Ethan Swan

Ongoing

2010-10-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

This blog has been discontinued, thank you to RVCA and especially Liz Rice for the opportunity to be a part of their network for awhile. Below are links to other writing I've worked on in the meantime as well as some archives. Feel free to check out NBA Tattoos and the Silk Flowers blog as well. This page will be updated as projects emerge. Thanks

2011
Led Er Est. GQ Style, Issue 13. Autumn/Winter 2011-2012
Nite Jewel. GQ Style, Issue 13. Autumn/Winter 2011-2012
No Age. GQ Style, Issue 13. Autumn/Winter 2011-2012
Prurient. GQ Style, Issue 13. Autumn/Winter 2011-2012
SFV Acid. GQ Style, Issue 13. Autumn/Winter 2011-2012
Xeno + Oaklander, GQ Style, Issue 13. Autumn/Winter 2011-2012
Felix Kubin: The Symptom of the East. Interview for New Museum blog, September 2011
Main Attrakionz: websites and trap spots. Interview for New Museum blog, August 2011
The expressionist no wave of Gray. Interview for New Museum blog, July 2011
Heavy Metal Meets Shaker Culture with Jon Mueller. Interview for New Museum blog, February 2011
MF Grimm, Master of the Concept 12". Seen website, January 2011

2010
Let's Talk About DeMarcus Cousins. Seen website, December 2010
Best Record of 2011: Iceage - "New Brigade". Seen website, December 2010
A Band's Worst Nightmare Came True Here. Cassette produced on the occasion of the NY Art Book Fair 2010 by the Kingsboro Press. November 2010
Wierd Records. ANP Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 5. Autumn 2010
Bowery Artist Tribute Vol. 2. September 2010. A project of the New Museum
Top Dollar, Top Class: Endless Boogie's Paul Major. Vice Magazine, August 2010
Tonight We Try to Die On Purpose: The Broken Promise of Ink & Dagger. Kingsboro Press, Issue 6. June 2010
222 Bowery: The Bunker. ANP Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 4. Winter 2010
iceage Interview. Maximum Rocknroll #324, May '10

2009
Vampire Rules. Printed zine, edition of 200. Springtime, 2009.
Report on 1993: From The Diane Files: Volume One. Kingsboro Press, Issue 5. 2009

2008
Literary - Fuck This Life. Vice Magazine, September 2008
Blank Dogs is Good. Vice Magazine, September 2008
Somehow That Really Impressed Me : Shelagh Delaney, John Osbourne, and Morrissey. Printed zine, edition of 150. August 2008
Bowery Artist Tribute Vol. 1, July 2008. A project of the New Museum
Denver - Pictureplane. Vice Magazine, July 2008
Hey, Where Did Bridget Cross Go? Vice Magazine, May 2008
Tao Lin. ANP Quarterly, Volume 1, Number 10. 2008

2007
Mystery Man: Cass McCombs Does Not Vouch For His Actions. Vice Magazine, November 2007
Does It Make You More a Kid if You Want to Off the Pigs. Printed zine, edition of 100. 2007

Who the king piece in the chess game?

2008-02-01T08:16:00.000-08:00

Slick Rick - Underwear is Wet

Today is my sister's birthday. Happy birthday Jordana. A little while ago she wrote a top ten of 2007 list for me that was at least half rap music which was, of course, no surprise to me since we share an apartment, and I heard her listening to these songs for months, some of them for years. A few years ago she lived in a Philly apartment crowded out with all of my records. She made the best of it, running through piles of 12"s and assembling genius mixtapes. When I showed up to the fort she had made out of cardboard sleeves and dirty clothes we spent weeks laughing and freaking out over songs. Barely letting two verses of Biggie songs play out before we shoved Foster Sylvers onto the turntable, followed quickly by "If I Had No Loot." It had been a minute since we had seen each other, and the themes that emerged in her hasty playbacks nudged me to ask if she had discovered the Slick Rick white label in the shelves with the B-side "Underwear is Wet", claiming that it was the exact sort of misogyny that she appreciated.

In the late 90s I lived in Portland Oregon and there were so few stores to buy rap records that I ended up figuring out the internet so that I could keep up. It turned out a good thing, because between sandboxautomatic.com and hiphopsite.com I found a ton of weird stuff that barely made it to stores beyond midtown Manhattan and Los Angeles. When Slick Rick was released from prison in 1998, I obsessively fantasized about how great his comeback record would be. I think it must've been in 1999 when this 12" came out, listed on one of those sites as "I Sparkle" b/w "Underwear is Wet" which is funny since the 12" only says "I Sparkle (clean version)" on one side and "I Sparkle (dirty version)" on the other. "Sparkle" is a Large Professor produced cut that's confident, easygoing and steady graciousness, the kind of thing that Jay-Z's grown man rap music should've aspired to. But "Underwear" was the real winner, a fearsome battle track with him twisting and turning over a ridiculously simple beat that basically flips the "there's a place in france where the naked ladies dance" theme.

The song is full of quoteables, nearly every line hits with that hurt-your-feelings sharpness, but Rick sounds nonchalant and grinning the whole time, so clearly in control of the situation. I think it was that era where everyone started describing MCs as sounding "hungry" and it was a sound I was very compelled by but on "Underwear is Wet" Slick Rick outdid the hunger of Shabaam Sahdeeq or Ill Bill or whatever it was by sounding well fed but a gourmand, like he was just eating for the taste of it. Appreciating the flavor of demolished MCs. Quick favorite punchlines:

"my record will be barking all through your broke project"
"if a rapper wants to eat he better never cry battle"
"put you and your family on welfare"

And then of course the chorus, which features the eye-widening, nudge-your-friend-in-disbelief line which made me think my sister would love the song so much: "no period and still have to put a pad on." Always with the grin on his face, I can't think of another rapper who you can so clearly hear his smile while he's rapping.

Jordana and I have secretly fought over this 12" for years. I have no count of how many times it's changed hands over the years. Always without a word or discussion. It's just suddenly gone one day, and then the next time I see her I sneak it into the bag with whatever I just bought. I think we've both looked for extra copies on the internet but never with any luck, the fact that it doesn't say "Underwear is Wet" anywhere on the record doesn't help. A year or so ago Cocaine Blunts aka the gold standard of talking about rap records on the internet ran an entry on Slick Rick rarities that had some gems but both of these songs were absent. "I Sparkle", by the way, did surface on the "Wild Wild West" soundtrack but as far as I know "Underwear is Wet" has been hidden forever. Anyway, it's now here and on her computer so no matter what happens to the 12" we can always hear a favorite.

And I play "couldn't-be-much-boreder"

2008-01-13T20:17:00.001-08:00

Shudder to Think - Corner of My Eye

A couple of months ago this movie came out, called "Control" that was about the band Joy Division and specifically their singer, Ian Curtis. A few years ago, I read the book that "Control" is based on, called Touching From a Distance. It was written by Deborah Curtis, who was married to the singer. They even had a daughter. The book, um, debased me of a mythology that I had carried about Curtis since I was a teenager - that he committed suicide by hanging himself in an empty room, leaving a mystery for the authorities. They eventually figured out that he stood atop a block of ice to place the noose around his neck, which he knew would melt and leave no trace before they found his body. Anyway, it's not at all true, although it is true that they found a copy of Iggy Pop's The Idiot on the turntable beside him.

Beyond movies, the internet is doing a good job of removing all of these weird legends that we carry about our favorites - like how Debbie Harry wasn't actually almost abducted by Ted Bundy, or how Sinbad didn't die last year, or how Lars Ulrich isn't HIV-positive. But it sometimes feels like a fun robber.

Anyway, when I first heard Shudder to Think it was this song on a mixed tape, and the friend who made it for me said that the singer had trained for the opera before getting into punk, which is why he sang so uniquely. I resisted his voice for awhile; the leaps in pitch, the near-constant vibrato and smoothed-out vowels sounding so much like good posture and all the other stuff I joined punk to avoid. But I really liked the way he sang "and I just want to see my girlfriend, cause her hugs are the best I know", because his inflection actually adds to the emotion of the line, makes it believable and bright in a way that Blake Schwarzenbach or Billie Joe wouldn't have been able to. That scratch of ache that I felt so deeply when I first heard it and feel again on a night like tonight was enough to carry me through the song over and over and over again. I liked the poetry of his lyrics, it was sweetly teenaged and facile, full of images like "housefly hair" and alcohol described as "forgetting sauce", the types of conceits that never appeared in the underground where everyone simply said what they meant. "At least I can fucking think" and "if I started crying, would you start crying?" and "put your hand in my hand and look me in the eye when you're talking to me" are all potent, but they sometimes fade and stop registering with their directness. While I still think about Shudder to Think's "neurotic time" when I'm on the subway.

The song itself is another kind of magic, a take on the sound of their friends that's just skewed enough to sound unlike everything else. On the Dischord Records biography of Shudder to Think they describe the band as being "inspired by, but also independent from" the Dischord scene. I like the way they take the insistent, melodic guitars of Revolution Summer and slowed them down just a touch, releasing a bit of the tension but creating some kind of nobleness that matches the singer's tone. As the verse begins, there's a chugga-chugga guitar riff that would feel muscular and heavy-browed in another band's hands, but in "Corner of My Eye" feels pensive and wide-eyed in the way the lyrics feel.

The thing is that there are a million punk songs about feeling isolated in a crowd, about the weight of the mainstream, the pressure of their lifestyles. And there's something great about kicking out, and spitting and causing a scene like the songs do, but most of the time I just feel tense and so quiet and wishing I could shrink or vanish. And more than anything, I watch: the secret interactions of the people around me, the way they hold their bags, the way they care about other people's gazes or else the way they make a show of not caring. But I never found a song that said that until "Corner of My Eye." And I just spent an hour reading every bio I could of Shudder to Think's singer Craig Wedren and I can't find a single reference to him training for the opera. And I'm annoyed to have to let go of another amazing myth but I feel even better coming to terms with the brilliant cohesion of the entire band, with the way their every gesture reinforces this sense of movement surrounding me and forcing me more and more inward, wishing for faraway hugs and wondering about the lives of the people across me on the train.

A certain something asphyxiates my breathing

2008-01-04T22:48:00.000-08:00

Hardcore has always felt the most potent to me when the music reaches the same kind of frantic violence as the world that it's responding to. The first song on the Necros LP. Crossed Out. Die Kreuzen. The entire second side of the Heroin LP. There's something so compelling to me about the balance, these short, super-tight songs where it feels like everything is at the breaking point. Drummers hitting every single surface in front of them, exploding bursts that cut and jab but always remain concise. Guitar and bass careening, like their strings are a staircase the players are falling down. Listening to "Jack of All Phobias", the first song on Phantom Tollbooth's 1986 self-titled EP, I sometimes can't believe there's only three people in the band.

I spent a lot of the 90s feeling breathless and aghast, and those years were thankfully escorted by hardcore records. When life felt hectic, instead of finding a song that could calm me, I looked for one that felt just as hectic. There was a few years there where it seemed like Born Against were clearly the most succinct expression of this feeling; the songs swarmed and kicked in a way that I wished I could. Their abrupt endings made the two seconds of silence before the next song feel like a new kind of violence, a sudden elimination of air.

Somewhere along the line I explained to someone how deeply I felt for Born Against, how original and telling their records were. In a very friendly, hey-check-this-out kind of way he suggested I look for a 7" by the band Mecht Mensch. A few weeks later I saw a copy in a record shop in Rochester and paid $50 for it unheard, begging my sister not to tell my parents how much I spent. I loved it. Ran around the living room stagedive off the loveseat unspeakably happy. It felt like fighting every person that's ever made me feel worthless, irrelevent, or unfit, and winning! It was everything I knew hardcore could be.

A while later my friend Isaac gave me the first 12" EP by Phantom Tollbooth, knowing my love for this kind of brutality. The first song, clocking at 1 minute, 52 seconds, feels like it has somehow lasted from the moment I put on the record until this moment, and will extend its savagery for the rest of my life.

What was going on in New York in 1986 when this record came out? The history books seem to think there was just the Cro-Mags "Age of Quarrel" and Youth of Today's "Break Down the Walls", leaving no room for this kind of storm. The art-damage of D.N.A. was far enough in the past that it wouldn't even signify, and the band's reliance on sheer noise as a foundation seems to distance it from any of the midwest hardcore acts that reached their levels of aggression. Their thank you list includes Sonic Youth, Das Damen and Yo La Tengo, which suggests the company they were keeping. But if I try to imagine going to see Sonic Youth, even in their feedback-swirl mid-80s mode, and hearing this, I can only think of it like waiting for the train and suddenly getting stabbed in the ribcage with a screwdriver.

The track begins with an evil squall, which fades just enough to introduce the bassline before the drums and vocals kick down the door. Their initial impact is one of the harshest openings I can think of. The song rages forward with a wild-eyed fury, the drumming running so many fills that it seems like he recorded three different takes. It's a paranoia-inspiring flurry, makes me feel surrounded and harried. Just at the moment that you could become acclimated to the pace, the song stops with a neck-grabbing precision, which isn't at all showy but does make you realize that everything is carefully placed. Then they leap back into the fight.

This is where the song almost derails, with a dis-ease and drama that only heightens the sense of paranoia and harassment, with the bass peaking into this Minutemen-ish high-end speed, while the guitar restrains itself to tight, sparse chords. The drums almost manage a typical 4/4 beat. Then the noise swells up underneath while the vocals maniacally repeat "laugh, laugh and survive." It's harrowing, but clearly encouraging.

The other five songs on the 12" are good, they don't kill me the way "Jack" does but there is some gleeful dement on it, the lines "blood on the stairs/still mine" from "More Paranoia" or the haunted nonsense of "Little green girls with little green tails are telling tales, they're telling tales/about me" in "Sweat Blood." The thing that does kill me is how much this record means to me and how little it's entered any kind of hardcore canon. These days Phantom Tollbooth is best known for the remake of their 1988 LP "Power Toy" by Bob Pollard and by the bands they went on to form/join. Apparently the $50 I paid for the Mecht Mensch 7" is nothing compared to what it's fetching today, but you can buy a sealed copy of the Phantom Tollbooth 12" for $9. Really. It's on ebay right now. And when I can't breathe, and there are enemies on every side, it's impossible to say that one record signifies more than the other. And the Phantom Tollbooth has a better cover.

I'm looking for amusement, please believe me

2008-01-01T11:19:00.000-08:00

Roy Harper - Mr. Stationmaster

Something's that's been discussed before is that amazing process where you learn about things in isolation. Reading Maximum RocknRoll and noticing that every third band in the review section gets compared to Green Day so you buy a Green Day record. Green Day thanks Crimpshrine on that record so you get one of theirs. They're both on Lookout Records, so you start checking for other records on that label.

Or a roommate played Nick Drake for me and I absolutely flipped. It was the best! Like the music my parents played around the house when I was a kid, but more ghostlike, closer to my ear. And then I found a biography where the author claimed that there's nothing special about Drake's guitar playing, he just knocked off Bert Jansch. So go buy one of his. Bert Jansch was famous for his cover of "Angie", written by Davy Graham. Davy Graham made a record with Shirley Collins. Their version of "Nottamun Town" is on the boxed set "Electric Muse: The Story of Folk into Rock" which has this one perfect, precious love song. "Forever" by Roy Harper.

Everyone likes Roy Harper. Led Zeppelin made a song about him called "Hats off to Harper." Pink Floyd had him sing "Have a Cigar" on one of their records. Kate Bush traded duets with him on her record, then his. This past September, Joanna Newsom called on him to play a show with her in London. But when I heard him sing that song, the weight of his reputation, really the whole world, just fell away. It was me, cross legged on the floor with headphones on, like a teenager on TV, and Harper, playing this perfect, fingerpicked guitar that felt like warm water, that certain softness, roundness maybe, of bathwater, the weight of it on your body when you lay all the way back. His voice is clear, with one haunted touch of roughness. It sounds like he wandered in the forest for days or weeks, sleepless and alone, only emerging after finding the right words to tell someone how dearly he loved them.

So then go after the record the song is from: Sophisticated Beggar, released in 1967 and rereleased as Return of the Sophisticated Beggar in 1970. The record is full of the same beautifully rich, dancing guitar work as the song "Forever", and that same gentle, modest voice. And this magic little surprise, "Mr. Stationmaster" with no guitar at all and its jaunty organ marching along like some perfect night in a yellow-lit pub, dark wood everywhere and crooked-teeth smiles inviting you to new friendships.

Honestly I don't know enough about the condition of the English railways circa 1967 to understand why Harper needed to write a song where he declares, "oh Mr. Stationmaster, you're a national distaster" and I think he's mostly trying to make a listener laugh. But I don't really even hear the actual comedy, all I can hear is the laughter behind his voice, the steady skip of the drums and that merry organ bending its elbows and swinging its wrists in some smiling, marching dance. And it makes me so ridiculously happy.

So, new year, old song. I like having the reminder that a song can just be a cheerful pump of organ chords, steady drums, and an insolent but good-natured voice singing out snapshot images and almost-jokes. And listening to it reminds me also that I'm much more drawn to that simple joy than all the careful programming, sophisticated song structures, or accomplished musicianship that I normally fret over.

Best of 2007=my friends Part 7

2007-12-27T23:15:00.000-08:00

Okay friends, thank you for reading. I know it's a lot but I really loved seeing these and hope you did too. Happy new year and to steal from an email I got from my friend Devon recently, good dreams or none at all. Peace.

Best of 2007=my friends Part 6

2007-12-26T20:10:00.000-08:00

I should also mention that the car I'm driving is an '88 Camry with a blown stock system. Everything that comes out of the speakers sounds like a dub of a dub: It's like a machine that can turn the smoothest Dr. Dre production into some Tical sounding ruggedness.

Lil' Wayne "Da Drought III"

Before "DDIII" came out, I saw a Juvenile show where he threw a bunch of fliers into a crowd that showed the now infamous Wayne and Baby kiss. People were going crazy, and for a second it seemed like Weezy F. might get Ja Rule'd over the whole thing. Instead, it turns out that Wayne was on a spaceship or something, listening to "It Was Written" over and over again recording a million songs. "Sky's the Limit 2007" was an NO anthem for a second (I would turn off the car and another car would drive by playing it, or I would be in the corner store and there would be some kid wearing a 3XL Scarface t-shirt playing the cd on one of those portable DVD players). The song even sounds like the city: violent, angry, funny, and soulful. There's this part at the end of the song where the instrumental is riding out and Wayne keeps spitting these increasingly fucked scenarios ("use your head 'fore I take it off your shoulders, mail it to your mom with a dozen roses") and then mumbles, "now that's fucked up." Then, the music fades out for a second and Wayne makes like a second line trumpet and sing/scats the chorus one last time, spitting out the entire evolution of music into that one moment. Word to Gizmo.

Devin the Dude "Waiting to Inhale" and UGK "Underground Kangz"

Another thing about the car: there's no air conditioning. Once May hit, I started having to bring a change of clothes along because I was always totally soaked once I got to BR. Ethan once told me that he understood why Screw comes from Houston, 'cause of the slow traffic. That's good. It makes sense, but in my mind, Screw's it's-too-fucking-hot-to-actually-have-your-brain-work-to-comprehend-what's-being-said- at-normal-speed music. The Devin and UGK albums perfectly capture the feel of a Screw tape without the creepiness, both albums' beats and choruses are beautiful, even though the raps are on some hide-that-shit-under-your-bed shit, especially Devin's verses. Although, his rhymes are delivered so criminally smooth he might be able to get away with singing to your grandma about how his "dick is so clean, you can serve it with some lima beans" and she would still say, "that young man has a nice voice." The UGK album is a little harder to think about with the recent passing of Pimp C. My favorite track on the album, "Living this Life," seems especially ominous in retrospect, going from what was in my mind a post-prison song about heaven to some Tupac shit ("died young, oh well, I had a good life"). Of course, Bun murderizes that shit with the non-glamorous hustler life, "I'm a pawn in this neighborhood chess game/having to see a man 'bout a dog and sell him a cat."

Freeway-"Free At Last"

Freeway sounds like he hasn't really listened to a rap album since he put out "Philadelphia Freeway" four years ago. He's still rapping in that crazy rhyme pattern and his voice sounds like a wounded elephant trying to speak some kind of strange human language. He didn't get any new Just Blaze or Kanye tracks- just a bunch of producers that make beats that sound like four year old Just Blaze and Kanye tracks before they got all smoothed out by success. It's a great look though, Free knows he's not gonna be doing any HP commercials, so he just decides to rhyme as cold as he possibly can: there's this Rakim moment where he goes from biblical reference, to the jungle, to space in the span of two bars ("I am Noah, I will throw you off the damn Ark/ feed you to the fishes like spare parts, don't you dare start. Boa constrictor flow, constricting your airlines, like you outerspace with no oxygen. Tell your man, 'Halt'"). Free also drops one of the most painfully confessional rhymes this side of Fatlip about his grandparents dying. And then he rhymes, "(I cried) when I realized that they died on the wrong religion. Hope Allah forgives 'em." Even though it's been like 80 degrees for most of December, this shit brings the winter.

Will.i.am-"Heartbreaker" from "Songs about Girls"

The poor man's Justin Timberlake. This song almost makes amends for "Humps" (and makes me want to hang a little disco ball from the rear-view mirror).

Someone should make a video where a kid puts a Freeway tape in his walkman and he starts rapping along while putting on his jacket and when he walks out of his house has a Freeway beard. Then his girlfriend asks to hear the tape and she ends up rapping with a Freeway beard. And then she lets a baby hear the tape until a bunch of people have Freeway beards. Then they play a baseball game against State Property.

Best of 2007=my friends Part 5

2007-12-25T20:02:00.000-08:00

Best of 2007=my friends Part 4

2007-12-24T19:49:00.000-08:00

~~2007 top tens~~

Fuyuki Yamakawa at TBA festival in Portland—He manipulates his breathing and heart rate to affect light and sound. A visually romantic display of control. It felt like a magician’s performance. Some gothic and demonic things happening.

Sud. Grenze ---DEREVO. Someone in Bristol who worked on this film showed it at their house. Super beautiful, hard to describe. Strange metaphors and breathtaking cinematography. By the performance/art group DEREVO from Russia. Its not from this year but I saw it this year. From their website:

“One time you find yourself in a park, on a bench, looking into space, and for a second you forget which country you are in, whether it's morning or evening; you are pierced by a pang of loneliness, your heart becomes light and sad, what is important separates out from all the noise of the world, and the slipping, sliding shadows fill with meaning profound...

Words come to mind...

‘South. Border’ is my present to myself, a little window to the house I will never be able to build, a house of silver and light.”

Valet @ Rotture, in Portland.

Inca Ore—Churpa Champurrado. 18 minutes or so of new recordings by Eva Saelens of Inca Ore. A return to something dark and private. Really nice, and haunting.

Pink Reason, “By a Thread”–It’s the By a Thread side that we listen to a lot in my house. It has a dusty and scratched-up catchiness, dark and suffocated.

Yo Majesty @Holocene, Portland. This show was amazing. I went mostly expecting a raucous show, which it was, but their raw lyrical talent caught me off-guard. Weird intertwining rhythmic stuff not on the recordings that I’d heard, and at the end one of the MC’s sort of broke down in a way that made a lot of the audience cry. Not that crying or making other people cry automatically makes your show good, but sometimes it does, and this time it did, because it was all about this humble feeling of still appreciating your audience, even though you have the same amount of talent as a lot of folks that could easily at that point choose to just be super cocky and forget about anyone but themselves.

DJ Yo-Yo Dieting: Nonexistences of the Eyes Mixx/Unborn Faces Withering Mixx. When I think about Glamorous Pat I think about the time he disappeared into the bathroom for half an hour a couple years ago at a gallery party in Portland, and how when he emerged he told me that he’d taken so long because he was lost in the mirror. I like his remixes because it keeps all the good parts of the song, or just condenses and amplifies them. Everything else is fuzzed or just not there.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=aUgcFiLA0_o

Best of 2007=my friends Part 3

2007-12-23T19:44:00.000-08:00

Best of 2007=my friends Part 2

2007-12-22T19:37:00.000-08:00

Best of 2007=my friends Part 1

2007-12-21T19:32:00.000-08:00

All this blog was ever supposed to be was my favorite records. A bad habit I have is promising to make a tape for someone that I never do. Most of the songs I've written about have appeared on a mixtape, some of them have appeared on nearly ever one I've ever made. Anyway, what that means is that it's sort of superfluous for me to make any sort of year-end list. You already know what it's going to be. But! There are many reasons to have year-end lists and my favorite have always been the ones written by people that didn't spend the whole year writing about music already. So! Here are seven different lists written by people that I love. I hope you have fun reading them.

Fred Thomas
Clearly the person mentioned most often on this blog, Fred Thomas has been a part of every monumental event in my life for ten years. Even if he is far away, his songs have been right nearby to comfort, revel, or sympathize. One time he told me that when I start laughing, it makes him start laughing, and then I laugh harder and on it goes until we're both gone. That's how his top ten list makes me feel:

I feel like the best record that came out this year or any year ever is "Person Pitch" by Panda Bear, though I really think he should have stuck with the original working title "The Witch Comes Home To Roost", or the runner-up title "Grab The Lemons and Make A Smoothie, All You Strange And Overly-Excitable People With Your Person-Face Persony Pal People". But the alliterating front-runner is just as good, and any name would have been just another detail on the outside of this treasure trove of sample-based sonic bliss pills. The real strangeness and success of the PB record is how the simplistic approach to these songs could have come off as small-minded, too skeletal or coyly twee, but instead breaks through all that to usher in a new kind of pop music. Simple and repetitive in both musical form and lyrical content, barren and unchanging for long stretches of time, running intricate counter-melodies over what are essentially one-chord songs, but never ever boring or boneheaded. In fact, this is one record that I could listen to all day actually, not just the way where you say "I could listen to this all day!" and that means twice or maybe four times in a week.

In the same way where what seems like less-than-stellar musical choices actually sound surprisingly great, the somewhat overlooked record "Star Destroyer" by Alex Delivery handed up lots of corny synth runs, elongated jams that went all over the place with no direction in mind, quick-turning and overbearing prog-y song structures and in general a ton of goofy shit... AND IT RULED! Taken out of context or looked at on paper, any of the gurgling schizophonic elements that make up the Faust-worshiping fare of this record would be really lame, but somehow there is a glue that both holds it all together and makes the bad tastes taste great together. Not many people I've talked to got this record on their radar, but it's a sweet strange sound worth hearing.

Phosphorescent's "Pride" stood as the best he's done as of yet and a calming and sad symphony of vocal loops and low-light joys.

The Chromatics' "Night Drive" took the band from basement rat dissection and re-wired skree tactics to straight up Italo Disco, all the songs at a sturdy and hypnotic 107 bpm, setting a thematic vibe somewhere between Kate Bush and Goblin.

A Sunny Day In Glasgow might be the first in a long line of new bands in a time where the world is out of band names. It's not their fault and it's too bad because their debut full-length "Scribble Mural Comic Journal" is a clever and jittery scrap book of bedroom laptop drum sounds, twee-informed vocals and a new breed of shoegazey guitar wash that doesn't really owe as much to it's historical reference point as the composer's ideas of those reference points. Deerhunter's record was kind of like that, too, but less twee, and seemingly more fake crazy.

High Places made a new 7" and had a bunch of songs online this year, and also happen to be the best band in Brooklyn. They might not have an album-of-the-year or an album this year, but they still make the list on charismatic, inspiring and waterfalls-of-joy style sound alone.

Thurston Moore put on the best show I saw at South By Southwest this year, backed up by Samara Lubeski and Steve Shelley. It actually felt like a show instead of a beer commercial, and the atmosphere was so thick with the sound and vibe the trio was putting out, you felt like you were watching some new amazing band for the first time, enough so to forget the somewhat inhibiting indie mythos that surrounds the "Your Band Could Be My Life" icons. This show was pure fall feelings, rising above the hungry mob and the free vodka and Red Bull energy of the surroundings. The record that came out later was pretty good, too, but nothing like the show.

Vashti Bunyan's "Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind" collection sounded like more than fodder for completeists, and the icy quality of the second disc's low-pressure demo tape is beautiful in a way the fully-produced records can't capture.

I wasn't all that into Jens Lekman's new record, "The Night Falling On The Hill Of The Dusk Central Public Transit Glarbrel", but I did get to see him play a really nice show at the Troubadour in LA very recently, and there were a couple of moments that will stick with me for a long time. He has a song with a Beat Happening sample and the entire sold-out crowd sang the sample in deep Calvin Johnson-y voices, half of them, I'm sure unaware of the source material. It was strangely sad and also really cool. Then he played a cover of Paul Simon's "Call Me Al" where he omitted the chorus because he hated it, and that, too was strangely sad and really cool.

The Karen Dalton live reissue is close to speechlessness.

Truth to the people

2007-12-09T19:55:00.000-08:00

King Tubby - Ethiopian Version

Travelling with Ajay Saggar for a month was absolutely one of the most rewarding and sweet experiences I had this year. Ajay is a monstrously talented soundperson, and I think a big part of the key to his genius is how carefully he listens to music and how clearly earnest his love for it is. He's also methodical, and when he toured with Dinosaur Jr. he played the same song by the Fall every night when he first arrived at the club, in order to hear the limits, the strengths and weaknesses of the system.

But for Animal Collective he needed a different song, one that would push the limits and reach and twist and flex the way their music does. This is the song he chose.

I first heard dub music in a completely ridiculous, far-removed context. I was living in Washington D.C. and had just heard the first This Heat LP. I thought it was the best thing ever, was completely overwhelmed by its genius. It was crushing. I scrambled to find information about it, this was in a pre-internet world or at least for me so my resources were scant: libraries and magazine stores and the guy at the record store. I found an article in The Wire about Charles Hayward, drummer for This Heat, where he talked just a bit about the band. At one point he was weirdly dismissive and said something like "we never really did anything groundbreaking, all we did was take the strategies of Lee Perry and King Tubby and moved them out of a Jamaican context to a rock/punk context." I knew who Lee Perry was because of that Grand Royal cover story but King Tubby was a new name to me.

What's your favorite song on Illmatic? Around that time all my friends liked "One Time for Your Mind" best but I was running "Represent." It took me four months of arguing about it to realize the difference was that I didn't smoke reefer and that's why the resonant, echo-y boom of "One Time" didn't read for me the same way it hit my friends. I felt the same way about King Tubby's "King of Dub", which felt all rumbling and lost. It took me a while, years really, to find the strain of dub I was really interested in, the soulful, achy kind where the effects lurk and attack with a sinister restraint. Where I feel like I'm listening to one song and suddenly I'm listening to another. Keith Hudson's "I'm All Right." "Place Called Africa" by Jr. Byles. The entire 2nd LP on the deluxe version of "Heart of the Congos." But I'm pretty sure "Ethiopians Version" is the best example I've ever heard.

I can't think of a way to say this without sounding fucked, but I really like reggae slang. I think "live-icate" instead of "dedicate" (read "dead-icate") is brilliant and a beautiful shift. When Nate explained "overstand" instead of "understand" to me after "What Goes Around" came out I felt blurry with excitement. And when I would order reggae records for the store from our salesperson in Brooklyn, and he would respond to my "goodbye" with "bless", or when I knew him better, "blessed love", it sailed my heart for the rest of the day. But the thing is, I cannot get away with it. Those words come out of my mouth and I sound like Sean Connery saying "you're the man now, dog" at the end of Finding Forrester. A nightmare.

But with that introduction, I can't think of a better description for Rod Taylor's vocal performance in "Ethiopian Kings" than righteous. This is the guy whose debut record was titled "Where is Your Love Mankind?" His politics are fierce, hopeful, and most of all, uncompromising. The opening lyrics make for one of the starkest drawn lines I've ever seen; power on one side, and righteousness on the other. In a voice that rings with as much bravery as it does grief, he testifies: "King David he was a bad man, King Solomon he was a bad man, King Moses he was a bad man." King David who defeated Goliath. King Solomon the wise. Moses who led the slaves from Egypt. It's a brutal recasting of history, an acknowledgement of the corruption of power that handles honesty like a weapon, like a slap, like a sharp blade.

But this is where Tubby's version begins its rise, like hands reaching out of the darkness. The vocals hook on a syllable, echoing out with a ghost's mourn before descending like stormclouds. Sounds expand and cave in underneath you, every bar crumbling a bit more, the song's foundations as unstable as the world Taylor describes. It's almost gruesome, the destabilisation of the song, in just a minute it's devolved from a rocking battle cry to a quicksand lurch. But it never feels like two separate songs, somehow Tubby manages to drift from one to the other without seams. And just as quickly, it becomes three songs, as the expansive, demonic fragments merge back together for a meditative, pulsing finish. Like he knew you needed a minute to think.

I don't write about Animal Collective's music because I don't much know how. But these kinds of seamless twists and drastic mood-changes, indescribably subtle and more than that thoughtful, are maybe the thing I like best about them. Ajay is one of those people whose life was so clearly saved by music, that it's almost like he's repaying it by listening so reverentially. I don't know how many songs he has in his computer to choose from, but I'm sure I could go through every single one of them and not find a better way to test a room for Animal Collective than "Ethiopian Version."

The image up above is a page from Ansul Pull magazine, maybe circa 1998? Fred Thomas made it, and I like it because it makes me laugh and feels really serious and heavy to me at the same time. It's been on the wall of every room I've lived in since 2003, from Philly to San Francisco to Portland to New York.

Give you an earful, it's tearful

2007-12-04T19:45:00.000-08:00

Soiled Mattress and The Springs - Someone's Drinking Water

Avi Cohen, drummer for Soiled Mattress and The Springs, once mentioned to me that he read the Mike Bones post on this blog. "You sure like words," was his only comment.

He's right, and when I'm acting overblown and boring I tend to make really dramatic blanket statements like "I only listen to the words" or "I don't like guitar bands" or "the Anne Briggs LP on Topic is my favorite record of all time" [1]. And it's true that I have always been pulled towards lyrics, that I remember all four verses of "8 Ball" but have a hard time humming the melody; but if you ask me what the brightest, most life-changing absolute moments in my relationship with music are, every one of them would be wordless. The part in "Catholic Block" right after he says "come back to me awhile" and the guitars breathlessly leap up and down the stairs; the light skip of the Isaac Hayes studder gliding over the grimy lurk of "Mind Playing Tricks on Me"; the willful, pin-sharp electronic tones that stab up and derail "In the Singing Box"; and for sure, the way that the Hill Street Blues theme song broke my tiny 9-year old's heart with emotion, even as my parents chased me out of the living room and up to my room, "way past bedtime!!"

So there is a tremendous sense of justice in the realization that Avi's band is one of the great new examples of any of the emotions conjured above: in the way they make me feel untethered and nonchalant and then they annihilate my bliss with a sudden dark turn; the way they build finely-textured, unified landscapes and then suddenly, gleefully, skip a pretty bit of sound across it, just barely disturbing the surface; and, most of all, the way they work right into my heart with a mysterious nostalgia, like I'd heard these songs my whole life and hearing them again brings back every heavy, beautiful and important emotion I'd ever felt.

The first time I saw Soiled Mattress and The Springs they were touring the west coast with No Age, playing all-ages D.I.Y. spaces and sleeping on people's floors. The kids that go to these kinds of shows have a sense of what to expect, and even seeing keyboards and saxophones just signals some kind of no wave or whatever band. Definitely not this. And so the band just dives into their first song, and people can't tell if it's a put on, some kind of ironic joke or maybe a prelude to something else? The old-fashioned lettering on the bass drum spelling out the band's name, the keyboards strolling and warm like a roller skating rink, and then the guy with the saxophone jumping in the air and zipping from one side of the room to the other, just as breathless from playing as he is from running around. Everyone in the room asking themselves, how did this get here?

But the songs are remarkably sincere, played with more conviction and bravery than one hundred heartbroken singers or rebellious songwriters. The band clearly loves to play this music, and once the audience realizes, they're trapped. And the songs are brilliant.

It's a thing that you don't ever have to notice, how well-structured and clever they are, because that's a part of their deftness. It's like Dr. Dre or something, how you're never conscious of the interlaced themes, the sounds that vanish and reappear with a calm, strategic genius. You don't have to be, because it's better just to feel great about them.

The second LP by Soiled Mattress and The Springs, "Honk Honk Bonk", features two songs called "Someone's Drinking Water." They're both live favorites, and each one has its own brightness. The first one has this really dark-sky minor passage about a minute in that kills me every time, but I wanted to write about the second one because, besides being one of the boldest, most unabashed jams on the record, it also shows what a great job they did recording the LP. During the song, Matthew Thurber switches from saxophone to xylophone during one section, giving the middle of the song a resonant, distant coolness. Keyboardist Peter Schuette gets into some heavy sound effect territory during this part, and the entire transition feels like some exotic distance, like seeing the beach for the first time. Live, this section signifies most in the steady economy of Avi's drumming, a work-hard focus that tethers the helium sounds of the keyboard and xylophone. On the record, the section is unified, diamond edged and above all poised; it makes the energetic explosion that follows a heart-leaping joy, a grin-filled celebration. The LP catches every little sound and weaves them all together with an unfelt precision.

Not only is the newest LP Soiled Mattress and The Springs available now, but the band is also on tour if you really want a chance to join in the fun:

Dec 5 2007 Tampa, Florida @ New World Brewery
Dec 6 2007 Backyard Bash in Tallahassee, Florida
Dec 7 2007 Miami, Florida @ NADA Art Fair Party
Dec 8 2007 Miami, Florida @ NADA Art Fair
Dec 9 2007 Atlanta, Georgia @ The Drunken Unicorn
Dec 10 2007 Athens, Georgia @ Caledonia
Dec 11 2007 Asheville, North Carolina @ Gourmet Perks
Dec 12 2007 Chapel Hill, North Carolina @ Night Light Club
Dec 13 2007 Charlottesville, Virginia @ Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar

(endnotes)

-A lot of people have written about this, but really, Pimp C R.I.P. This one's a total heartbreaker, I mean, I can't really think of a sweeter friendship between two men than Bun B and Pimp C. After five years spent apart, it really hurts that they've been separated again in less than two years.

-I am really proud to be a part of this. Please come if you can.

[1] Actually true.

It's flowing with dread because it's all we know

2007-11-29T22:00:00.000-08:00

Talk to Morrissey

Morrissey - Born to Hang

So the idea of a casual Morrissey fan is pretty ridiculous and my guess is that if you didn't know this song it's because you couldn't care less about the guy; but if you haven't checked out this site yet and if you were not involved in heavy tape trading scenes then there are some pretty good surprises ahead. In a way I just wanted an excuse to post the radio call in session although it seemed a lot funnier when I was fifteen, and these days I mostly just feel a monsterous empathy for this girl's loneliness.

Did you ever hear of this zine the Diane Files? This guy from Cleveland made it in the early 90s, he posted a suitably vague and somewhat suggestive fake classified ad in the back of Maximum RocknRoll [1], posing as a girl named Diane who was looking for friends/allies/partners in crime. I lost most of the details, but I remember the phrase "into violence as beauty" and also at least two references to darkness and/or black. The idea was to print all the responses from asshole dudes asking for a naked photo or dirty letter or whatever but he got such a massive response from the lonely children of the punk underground that he had to refigure the entire project; instead he filtered out the letters by most desperate, most crazy, most entertaining and most troubling and printed a cross-section in this free zine that was just left around at shows. He did another zine a while later that had a really bitter piece about how people totally misinterpreted the concept, thought that it was just this freakshow where you could laugh at the fucked up creeps who read MRR. But his intention was to show how isolated and friendless everyone in the scene actually was, how such a basic and unspectacular plea for friendship could draw so many responses, how there's obviously a problem that we need to address.

If you look at MRR right now there's barely one page of classifieds in the back, as opposed to the 10-15 pages there were back when The Diane Files happened. There's an easy reason for this, and it's the internet. Clearly if you wanted to sell Misfits 7"s, trade GG Allin videos or, and this is the big one, meet penpals, there's a much easier way to do it now. A part of me feels crazy about it though, because I used to scour those classifieds looking for this one SS Decontrol LP and now I can just search ebay or whatever, and I don't have to look past all the kids desperate to meet someone else into "anarchy, Crimpshrine, sk8ing, and fucking with cops" to spot it. I'm still totally sincere when I say punk shows saved my life but how ever many years later there are different things that are saving my life. At the same time, there's also a ton of kids whose lives are being saved right now by shows and records and patches and the excitement of a new community, and I'm at least one-third oblivious to it. And I'm 99% oblivious to the kids that are slipping through those cracks, that are so lonely and pained they'll fall for fake classifieds and call Morrissey and just scream and bawl until they cut her off. I guess I don't know what good it does to acknowledge it, but it's amazing to realize how easy it is to avoid it.

So "Born to Hang", recorded during the "Kill Uncle" sessions in 1992, is considered "unfinished" (as described by co-writer Mark Nevin in an interview) although I don't see what's missing. I like it because it has super fast, propulsive drums and you could definitely dance to it, the sloppy guitar totally begging for bent-wrists and serious faced neck-swinging like Molly Ringwald. I like it because Morrissey totally owns his own loneliness and difference, "I never have to live like you" coming off more taunt than lament; it's clearly the same guy who sang "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" but he has a different take on the whole thing. The girl who was so alienated by "those stupid shiny black shoes" and New Kids on the Block is well over thirty now, and I can imagine her living a life where she doesn't even remember how important the Smiths were to her, and maybe even has a daughter of her own who is all flipped out and friendless and she can't even relate. I can also imagine her completely on her own, three rows up at the movie theater sitting by herself, "not to have kids" and totally content with that path. Both visions tug at different parts of my heart, but I'm sort of rooting for her to have a burned CD of "Born to Hang" that's years old and she totally thinks it a waste of time for me to repost it as if everyone hadn't heard it already.

[1] by the way if you haven't checked lately MRR completely rules right now, columns especially at an all time high of interesting and informative.

Try to unlearn bouts of despair

2007-11-27T22:33:00.000-08:00

His Hero is Gone - Anthem for the Undesirables (live at Columbus Fest 1997)

There are those defining instances where a song or even just a line connects with you so fiercely that the entire history of music seems stretched to create this electric moment. They seem heaviest in adolescence, maybe because people are more open then or maybe because they're thirstier to find a relevence. During those early teenage years they seem so monumental I still feel guided by the shock of hearing Metallica or the Beastie Boys for the first time. And by extension, sometimes I try to piece together how all of my middle school friends and I created our own identities from the same pool of references - Carcass, N.W.A., the Misfits - and still ended up in wildly different places.

In any case, at a certain point it feels like those moments are a thing of the past, that you've gathered up all the breath-taking, eye-opening first shots at Rites of Spring or Tiger Trap or Irma Thomas and you no longer get hit in the same way. New records are still exciting, but they're probably not going to save your life.

At age 21 I got talked into going to the More Than Music Festival in Columbus Ohio. I was mad about Promise Ring, hadn't heard of Charles Bronson, and wasn't nearly punk enough for Code 13. In a way the whole thing was as baffling and inpenetrable as if I were one of my parents, and it had only been a couple years since I stopped going to hardcore shows. But of course the turnover is fast and the evasive tactics of the scene cut you out pretty quick. I kept wandering off when the bands would play, there was a lot of metal-influenced hardcore, not good like crossover but bad like Florida. I just kept feeling like I was getting yelled at, like the band was right and I was wrong.

I will confess that I wasn't particularly caught by His Hero is Gone's set, again it was a lot of screaming and pick slides and guitar guitar guitar but this introduction, oh it was one of those moments that changes everything. It distilled everything that brought me to hardcore in the first place, this refuge from polo shirts and haircuts and SAT scores and phony smiles. I felt foolish not being able to scream "I! Fight! Every! Day!" along with the rest of the room. I almost wrote "the rest of the tribe" and I even meant it, without irony or scorn. At fourteen I loved that punk said "we're fucked, come join us" and even when it didn't I was too crushed out and dreamy to care. I feel like I must've stopped hearing it at some point, and this song, this introduction returned me to the fold.

When I went to More Than Music the next year I had all the His Hero is Gone records.

We will beat them all to dust, I bet

2007-11-16T17:03:00.000-08:00

Jane's Addiction - Then She Did

In May of 1991 my friend Jon convinced his older sister to take us along with her to the Jane's Addiction show. It was the first concert I ever went to without my parents, and as a result I remember it better than the hundreds of shows I've gone to since then, better than shows I saw last week. One of the things I remember best was when they started playing "Three Days" and where he announces "I prepared the room with christmas lights" the stage suddenly lit up with a long tangle of tiny white bulbs. I thought it was brilliant. "Three Days" was my favorite song on "Ritual de la Habitual" and with the darkness, and sudden light, and immense volume it felt so dramatic and huge, complete magic.

I was also really into "Stop", "Been Caught Stealing" and the two songs that sounded the same: "No One's Leaving" and "Ain't No Right." Basically side A of the tape got me to and from school, the hyper pace and flail of those first five songs (besides "It's Obvious" which compelled with a different type of strength) clipping minutes off of the walk each way. Side B happened more in my room, the weird intense lesson in "Of Course" kind of impossible to digest in the school hallways, and "Classic Girl" reserved as a dramatic climax for imaginary tapes I would assemble for girls. But of course "Three Days" was the center, and positioned perfectly at the beginning of side B so I could rewind and replay as many times as I wanted.

Near the end of that last tour we drove from North Carolina to Washington D.C., which is okay but we had to be in D.C. by 10 AM for soundcheck, which meant driving overnight. Sometime between 7 or 8 we reached what we were jokingly calling "the heart of darkness" and I felt skinless with exhaustion, everything felt wrong. I wanted to hear something I knew all the words to, every change and every note. And so for the first time in years I played "Ritual de la Habitual."

Here is the crazy thing, I didn't remember this song. Once it was playing it came right back to me, but if you asked me to recite the track list of "Ritual" I would run the whole thing down without hesitation, but I would definitely forget "Then She Did." Watching the sun come up while Perry Farrell's voice rang out on infinite delay and the band bubbled and rocketed with a string section, it became clear that this is my favorite song.

The arrangements are magnificent, sophisticated and painfully emotional, layers of sound that stretch out and shine with an cinematic grace. I'm completely at a loss for where they unearthed this skill, I mean this is only two years after the band released "Idiots Rule." I'm not trying to down their earlier work, I just can't believe there's no precedent. Even "Three Days", which felt so expansive, richly colored and bold doesn't suggest this strain of beauty. I can't even imagine what series of inspirations led them to it, some dark bloodmixing of Bauhaus and Van Dyke Parks and Swans without paying tribute to any of them. It doesn't help that Dave Navarro is currently impossible to look at, I mean how could a guy with eyebrows like that play so sensitively?

The evil meanderings that mark the middle third of the song only increase the force of the blow once the structure returns. Farrell's restraint as powerful as his eventual return to the acerbic catharsis of his standard mode. Once he reaches the final lines, he could be speaking gibberish and your heart would be snagged by the sheer force of the song, their self-restraint finally shed and every voice rising skywards.

But instead of gibberish we get one of the prettiest, saddest, most endearing pleas ever set to music. Farrell entreats a dead lover with a wish for the afterworld:

Will you say hello to my ma?
Will you pay a visit to her?
She was an artist just as you were
I'd have introduced you to her

She would take me on on Sundays
We'd go laughing through the garbage
She'd repair legs like a doctor
On the kitchen chairs we sat on

She was unhappy, just as you were

The last line of course is just such a vicious knife-twist but even without it there's such a heavy tugging throughout these lines, a miserable farewell that echoes every miserable farewell of his life.

That night in D.C. I was tired and surly, went for a long walk and avoided everyone I knew. Total crybaby. The show was over and we were packing everything up and Noah grabbed me to say that he wanted to thank me for playing the Jane's Addiction that morning, that he had never really heard them before and waking up during the record with the sun rising ahead of us and the strings swelling and voices bursting it was possibly the most epic moment of his life. And it was exactly how the song made me feel during those small painful hours, and I was happy to know that a record I had bought 16 years ago could still move me so fiercely, and, even better, that it could do the same thing to someone who had never heard it before, who, free of nostalgia, could be caught by the beauty of it.

I Wish I Could See the Look on His Face

2007-11-14T11:38:00.000-08:00

Harbor Lights - It Won't Be You

When I lived in Portland and Brendan lived in L.A. I would fly down for shows or whatever and we would drive around buying blank tshirts and french fries and try to play each other new CDs. I'm really drawn to the car as a place to hear music for the first time, and imagining him rushing around the city these days brings this immediate jolt of nostalgia and excitement. Add to that this autumn coolness and all I want is super energetic, sincere, smart music. Like back to school.

If I were in L.A. right now I know exactly what CD I would play for Brendan. Harbor Lights. When I think of the number of people who grew up on Matador and Merge and Drag City I'm shocked at how few people remember what a riot that music is. Go read reviews of the Pavement reissues, everyone talks about how they were record nerds and pranksters and sarcastic and standoffish. Everyone uses the word "funny" and no one uses the word "fun." And it kind of kills me because in this hurry to elevate [1] all our favorites to all of our parents' favorites (you know, Berman as the new Parsons, Pollard as the new McCartney, Lou Barlow as the new Richard Thompson yes I really did find all of these on the internet) there's this distance built, everything goes into the museum and then you can't touch it.

Harbor Lights are on an opposite program. They only remember the fun, they find it everywhere. The way Eric Gaffney would jump and stumble like he was in the Chili Peppers or something. The ear-to-ear smiles and hi-fives when Polvo would kick into "Bend or Break." The way a lead guitar line could scoop up your heart like a owl with a mouse, soaring and diving and your breath caught as you helplessly follow. Even the way the "failed experiments" and "sonic meanderings" of, like "Chelsea's Little Wrists" feel like a celebration if you're not going to be so stuck up about it. None of this music was ever a riddle to unlock, it was always a different way to have fun. Not everyone's going to like Kiss.

And so there we are in high school, with white corduroy pants and notebooks covered in band names and maybe mad at a ex-girlfriend. And there's times when it's important to feel sad and listen to Lois but a lot of the time it's better to tell them all to fuck off and just jump on the bed and drive too fast and throw snowballs and laugh until our chests hurt. And there's no way we're doing that without a soundtrack.

"It Won't Be You" isn't even a minute-and-a-half long, but during that 76 seconds it cartwheels and dips and explodes more time than half the indie-rock records I heard this year total. The entire vocabulary for this song would have to be borrowed from excitable post-MC5 rants, linking together words like "blazing" and "bombast" and "incendiary" but without any of those rocknroll references. There's none of the huffing/puffing of The Stooges, none of the posturing of the Small Faces and none of the excess of Blue Cheer. How do you say "explosive" without making people think of Van Halen? I guess you remind them of how breathtakingly fiery and ruleless a song like "Jackals" (then) or "It Won't Be You" (now) is.

The entire Harbor Lights CD is available free at Power Records.

In addition, the members of Harbor Lights will be playing a show as Copperheads this Saturday, November 17th at Cake Shop. Details HERE

[1] yes of course on purpose

Make the living run

2007-11-06T21:26:00.000-08:00

Mike Bones - Do You Wish I Left"

A good way to start an endless argument is to ask a group of people what their favorite track is on a well loved record; say, "I am the Cosmos" or "Odyssey and Oracle" or "American Beauty", because of course everyone thinks a different song. Hearing one guy argue for "Still Ill" while the other guy insists "Suffer Little Children" is one of the more pointless and interminable ways to spend your time but it does signal an important thing: how brilliant the record actually is. Because while everyone loves "that first jam" on Karen Dalton's "In My Own Time" you can't get two people to agree on the the best song on "It's So Hard to Tell..." because one is a good record and the other is a great record.

I had a really difficult time choosing what song to talk about from "The Sky Behind the Sea". All nine songs have similar elements: Mike's reflective vocal glide; shaded, underplayed arrangements; engaging, story-rich lyrics. But each one had an individual appeal as well: the insistent creep of "Forever a Failure"; the overwhelmed, thunderstorm piano/vocal duet of "The Enemies of My Enemies Hate Me Too"; the jolting surprise of the last minute of "Pope John Paul." I couldn't believe how completely the album version of "Love's Not Yours" rivalled the stark trauma of its live performance, and at the same time was dumbfounded at the studio-experiment success of "Town Crier." But it's the striking balance between the poetic exactness and blithe musical ease of "Do You Wish I Left?" that I keep returning to.

Structurally, "Do You Wish I Left?" is both tidy and complete in a way that feels closer to a poem than a song. There are a few recurring images - hands/arms, the approach of closed doors, pennies - that guide the narrative with an artfulness that develops characters, establishes relationships, and wails out the climax with an incredible economy of words. The difference between "still I beat my knuckles upon his door" and "he scraped his fingers across my door" immediately illustrates the edgy disquiet of the former and the bad-touch darkness of the latter,
without explicitly saying either. It's a much more visually engaging creation with a sparseness that perfectly complements the musical direction.

As an album, "The Sky Behind the Sea" is careful, deep-breathing, with so much empty space, but then it's never underplayed or bleak. Each note carries so much weight, engaging the same chain of suggestion and reference as each word. So when the strings come in halfway through "Do You Wish" at the same time as Mike sings "models and wealthy men" there's the easy connection to be made between the richness of the violins and the characters, but there's also a heavier impact: the balance between really gritty,graspable images and these grander, more cinematic images, no different than the balance between the stark honesty of a voice and a guitar and the romantic evocation of orchestras and session men. And the seams are nowhere to be found.

Of all the things I like about "The Sky Behind the Sea" the quality I keep returning to most is its dignity. Even when the characters are at their most abject and the behaviors so rough Mike maintains this very classic, upright pose. I'm hesitant to place his record in or against any historical trajectory, but it's hard not to consider the unique space he occupies amidst the dejection of confessional songwriters, the flawed sincerity of nostalgic bands or the embarrassing maudlin of all the brooding, eccentric post-Talking Heads groups of today. His stories are as severe and blood-draining as the first type, as aware and respectful of their musical lineage as the second type, and as crafted and stirring as the third without carrying
any of their flaws. And while this victory owes the most to sheer talent, it's most easily located in his posture, in the inherent virtue of his voice and the warm sobriety of his songs.

Mike Bones is on the west coast NOW!

November 7th at The Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco, CA (with Jack Rose and MV/EE)
November 8th at 21 Grand in Oakland, CA (with Jack Rose and Colossal Yes)
November 11th at The Echo in Los Angeles, CA (with Douglas Armour)
November 12th at Pappy and Harriet's in Pioneertown, CA

(endnotes)

two exciting things to do this week:

-buy the new BURIAL CD "Untrue" the 100-second long track "UK" is as happy as a song can make a person

-download the new Cam'ron mixtape, there's a song that samples Prince's "Starfish and Coffee."

Portland blast! Part five: SARAH SHAPIRO

2007-10-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day of my all-week Portland review and like all clumsy presenters I have saved the best for last.

Sarah Shapiro - Stranger

Frank O’Hara wrote an essay on a new movement in poetry that he was calling “Personism.” Since many of his poems were written directly at people in his life, it was as if they took the place of a conversation. O’Hara felt like they were intensified by this real-world existence: the poem could’ve been a moment in time shared between two people instead of a poem. Such moments have an obvious power, and if that power transfers to the page, clearly it would be the most potent writing possible. The essay is meant to be funny but it does signal why some songwriters are so forceful; Elliott Smith is a great example of someone who wrote songs instead of talking to people, Mirah is a genius at it.

The song “Stranger” exists in a similar place between two people, and, of all the ones I can think of, is the most beautifully fucked almost-conversation. In it, Sarah explains that to the stranger that she’s not looking to fall in love but “I do have a sense that if you wrap me in your limbs I will wake up tomorrow feeling slightly less shitty.” That kind of stark truthtelling is not unique in the world, but by the end of the song it’s obvious that no one else could’ve sang it.

There are a few stubborn themes on Sarah’s LP “I Wish I Was an Animal” and they are all troubled. Not just on an individual level where she is certain she’d rather be a horse than a person or can’t figure out how to integrate love into life, but with an anxious concern for the people around her. Even on the individual, one-on-one level of “Stranger” she is bothered by the inevitabilities of emotional damage: “the raddest people I know cannot help being fucked.” I wouldn’t have said it myself but I know exactly what she means. It’s exactly the kind of confrontational honesty that put her in the situation described in “Stranger”, and also what drives her heartache.

Her take on hopelessness falls right into this ideology: “the option seems to be just completely give up or keep stumbling around like some broken lamb.” But before the song breaks down entirely she returns to the stranger, making realistic promises: “we’ll build a nest with our bodies where we’ll sleep for the night it’ll be less than perfect…” Somehow the barren fingerplucked guitar feels the strongest during this part, like two or three extra notes hop in and with that tiny embellishment the song flourishes with this promise of some vague good thing happening.

I guess I spend a lot of my time thinking of menace, hidden threats, sinister undertones. And in this song full of darkness I realize that there isn’t a reciprocal idea, because how could brightness lurk? How do good things hide? This isn’t like a silver lining, because there’s nothing sketchy about silver. But someday we can invent a word for it and this will be the example, the gentle peril of something okay hiding in an essentially ruined existence.

At the end of the song, in “the silence of the violence after we come,” a surprising connection is made during a coldness that seems completely devoid of possibility. Sarah sings: “we’ll put on Joy Division and drink until we’re numb and you’ll say love love will tear us apart, and I’ll say love love will tear us apart, and you’ll say love love will tear us apart again…” I’m not exactly rooting for these two but I feel so happy at their unlikely connection and in such ghastly circumstances. I’m not the only one awed by it: “and the perfection of that moment will be so paralyzingly profound that it will silence us.”

What I like best about Sarah's songs is the different dimensions and depths they can take on depending on my mood. Like when I’m happy I feel like I can resolve all the reflections and honesties of a song like “Stranger”: I can follow the path ricocheting between cynicism and honor, I can recognize the irony in the way the song neatly falls into the narrative of love songs at the exact same moment it attempts to reject this narrative, and I see the finely-toed line between trembling honesty and crafty humor. But when I’m sad I just curl up and plead along with her.

Portland blast! Part four: CRACKERBASH

2007-10-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

Okay so as stated before I am going to Portland next week to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Jackpot Records and to mark that I was going to write about my five favorite Portland bands this week. And in my head there were a whole lot of rules but I didn't explain any of them on here, and the number one rule was that they all had to be bands playing right now. Because of course if it was 5 favorite Portland bands of all time I would just be writing about the Wipers and the New Tweedy Bros. and Elliott Smith and a hundred other things you already know about and read too much about anyway. But I'm just too excited about this song.

Crackerbash - Song For Lon Mabon

This song is exactly what the last seven years should've sounded like - fired up, indignant, relentless, unified. The subject of the song, Lon Mabon, is behind the Oregon Citizens Alliance, who are responsible for the most viciously homophobic and anti-abortion ballot measures in Oregon. 1992's Measure 9 was Mabon's attempt to define gay rights as "special rights" in the state constitution and basically write discrimination into the law. He lost by a narrow margin, but revisited the topic again in 1996 and 2000.

I was happily living in Portland in 2000 during the height of the debate over measure 9 part 3, which wanted to make it illegal for Oregon public schools to "encourage homosexuality" which meant not talking about it at all. My life consisted of maybe 12 square miles of metropolitan Portland, which meant I was surrounded by "No on 9" stickers, tshirts, window displays, etc. I was convinced that Measure 9 was the work of crazy, delusional Christians who clearly didn't know what they were up against. When the votes were counted, the measure was defeated but by such a slight margin, 47% for, 53% against. Complete shock, I had no idea who these people were that wanted to legally prevent teachers from saying the word "gay." Who would keep Oscar Wilde, one of the few important things I discovered in 4 years of high school, out of classrooms. Who were so fearful they would try and pass a law.

But 2000 was nothing compared to 1992, and Lon Mabon was an even greater menace back in the early nineties when "Song" was recorded. The Oregon Citizens Alliance had already passed similar discriminatory laws at local levels, was lobbying heavily in the state, and lent massive support to like-minded political candidates. Mabon even ran for Senate himself. The desperate and forceful opposition to him cannot be spoken more succinctly than Crackerbash's song.

The careening guitar rings out like an alarm, slicing through the insistent rhythmic unity of the bass and drums like a killer. You can actually hear the spit machine-gunning out of singer Sean Croghan's throat as he runs down Mabon's agenda. The lyrics are necessarily reductive and brutal; the song is a battle-cry, not a debate. It's almost as if the persuasion takes place in the instrumentation instead of the words - the wordless explosion of fury and defiance after a sudden break is far more compelling than the wailing "what makes you so right?" that precedes it. But at the same time, it feels clearly empowering to sing along, and the vocals definitely provide an anchor for the listener.

"Song For Lon Mabon" is the first track on Crackerbash's Tin Toy EP, which contains brief liner notes for each cut. The ones to accompany "Song" talk about Mabon's "fundamentalist preaching and media terrorism" but makes an even more important point. The band directly questions the listener: "Is there a Lon in your backyard? Probably!" It's great to rage out and skitter across the floor with all the fire of the song, but it's important to remember there's a real-world component to these feelings. That the song isn't just about one guy and his cronies in Oregon, but a world-wide network of bigotry.

This isn't to say there's not amazing protest/opposition music being made today; everyone from DROPDEAD to Bruce Springsteen has made an effort to remind the world that change is in our hands and these choices are up to us. But I still haven't heard a song as spirited, as genuinely provoked and hostile as "Song For Lon Mabon" and it seems like the world could probably use one.

Portland blast! Part three: ILYAS AHMED

2007-10-24T08:26:00.000-07:00

In one week I am going to Portland to see dear friends and celebrate the tenth anniversary of Jackpot Records which is a place that has shaped me as much as any location or even as much as a friend. This is the celebration, the next five days will be my five favorite bands in Portland right now! or at least that is the promise.

Ilyas Ahmed - Kabhi Ma Boley Ashista

It feels like the theme so far has been stark contrasts and uncovered secrets, and this song is maybe the best example yet. The opening notes crash heavily on the low strings of an acoustic guitar with all the overpowering resonance of a gong, it's like someone riding piano strings with a clawhammer. In a world where entire roomfuls of instruments can feel thin and hesitant, the richness of a single acoustic guitar can be a monsterous surprise the way it surrounds and rings out. Across the 13 minutes of "Kabhi Ma Boley Ashista" Ilyas introduces a complex web of tiny melodies, metallic scratches, cough-syrup drones and ghostly voices, but he steadily rides that pounding reverberation with a near-ritual repetition.

The wordless voices and folkish instrumentation quickly moves the song away from any realm and any time, which makes it tremendously easy to simply fall into the sound. This is maybe the most rewarding thing about Ahmed's music, the way he builds a complete world around you, but it's also a little bit dangerous. Because, for all of his influences - the dense spill of Robbie Basho's guitar, the natural-world restlessness of oud-player Hamza El Din, the flawless balance of meditation and fury in "A Love Supreme" - Ilyas plays uniquely contemporary music
that is truly more of a confrontation of life today than an escape from it.

It's a pretty common feeling for people these days; disquiet, searching without design, unfocusable accusation. There's a widespread sense that someone has ruined it for everyone and no clear sense of who to blame, or what to do if we could find a culprit. I think one of the best predecessors for Ahmed's music is Sandy Bull, who made three brilliant LPs that bound classical guitar to Eastern music traditions in the 1960s and then spent the next 30 years fighting addiction before his death in 2001. The darkness in his life is well documented, and yet his musical search has a tremendously positive, hopeful spirit to it.

Ilyas, on the other hand, gives off the impression of a man trapped in a labyrinth. The guitar notes feel like breathless turns down endless passages, percussion sounding as a too-infrequent light in these tunnels. His mournful, almost subhuman vocals set a cold, wasted tone that even the warmest hum from the harmonium can't compete with. This isn't to say it's depressing or even difficult music, but it does contain a spirit that will be intimately familiar to anyone alive and alert in these days.

So far Ilyas has released a handful of CDRs, each packaged in simple cardstock sleeves with minimal graphics. The most recent one I've found is called "Naqi" and every copy has a unique collaged cover. Although each one is clearly different from the last, they all share a common theme: people without eyes. My copy has a serious looking blonde woman, her eyes disturbingly clipped out leaving the yellow card to show through her sockets. I saw one with a young Mick Jagger: pouting lips, messy hair, empty holes. They're sinister but not pointlessly so; the hollow helplessness of the image falls right in line with the way the music seizes me.

At the conclusion of "Kabhi", each sound fades and turns off like companions parting at the end of the night, leaving only the guitar, notes pouring like water from Ahmed's hands. There's something very brave and noble about that last minute of solo guitar, after the strenuous journeys of the song, the round resonance of the final passage feels determined, undefeated. Ilyas confronts a lot in his music, and although there's no easy outcome, it's a massive comfort to hear him so composed and self-controlled at the finish.

Portland blast! Part two: SOUR GRAPES

2007-10-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

In one week I am going to Portland to see dear friends and celebrate the tenth anniversary of Jackpot Records which is a place that has shaped me as much as any location or even as much as a friend. This is the celebration, the next five days will be my five favorite bands in Portland right now! or at least that is the promise.

Sour Grapes - Send My Valentine to the Burn Ward

The Sour Grapes have one of the best legends of any band ever. Nicole Georges is at the start of the story, the night I met Nicole she showed me a picture of my friend Travis with his face in a pieplate, reddish-purple fruit smeared from his ears to his chin. She explained that the photo was taken at a pie-eating contest held at her house, that he was the winner, and that at some point before he won he actually threw up into one of the pies and just kept going like nothing happened. She is trouble in a big way.

Anyway, the story is that she was involved with a boy who turned out to be just the worst chump, and she furiously wrote out words for a clutch of angry songs about him. Here are some sample lyrics:

"I thought you just liked me, I didn't know you would call me a ho to my face"

"If I was so wrong about you writing me a song, then when I said you were great to my friends I was probably wrong"

"What you might not know is if it wasn't for coffee, then I wouldn't like you"

"you want me to put out? you won't even make out"

So she ran over to her friend Dawn Riddle's house who quickly turned the words into songs. I think they were playing shows within a month, and added third member Steve Gevurtz who is one of my favorite harmonizers ever. I think people got their feelings hurt immediately, which was ostensibly the point.

The first time I saw them was a total hectic mess, with the boy villain of all their songs showing up to check things out. They ended up playing in Nicole's bedroom, where a handful of kids sat on the floor quietly while the Sour Grapes began with their most brutal knife turn, "Send My Valentine to the Burn Ward."

The thing is Nicole has a nice room: quilts, pictures of animals on the wall, everyone sitting close and laughing. And "Burn Ward" starts so gently and sweet, even before the words come in. Dawn has a really warm, close voice, and when she sings "I want to set you on fire" you don't think literal. And even when Nicole asks "Do you mean inspire me?" you're still following with your heart, imagining this love story. And then the response falls like a building collapsing: "No I mean realistically, I mean with kerosene, I mean to push you down the stairs, I mean to throw a match in your hair."

It's during these lines that the song soars in an epic, totally lo-fi way. The guitar switches from muted single notes to impatient, ringing chords while the keyboard skips, descends, and climbs again with this breathless merry-go-round beauty. It's spellbinding, with a lightness that makes you feel like it's okay to laugh about the violence, but also a deftness that makes you realize this isn't a joke song.

This is where I'm hesitant to discuss it any further because I feel like I'm going to ruin them. Their bad-kid energy flashes even brighter in the second half of the song, but then it also fades to a sincere, almost vulnerable sadness that's even sharper for the contrast. After the band reins in the chorus, the meanness continues in this very specific, precise way: "I don't like your zine... I don't like your fake emo ways." It's funny and laughter is clearly encouraged, but then the song darkens and it makes my skin crawl even now. Again the pace gallops but this time Nicole sings: "and if I had fallen in love with you, you'd be the very first to know, and if I had wanted to marry you, I would've told you so." At the point that they recorded the song it had been years since any of this had happened but there's a tenderness in the lines that fills my eyes every time, like there's a real, present pain that's truly hard to confront. The same way that the opening lines mislead you into thinking you're getting a love song instead of a hate song, the sudden clarity is like a sudden slap, like you're wrong again, you're getting a glimpse into heartache, not a story to laugh at. And that kind of helplessness is contagious, at this point I'm always struck by the song with the same frustration at this asshole. Honestly I'm surprised no one's ever broken his nose.

The Sour Grapes ran out of complaints about the kid after a few songs, and starting turning their attention to other people that frustrated them. Co-workers, other bands, J.K. Rowling, um, other bands? They made a lot of enemies although I think everyone's friends now. Although I think Jordan Blilie is still kind of stung by "Blood Brothers with your tight muscle tees, double orange stacks and you're not speaking to me: Zoolander chaotic hardcore." That actually almost hurt my feelings and I never even heard Blood Brothers. How amazing would it have been if everyone was just living in fear of getting Sour Grapes songs written about them?

Portland blast! Part one: GROUPER

2007-10-22T01:14:00.000-07:00

In one week I am going to Portland to see dear friends and celebrate the tenth anniversary of Jackpot Records which is a place that has shaped me as much as any location or even as much as a friend. This is the celebration, the next five days will be my five favorite bands in Portland right now! or at least that is the promise.

Grouper - Untitled

The first thing I love about my favorite songs is when they make a physical demand. Someday I will write about "Press the Trigger" and how it makes me feel like I am being pushed down multiple flights of stairs. The first time I saw High Places I had this very whimsical feeling of swimming underwater and then having a towel wrapped around my shoulders. Anne Briggs makes me still like a child listening to stories. But Liz Harris's Grouper is a really disconcerting collision of physical feelings, and maybe best represented in this untitled song off the debut self titled CDR.

The two immediate collisions look like this: the first is a simple yet careful hopping dance, something you would see in a temple or a field, knees raised and arms up. I can't imagine what the ritual is demanding, but it feels like an ancient demand and one that is constantly fulfilled and just as constantly desired. It's a handsome, unornamented dance, like work-strong hands. The second is much darker, where I'm facing a person whose head is against my chest, steadily thumping against my body as sob after sob shudders out. Both of our arms lay helpless at our sides, occasionally rising in an ineffectual attempt at contact. It's exactly as fucked as it sounds.

The times I've seen Grouper play live have been among my favorite shows in Portland ever, amazing community-minded shows where people are eager, attentive, and brave. Liz Harris, cross legged on the floor with a guitar and a modest tangle of cables and pedals, always took these quiet, respectful audiences on drifting, haunted paths, forcing a silence that I find myself reaching for even now as I remember it. I think this is what reviewers connect with when they compare Grouper to Arvo Pärt which I sort of appreciate but Pärt is contemplative while Grouper is a guide, and not one that takes you by the hand. Even in this song, which is one of the most sonically present of Grouper's compositions, there's a ghoulish cast floating around in there, a spectral hand wrapping its fingers around my collarbone and leading me through the wet cold of fog and the gaping beauty of empty glades.

I think that's what works best about Grouper, is that the songs are undeniably human, the way you would rather not see someone cry but you would feel worse knowing they are on their own crying, like it's better to be there. In high school many of the worst things I did I did in the name of shared experiences, that is to say if one of us had to get cut jumping over a barbed wire fence then we might as well all get cut. It's a good surprise because she never sings words, never approaches language in the way that a listener is used to. There's a way that that could read inhuman, or at the very least intangible, and looking back I used plenty of words like "haunted" and "spectral" as if to distinguish the music from a body. But surpassing that is the immediate physicality of the music, and the human feeling bound up in that weight.

If you check out Grouper's subsequent releases, there's always this cast of fear, or more specifically horror: "Black Blood", "Zombie Skin", "He Knows"; I think that might be a part of what's going on, an uneasy response to an uneasy world. The other part is an unavoidable embrace of that world; a warm, somber, rising dance, a concrete, physical response to everything at once.

Unbeings

2007-10-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

Eric Copeland - FKD

Eric Copeland is a genius at killing mosquitoes. Where I chase them around the room clapping my hands together around empty air, he follows the little monster's flight with just his eyes, waiting for it to approach his body. When it gets close enough, he raises one arm under its body, and the bug is still, momentarily surprised (I think) by being suddenly landed. At this point Eric destroys the mosquito with his other hand.

I'm sure you know somebody that seems to have a fuller understanding of the world, who knows what days the parking ticket cops come by, which apple is the crispest, where to stand to see the most shooting stars, which side of the street to walk on to avoid being hassled. The one you'd pick if you were lost on the side of the mountain and needed to make your way back home. Eric is the prince of those people. I'm pretty sure he always knows the best way to do things, is involved in some kind of deeper conversation with the world that keeps him aware of the best path, always.

Which sort of explains his music and sort of makes it the most baffling sound ever. Because it seems like anyone that in tune with the world around us would be able to communicate on an intense level with other people, but I don't know what these sounds are trying to tell me. I think maybe this kind of communication requires a non-human language, a set of sounds that scratches deeper. I have been known to complain about feeling left out, to show frustration at not understanding. But with the songs on "Hermaphrodite", I find myself concentrating and thinking through my own confusion, rather than dismissing it.

For the first couple weeks of September I saw Eric play every night. He always started with the most difficult songs he had; crushing, shaking sandstorms that thickened the air, made lungs feel useless. I watched people stumble, move too slowly and squint at their friends, completely overwhelmed for the first 10 minutes of his set. I felt the same way. It took him 2/3rd of the show to get to "FKD", and no matter how many times I saw him play I always ended up stopping everything to watch him play that song. I always had this feeling that the harshness of the set was a necessity to really connect with "FKD", like some part of the subwoofers rattling your ribcage and filling your stomach with cement was teaching you the language to understand "FKD." A lot's been said about the cover of "Hermaphrodite", and listening to the song now, isolated from the rest of the record, it feels as scary and alien as the cover looks. But it is the moment that I saw the most people caught by Eric's set, and represents the most vivid redefinition of beauty that the record projects. The rising skip of the rhythm makes it feel like some kind of inhuman ritual, but one you'd join in on, instead of run away from.

There's so many voices in the song: some emerge quickly, crowding right in front of your eyes, while others lurk behind the delay, long-fingered phantoms that seem content with keeping the song in subtle order. Every time I try and follow one I find myself led astray by a second voice, a third; sometimes I just fall backwards into this tiny chime of bells. But it's nice not being in control for once, a complete opposite of the pop songs I'm usually in love with, the ones that shamelessly sing out their clarity. And then it makes me almost hungry, like I want more from everything, like I deserve to feel this swarmed, this misled and retaught by every song.

Here's Some Dances

2007-09-04T21:28:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone

tomorrow morning I am leaving for a month on tour. I am really excited to be running around the country and seeing one of my favorite bands ever ever ever play every night and getting to see the children so happy to see them too.

since it will be a hectic time I probably will not post anything here until october but I know you will forgive me because today I want to tell you about the greatest CD of 2007: Home Schooled: The ABCs of Kid Soul

it is a collection of soul songs performed by kids, maybe you liked that Foster Sylvers song or maybe you like the Jackson 5. Or that Yum Yums song "Gonna Be a Big Thing." This collection of songs will touch the same place in your heart and 17 times over. I feel overwhelmed by how magical this music is. The CD was issued by The Numero Group, who put out those Eccentric Soul comps and that Ladies From the Canyon which also rules but this is simply the best. I have a reputation for driving my travelling companions insane by repeating the same music over and over, but I think this one will make everyone eternally happier and am so glad to have this just in time to drive ten thousand miles.

Anyway, go buy the CD, or the 2LP or you can even download it off their website. Enjoy and remember that I miss you and want to see you soon

Catch all kinds of us, more kinds of thugs

2007-08-29T18:02:00.000-07:00

Turf Talk, E-40 and Mistah F.A.B. - Super Sick Wit It

Okay I am not really one of these people but you really can’t listen to this song on your computer speakers. You have to listen to it on giant headphones or speakers with sub woofers because the bass is such an evil monster it will make you feel like your head is being crushed. Like some James Bond plot where an evil genius is using sound to take control of the world, the first time I listened to this song on headphones I felt like I was getting smacked, like I could actually feel my eardrum reverberating.

As if the initial hit weren’t enough, the bass note rings out with this rumbling delay [1], giants approaching the city. Then it’s a fucking false start. Maybe you had a cassette walkman before an iPod, and the way the song grinds to a halt will remind you of the frustration of dying batteries [2]. I actually instinctively reached to replace some AA’s the first time I ran it.

A second later the song strikes up again, little artificial melodies whistling along over the bass, two really distinct lines that should totally clash but instead strike this hectic clockwork balance that sends the track spinning with momentum. They’re so weirdly aligned part of me imagines that their pairing was a mistake, the wrong card loaded into the sampler or something and then surprise! it worked after all. But producer Droop-E (who was 17 when he made the track back in 2005) clearly knew what he was doing, and although hyphy doesn’t always hit for me, those guys are pretty sharp.

I actually think of this song a lot when people are downing hyphy, or the bay area in general; I don’t think it’s worth getting specific with people’s individual criticisms of that sound but “Super Sic Wit It” does evade all of those. The beat has a ton of open space, and it isn’t too fast to dance to; the three MCs all rhyme fierce and focused: it’s as easily as confident as Jadakiss with Juelz-level punchlines; the very specific yay area slang doesn’t make the song impenetrable to a non-speaker; and their voices are not goofy. I mean, E-40 is his usual dumbly-melodic self but he uses it to his advantage here, the openness of the beat giving him a chance to soar and dip and make funny sounds. I am always charmed by songs where MCs make the own gun sound effects, like kids yelling rat-a-tat, and the previous winner was Big L’s “My guns go boom boom and your guns go pow pow” but 40 definitely takes the prize with “Not the pretty AKs that go “skee-skee” but the ugly AKs that go “stoo-pee.”

Do you know the feeling of loving a song so much and never being able to find the 12"? You don't have to worry about this one, I have "Super Sic Wit It" on three different records, one of which is a collection of Mistah F.A.B. tracks, and two of which are "Hits From the Bay" type samplers. Also, if you needed another reason, F.A.B. could use your support, as he is currently being persecuted by two distinct groups--concerned parents, and Ghostbusters fans.

His recent video for "Ghost Ride the Whip" has been unfortunately banned from MTV and even YouTube after a successful online petition. As F.A.B. explained in an Ozone Magazine interview, "You know how they got the Star Wars, the Trekkies, Star Trek diehard fans? A lot of Ghostbusters diehard fans had started this website really tryna knock me for what I was doin'." Soon after, parents of children who had been injured while ghostriding have been threatening to sue F.A.B. and his label, Atlantic Records.

In the same Ozone interview, F.A.B. responds:

"They try to point the finger at people and say that ghostridin' is dangerous, but there has to be a point in our lives when we become responsible for our own actions. If I go out in the middle of the street in the middle of traffic and get hit by a car, how can I blame you if you had a song called "In the Middle of the Street?" Shouldn't I be wise enough to know what's good for me and what's not good for me?"

He also makes some really good points about how there was no uproar about ghostriding until suburban kids were losing control of mom's SUV and hurt themselves, securing a place in my heart as one of the more endearing and deft rappers in recent memory. Plus how dope would a song called "In the Middle of the Street" be?

[1] you should really go listen to T.I.’s “Top Back” and pay attention to the delay on the snare, Mannie Fresh is a brilliant man and I would like to call delay in rap beats an exciting new future.

[2] if you’re a real nerd, it’ll remind you of the frustration of dying rechargeable batteries, which happened a lot quicker than the alkaline ones, which kind of took half a song.

Only Dance to Reggae and Calypso

2007-08-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

Collie Buddz - Mamacita

Brendan has been singing increasingly ridiculous variations of the one-time summer anthem contender "Come Around" since June, and when there were giant posters wheatpasted everywhere advertising the upcoming LP there was a constant undertone of the song, of dude's stern but unthreatening voice. But of course those posters have been gone over a long time, and I haven't heard him rumbling out of open jeep windows for at least a month.

So today Brendan and Aaron and I wandered around on a few missions, one of which was to buy the Collie Buddz CD. It was completely disappeared, and when KMart didn't have it we pretty much gave up. It's a shame because he's a great singer and a total charmer. A friend who photographed him said he was sweet, quiet and a gentleman. I think he deserves it.

Personally, I didn't really like "Come Around", but christ, I listen to "Mamacita" all the time. The beat is all staggering hi-step, with these small synth melodies that lurk and flash like it's a Debbie Deb song or something, the whole thing bouncing with a very un-American feel, light and springy instead of big and masculine. And he sings sweetly, the lyrics are full of surprise and delight--my favorite line is where he's watching the woman dance and says, completely impressed, "look how she move fast when the beat slow." But again, gentlemanly, no "have you naked by the end of this song", but just "we can dance all night if you want to..." He's talking to the girl, not talking to his friends about the girl. It's an important distinction I think.

I know it's ahistorical and a little fucked, but I can't help but think of "Mamacita" as a contemporary version of certain rocksteady songs, those Studio One Soul comps that Soul Jazz puts out maybe. Like that Johnny Osbourne song, "We Need Love" which to me feels like he heard a Sam Cooke record and thought to himself, "Really? I can sing like that...." and then made this brilliant, heartfelt song that shrugs off the heavy clumsiness of the American record executives and producers that tried to choke all the emotion out of the originals. There's a ton of examples, certain Heptones songs that feel more Motown than Kingston, or Phyllis Dillon after hearing Marva Whitney maybe.

The first time I heard "Mamacita" I didn't know Collie Buddz' whole born-in-New Orleans/raised-in-Bermuda story and just imagined this Jamaican dude hearing R. Kelly or Justin Timberlake and thinking to himself, "Man, I can do that" the same way Alton Ellis thought he could do Marvin Gaye and got himself a 100 B.P.M. track to make an easy song to dance to. Even after reading a bunch of articles and interviews with dude, I still imagine Collie Buddz as this super-innocent, good-natured singer who couldn't really run lines like "throw that ass at me, make me want to catch it" but could use a similar sweet voice and easygoing delivery to make "let me hold you tight" feel like a real gentle smile.

Brendan found the CD at a store that didn't even know they stocked it and we're giving Collie Buddz another chance to run the summer. He completely deserves it.

I thought about you to like the ninth degree

2007-08-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

Sue Tompkins - Be My Wife, Live At The Modern Institute from Mot and Vimeo.

I have such a vivid memory of listening to the Life Without Buildings LP for the first time, it arrived at the record store in a box of minimal techno and Morr Music stuff from Forced Exposure, who described it as a cross between the Slits and the Talking Heads (please remember it was 2001 and neither of those bands had their comparison energy spent up). Amy came by while it was playing, and I asked her if she liked it and she said she'd have to hear it again, so I brought it home. It was maybe the first time in my life that I bought a record because I wasn't sure if I liked it or not. It definitely didn't sound like either of those reference points, I thought the guitars were a little bit like the Smiths, with really long, note-y passages that descended and crested and doubled back long before they ever repeated, the way "Still Ill" almost doesn't even have a riff, like it's just a long string of pleasant, stirring notes. The vocalist, Sue Tompkins, flourished and chirped over the notes, a burst of excitement and unleashed joy, even as she sang about disappointment and mistakes. It feels almost disorienting to remember, but her voice was the point in question, the reason neither of us were sure.

Within 48 hours we were both certain. It was perfect. Quickly made tapes of the LP filled everything, the car, the walkman that accompanied me to and from work, the little tape player in the kitchen. It was always playing. Our friends were infected, they didn't have a chance. I only remember Lily getting into the car at one point, and absolutely losing it, tired of hearing Tompkins' punchy, bright voice spit out "The right stuff! The. Right. Stuff!" in our house, through the wall she shared with a roommate, in the back seat on the way to a resturant. It absolutely took over, and I frantically mailordered with U.K. shops trying to track down 7"s with B-sides I hadn't yet heard, or even alternate versions.

Kids we knew from Olympia toured the U.K. and played with Life Without Buildings in Glasgow, and it was possibly the most jealous I've ever been of another band. I thought I was going to throw up. When the record got liscensed to a label from Baltimore we celebrated, thinking it would obviously bring the band to America, but instead they broke up with a short notice on their website.

Around this time I started to meet people who had seen them, everyone dead serious and insistant that they were far superior live. As much as I loved their records, I was quick to believe them all, there was such a eagerness in these songs that it made me shiver to imagine them playing. There were always rumors of a forthcoming live record, and every time anyone brought it up, someone in the conversation had an anecdote about a friend who saw Life Without Buildings, how absolutely perfect they were.

In April of this year I was in Glasgow, nearly trembling with excitement about my first visit to this town where so many of my favorite artists and bands lived. Outside Monorail, the record shop run by Stephen Pastel, there was a chalkboard with an announcement that tickets have gone on sale for Life Without Buildings. I flipped. I paced and asked half questions, "do you think?"; "could it be?" not daring to believe. Once I had convinced myself it was true, I started to scheme plane tickets for the end of May, so amped to fly across the ocean to finally see them play. I returned to the counter of the store and barely got the word "Life" out of my mouth before I was informed that it was a record release party, that some of the members of the band would be there, possibly DJing, but that was all. He saw my disappointment and said, "tough break, huh?" as I wandered away.

Still it was nice to know the live CD actually was coming out, and that night I talked to more than a few kids who loved the band as much as I and shared their stories, and this video of Sue Tompkins singing a David Bowie song at the Modern Institute which I had spent the afternoon at and fallen in love with. But back to that in a second.

The live CD was released this week to a couple great reviews and I have happily listened to it non-stop since yesterday, but I'm a bit wary. I think the CD is excellent, so charming and well-played that it feels like reading a love-letter, full of sun and color. But it also sounds a lot like the record, and I'm not 100% sure why everyone insists they were so much better live. Everyone seems to mention Tompkins' conversation, which is sweet for sure, but doesn't make so much difference. There are a couple of moments where I'm really caught up in their momentum, which is purely a live phenomenon, but it's not like the difference between "Disorder" on Unknown Pleasures and "Disorder" on Live aux Bains Douches. Then I went back and watched the video of "Be My Wife."

Sue Tompkins bounces and sways and bows and curls up like an exact physical representation of her voice. There's a restlessness, a spirit that can get locked in a repetitive motion or burst in a sudden leap that feels like no performance I've ever seen. It's like there's twenty people inside her tiny body all struggling to express themselves, not with a chaos but with a delighted, non-stop action. I can only imagine how transfixing it would be for the 55 minutes of "Live at the Annandale Hotel" and am certain that I would be just as reverent when talking about the band had I seen them. It's also really nice to hear a new song, "Liberty Feelup." Really I want everyone in the world to hear this band, and honestly I feel like a jerk for casting a single doubt about this new CD, because it's such a treat.

The romance is unavoidable, this is the town to live in

2007-08-16T19:12:00.000-07:00

Silver Jews - Old New York

Not that long ago I was in Rochester, New York, the city I grew up in. Being there always conjures spectres for me, some darker than others. This last time, caught at a stoplight, I was reminded of the itchy, tan interior of the family car, listening to oldies radio one Labor Day weekend. The station was playing the entire Beatles catalog beginning to end, in alphabetical order by song title. There was a catch. They were going to leave out one song, and whoever called up and identified the missing track won a prize. As a child it blew my mind, and as a stressed out child it forced me to imagine how many years it would be before I was old enough and clever enough to know the answer. I had a funny sense of honor about it, as I imagined my slightly older self listening along and making notes. I decided it would be okay to write down the songs, just for the sake of getting the order correct, but for sure it was inappropriate to consult record sleeves. Like the prize belonged to the person who knew, not the person who researched and made lists.

Of course I drifted away from the Beatles, at a certain point in adolescence it was hard to identify with anything my parents liked that much, and so I never learned the catalog well enough to ever even casually attempt to find the missing song on subsequent weekends. While sitting at the stoplight a few weeks ago, I tried to think of what bands I knew well enough to actually win if someone ran the contest now. Most of my favorites either 1. only made one or two records (Left Banke, Anne Briggs), 2. made one really good record and a bunch that I pretend don’t exist (Nas, The Microphones) or 3. have such complicated, overlapping discographies that I couldn’t possibly keep them straight (Misfits, Pavement). I had a notion that I could do Jawbreaker, but then I never really spent enough time with Bivouac. For some reason I can’t remember any Fugazi song titles, so that’s out, and I get tripped up with the N.W.A. skits.

I decided the only band I would be able to play the game successfully and with any sort of honor would be the Silver Jews. Five LPs seems enough to make it a challenge, and Berman uses the titles in nearly every song so they’re familiar. Then I cheated. I cheated so badly, I went to itunes and had it show me just the Silver Jews songs, arranged alphabetically by title. Of course the 11-year old in the back seat never could’ve imagined this technology, but if I had tried to envision what the worst villain would’ve done in order to win the contest, this would’ve been it. I was vaguely proud of myself for guessing the last song correctly (“[the] Wild Kindness”) but I forgot the “L” in “Albermerle Station” and so messed up the beginning. Looking through the list I realized I never would’ve done it and also realized that I had left out the singles anyway and would’ve lost anyway. Then I got thinking about the singles, about that funny song on the “Tennessee” 12” where he says “Being in love doesn’t mean yelling all weekend” and also about the first Silver Jews record I ever bought, the split single with New Radiant Storm King.

It had this sarcastic song about New York, which, as a teenager, I took personally, having grown up in the state and carrying a considerable chip on my shoulder about it. Going back to it now, it’s really pretty tame and his observations are sharp. I find myself more sympathetic to the Silver Jews lyrically now than I ever have in my life, certainly “When I was younger, I was a cobra, every case I wanted to to be cool, now that I’m older, and subspace is colder, I just want to say something true” is the best expression of the last few years of my life that I’ve heard. At 18 years old, “The Chrysler Building will never fall down as long as you frequent the bars in this town” seemed snide, but these days, nervously hovering in doorways on 2nd Avenue, I’m pretty sure he knew exactly what was going on.

So I’m curious what your band is, the one that you know well enough to be able to play the alphabetical song title game with. Maybe you are a person that reads here but doesn’t ever want to comment, well this is an easy way to do it. I actually would really love it if you did, it would mean a lot to me. I don’t even care if you check itunes.

Turn out okay

2007-08-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

Unrest - Hey London

The thing I learned yesterday is that Mercury is closer to Earth than it’s ever been and will ever be, at least in our lifetimes. There is a sense that this planetary closeness has an intense impact on our emotional lives, and I will confess that I’ve felt an abstract desire to cry for weeks now. It’s not a sadness relatable to anything, not connected to a disappointment or a loss or heartache; just a pull, a tendency to darkness. This feeling has been steady enough and difficult enough to describe that it’s affected my life, and probably annoyed my friends. I am glad to have Mercury to blame it on, gladder to have a song to think about.

You can still find the soundtrack for “Mod Fuck Explosion” pretty easily, I think it must’ve been sold as a cutout by Shimmy Disc or Dutch East India or whatever because I see sealed copies pretty regularly, always with one corner missing. One side has this really fired up, vicious rock and roll by Japanese band Karyo Tengoku. I guess I’ve never really listened to Guitar Wolf, but I’m sure that Karyo Tengoku are better; the first song “Hiroshima” has the whole band screaming “We never forgive you!” with a snarl and threat that I can’t imagine any cowboy boots or leather jackets ever surpassing.

The other half of the record is by Unrest, who of course are my favorite band. Halfway through their side is the song “London’s Theme” which is okay but the completed version, “Hey London” didn’t turn up until two years later on the B-sides/rarities compilation “B.P.M. 1991-1994” which is also still readily available. The notes on the LP are terse, and all it says is “cut from Mod Fuck Explosion motion picture soundtrack” which is one of those what the fuck? moments, like it’s terrifying to me to imagine this song being lost to history.

I never saw the movie so I don’t know what London’s story is, but when Mark Robinson sings “Hey London/your bedroom is your sanctuary/from all the messed up teenage girls outside” I can immediately imagine the room. The unassuming staircase with family portraits running parallel with the railing leading up to this intensely collaged, magazine and clothing strewn room. Dressers moved to barricade the bed, you could lay in it all day and never be seen from the doorway. Behind Mark, Bridget Cross sings the name “London” in falling tones like stepping down off a chair, it’s not quite stern but there’s a ghostly authority to her voice, something she knows but isn’t telling.

The song is tremendously sophisticated in its simplicity, like a succinct, beautiful culmination of all the brilliant pop songs Unrest ever wrote. The parts are calm and repetitive, almost lulling in their regularity, but the guitar and bass are woven together so cleanly it’s inescapable, forever binding. It’s nice to hear them play slowly, there’s a grace to the song that sets it apart from anything else they ever did; it’s not sleepy like “Angel I’ll Walk You Home” or achy and impatient like “I Do Believe You are Blushing.” It’s as if singing about a teenager made the band recognize that they’re actually adults. But they never condescend, there’s this equalizing honesty, an understanding without comment.

I remember during my darkest and most self-destructive teenage moments my mom was always attentive enough to see that I wasn’t causing irreparable damage but never tried to contradict or patronize me. Years later she told me at age 14 she wore a homemade badge to school everyday that read “LIFE ISN’T FUN ANYMORE” but she never tried to tell me she knew what I was going through or that I wasn’t the first teenager to feel isolated or persecuted. She knew I wouldn’t care what she had to say, and she also knew that I’d figure it out. I’m lucky.

“Hey London” is maybe the prettiest song I know, full of comfort and emotion, but with a distance and coolness that’s unlike any other comfort I’ve known. I always try and think about songs as gestures, you know, “Who Could Win a Rabbit” like an eager child pulling at your hand on the path to the park, or the comforting embrace of “Fade to Black” or “Are You That Somebody?” a burning hand wrapped up in your t-shirt. “Hey London” doesn’t have an easy physical comparison, and the scenarios I have to imagine to approximate it are ridiculously complicated and subtle. Like skinning your knee on the blacktop at recess, jeans ripped to reveal a red wetness, dark with bits of gravel and dirt which you pick at aimlessly, kind of sitting on your other hip, your unhurt leg twisted underneath you, not really willing to stand up or call out. Eventually you look around and see a kid you don’t really know watching you with sympathy but not pity, like she’s partaking in your helplessness, knowing there isn’t much anyone can do to help and that you’re probably better off dealing with it on your own. Or maybe it’s just the feeling of Mercury being so close and making you feel like you want to cry all the time for no reason.

Stealing Moments You Said Were Gone

2007-08-04T17:49:00.000-07:00

Thank You - Help God

Everyone talks about the summer of 1994. Cap’n Jazz, Universal Order of Armageddon, John Henry West, Mohinder. All of my favorite bands. Everyone nailing their Rites of Spring/Moss Icon/Hated impressions. Crying at shows, workpants constantly dirty from rolling around on basement floors in this funny agony/ecstasy dance and we were all comfortable with the word “emo” like what could make more sense? But I want to talk about the summer of 1995, or maybe even the autumn of 1995. When the first Rye Coalition (ex-Merel) 7”s came out; or Daredevil (ex-Indian Summer) was supposed to tour but didn’t; some other label besides Gravity released the 3rd Antioch Arrow LP, the circus music one (“your mascara… it’s running”); when Policy of Three played their last show and burned their gear and dudes just sat in the back drunk and acting jaded. Early September, I remember sitting in my room with what would turn out to be my last mail order from Old Glory Distro, surly and disappointed, a stack of records that either mimicked my favorites to the point of nullification, or veered so far from their earlier work that it felt like a betrayal. I sat next to the record player, running through Delta 72, Young Pioneers and Carbomb in total disbelief and ache, this guy Max sitting on my bed with a similar annoyance, demanding that the “next big thing” happen soon. Like we were just waiting for music to come along and save us.

It went on like this for years, the dudes from Indian Summer ending up in electronica bands, that funny moment of hardcore guys playing free jazz, then every band got keyboards, or Tarot Bolero and this weird cabaret scene, eventually screamo appeared, and I guess at that point I completely lost touch with it all, it just became unapproachable for me. There were a million other records I cared about at that point, so it’s not like I had some void in my life, but it still felt like a surrender, like I was giving up on something I shouldn’t have. If I spent the rest of my life trying, I really could never say enough good things about Tonie Joy’s guitar playing; or accurately describe how the angular, fractured song structures of Fisticuffs Bluff actually shook my body, or relate how desperately I wanted to play drums like Ron Anarchy, how I couldn’t even begin to fathom how he approached those rhythms; above all, I’ll really never be able to express what this music did for me, the way it taught me to recognize the parallels of extremes, that the transport of agony is no different than the transport of euphoria; I had already gotten pretty good at abandoning myself to despair thanks to Henry Rollins, but I never knew you could do it the other way.

When I saw Thank You play the other night I absolutely lost it; I felt kicked, shaken, creeped out, thrown in the air like a child. It was suffocating, and it was completely joyful. And I was immediately ready to describe it as an amazing reminder of that 1994 era that I loved so dearly, their whiplash dynamics and head-hung/last-gasp energy a familiar, long-absent excitement. But that’s not it at all. Thank You don’t sound like 1994, they sound like 1995 should’ve sounded. Okay that sounds dismissive but it’s meant to sound like praise. The thing is that their music is the first positive, forward movement in that realm that I’ve heard since those seeming glory day. It’s not important that it happened now instead of then because their sound is not at all nostalgic; they simply picked up a thread and moved forward, the same way Anasarca had sharpened and developed the sounds of The Hated—progress irrespective of time passed. I’m still not saying it right. Thank You don’t sound like any of those 1994 bands, they sound like what those bands could’ve become if they continued to evolve, continued to run down dark passages and peek under rocks.

Sometimes going back and listening to. like, Current is a pretty bitter pill. I remember thinking that all that Summer 1994 emo was so contrary to what was happening in mainstream music at the time but in retrospect the quiet-loud-quiet-loud structure is remarkably similar to, um, Nirvana, and that weary, sore-throated but melodic vocal style treads in the same territory as (forgive me) Eddie Vedder.

But there’s no real precedent for the Thank You’s dynamic sense, which works on so many different planes of sound, operating on such different scales than volume or passion. Sometimes the two guys up front would bow their heads over keyboards, churning out evil, haunted house dirge, while the drums skittered and crashed like thieves surrounding you in the dark, and sometimes the whole band exploded and raged with a overpowering unity. Their agility was unpredictable but never off-putting, the room was transfixed, at turns appropriately still and appropriately violent. There were familiar sounds and there were sounds that seemed like phantoms. They always seemed to know when the audience needed a break; better than that they always knew when the audience felt like a break but were better off without one, and where another band would’ve come off as oppressive, they came off as friendly geniuses.

Thank You were unquestionably one of the best bands I’ve seen, and I was so glad to get their CD, released by the amazing Wildfire Wildfire collective. The nine songs of “World City” touch all the same senses as their live show; uneasing and triumphant, clever and dire. “Help God” in particular is an unchartably great song, full of misdirection, mind-destroying guitar/bass interplay and possibly the most musical and celebratory drumming I’ve ever heard in a rock band. The CD obviously couldn’t have the same power as their live set, but there’s a nice trade-off—a ton of tiny, subtle sounds that were buried in their live set are able to surface. It goes without question that I would’ve lost my mind had I received this record in the mail as a teenager instead of all that boring, disconcerting mimicry, but even as I sit here listening to “World City” I’m losing my mind on a level that I can’t imagine being surpassed a decade ago. I’ll admit I forgot how much I like the sound of jagged guitars and sudden, breath-stopping pauses, but there’s no way a Moss Icon/Cap’n Jazz/Lync revival would’ve reminded me. It took Thank You, who remembered those things and made a new sound to remind me, and I couldn’t be happier for it.

C’mon Give Us Some More Stupid Looks

2007-07-20T03:26:00.000-07:00

Die Kreuzen - In School

Tonight I saw Fred Thomas play a solo set in Park Slope. Fred just moved to New York, earlier in the week he played in Williamsburg with his band Saturday Looks Good to Me and although I’ve seen him play a bunch of different times in so many different bands it felt like such a rare treat seeing him play twice in a week. I’ve said so many times that he is one of the greatest songwriters of our generation, a total genius at telling stories, at finding the huge truths in little actions, in making me want to live forever and spend that time telling so many people that I love them. His set tonight was great, a little dark, he charmed the audience immediately by singing the song where he spells out “h-o-u-n-d” and then kept everyone locked while he told sad stories of losing teeth, helpless friends, and most of all bravery. As soon as he was done I decided I would write about him tonight, about “Get it Together” or “Holland Tunnel” (because he just moved to New York, don’t you see?) or any of a million others that have made me cry and laugh and sing so loud, but then a funny thing happened on the walk home, and besides my new zine [1] has a huge part about his song “Disappearing” so instead it’s Die Kreuzen.

I think a lot about the impact that a song has on perception, not just the way its mood directs yours, but the way it can make the whole world look different. One summer I walked everywhere, listened to Shadow Ring incessantly on my headphones and was stunned to see how lunar and desolate neighborhoods I had lived in for 10 years suddenly appeared. I probably still owe Heather an apology for the time I showed up at her house after listening to that Jawbreaker song all day (“I just hear hot rods and gunshots and sirens”) and started talking so much shit about how I wanted to live in a brutal place, Oakland or Atlanta or Glasgow or something, that life is brutal and I ought to have to confront that brutality every day, look it in the face, hear the gunshots and screaming and sing songs about it. If I were a little bit smarter and switched the song on the way over, all the leaves and smiling faces of Portland probably would’ve kept me there forever.

The band that played after Fred did this one song, it goes “God only knows what I’d be without you” (I think) and everyone sang along. I know that people like it but it kind of ground a fearsome trench into my skull, and I ended up having to run out and carefully listen to music the whole way home to try and heal the rut. Fred suggested that I try Black Dice’s “Beaches and Canyons” for the walk to the train station, and I told him I was going to listen to “Bald Headed Hoes” but only one thing jumped out at me when I scrolled through the songs at hand: Die Kreuzen.

The debut 7”, “Cows and Beers”, and the first self-titled LP by Die Kreuzen are some of the best hardcore ever ever ever. The drummer from His Hero is Gone told me it was his favorite LP of all time. People say a lot of things about the historic importance of those records, the introduction of metal-ish guitars to hardcore blah blah, the collision of Midwest-style aggression with New York’s speed blah blah but on such a basic level nobody listens to those records and emerges unchanged, they’re violent and relentless and bleak on a level that surpasses any era or genre.

Park Slope is pretty. Isn’t it the Cosby show neighborhood? Looks like it, all tidy buildings and flowerboxes, no aNYthing stickers on the lightposts or pizza boxes in the streets. I like greeting people and having them smile back, and on the way to the show it was a good place to do that, shopkeepers watching the sunset and guys on their way home from work all grinning and nodding their heads in that gracious, masculine way. On the way back, however, everyone wanted to fight me. Everyone looked at me like I had crawled out of the sewer, they all clipped my shoulder as I walked past, some even seemed to know that I had hurt my elbow last week and went out of their way to knock into it. I knew that I wasn’t going to make it the 12 blocks to the train without catching a black eye, some part of me also knew that if I would just change back to the Pavement record I listened to on the way there everything would be fine.

It was just too good though, the guitars like catapults throwing my body into strangers, so abrasive and noteless, like a massive arrangement of percussion all pounding out the same vicious orders while that shredded-throat voice mutters about “fucking hippies and fucking jocks, talking shit man you don’t know where it’s at” and then it’s suddenly so melodic, the one guitar chugging out this syncopated riff while the other guitar is all cartwheeling and flipping in a flurry of high single notes, you would be stupid to call it a solo but it has the exact same energy. I love how he sounds like it’s not his fault, like he has no choice but to attack: “we’re gonna have to punch your face out!” I understand being punk in early 80s Wisconsin probably necessitated a lot of fighting, but the full line is “look our way, we’re gonna have to…”; it’s not exactly self-defense.

And so there I was, staring down strangers, muttering along with the record, “we don’t care what you came here for”, all sympathy and sense of beauty drained out of my body, replaced by the rhetoric of songs like “Hate Me”, “Enemies”, “Get ‘Em” and “Fuckups.” It’s hours later and my jaw still hurts from grinding my teeth. All these 90 second blasts of fury nearly chasing me down the street, and reminding me of being 16 and feeling that way all the time regardless of what was playing, my thumbs tucked and my head hung.

I doubt it’s actually necessary for me to say I’m glad I don’t feel that way very much anymore, but I can’t stress how important it was to have those kinds of records when I really was that paranoid and angry. By the time I had heard Minor Threat I was already certain I didn’t want to drink, but it was super nice having evidence that someone else made that decision and survived it, was able to sing about it and continue on with their life. It’s really easy to listen to Die Kreuzen play “I’m Tired” as an adult and jadedly think, “then why don’t you just give up?” But obviously the reason to not give up is to make the song, and then the song becomes a reason for someone else. I’ve had a lot of songs do a lot of important things for me, but nothing as great as that.

[1] new zines all the time! If you ever want one just email your address and I will send it to you immediately! Or Ooga Booga in L.A.! The Golden Age in Chicago!

A street, a house, a room, a life

2007-07-19T18:01:00.000-07:00

Egoexpress - Aranda (Lawrence Mix)

So in continuing my tangential love affair with that Pantha du Prince LP, which I feel entirely unable to write about, here is instead another record that might not change lives but will totally manipulate the same part of your heart. To make this as literal and obvious as possible, I first heard about Lawrence in the Other Music review of “This Bliss”, which favorably compared the two, especially in terms of melody.

The new-ish CD “Lowlights from the Past and Future” is a collection of new and old Lawrence tracks, they’re mostly mixes for other artists and maybe taken from singles or something? Almost all of the songs are licensed from somewhere else, and the “greatest misses” style pun in the title (“lowlights,” not “highlights”, get it?) suggests that this set documents a distinct past, something that may be over at this point. The cover photo is appropriately hazy, tinted the loveliest turquoise blue, immediate nostalgia for an artificial past, like how I always wanted Morr Music releases to look.

It might take a minute or two for them to develop, but every single song on “Lowlights” has a really solid backbone; all pulsing, warm, and supremely dominant beats that don’t ask you to dance but do propel you. It’s not an immediate hook for me, and I know a lot of people who dismiss that sound pretty easily. Look, here is the deal; I grew up punk and this kind of downbeat, “chill out” electronica can sometimes drive me insane, reminds me of expensive, post-modern bars with too many lights glowing under the floor, under the mirrors and under the molded plastic bar.

But I like being moved, always, and the delicate, crystallized spirals of these songs feel like tiny hands inside my chest, coaxing and calming my heart, riling up my breath and occasionally disturbing everything with a sudden rough edge. The Lawrence remix of “The Morning” by Antonelli builds for eight minutes to this incredible hush of ringing chimes that somehow recalls every childhood memory involving a carousal as the happiest of my life. Many of the songs get a little too far out into orbit for me, but the ones that are well-grounded make me feel so happy and wet-eyed emotional that I’m so glad to have heard this record.

But the track I want to discuss is the one that I think is easiest to grasp, for the simple reason that this gentle, utterly familiar progression of guitar chords provides the foundation for the song. I’ve never heard the original cut, but my guess is the vocals and guitar are plucked right from it, the rest of the song left behind. But I could be totally wrong. If I guessed right though, the deftness that Lawrence grafts the crisp humanity of these gestures to his feather-soft beats with is a remarkable gift.

You don’t get the guitar right away though, the song begins with an airy, cool drift of sound, the same soft handed tones that chime through most of his songs, with tiny synthetic wormy sounds buried deep below, corkscrewing to the surface every once in awhile with an unsettling whirr.

It’s nearly two minutes into the track before the guitar appears, and then only if you’re listening for it. As it gently fades in, growing in fullness and warmth, the synthesized tones fall away, and for a couple of bars, these major chords strum away like a Joni Mitchell song. Then weird things start to happen. The guitar stutters, like it’s doubled up badly; the futuristic windharps resume their emotional wail and the tiny computer rhythms return, but the guitar can’t keep up, instead veering and shuddering. The electronic sounds stay intact and steady while the guitar fractures and phases out of sound, like a sick thing. Eventually it disappears. But the sickness caught hold, and the electronic sounds now shift and swell with an uneasing grace. There’s a part where the main bass rhythm is transposed half an octave up, and for the one-and-a-half seconds it takes it’s about the most sickening feeling you can have.

Did you ever have a dual cassette deck? With high-speed dubbing? Ever turn the high speed dubbing on or off while copying a tape? I did, it was during the Cream song “Sunshine of Your Love” and I was in 6th grade. For the half a bar that the two tapes were out of sync, the one being played speeding up at a slightly different rate than the one being recorded, it felt like a fucking Caroliner record. Like this seasick lunge of self-correction that just felt worse for the attempt. I listened to the tape on the walk to school every morning and felt queasy and bad-touched for the rest of the song, eventually taping over it.

That’s how the transposed notes make me feel, and it’s such a subtly jarring transition I probably shouldn’t even mention it, should let you discover the uneasy pull inside your guts on your own, or worse, just let you feel bad for no discernable reason. The fact that it lurks in these amazingly melodic, gentle and resonant cuts is unbelievably sinister and quite clever to me, like the best trick of the year. Or maybe I’m just over sensitive and paranoid.

In the last minute of the song, it seems like every bit of sound encountered during the cut returns to coyly demonstrate just how harmonically in tune they all actually are, even the careening, glitching guitar, even the perfectly round bell tones, even the tiny air bubble rhythms, even the demanding, bass-hard beats. Not a single one clashes, and despite any hard feelings, it’s a moment of triumph and positive memory. It’s the same nostalgic quality lent by the cover, a reflection on something more imagined than existent, yet so firmly engaging and well-loved there’s no avoiding its impact. And once “Aranda” has you open to those charmed, overwhelming tones, you’ll fall right in love with the rest of it.

It’s such a shame we can’t control ourselves

2007-07-17T02:55:00.000-07:00

Panax - The Garden

More than anything I like the catchiest songs. It’s like when you have a bad friend, stealing silverware at the party, and you’re getting thrown out and standing in the doorway defending him, “you know he’s really a sweet guy…” It’s the same way with dumb songs with a brilliant hook, me sheepishly trying to explain my Belle & Sebastian obsession to a friend [1], or, you know, the Strokes. But my favorite kind of catchy song is the frantic one, Cap’n Jazz’s “Little League”, “Words and Smiles” by Tiger Trap, “I Want the One I Can’t Have.” I just heard “Make Out Club” by Unrest at the club and was helpless, grasping the forearm of everyone I saw, eyes wide and unblinking, begging at both best friends and unfamiliar faces: “did you know this is my favorite band??” Yes, everyone knew, even strangers.

After Unrest broke up, there were a few different ex-Unrest bands (and a nerve-wracking day spent at the Indie Rock Flea Market in 1995 expecting a secret reunion) and most were catchy but none were that frantic. I think Flin Flon is one of the more amazing bands of the last ten years but it’s more about tension and minimalism than overwhelmed, buzzing energy. Oh but Panax.

Panax was the duo of Bridget Cross (ex-Unrest) and Kathi Wilcox (ex-Bikini Kill, Frumpies). They released exactly one song and I have listened to that one song more than I’ve listened to all the songs by all the ex-Unrest bands combined. That’s not a criticism of Air Miami or Phil Krauth or whatever, it’s a testament to how terrific the song is. It was the first or second song on a Teenbeat budget CD sampler which promised a Panax full length in the upcoming year, but it never materialized.

In the verses, Cross desperately tries to fit all her words into each line, an un-ease that follows the story; when she sings about dreaming fitfully (“makes me think I’m crazy”) it inspires the same kind of fretful alertness as laying next to a nightmare-burdened friend. The flip is that the chorus has way fewer words, but the instruments pick up so excitedly, the frenzy only intensifies.

The rhythm is kept by a somewhat jaunty drum machine with a very compelling hand clap. If you’ve ever listened to old Guided by Voices records or Mortician you will agree that it’s hard to maintain dynamics with a drum machine. The deftness of Panax’s programming, along with a clever shift from resonant, descending notes to high staccato picking makes the chorus feel like this anxious, world-collapsing swarm, recalling the lyric, “how can I stay calm?” And then it all pulls back for this barren grief, her isolated voice asking, “how can you leave me now?”

I’ve never tried to play this song at a party but my guess is it could light up a dancefloor. I’ve never played it out of desperation but my guess is it could make the coldest heart have a change. I have played it for pretty much everyone I love and the immediacy of it is pretty universal in a way that makes me feel good about my friends. I don’t know what would change if everyone in the world heard it, but I’m sure it would be a good change.

[1] I actually kept the B & S records backwards on the shelf for the first few years I had them so no one could hassle me upon seeing the spines

Love tracks, setbacks

2007-07-09T18:07:00.000-07:00

Foster Sylvers - Misdemeanor

A reissue of this LP just appeared and if you have a crush on someone and want to make them a tape, your summer is going to rule. Watching a friend hear this song for the first time is one of the greatest treats I have had in my life. I know a lot of charming people but none of them touch the ridiculous heart-capturing skills of 11-year-old Foster Sylvers, and he's at his best on "Misdemeanor."

People are always struck by his bright eyes and huge smile on the cover, and both features play a huge role in his voice. He sings with such pure joy, breathlessly rushing through passages before bursting into these warm, round-edged choruses and dazzling harmonies. There's something absurdly mature about his dynamics, jumping from desperate ("she makes me feel so out of place"), to detached ("it's no big deal"), to worldly and in control (it's going to subside"). It's maybe a few too many conflicting feelings for one song, but he handles it easily; I mean, I can't really think of many singers who could pull off the word "subside" at all, let alone in the middle of such an emotionally undecided song. And all of that during a cut that sounds like so much laughter, like the most fun you've ever had dancing, like steady bouncing with the biggest smile on your face. The last few runs through the chorus he lets the backing vocalists handle it while he sings over all of them, "you're what I need!" The "eeeee's" in "need" get held so long, notes climbing through the other voices way longer than any normal kid could hold his breath. It starts on such a dark, minor note, the most chilling part of the song, but quickly rises to such a bright, frenzied pitch, for a second it's near-spiritual, then the next second it just surpasses the song, an exalting, celebratory high note that feels like the whole song in miniature.

It definitely helps that "Misdemeanor" is one of the greatest tracks of the 70s, with an irresistible backbeat, but subtle enough details to withstand constant listening. The production snaps so tight and succinct, it feels closer to mid-90s east coast rap beats than 70s kiddie-soul, and everyone from Afrika Bambaataa to Dr. Dre has sampled it. There's this glockenspiel/xylophone part that pounds with a clipped, repetitive sharpness that's a lot easier to imagine emerging from the rubber pads of an MPC than the rubber mallets of a human hand. The bass line bumps along with a three note lurk, a ton of empty space, and every once in awhile an understated yet smart-alecky bubbling walk. The dusty snare cracks nice and regular, with a shimmering hi-hat backbone. Every sound is crisp and individual, except this quiet guitar part that would wail if it were cranked, but instead rides below-the-surface, creating a subtle fullness that holds all the bits together.

Foster was the youngest of the Sylvers, the Memphis vocal soul made up of nine brothers and sisters. The group was considered a Southern version of the Jackson 5, but as the kids grew up the family looked to the younger siblings to create new hits. Foster's 1973 debut, "Misdemeanor" ended up a bigger hit than almost anything the Sylvers ever made (surpassed only by "Boogie Fever"), selling over 250,000 copies of the 45. Like his older siblings, Foster Sylvers got locked into his early persona and confused his listeners simply by growing up. In the 80s he moved into songwriting and production, including a hit for Janet Jackson in 1983.

After hearing "Misdemeanor" for the first time I went on one of the more rabid record hunts of my life and ended up finding a copy of the LP in London; I was skeptical because I hadn't heard the rest of the cuts and worried that he was a one-hit wonder but I was pleasantly surprised by how solid his debut LP is. Nothing ranks with the single, but what could? Fans of the band Nation of Ulysses will find a pretty good surprise at the end of side one, and there's an amazing legend about Ian Svenonius giving his copy of the LP to Chris during Huggy Bear's first U.S. tour. The reissue is a fantastic deal, even if you just grab the LP and put the first song on a mixtape, I promise it's worth it.

Skeleton come to life

2007-06-30T10:09:00.001-07:00

Troyton Rami - Bad Dog Riddim

There is this one kind of horrible image that haunts me pretty regularly where a skeleton comes back to life. It's a slow, gruesome process, these inert bones laying in a crypt while some evil force knits together muscle and tendon, veins creep along once dead limbs and fingers twitch with malice until it finally rises, a raging ghoul with newly coursing blood driving it to kill. In the nightmare version, I am of course transfixed, standing (for some unknown reason) at the foot of the tomb while the creature comes to life, too scared or stupid to run away. In the daydream version it is this weird science project, like those high-speed nature films of sunsets and flowers blooming. In my thoughts it becomes a metaphor for this one kind of minimal music that I am drawn too.

I mean like Mobb Deep "Shook Ones Part II", where the blaring, siren-like horns play out on their own with just a hi-hat/snare crack behind them before that muttering starts; where the menacing voices and horns fully mesh up before the creeping, ominous chords join in; where even two minutes into the song it feels like some sounds are still missing. Where the chorus, finally bringing all the sounds together, feels like a storm, feels like drowning and being shook and lost in the dark and thunder all at once.

I mean like every single cut on the Pantha du Prince record, the one I really can't stop listening to. Where these almost off-kilter loops tangle and mash each other: bells ring [arteries stretch out]; hoofbeat bass clips [sinews twist and wrap around bone], mournful, distant piano notes chime [eyelids blink over empty sockets]; blown-out yet muted alien static hisses [blood starts to fill the once-empty ribcage, first breath gasped]. Each song takes you to such dark new places but with a deftness that surprises every time.

But I also mean like Squarepusher's "Journey to Reedham", which is like the Disney cartoon version of the skeleton-come-to-life vision. The steady layering and re-layering of sound, starting from tiny, bouncing, neon-lit melodies to full-on, cartwheeling breathless fun, complete with blurry bass drum rolls and a completely life-affirming melody. Again, it's one of those songs that seems to travel a million miles from beginning to end, but if you listen carefully, you'll hear that every individual sound that barely held together the opening of the song - those snare notes that sounded once every other measure, the three root notes of the opening melody, the almost sub-sonic bass tone that grounded the song - they're still there. The bones all present, just hidden under the surface.

In April of this year Black Shadow issued a handful of 45s with a new riddim, Bad Dog. Produced by Troyton Rami (um, dude behind Sean Paul's "Give Me the Light"), the beat is absolutely one of the best things that's happened so far this year in music, period. While I'm certainly not the first person to write about it, there hasn't yet been the storm of excitement that the riddim deserves.

This skeleton-come-to-life scenario is midway between the scary version and the kiddie one. The song begins with a minimal snare beat and a flat, whistling, four-note tune. I don't know what that sound is sourced from, but it reminds me of those long, corregated plastic tubes that you whirl around to make a high pitched tone, but chopped up into little pieces. After a few measures, a second tone appears, but that melody just follows the first one, right on top of it. It's one of those moves that could either be amateur or beyond genius, either way I'd give him credit, but for sure Rami knows what he's doing. For the rest of the cut he continues to add layers to the same melody, each one making a little bit more use of delay to fill out the sound. Subtle rattles appear and vanish like phantoms, clipped gurgles and sped-up dub effects sound just often enough to prevent the riddim from feeling hypnotic or repetitive. On the one hand it's horribly desolate, an ill-ease soundtrack for a slow, grey-skied landscape. But the lightness of the root melody skips along with an eager, c'mon-let's-have-fun energy that's completely unavoidable. Before I can ever make up my mind which one it is, the side's over.

By my count there are eight different versions floating around of the cut, but none of them are as compelling as the beat on its own. Elephant Man's try ("Down Ah Prison") is maybe the most interesting, because he rides the beat so completely it's like his voice is another layer on the whistle melody, but at the same time it's kind of the most annoying, his heavy cough of a voice gumming up the ghostlike whisper of the song. Beenie Man's trilling bombast ("The Crime") is kind of charming, as is Movado's melodic croon ("Don't Mess Around"), but for the most part every version just sounds like the vocals were lifted off any similar-paced riddim, without any connection to the beat. Rekha's Jamaican take on Kelly Rowland ("No guts") is generally my favorite singing style in the world, but I'd still prefer the beat on its own.

The timing is a little bit blurry to me but I like the idea that this riddim first hit right around the same time as all the Basic Channel stuff got reissued, right around the same time that the Pantha du Prince and the Field CDs came out and everyone started thinking about minimal techno again. It would definitely be an amazing historical moment if everyone just started thinking about minimal music again, and the "Bad Dog" riddim was at the front of the pack.

Some folks say that they're okay when they really shouldn't be

2007-06-28T10:37:00.000-07:00

Driving up from Los Angeles on last winter's tour, I'm pretty sure none of us had been to San Luis Obispo before. You get to follow 101, which is one of the nicer places to drive in the U$A. It's a pretty town, with a really amazing record store, Boo Boo and the show was at the Steynberg Gallery which had a coffee shop, a ton of folding chairs, and a stack of Artforum back issues from the mid 90s. It felt pretty and tame, it's always a little bit awkward when everyone is sitting, but everyone there was super polite and attentive. This band called the Black Shirts played, two acoustic guitars shared between three kids, a lot of little stuff, hand percussion, a pair or drumsticks. Before they started playing there was this uncomfortable moment where they all stood frozen, like they couldn't get comfortable in the space.

The two boys played guitar together really well, there was this really firm, rich, chord-y side to their sound but then they'd creep into a weird minimal space, and the way they cut back and forth between the two had this easy confidence that somehow didn't clash with their hair-in-face/downcast eyes shyness. They had heavy, worksong-ish voices; tired, a little bit pleading, but mostly resigned. When the girl sang it just cut right through the song, blunt and pretty at the same time. Like the way Chan Marshall sounds on the slowest Cat Power songs, or a sad Kim Deal. She clearly had a different burden than the boys, but her road wasn't any easier. Her voice is like yours when you first wake up, sandpapery, thirsty, but not un-eager.

The three of them all wore keys around their necks. I'm pretty sure they all came together and all left together. They stood super close to each other when they played, after they played, and seemed to navigate the gallery as one unit. I have no idea if they all live together, but I assume they do. I like the idea of bands-as-community for each other, and that legacy is pretty heavy: the Stooges, Throbbing Gristle, Animal Collective..... all of whom have this really innate, tightly bonded musical communication, like you can't really tell which individual is responsible for which sound, instead, the whole band moves as one. Black Shirts definitely ruled this aesthetic, and despite their bashfulness they always looked comfortable with the songs, and it felt less a product of rehearsal than a product of friendship.

A week after the show they wrote to let us know they had created a myspace page with a few of their songs. Of the four, "Funny Bones" is the one that reminds me most of their set. Dreary, falling notes that suddenly pound out with evil, heavily strummed chords; a weary male voice creeping out of a dark room before the three Black Shirts burst into a perfect, harmonized chorus (this is, after all, the band that posted a photo of Peter, Paul and Mary in their "view photos" section). But the real surprise is how dark the song is. The first refrain has the girl singing solo, "It's like getting shanghai'd baby, you just never know," which could fit in probably any song, the second refrain she switches to "It's like sleeping with witches baby, you just never know," which, in a post-CocoRosie way, isn't too far out. But the third time. "It's like sleeping with siblings, baby..." is just murder. Especially when sung with her sleepy, unassuming voice. And of course there's a shock value moment, but the last line of the song, "we're testing the waters honey, and they're oh so cold" twists the whole thing into a shamed but straight-faced confession. Just like the listener, they don't know what else to do but feel cold.

The 94-second "Pinwheel" is a gentle, fingerplucked surprise. You remember that Emitt Rhodes song "Lullaby" that was on the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack? It feels like that: a tiny, sweet thing, the kind of song you put at the end of a mixtape to fill out the last minute. The Black Shirts don't quite escape their darkness, the guitar part has this one vaguely off note that rings out for a moment or two with a perfect queasiness but the song is a charmer, and just a little bit too short.

If you're trying to get from L.A. to San Francisco the quickest way possible, you drive on I-5. About two hours after leaving L.A. there's this eye-watering smell, it feels like having the bridge of your nose cracked with a hammer. You don't see the source of the smell for seven or eight miles, but up ahead there's this massive cattle slaughterhouse. Since the cows are soon to die, there aren't really any amenities for them, no water, no grass, just mud and their own filth. I'm not trying to convince you to stop eating meat, but it's absolutely gruesome. Every time I realize I'm passing through that way I do all this mental/emotional preparation, trying to get ready for it, and every time the stench just floors me, every time the stretch of almost-dead cows seems miles longer.

A detour through San Luis Obispo meant missing the slaughterhouse. That was enough for me but I was so happy to see what else it meant. The town has a really exciting D.I.Y. scene, the kind of thing I wish I had grown up with. You can find out more here.

I'm always thinking about you

2007-06-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

Sub Society - A Lot Less

When Hokus Pokus was reissued on DVD by H-Street a couple of years ago you could find a ton of reviews and testimonials from fans who said that the video was one of the most important things that happened to them. Not just skaters but kids with video cameras too, who got the best-yet example of the potential of D.I.Y. filming. The whole thing has this camcorder-and-three-best-friends feeling; it's super homemade (legendarily, it was edited in a living room) but that aesthetic speaks a lot better to skateboarding culture than some multi-cam ESPN edit. Also the music was maybe the best ever.

My sophomore year of highschool we figured out that VCRs had audio outputs and we connected up our parents' decks, fed our walkmans endless hissy tapes of bands we'd never heard of, assuming we could even figure out which band was which. I swear I listened to "Dollar on A Platter" every day for months but only recently found out who it was by (Wheezing Maniac). It didn't really matter, we ignored the crash-whoosh of railslides and hard crashes (and Danny Way yelling "yeah man!"), flipped out over anonymous songs, and never once felt weird that a lot of this super-energetic punk was also depressed and hurt.

The real killer was "A Lot Less" by Sub Society, from the Matt Hensley session. I was fifteen years old and could not have been more heartsick or desperate if I tried. Sometimes I felt tough and I rocked Black Flag ("There's no girl that wants to touch me, I don't need, I don't need your fucking sympathy") but most times it was miserable and cowardly: Jawbreaker ("too scared to say a thing") or Green Day ("I wish I could tell you..."). "A Lot Less" cut through all of that.

The singer's gruff, worn voice seems so spent, so tired of dwelling on this girl. In retrospect it's crazy to think that the teenagers who made the song were only a couple of years older than I was when I first heard it, he just sounds so beat. Even with all this weight on him, he still maintains this melody, like he has to keep up with the band. The guitar and bass are locked in this classic west coast way, there's a propulsion to it that's completely irresistable, the same way the bay area bands could make songs that were so mopey and explosive at the same time.
On the east coast I feel like bands had a harder time with that split, like for them it was either winter or summer. But in California it seemed natural to get all fired up and heartachey at the same time, and 3000 miles away it really resonated for us. There's a preserverence, a relentlessness to the song that is probably the most important sense a song could impart to a person caught in that agony.

The DVD reissue of Hokus Pokus started a lot of conversations about those old songs, and "A Lot Less" became a pretty intense obsession for a second, we all wanted to hear it a) for nostalgia and b) because there still are times when I feel like I should think a whole lot less. Anyway, the amazing thing is that Hesh One from Sub Society set up a website where you can download their entire discography, complete with cover art to print out and assemble for FREE. Most of this stuff I've never heard, it seems like everyone had the "Relaxin'" 7" but the rest of it? Total freak-out panic excitement.

And you know it's right when he wins

2007-06-26T10:08:00.000-07:00

Tracey Thorn - Goodbye Joe

It feels pretty good to be a jaded teenager. My friend Joachim and I were laughing the other night about being 18 and suffering this summertime city heat, hazy air and sticky clothes, always wanting to go to movies just to be in the air conditioning for a couple of hours. It was always really important to point out how we didn't even care what movie it was, that the point was to just get out of the heat. Showing up to the theater and just seeing whatever was next. Joe's Apartment. Cable Guy. Eraser. Sitting in the back and making sarcastic comments about everything around us.

But in retrospect I feel a little bad about the whole thing, about laughing at every act of heroics, about shaking my head in disbelief through the silliness of Hollywood romance. Not bad like guilty, bad like it's a shame that our generation was never dazzled by the movies. We never admired anyone, we never fell in love; not like our parents did. And if we did put photos of movie stars on our walls, they were from a different generation, Jean Seberg or Kim Novak, like we recognized the glamour but also knew it didn't exist today.

Around this same summer I was at my friend Robin's house talking about Lois Maffeo. If I had to guess I would bet that we were both wearing corduroy pants, and we were both amped up about how sweet Lois is, or more appropriately how bittersweet she is. The song "Wet Eyes", how could it be so sad and so pretty? So few chords on an acoustic guitar and her warm, low voice, the part where she talks about dying "100 times nightly/but I did it politely" and when I wasn't busy being too jaded to feel anything that was exactly how I felt. Robin asked if I had ever heard the Marine Girls. I hadn't, and when he came back from his room carrying two plain-looking LPs with these awkward-looking girls on them it was immediate, this was my new favorite.

I couldn't believe that there was a precursor to the empty, homemade, lovesick music that I was obsessed with, that there were bands in the early 80s that felt satisfied with a couple of looping notes on the guitar and two gleeful, sort-of harmonized voices dancing around them with handclaps and "la-la-la's". The group was made of of two sisters-Jane and Alice Fox, and their schoolmate Tracey Thorn. It was perfect. I found a CD that had both of their LPs, and then really flipped out when I found Tracey Thorn's solo LP, "A Distant Shore", recorded just after the Marine Girls ended. The cover has a drawing of a girl sitting in a beach chair, her chin resting in her hands, her gaze focused so far away from anything in her surroundings. The songs sound identical to the drawing; wistful, calm, spare. At the record store I found out that she went on to be in the band Everything But the Girl, who were apparently much more famous and important to the history of music. I didn't like them, but in a collection of their records sold to a shop in D.C. my friend Amy found a Tracey Thorn 7" from 1983 with two songs we'd never heard.

The song "Goodbye Joe" is sung with such ache and melancholy, the word "goodbye" repeated over and over, that it could only be a love song. But it's a love song to a movie star, for sitting in the dark and being overwhelmed by how "he looks so good in technicolor." At each chorus, another little guitar part enters, this sweet slowdance of notes swelling alongside her rising voice, the richness of her devotion growing at every turn. It's sung with such sincerity there could be no question that Thorn was writing from her own experience, from sitting in the back row herself and daydreaming kisses.

But it turns out the song was written by The Monochrome Set, who released their own version a year earlier. I like the Monochrome Set, they had a nice, well-educated take on the early-80s Rough Trade sound. The singer was some sort of royalty, so, you know, if Mark E. Smith was a prince, how the Fall would sound. Their version is good, it's clearly one of the most heartfelt moments of their career, but it can't compare with her single. I know I'm informed by the fact that I heard Thorn's first, but I can't shake the feeling that hers is the authentic, theirs is the tribute. It's not a thing that happens very often, covers surpassing originals, and it adds even more weight to this magical song.

I always wanted more people to know about The Marine Girls and especially Tracey Thorn's solo career, waited to see her covered by Elliott Smith live, or name-checked by Belle & Sebastian, or (more absurdly) to read Chan Marshall describe how Thorn's version of "Goodbye Joe" inspired her to make the Cat Power Covers Record. "A Distant Shore" has been reissued from time to time, occasionally on vinyl, but "Goodbye Joe" has just disappeared, too sadly similar to the daydreamy allure of the movies it obsesses over.