the noisiest sax since James Chance.  So do not buy this record if you though “Jaded” was the worst song you ever heard.
• Here is a summary of the first ten minutes:  It starts out with a few minutes of some damaged indie rock with Kim Gordon moaning somewhat tunefully, then goes into noise territory at the three-minute mark, settles down a bit at 3:40 and settles into some bass drones and shimmering guitar for about two minutes as drums fade in and out, then gets slightly faster at 6:00, whereupon at 6:54 there are some cymbal washes; at 7:10, everything gets noisier and the bass gets louder- this continues for a minute- then the drums come in.  At 8:10, a noise crescendo occurs, and then at 8:38 the drums start to play a beat as everything comes together in a strange way before falling apart at about 9:00.  At 9:10, drones come in, and at about 9:50 feedback joins this.  So do not buy this record if you are not already drooling at the mouth
• Thurston Moore does not sing.  Do not buy this record if you think “Catholic Block” is the pinnacle of Sonic Youth.
• All in all, I like this record and it is satisfying to know that even as Sonic Youth records proper become more modern rock than no wave, the SYR releases will always provide the wretched squall and horrible noise Lester Bangs admired so much.  I like it too.

Strange Overtones: The New Single From Eno and Byrne

A new track from Brian Eno and David Byrne (from their upcoming album, “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today”), and it’s a straightforward pop song.  If you say “quiet subversion”, I will slap you.  This is easily the most normal thing Eno has ever done, and Byrne’s voice just makes it more so.  His singing sounds vaguely like his work on Remain In Light, though considerably more mellow; even in the chorus where he gets more excited, he never gets completely unhinged, such as during the falsetto on “Crosseyed and Painless”.  The lyrics are vaguely dark, but also vaguely meaningless, without any of the darkly witty wordplay manifested on tracks like Eno’s “Baby’s On Fire” (They said you were hot stuff/And that’s what baby’s been reduced to) or Talking Head’s “Psycho Killer” (I can’t sleep cuz my bed’s on fire/Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire).   Musically, it’s extremely calm, completely unlike Eno and Byrne’s last collaboration, the landmark “My Life In The Bush of Ghosts”, a frenzied cultural blitz of polyrhythms, sampled televangelists, and psychotically propulsive guitar and bass melodies.  There’s some synth melody, a distorted guitar line in the back of the mix that comes up a bit more in the chorus, and a drum track that sounds sampled.  It comes across as nothing groundbreaking, and retains none of the manic drive of Eno’s early pop work; there’s no sound as weird as the guitar on “Here Come the Warm Jets”, there’s nothing as disturbing as the vocal treatment on “Fat Lady Of Limbourg”, and there’s no melody as perfectly sublime as “I’ll Come Running”.   It’s not a bad track, it’s just… normal.  The good news is: it’s available for free on “http://everythingthathappens.com/”, and the entire album, (released on the 18th of August), will also be available free.  And this is the single, so I still have hopes that the album could be more… well, deranged.  Byrne made a career out of neuroticism, and before Eno plunged into blissful ambience, he was the violently insane (yet tuneful) dadaist in the glam camp.  This is where their best pop music comes from, but “Strange Overtones” is a little too well-adjusted for me.

The Immediate Stages Of Genius:The Mars LP

 

A band starts out trying to play rock and roll, can’t play anyone else’s songs, writes their own.  In the case of the Ramones, “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You” is created.  In the case of Mars, a song about Proust, “3E” is created.  The Ramones go on to write “I Wanna Be Sedated”.  Mars go on to write “Puerto Rican Ghost”, a one minute “song” that is a better distillation of abstract rage than any hardcore punk.  The point is clear- yes, you really can do anything you wanna do. Mars wrote songs featuring S&M with robots, interjections of Egyptian consonants, and coughs as vocals, all laid over postapocalyptic soundscapes where addled mutants scream.  This is not elevator music.  There are no hooks or any real musical precedent.  But Mars are one of the most important bands ever because of the sheer sound they smashed out of their instruments, the textures, the timbre, the POWER of the raw noise!  The Mars LP is a record to be played loud because it is a sensual record; that is, it is one that is to be felt, not to be heard. If it is played only once (all 32 minutes), it will stay with you, from the guitars of “Helen Fordsdale” imitating insects, Sumner Crane muttering “SCORN!” in an imitation of a homeless man, the two second reprise of “Outside Africa” sputters into implosion, China Burg mumbling threateningly in “11,000 Volts”, Nancy Arlen’s beat(!) holding down “Monopoly” as guitars twitch and hum, the guitar jack being pushed in and out to create noise in “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic”, better music for a bondage performance than Merzbow ever recorded.   The record is disturbing, frightening music.  But it is glorious because it is music to play on the sidewalk obnoxiously, to listen to at three in the morning three times in a row, to overdrive through a guitar amp and marvel at.  The only other artwork I can compare it to is a Jackson Pollock action painting; they are both beautiful yet hold no elements of beauty.

This and the Teenage Jesus & The Jerks/Beirut Slump anthology are the reissues of the year.    Forget U2.  Forget anything else on earth for thirty two minutes and play this record, which is currently available at a (gasp) reasonable price, making it the only in print edition of Mars’ discography that includes their original mix of the Mars EP.  Currently, Complete Studio Recordings 1977-78 (its contents equivalent to this) can be found secondhand at Amazon for 100 dollars.  So buy The Mars LP now.

Highlights of the Year So Far

 

Lou Reed (Duh).

Seeing as we are nearly two-thirds through 2008, I thought it apt to publish a few of the musical highlights so far.  Read on:

 

• Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi Birgisson sang a song in English (!?!?) on their latest album, “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust”, proving himself to be the most strikingly incoherent singer since Darby Crash, though considerably more melodic.
• The Mars Volta took enough hits of acid to believe that a Ouija board was both possessed AND worthy of a seventy-five minute album.
• Nurse With Wound combined smooth jazz and light classical, two supposedly relaxing musical forms, into a record, Huffin’ Rag Blues, that made you want to kill yourself. Not because of any avant-garde neo-dada tape experiments, just because it was so incomprehensibly bad.  
• Lou Reed released a concert film, “Lou Reed’s Berlin”, possibly starting down the path that will lead to “Metal Machine Musical” opening on Broadway.  
• Suicide released a SIX-CD set of live performances from 1977-78.  Who said they’d never make it? 
• Girl Talk sampled Twisted Sister (We’re Not Gonna Take It), Jimi Hendrix (Purple Haze), Aphex Twin (Girl/Boy Song), the Cure (In Between Days), and nearly everyone not sampled on Night Ripper to create one of the most cohesive albums of the year.  Well, I liked it.
• Throbbing Gristle planned to release their new record, a cover of Nico’s Desertshore.  They didn’t, but if Nico’s voice is deep and hypnotic, Genesis P-Orridge’s could be likened to HAL on downers.
• The Magnetic Fields released a pretty good homage to the Jesus & Mary Chain.  They titled it “Distortion”, proving themselves for the third time in a row to have the most unimaginative titles since Jackson Pollock.
• Coldplay’s new look proved once and for all Sgt. Pepper was the worst thing for fashion since corsets. 
• ZE Records celebrated their 20th anniversary, kind of strange seeing as the label actually dissolved for a while in the eighties and nineties.  But who doesn’t like parties?
• Teenage Jesus & the Jerks reunited to give me tinnitus for three days after the concert.  
• Madonna refused to accept she was getting old, and chose to attempt to look younger by dressing as a cheap whore on the cover of her new record.  The music wasn’t so hot either.
• Flight of the Conchords released their debut record, which was funny, but more so if you’d ever seen the show.  Or just searched them on YouTube.

An Open Letter to the Red Hot Chili Peppers

Dear Flea, Chad, John, and Anthony,

I’m not a fan.  The Red Hot Chili Peppers are Gang of Four if Andy Gill thought he was better than Hendrix and Jon King eschewed leftist politics in favor of pretending he was in Animal House.  Essentially, your funk is slightly above average but useless, not because it’s “art for art’s sake”, but because it’s so mind numbingly pointless; the Red Hot Chili Peppers epitomize the rather dire flip side of pretentiousness, not aspiring to anything.  You’ve pushed the same sound for nearly 30 years (Any song of their latest studio album, Stadium Arcadium, could be exchanged for any song on their eponymous debut.  The biggest musical evolution that you’ve achieved is realizing that your rapping sucks.), even though your music is a rip off of the great Gang of Four, as mentioned already.  John Frusciante, you might say your “psychedelic-funk” (as blathered by Rolling Stone) playing is different from Gang Of Four.  That is true. Andy Gill was never stupid enough to bog down a 2 hour record with solos that take up roughly a third of the time.  Frusciante, you are talented, but ultimately boring.  Other, less “talented” (in the traditional sense) guitarists have made more interesting music; for instance, Arto Lindsay’s skronk guitar style in DNA or Keith Levene’s metallic scrapings in Public Image Ltd. 

But if your music aspires to nothing, the lyrics aspire to less, and this is the true reason you pale next to Gang of Four.  This is not to say that you should attempt leftist polemics on your new record.  Anthony Kiedis, I believe you think sexual politics is a porno film set in the White House, and when someone writes lyrics about things they don’t understand, they come off as even stupider than you when you sing “Hey o/Listen what I say o”.  But even when you try to be funny, as on Mr. Psycho Sexy (Mr. Psycho Sexy that is me/Sometimes I find I need to scream),  you lack the biting wit of LCD Soundsystem (“Sound of Silver makes you want to feel like a teenager/until you remember the feelings of a real life emotion of teenager” from Sound of Silver) or the absurd hilarity of the Dictators (“I drink Coca Cola for breakfast/I got Jackie Onassis in my pants”).  And when you try to be serious, it comes off as a joke that’s not funny.  “Death of A Martian” stands as one of the most unintentionally idiotic songs ever recorded.  Overall, stupid lyrics bode well when the band is in on the joke and intentionally stylizes and exaggerates stupidity in their lyrics, as the Ramones did, not when the band thinks they did something meaningful and wrote a Spinal Tap reject song.  

If you did not understand my letter above, let me phrase it to you as a suitably moronic verse that could fit perfectly into a Red Hot Chili Peppers song (Before you ask, it fits into your mold of sex and California):

“California oh yeah

The Red Hot Chili Peppers suck

Just like you oh yeah

Gang of Four had no luck”

Hatefully,

Petey Menz

I Might Be Wrong: Is Kid A Really A Bad Record?

In my article “But Is It Art?”, I attacked Radiohead for being extremely pretentious, especially during the recording of their fourth record, Kid A.  I also lambasted the music of the record, characterizing it as “listless”. I must apologize, not for calling Radiohead pretentious (see “But Is It Art? for details), but for perhaps unfairly attacking the music of Kid A.  Kid A is not an accessible record, but I disliked it not for that reason; rather, I was disgusted by the pretensions and by Thom Yorke’s statement that Radiohead “just wanted rhythm”, which seemed completely out of touch with the ambient tones of “Treefingers” and lack of rhythmic drive in “Kid A”.    But when removed from the idiocy of the production and the blind worship of Pitchfork Media (in his 10 out of 10 wetdream review for Kid A, Brent DiCrescenzo blathered that “Kid A makes rock and roll childish…Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper.”), Kid A stands up as a surprisingly (for me, of course) good record.  

Since the record nearly completely does away with conventional song structure, hooks, and guitars, it’s automatically better than OK Computer, which had just as pretentious but didn’t break enough musical ground to validate the pretensions.  The electronic, IDM sound is the best thing about Kid A, partly because Aphex Twin is so much better than the prog Radiohead emulated before, and partly because Radiohead’s pretensions are suited for chilling electronic tones than a triple-guitar attack; essentially, Kid A is good, perhaps even great, (and probably Radiohead’s best) due to the fact that it’s the only one that measures up to at least some of their pretensions.  Even better, Thom Yorke is less annoying than ever (coincidence that this is the record with the most amount of processed vocals?).  Given the way his listless vocal on Amnesiac’s Pyramid Song nearly undermines the track, it’s to Yorke’s great credit that the unidentifiable, extremely processed vocals on “Kid A” aren’t the best “singing” on the album.  That credit would go to either “Everything In Its Right Place” (processed, but in no way to the same degree) or “Idioteque” (in which Yorke sounds like he might actually be a good singer.).  

Overall, I still believe that Radiohead are enormously pretentious, and as people they are probably very annoying and overly serious.  But even assholes can have one good record in them, and Kid A is that record.  

Play Your Part and this Record: Feed The Animals

 

The fundamental rule of mashup is that any bit of music can sound perfect when taken out of the context of its original song, and Greg Gillis proves this rule (The Cure’s”Inbetween Days” sounds downright sublime without Robert Smith’s histrionic angst.)  throughout the continuous mix of Girl Talk’s latest record, Feed the Animals.

The record starts extremely quickly (1.5 Seconds), with a sampled rapper saying “Play your part” over a sampled drumbeat, before “Play Your Part- Part 1″ really begins, which features, among others, an instantly recognizable sample from Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. 

One problem with using such familiar samples is that the listener often wants to hear the rest of the song (depending on one’s feelings for the sampled track); if DJ Shadow loops 1.5 seconds of a rare groove no one’s heard since 1963, the listener won’t care, but if half a familiar riff is looped, the listener will eventually put on the sampled song.  This ruins many lesser mashup artists, as it makes the music annoying as well as somewhat disposable, but Gillis avoids this problem by keeping the sound collage moving at an incredible pace; you will vaguely recognize the sample, but then it will be replaced by another sample.  The only time where Gillis slips with this technique is when “Purple Haze” is sampled in “No Pause”- the entire track stops for Hendrix’s a capella line “scuse me while I kiss the sky”, but the following Feist sample, “1234″, lacks the sonic strength to surprise the listener enough, and one simply wants to hear that Hendrix riff.  This is only, however, for one moment.

The only part where Gillis’s fast pace works against him is that it makes brilliant moments, but not always brilliant songs.  But this is a problem with all mashup, and Gillis provides better moments than nearly any other mashup artist, and with consistency second only to 2manyDJs.  Overall, Feed The Animals is the best record thus far of 2008, and even better, it’s available as a pay-what-you-like download from www.illegalart.net.  Click, don’t walk, to the link and get this record. 

Nurse Without Inspiration: Huffin’ Rag Blues

 

The first sign there was a problem with Huffing Rag Blues was the cover.  Unlike earlier records such as Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table Between a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (featuring photos from s&m magazines) or recent records like Salt Marie Celeste, the cover of Huffin’ Rag Blues did not even attempt to be disturbing, or it has failed so completely that it is humorous.  Part of the appeal of Nurse With Wound is that it is so intensely scary at points; Homotopy To Marie, placed at 61 in Pitchfork Media’s best records of the 1980s, was described in said article as “a twisted masterpiece of minimalism whispering terrifying suggestions of death rituals and torture chambers”.  But Huffin’ Rag Blues is not scary.  The cover might attempt to be “subversive”, and so might the title, but subversion is not scary; it is amusing when done right.  And Huffin’ Rag Blues is not done right.  Is this record pretentious? Yes, in that it was considered good enough to put out.  

What’s the sound of the record? There are jazzlike rhythms and a lounge atmosphere.  Thirty-five seconds through the first real song, “Groove Grease (Hot Catz)” , I felt like taking Steven Stapleton and shoving him down the shaft of the elevator where he got the music for this horrible, horrible track.  How bad is it? Well, if Weird Al Yankovic parodied this song (bear with me), it would be more threatening and abrasive than it is now. And then the title of the song… Idiotic. But when you think about it, so is “The Tumultuous Upsurge (Of Lasting Hatred)”.  At least “The Tumultuous Upsurge…” had music scary enough to back up the title.  There is no music scary enough to redeem any of the titles on “Huffin’ Rag Blues (Worst one: Juice Head Crazy Lady.  It just lends itself to images of David Lee Roth singing).

This song is a blueprint for the rest of the long-winded album, which feels even longer than other NWW records because there’s so little going on.  When “Homotopy to Marie” (the song) goes on for 16 minutes, it uses the time both to build tension and fear and to support Stapleton’s incredible musique concrete imagination.  When “The Funktion of the Hairy Egg” goes on for 14 minutes, it clutters the soundscape with an ultrarepetitive shaker and makes the song a chore.  

Overall, Huffin’ Rag Blues is a total disappointment, both conceptually and musically. Finally, Stapleton’s claim that NWW is not industrial rings true; this is zero-effort malt-o-meal muzak put out by an artist formerly known as someone with substance.  I sure hope he reissues Merzbild Schwet soon.

The (Guitar) Gods Must Be Boring

During the 1980s, Sonic Youth seized on the unorthodox tunings used by Glenn Branca and Mars (Branca used unorthodox tuning to create a wide palette for his electric guitar symphonies, while Mars detuned their instruments to create appropriate instrumentation for their abrasive, shattered fragments masquerading as songs) and attempted to smash rock and roll over the head with cacophonous semi-songs; later, they would integrate the two styles in a less jarring way.  The path they followed- from industrial ground zero on Confusion Is Sex to semi-pop on their major label records (Goo, Dirty)- created some of the most interesting guitar sounds ever recorded.  Sonic Youth’s later success during the 90s and their placement in the rock pantheon suggested that there could be more groups like Sonic Youth; that their larger audience could inspire more people in the mainstream to make bizarre, experimental music.  

That wondrous idea was correct, as proven by the interesting timbres and textures wrangled out of electric guitars by…. Nickelback. Red Hot Chili Peppers? Coldplay? John Mayer?!?

Unless sanitized distortion, self-indulgent funk, sterilized dream pop, or the same old shit (respectively) are new styles, there are only a few new groups (No Age, Liars)  that are using the electric guitar in an inventive way.  Most guitarists are indistinguishable from each other; the biggest difference in guitar sounds today is between acoustic and grungily distorted.  What happened to the days when even mainstream rockers experimented? Robert Fripp, leader of King Crimson, dived into ambient music with Brian Eno and the experimental tape-loop system Frippertronics.  Jimi Hendrix explored the possibilities of feedback, albeit much less brutally than the Velvet Underground.  What happened to this experimentalism? The electric guitar is not a dead instrument.  It has a virtually limitless array of sounds; it is, for all intensive purposes, a synthesizer, one that can generate harsh noise (Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music,  Lydia Lunch’s slide guitar work in Teenage Jesus & the Jerks), droning tones (Rhys Chatham’s composition Guitar Trio, Glenn Branca’s composition The Ascension), queasy whorls of sound (Richard H. Kirk’s guitar work in Cabaret Voltaire, best heard on the song “Seconds Too Late”), splintered scrapes (Arto Lindsay’s skronk guitar, and to a lesser extent Andy Gill’s work in Gang of Four), and even pop melodies (Cheap Trick).  But most guitarists simply aren’t exploring these possibilities (well, the pop melody possibility is being explored), which makes most rock music boring. The genre becomes formulaic and homogeneous; it’s as if every band employs the same studio guitarist with the same amp (With Nickelback, it’s as if they employed the studio guitarist once and then sampled the performance over and over.).

What can be done to fix this?  Well, I certainly do not advocate attacking the guitarists for popular bands and shoving copies of Daydream Nation down their throats.  You should also give them a copy of No New York.  But barring violence, start your own freaking band and don’t learn to play your guitar.  Originality must be favored over technique.  If you can’t play a chord, put a screwdriver under the strings and strum like mad.  Better yet, just do whatever you want to do.  It can’t be worse than John Mayer.

Coldplay Gets… Experimental?

 

“…the experimentation makes this their most musically interesting album to date.”- Rolling Stone

 

“…a brilliant collection of songs designed to push [their] epic envelope”- NME

 

“This consistently thrilling effort fills a much larger sonic canvas with much larger ideas.”- Spin

Are these reviews talking about “A Taste of DNA”, the 1981 EP featuring Tim Wright’s hypnotic bass and Ikue Mori’s semi-rhythmic drums juxtaposed against Arto Lindsay’s skronk guitar and manic vocals?  Or is it Public Image Ltd.’s “Metal Box/Second Edition”, featuring John Lydon tearing himself apart over Jah Wobble’s crushing dub basslines and Keith Levene’s scraping metal guitar?  Maybe it’s for Whitehouse’s “Birthdeath Experience” with atonal, nonmusical synthesizers providing a background for William Bennett’s processed wailing.  These records are decidedly experimental; they demolish song structure (DNA and Whitehouse), bastardize “normal” instruments (DNA), and mix musical genres, such as disco, dub, krautrock, etc (Public Image Ltd.). They use these techniques to break into a new musical space, one that is completely alien and has no direct precedents, but is still compelling to listen to despite the lack of hooks or anything resembling pop.

Actually, these reviews are for the pedestrian “art” “rock” of Coldplay; specifically for their new Brian Eno-produced album, “Viva La Vida, Or Chris Martin and All His Money”.  This is not an experimental album; it is pop music.  The first hint that this record is not experimental comes from the Apple commercial with Coldplay; generally, something pushing the boundaries of music cannot be used to sell product (Try to imagine “Hamburger Lady” by Throbbing Gristle in a McDonald’s commercial ). Furthermore, the actual song “Viva La Vida” uses strings in a traditional manner and has a traditional melody (rumored to be ripped off from another song).  After the first verse, there is a brief moment of strange sound effects and semi-dissonance.  This could be experimental if it lasted for more than five seconds.

I suspect that this album is billed as experimental because it is supposedly their most intelligent and sophisticated album.  Any semblance of intelligence is on the cover art (Any band produced by  Eno used to be considered smart, such as Talking Heads.  That changed with U2).  See the Delacroix painting upon which the name of a Frida Kahlo painting has been scrawled? Those two references are about as smart as Viva La Vida gets.  The lyrics include lines such as “When the future’s architectured/By a carnival of idiots on show/You’d better lie low”.  Actually, this line is one of the few times Coldplay use a word with more than three syllables.  And guess what? “Architecture” is a verb, not a noun.  

Overall, there’s no doubt that Eno is a genius producer, but all the innovative techniques really only used to service pop, instead of breaking new ground. Eno does introduce new elements, but they’re just too subtle; they  may add to the “texture” and “nuance”, but it doesn’t really doesn’t push the music into a new space.  It’s just the same tired Radiohead knockoff.

A Rolling Stone Gathers A Bias

A recent issue of Rolling Stone featured a cover article on the 100 greatest guitar songs of all time.  It also features interviews with several guitar greats.

It is completely useless.  It could be used as evidence in obscenity cases that writing can be artistically worthless.  It validates the statement that rock criticism is like dancing about architecture.  

Why was this article written?  At first I scanned it for mentions of Bo Diddley’s death, but the opening paragraph (the only actual writing in the entire piece- everything else is a two-sentence blurb about the songs) is some garbage about how rock and roll is “the sound of independence” and that the guitar is “liberating”.  It gives no coherent reason why the article is here; apparently they wrote this article because guitars just totally rock, dude.  And this is a front page article.  Is nothing happening in music that Rolling Stone deems important enough to write about?  

Maybe if this article was well done, I wouldn’t mind how unnecessary it is.  Let’s examine the article.  In the interviews,the extremely articulate Eddie Van Halen (Quote:”The first time I turned an amp all the way to 10 and it distorted, I went, “Yeeeah! This is fun.”) is interviewed.  As he is a forgotten master of the guitar, it is very interesting to hear his thesis-worthy responses to intriguing questions about his guitar playing.  And that incredibly innovative John Mayer is interviewed as well, adding even more insight (Quote:”It’s a completely exposed craft. There is no facade.”- my god, has he heard of overdubs? An even worse quote: “Because everything else you can buy, man. But guitar is the stuff that takes your life to figure out.”) to the article, which truly redefines our idea of the guitar (The only actual technique discussed is distortion.  That’s a novel idea).

And I haven’t even talked about the actual songs chosen yet. Well, the Ramones (18 for “Blitzkrieg Bop”) beat out Television (41 for “Marquee Moon”!?), Sonic Youth (hipster cred… because they’re such an obscure band) shows up once at 79 for “Silver Rocket”, Pearl Jam (77 for “Even Flow”) beats out My Bloody Valentine (93 for “Only Shallow”), and Jimi Hendrix is second only to Chuck Berry (because according to Rolling Stone, the older it is, the better).  All this could be an indication of how in touch Rolling Stone is with music nowadays.  It just might indicate they have nothing else to say and that their magazine is useless, out of touch, and hopelessly biased.  Cancel your subscriptions.

But Is It Art?

Radiohead is generally acknowledged as the best band in the world today (Pitchfork Media described them as better than the Beatles when reviewing the record Kid A, which they gave a 10.0/10).  Closely in pursuit are the Arcade Fire and the Mars Volta.  I am not sure if I am talking about musical greatness or pretensions.  In my opinion, the latter one is more accurate.  These bands think they are very, very, very important.  They are very, very, very serious about that.  Which makes it even funnier when they do something very, very, very stupid because it’s supposed to mean something.  Case in point: 

o Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s description of his band, the Mars Volta’s, third album, Amputechture: “It’s about the pineal gland … and how we can come up with cures forcancer and AIDS if we’re more in tune with what’s going on in the rainforest.”  This guy is completely serious when he says his album is about a gland.  Not just any gland- thepineal gland.  Maybe he relates to it more than the pituitary gland.  This suggests that the Mars Volta are stoned out of their minds 24-7, which could explain why their music is so incredibly indulgent; imagine Funkadelic without the saving grace of funkiness and a lot more stuff to musically jack-off with, and you have the Mars Volta.  It’s not a pretty image.

o The Arcade Fire’s lyrics to “Windowsill” from their second album, Neon Bible.  These are delivered with a completely straight face: “I don’t wanna fight in a holy war/I don’t wanna live in America no more”. Does Win Butler think he is writing something meaningful here?  These lyrics can be best described as ‘Ramones go expatriate’ (and would da bruddahs ever leave New Yawk?).  With some knowing humor, this song could actually be sold with that description (don’t knock Ramones ripoffs, it’s what the Undertones built their career on), but I suspect Win Butler fancies himself to be as serious as Ian Curtis.

o Radiohead’s fourth album, “Kid A”.  Well, maybe not the album so much as the creative process.  Thom Yorke declared he needed to electronically manipulate his vocals to distance himself from the “horrible” subject matter of the title track.  I wonder if Michael Gira ever had this problem.  A sample of the lyrics from aforementioned track: “We’ve got heads on sticks/You’ve got ventriloquists”.  Oh, wow.  Very brutal and horrible.  And this is the band Chuck Klosterman called the smartest band in the world.  Other choice snippets from the album’s production include the practice of taking words from a hat to create lyrics in the dada style that are then delivered with the utmost seriousness (not deadpan, serious), forgetting the fact that dada was absurd and FUNNY (If Duchamp was trying to be really deep and arty when he said “I have a spiral shaped penis”, I was unaware).  And of course, the fact that the band nearly broke up deciding a running order for the tracks.  Fans convince themselves this means the album is an important artistic achievement. This is the kind of thinking that convinces me that James Chance was right when he said that a fan was the lowest creature on earth.

So these guys are pretentious assholes.  But who cares.  David Thomas is too at some points, and he fronted PERE UBU.  What about the actual music?  Well, they are all pretentious enough to completely detach themselves from anything remotely danceable, as funkiness would be a degradation of the artistic ideals of these bands.  The Mars Volta has vague moments of funkiness, but this is probably something that can be compared to monkeys typing Shakespeare.  The Arcade Fire are the least danceable group in the world.  They make marching band music; very stirring, but with all the lyrics, it can just make you want to break the record and put on James Brown. Radiohead (or at least Thom Yorke) said that they were finished with melody and just wanted rhythm.  They also named themselves after a Talking Heads song.  Based on this, I thought their sound would be like something off Remain In Light or Fear Of Music (they’ve got the dada lyrics). Turns out their rhythms are more like listless, slow, boring dirges than disco-meets-Fela Kuti workouts.  So you can’t dance to it, it’s pretentious, and it’s made by a bunch of stoners with delusions of grandeur (Mars Volta), marching band rejects with some actual song writing value (Arcade Fire, and yes, despite their pretensions, I AM recommending them.  Let Andrew Weatherall produce them and they could be Primal Scream with more violins and less 303.), and people who think dada is as serious as The Sorrow and the Pity (Radiohead). And these are the “best bands in the world”.

Teenage Jesus and the Jerks: Live Review

Outside the Knitting Factory on Friday, June 13th, I talked with a woman who went to see Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in their heyday and had not bought a ticket for the one-night reunion, thinking she could walk right in.  She was shocked to find the show was sold out and remarked that they had more fans now then they ever had in their heyday.  

And the fans were not disappointed.  There is no midlife crisis for Teenage Jesus.  Time has not watered down Lydia Lunch.  For the one-night reunion of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, her slide guitar still sounds like scraping metal, she sings with even more venom (she doesn’t even attempt to sing anymore, she just belts out the words, which suits the lyrics (Sample from “The Closet”: I can’t talk/I can’t enunciate/And I’m treated like Sharon Tate)), and she continually insults the audience  (She seemed very nice when I got her autograph, which you would never know when she yelled “Don’t expect a f******g encore, when are you gonna learn less is more!”).  

Thurston Moore filled in on bass, looking scared out of his mind by Lunch, as did the drummer, Jim Sclavunos, who hits the drums with such force he could be smashing heads (and he is smashing eardrums).  Lunch enjoys pressuring her bandmates; at the start of their song “Orphans”,  she waited a minute or so before playing while Thurston Moore played the one-note bass line and looked increasingly uncomfortable.  The best song of the night could have been the first; after a wave of painful feedback, they started into the 30-second rip of “Red Alert”, which they played loud and fast enough to kill a horse.  

The opening band, Information, was kind of a cross between Robin Crutchfield-era DNA (repetitive amelodic keyboard lines) and Sonic Youth guitars (strangely tuned, ringing).  However, except for one song when the instruments fit together to make a sound like an engine, they can’t wrangle as interesting textures out of their instruments as their peers Mars could (Listen to “Scorn” from the Mars EP, which could be a recording from Hiroshima). I wish DNA could have opened for Teenage Jesus (Sumner Crane and Nancy Arlen died in 2003 and 2006, respectively, dashing any hope for a Mars reunion, and the Knitting Factory was so crowded that if James Chance had performed, half the audience would be trampled if he tried to bite someone), as it would be nice to see if Arto Lindsay can still play skronk after several pleasant but decidedly not noisy records.