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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.