BLOGSTITUDE

2012-02-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

MASAKI BATOH Brain Pulse Music LP/CD (DRAG CITY)
BURNING SPEAR Garvey's Ghost (ISLAND)
CAROL "Breakdown" b/w "So Low" 7" (DIRTY DANCE)
FREDDIE McGREGOR unofficial comp from Magic is Juju blog
OST Drive (LAKESHORE)
This mixtape by KURT VILE
This mp3 by MARY HALVORSON & WEASEL WALTER
VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR World Record (CHARISMA)
FLIPPER Unreleased Studio Session Tape 1982 (NOT ON LABEL)

The new solo album by Ghost frontman Masaki Batoh, to be released February 28th on Drag City, contains music that he played with his brain. The Brain Pulse Music Machine, which apparently will also be available from Drag City (street date TBA), comes with a head unit that reads your brain's alpha and theta waves and then transmits them via radio waves to a motherboard... but I listened to the album before reading the press release, so I didn't know any of this, and the album sounded like excellent and extremely austere and forbidding ancient-style ceremonial Japanese ritual music, not unlike stuff that would pop up on Ghost albums here and there in between those elegant nouveau psychedelic rockers that Batoh usually specializes in, as one of, in my opinion, the great and defining lead singers of the psychedelic 1990s. I also learned from the press release that Batoh was going to make the album entirely out of brain pulse music, but just before recording sessions were to begin, the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 happened, and he decided to add in the ancient acoustic ritual music element as the kind of prayer/dedication/offering to the gods that people of Japan would (pre)historically perform in the face of disaster. In my opinion, this element is what the album is all about, with the brainwaves taking a back seat, although the album does open with a piercing sustained tone cluster that sounds like an ancient woodwind instrument blending with a high-pitched brain tone, and works as a great cry of lamentation, and a call to attention for the grim ritual to follow. Then again, steadily beating on a drum with your hand is a type of brain pulse too. But like I said, I listened to it a couple times before I knew any of the back story, and what it made me think of the most were similarities between ancient Japanese music and ancient American Indian music and how it might just have something to do with that Bering Strait land bridge of 15,000 years ago. So there's a lot of layers of allusion here.

Once you've got a clutch of King Tubby & Lee Perry records and wanna keep going, you might check out Garvey's Ghost, the dub version of the Burning Spear album Marcus Garvey. Leadoff track "The Ghost" is pretty great, but it's a very low-key album, less arresting than the shattered Tubby or Scratch style you might be into, more in a relatively untreated mellow roots instrumental style. In fact, if you're only gonna get one of the two I'd recommend the vocal set Marcus Garvey, because if I'm gonna check out a Burning Spear album, I wanna hear the man sing!

This Carol 7-inch is crazy good. "Breakdown" b/w "So Low." Continental synth pop done right in 1981, complete with dubbed-out rockers-style rim clicks. If I'm reading the internet right, one recently sold for $333.

The official soundtrack to the film Drive is probably the best new fake 1980s pop music I've heard besides Channel Pressure by Ford & Lopatin. Normally I dislike new fake 1980s pop almost as much as I dislike new fake Italian giallo soundtracks, but both of these records have hit a hitherto unknown sweet spot, the kind of feat that can only happen if the songwriting is good (like the way Ford & Lopatin somehow endlessly extrapolate and improve on the Pointer Sisters' "Automatic"), though that hardly seems the case when considering this soundtrack's execrable-but-somehow-wonderful "A Real Hero" by College (feat. Electric Youth). Can you really call that good songwriting? I guess it turns out you can, but really, I think the reason this music is so good is simply because magic is involved, something beyond mortal understanding. Even the artists responsible for these creations don't understand, and never will. Good weird flick too, if you haven't seen it. Caveat: the pop portion of this soundtrack that I was just raving about is just 5 tracks at around 20 minutes. You've got French vocoder jam "Nightcall" by Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx, the stunning pop obsession of "Under Your Spell" by Desire (which I now see is a new band including Johnny Jewel of Glass Candy), some sort of cabaret/torch song which I'm not that into, and a killer Basic Channel-worthy minimalist jam by The Chromatics, which is another Johnny Jewel project, who I guess is the producer, or "developer" of the pop portion of the soundtrack. He also wrote a score for the whole movie, but it didn't get used. Instead, the film was scored by Cliff Martinez, maybe because he's more of an L.A. veteran. (After all, he played drums on the last Captain Beefheart album in '82 and the first two Red Hot Chili Peppers albums in '84-'85!) His ambient cityscapes are nice, but they go on for 50 minutes and, without being able to support the film, eventually fade into irrelevance.

I thought Flipper's "In The Garden" was maybe, just maybe, still the Van Der Graaf Generator album. I confess that about two minutes in I still wasn't 100% sure that it was a different album, and had to look at the iPod screen to find out. I know that sounds nuts.

2012-02-05T13:15:00.000-08:00

Here's a coda to the last post about New Zealand, surf, friends, Surf Friends, and the music of the great outdoors. This is one of the best surf videos I've ever seen and the reason is that there's no overdubbed soundtrack music... after immersion in the ancient cross-rhythms of pounding ocean, the watered-down world music (posing as "dub") or plodding post-Creed achievement-rock these videos often use just doesn't cut it. Plus, just last week I spent an hour or so hanging out on this very "beach" (instead of sand, you have to walk over about 100 feet of volcanic boulders, visible in the first 2 seconds of the clip, just to get to the water). The waves weren't nearly as big and only a couple surfers were out, but it was still a fabulous way to spend part of an afternoon.

Bonus clip (also without music!) of people surfing the infamous Jaws break in Hawaii. Insane!

Special shout to Erik Davis for getting me going yesterday by posting clips from unknown 1970 surf flick Pacific Vibrations on twitter, like this one:

HORSE BACK

2012-01-31T11:00:00.000-08:00

I was in New Zealand for the last couple weeks because my Dad is from there and the USA family goes once a decade or so to visit the NZ family. I had no musical plans of any kind for the trip other than the music of the great outdoors (seriously), although 20 minutes after landing, when we were picking up our rental car, a guy came in wearing a Flying Nun T-shirt and I asked him if he was going to see any live music while he was there. He replied that he actually lived in Auckland and was dropping his car off, that his job was taking bands on tour for Flying Nun and others, that he only wears the T-shirt when everything else is in the laundry, and that he didn't really know of any crucial shows in the next couple weeks. I asked who was good on Flying Nun these days, apologizing that I didn't already know, and he said the Surf Friends, apologizing for the name, just that they were "two friends who love to surf and love The Clean." I can't tell if they're actual Flying Nun signees or not from the FN website, but that's who he said. So, at the end of the trip, after traversing the Bay of Islands, the Coromandel Peninsula, the surf mecca of Raglan, and more, when we made it back to Auckland for a few nights and a cousin's wedding, I broke down and went to Real Groovy, which is apparently the last Queen Street record store standing, to look for a Surf Friends 7-inch. It's true, the Korean food options on and around Queen were more impressive than the funky books-and-records-and-fliers cultural options I grew up on, but all that culture's on the internet now, and there were a bunch of kids skateboarding amongst a game of street cricket at Aotea Square, so it was cool.

Surf Friends don't seem to have any vinyl out yet, and Real Groovy just had a couple of their CD EPs. I decided to listen to their music on the internet first because shit tends to be expensive in New Zealand. Real Groovy is a great store though, the Amoeba of Aotearoa, with a massive selection of (overpriced to a Yankee) records and books and movies and T-shirts and lots more. But the point of this story, and maybe every story, is that when we walked in to the store what should be blasting on the sound system but Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, specifically "Down By The River." Angelina said, "All this music all around and it's Neil Young on the stereo," and I said, "That's what it all comes around to. That's all you need." Sort of like the music of the great outdoors (seriously). We browsed until the stored closed, with no intention of buying anything, just to listen to Neil and the Horse because it sounded so good.

A couple days later we were at the Auckland airport waiting for our 12-hour flight to Los Angeles. I had 15 NZ bucks left. Not much, but I was going to change 'em back to USD anyway, until I noticed that the new issue of Mojo had articles on two of my Top 5 bands of all time, the Rolling Stones and Can, plus one on Todd Rundgren to boot, so I just spent the money on that instead (overpriced at $15.20 NZD!), and I'm thumbing through it at the gate, and there on page 58 they're asking PJ Harvey "what's the best thing you've heard all year," and what does she say but: "I really can't stop listening to Neil Young, particularly his first two solo albums [Neil Young and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere]. It's just doing something for my soul that my soul really needs, and I'm pretty much only listening to him. It's been about five months now (laughs)."

And THEN, when I get home to Chicago some 24 hours later, my facebook and twitter feeds are buzzing with the news of "Horse Back," a brand new 37-minute jam by Neil Young and Crazy Horse just posted on neilyoung.com. I'm listening to it right now for the second time. It's endless. It's what it all comes around to. It's kinda like the music of the great outdoors. And this kinda is too:

MY FAVORITE RECORDS OF 2011

2012-01-13T22:03:00.001-08:00

I would've written about more of these but I seem to have almost completely forgotten how to write record reviews, especially about the albums I love the most. Not necessarily in order and subject to change...

FORD & LOPATIN Channel Pressure
PEAKING LIGHTS 936
ALVARIUS B Baroque Primitiva
ANDY STOTT We Stay Together
ANDY STOTT Passed Me By
MEG BAIRD Seasons on Earth.
GROUPER A I A : Alien Observer
GROUPER A I A : Dream Loss
BLUES CONTROL & LARAAJI Frkys Vol. 8
VILLAGE OF SPACES Alchemy and Trust
STARE CASE Lose Today
JOVONTAES Things Are Different Here
HIVE MIND Elemental Disgrace
SKOAL KODIAK Kryptonym Bodliak
APACHE DROPOUT s/t
DAN MELCHIOR Assemblage Blues
DAN MELCHIOR UND DAS MENACE Catbirds & Cardinals
ICEAGE New Brigade
CONTAINER s/t
ANGELS IN AMERICA Narrow Road To The Interior
HAUNTED HOUSE Blue Ghost Blues
IMPLODES Black Earth
SANSO-XTRO Fountain Fountain Joyous Mountain
MAGICAL BEAUTIFUL Here Come The Wild Waves
THE POLYPS Ants on the Golden Cone
SIC ALPS Napa Asylum

2011-12-19T13:11:00.000-08:00

OMAR SOULEYMAN Leh Jani 2LP (SHAM PALACE)
NEIL YOUNG Zuma (REPRISE)
POWER OF THE SPOKEN WORD The Language of a Dying Breed (SACRIFICIAL)
PREGNANT s/t (BURN BOOKS)
HOW TO DRESS WELL Love Remains (LEFSE)
KEITH HUDSON Brand (PRESSURE SOUNDS)
TOMMY McCOOK Blazing Horns/Tenor In Roots (BLOOD & FIRE)

The new Omar Souleyman double LP Leh Jani is the first release on the Sham Palace label, which is Mark Gergis's own subdivision of Sublime Frequencies, which is an interesting move in that I could see Alan Bishop and Hisham Mayet also with their own subdivisions as each of the three do seem to have a distinct area of interest. Anyway, there has been a lot of Souleyman releases by now, so far be it from me to suggest that you may still need more, but Leh Jani just might be my favorite one yet, even though it only has 3 songs on it: the 30-minute title jam split onto Sides 3 and 4, with two more 15-minute jams taking up Sides 1 and 2. Apparently this music made up a C60 that was one of the first Omar cassette releases that Gergis procured on a trip in Syria. He excerpted a few minutes of "Leh Jani" onto Highway to Hassake, Omar's auspicious 2007 debut CD for Sublime Frequencies, but now the entire cassette has been cut onto 12" vinyl at 33RPM and it's a lot of fun, the title track being a totally driving and upbeat chanter in which seemingly about 75 different bouncing and ripping keyboard and electric bozouk solos get exchanged, by Rizan Sa'id and Hamid Souleyman respectively. I swear it never gets monotonous, and when either side of the record ends I instantly want to flip it over. I think the reason the groove stays interesting for 30 minutes is because of how sensuous, light, and airy the musicianship on top of it is. (See also: Can.) The other record features more of those insistent dabke grooves, with "Introduction/Mawal" having a slower tempo, and also a lot of talking, presumably because of the "Introduction" aspect.

When in doubt, jam "Danger Bird."

It's always funny to watch otherwise intelligent people who aren't from Nebraska talk about bands that are from Nebraska. When the subject is broached, they suddenly turn into self-parodies in a stumbling race to make the first joke about cornhusking and/or lack of electricity. I'll agree that Nebraska is not a premier musical hotbed, but you must admit that great bands can come from there. How can an engaged rock music listener deny The Boys? The Crap Detectors? For Against? For the love of god, Power of the Spoken Word?? This last band of antisocial miscreants released a single LP in 1985, called The Language of a Dying Breed, and if they'd come from California and released this record on SST, or come from DC and released this record on Dischord.... but never mind all that, this record is from Lincoln, Nebraska and was released on the band's own label Sacrifical Records. The stunning "pagan hardcore" cover art by Mott-ly (who, full disclosure, is one of my favorite people of all time, RIP) certainly looks a lot more like something from the deep Great Plains than it does either of the coasts. Also, the bass player was named Tree. Just Tree. As for the music, it's post-Void mutant hardcore, one of the few bands I can compare to the early Meat Puppets, where bass and drums tear through frantic rhythms, ripping dirty guitar solos spill out indiscrimately, and the singer is basically a DMT elf. Add to that a more stern and gothic metal crossover undercurrent (Die Kreuzen and Voivod are other reference points) and a whole bunch of that Great Plains isolation x-factor, and you're close.

Speaking of SST and ripping dirty guitar playing, I feel like there's been a few bands lately, from both here and there (okay mostly from Olympia, WA), that have been doing a kind of scratchy proto-grunge late 80s early 90s Homestead/SST-informed dirt-rock kinda thing. Not that I really know what I'm talking about, but Gun Outfit, maybe? Long-Legged Woman? Milk Music? The seven or eight better examples that I'm sure you can come up with? All I'm saying is, throw Pregnant onto the pile. Am I still speaking English? Yeah, I'm just talking about a band from New York City that I haven't heard too much about, other than a mention in Tony Rettman's Rettsounds column that seems like it might've been a whole year ago. Maybe it's because of their name! Pregnancy and rock just don't mix. Anyway, their medium long-playing (just over 20 minutes) debut finally came up on the iPod and it's really good. Anthemic rollicking yearning melodic tunes driven by big guitar chords and vocals that cut.

Alright man, chillin' at home, Monday night, hard day at work, havin' a hard time with my lady, you know I gotta put on that new How To Dress Well album.... Ha! Just kidding! It came up on shuffle! First time I've listened to it since the week it was released! Things are fine with my lady and I! But seriously folks, it seems like the hype on this guy didn't really continue past 2010's fabled "Summer of Chillwave," but then I don't look at Pitchfork very often. Maybe it did continue, or maybe it just wasn't that great of an album... to me, the guy seemed a little like a one-hit wonder, that hit being "Ready For The World," which still sounds fantastic. I got the album on the strength of that tune, but the rest didn't connect with me, just kinda hovered at a too-chill remove. Now I've got it on headphones and it does sound better and closer. The songwriting still isn't super strong, but I appreciate the meditative R&B angle a lot more than I do "beach pop" or whatever. He's not a bad straightforward soul singer, although it's kinda hard to tell because his voice is low in the mix, distant, often (as in maybe a little too often) overdubbed into lovely angelic chorales.

If you want a good dub album, get Brand by Keith Hudson. I mean, first get Keith Hudson's Pick A Dub, but if you already have that, Brand is also the kind of dub you hear in your dreams. Unlike Pick a Dub, it has a lot of Keith's own idiosyncratic and gravelly roots vocals dubbed in, which is a caveat for some. His vocals are very heavy with a real wrecked and gravelly emotional quaver, and sometimes are best in small doses even if you like them, which is why Brand is perfect. In other Jamaican news, I've grown to really love the combination of horns and reggae, especially those jazzy vintage horn solos that sound like they're blown in by a warm and salty sea breeze. That's why I'm finally massively getting into the Skatalites and early offshoots, such as anything with saxophonist Tommy McCook's name on it. This Blazing Horns set seems to have been recorded at the later end of the essential 1970s roots era, apparently at Yabby You's studio. Yabby You's stuff is always rock solid but after the 1977 Jesus Dread cut-off there's something a little too clean and sparkly about it... but maybe it's just me, and either way McCook blows lots of lovely solos here, so I won't complain.

2011-12-12T19:24:00.001-08:00

STONE COAL WHITE s/t LP (CALI-TEX)
LEE PERRY Wizdom 1971-1975 LP (ASCENSION)
SKOAL KODIAK Kryptonym Bodliak LP (LOAD)
FACTUMS Gilding The Lilies 2LP (ASSOPHON)
ICEAGE New Brigade (WHAT'S YOUR RUPTURE?)

It only takes a few seconds of introductory wah-wah guitar vamping for "You Know" by Stone Coal White to register as one of the most dusted late-night funk jams ever recorded, and that's before the moaning falsetto vocals come in and really make the case. You might've heard this track already on the Chains & Black Exhaust compilation from 2002, which was released without a track listing. "You Know" was the last jam on the album before the epilogue & encore, a perfect closer/cool-down/nod-off, and one of the last of the then-anonymous tracks to be identified by the message-board headz. No wonder, because Stone Coal White was an extremely underground band from Dayton, Ohio, more or less the wild and loose house band for a shell-shocked motorcycle gang called Bad to the Bone, and they had such a funky live show that their fliers often required a "Rated X" next to their name. They only released two 45 RPM singles, in small pressings, somewhere very deep in the early 1970s. For the preservation of "You Know" alone, and the other tracks released on the two 45s, this new record is essential, but one possible reason why the band didn't release more material when they were active is evident: things get reaaallly loose on here. A scorched warm-up jam called "Warm Up," humorous Curtis Mayfield goofs, special-guest soul sisters belting unhinged gospel, a Bill Withers cover, that type of thing... like Funkadelic, despite grim trappings, the band had a lot of fun.

I already thought single LPs by Factums were too long, with too many foreboding and severe tracks stringing too many lumbering dystopian synth riffs one after another, so how am I going to approach a double LP with 29 tracks?? It's not that I dislike this band... I think they're pretty awe-inspiring. I have no idea how they assemble these synth-punk Frankenstein monsters one after another, and I just can't process their material except in small doses, which they seem to rarely offer it in. This release looks and feels real good (nice paper selection, nice typewriter art cover), and it's certainly as good of a place as any to start trying to comprehend what they're up to. Just be prepared, pack an extra lunch and bring some ibuprofen!

Just popped by the internet to see what the kids were into these days, and before I knew it I had listened to the whole 24-minute debut album by Iceage, twice. When they toured the U.S. this summer, I never actually heard their music, but I heard quite a bit about 'em, which made 'em sound pretty good, and it turns out that in fact they are. Right from the brief industrial noise intro I was hooked, and they held me throughout 11 more songs of dark and rather frantic Danish teenage punk that skips around unpredictably through emotional flourishes, strange harmonic choices, and a gnarly reverbed-out twin-guitar sound. All presented in a way that does not wear out its welcome, which gives you time to think about what you heard. Canny aesthetic moves abound... for one thing, they inherently understand that the best thing you can do with a black metal influence in 2010 is to not play black metal.

I LOVE THE POINTER SISTERS

2011-12-10T20:56:00.001-08:00

Serious jam by these West Oakland ladies live in 1974... don't miss the drum solo!

2011-11-23T16:44:00.001-08:00

NEIL YOUNG Archives - Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (REPRISE) (via Spotify)
SIMON H. FELL Frank & Max (Bass Solos 2001-2011) CD (BO'WEAVIL)
ALAN WILKINSON Practice CD (BO'WEAVIL)
HESSION/WILKINSON/FELL Two Falls & A Submission CD (BO'WEAVIL)
VILLAGE OF SPACES Alchemy of Trust CD/LP (CORLEONE)
DAN MELCHIOR UND DAS MENACE Catbirds & Cardinals CD/LP/MP3/FLAC (NORTHERN SPY)
mp3s of ALICE COLTRANE on Piano Jazz with MARIAN McPARTLAND
mp3s of THE SILVERTONES "Young At Heart" b/w FREDDIE McKAY "Love Is A Treasure" 12" (STUDIO ONE)
mp3s of LES TOUAREG Avec les Seigneurs des Sables (DISQUES ALVARES)
BILL FAY Time of the Last Persecution (DERAM) (via Spotify)
BLUES CONTROL & LARAAJI FRKWYS Vol. 8 LP (RVNG INTL.)
SEX CHURCH Growing Over LP (LOAD)
SKOAL KODIAK Kryptonym Bodliak LP (LOAD)

I continue to have, but barely use, Spotify. Not because it isn't awesome, because of course it's awesome. Not even because they only pay the artist something like .002456 cents per play. (I don't know what it is exactly, but I'm pretty sure the amount starts with a point-zero-zero-two.) I already tweeted about the very first search I typed into Spotify, Ash Ra Tempel, and how it got zero results, which I'll admit I still haven't really forgiven them for. I also haven't really figured out how to use any of the social or discovery options... I realize that's because I'm not trying very hard, but so far there's nothing as inspiring as Turntable.fm chat, or even the good ole "suggestions" column on YouTube. And that's just it, the real reason I barely use Spotify is simply because I'm doing just fine with iTunes, YouTube, and, let's not forget, my own stereo. I'm already comically behind on the listening I need to do, let alone want to do, and at this point Spotify feels like an unnecessary complication.
          I've mainly been using it to look up current hip-hop and pop songs that people talk about, because I don't buy that stuff at all. In fact, there's really only one album I've been using Spotify to listen to so much that I'm probably going to reach my free-account limit. The only other album to even get close has been Ford & Lopatin's Channel Pressure when I binged on it over a couple awesome days this summer (and then promptly bought the 12"), but the winner is Neil Young's Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) 10 Blu-ray or 8 CD or whatever set. All 125 tracks are on Spotify, and in all those listens I still haven't even gotten through half of it, and I haven't had to mess around with 10 Blu-ray discs to do it, not to mention a Blu-ray player. (Then again, um, the actual set does sound really, really nice: "Also found on these 9 multimedia discs are 20 special feature videos, film clips, and film trailers, an additional 55 audio tracks of rare interviews, radio spots, and concert raps, and an array of interactive features, including image galleries of archival photos, press, lyric manuscripts, documents, biographies, tour dates, and complete lyrics, as well as an interactive timeline feature which presents an in-depth overview of Young's life and career." You also get "a digital download card to access MP3 files of all 128 audio tracks, a lavish 236 page fullcolor hardbound book that features additional archival materials, tapes database, and detailed descriptions of the music and artwork, a foldout Archives poster, a custom keeper for the 10 sleeved discs, and more." Apparently in there somewhere is a DVD of Young's lost/shelved debut feature film Journey To The Past, and I think I also heard that the audio discs will play film of a cozy burning fireplace on your TV while you listen to the tunes.)
           And of course, the tunes are the single most important thing, and this is one fine listen, starting at the very beginning, disc 0, with some stray tracks Neil cut in Canada before he was famous, mostly with a band called The Squires. I read about these sessions in Shakey, which was somewhat deprecating of them, but man, from the surf instrumental "Aurora" to a very early version of "Don't Cry No Tears" from Zuma, here called "I Wonder," I think they sound absolutely choice, with my fave being the perfectly sublime "I'll Love You Forever." After the Squires jams, disc 0 rounds out with a few early (and honestly not quite 'there' yet) solo hotel-room-style performances of various songs including "Sugar Mountain" and "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing," and then disc 1 goes right into the great Buffalo Springfield songs, including what might still be his finest achievement, the Jack Nitzsche-produced "Expecting to Fly." Disc 2 takes us through his eponymous debut LP all the way to some of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and then disc 3 takes a welcome detour to a single live solo gig somewhere on the way, the sublime Live at the Riverboat from 1969. Disc 4 gets into the rest of Everybody Knows and the first half of After the Gold Rush, disc 5 is another detour to a single gig (this time Crazy Horse live at the Fillmore East in 1970, drool), and so on all the way through Harvest. Thanks Spotify! And thanks for paying Neil Young almost one cent USD so far for my listening to, instead of buying, Volume 1 of the Archives. (The .002 cents-per-play royalty rate which I did just see quoted after a cursory google search, multiplied by approximately 15 separate listening sessions of let's say an average of 30 songs per session.)
          Neil Young Archives Volume 2 hasn't been released yet, but it has been announced that it will cover the years 1972 to 1982, which means it will not only give us the entire Ditch Trilogy (Time Fades Away/On The Beach/Tonight's the Night) but will also take us all the way up through the mighty Trans, in other words incorporating every single one of his truly great albums (though I might throw in Sleeps With Angels and Harvest Moon as almost great... hell, Le Noise too). Jeez, maybe I should just buy both of these sets... it'd be cheaper than the new washer & dryer I hafta get... I guess Spotify sells records!

This might be the first time I've actually heard British jazz double bassist Simon H. Fell, though he's been on my radar for a good 15 years, around which time he was recording some hardcore British free improv jazz jams with saxophonist Alan Wilkinson, who was in turn recording some hardcore British free improv jazz jams with guitarist and key link between free jazz and punk/industrial music (not to mention punk/industrial film criticism) Stefan Jaworzyn, all deep within the pre-internet bowels of the early-mid 1990s. Now we have here a new CD of solo 4- and-5-string double bass performances by Mr. Fell, assembled from recordings spanning ten years, released in an edition of 300 copies by the Bo'Weavil label. There are two venues, or at least locations, where these tracks were recorded, apparently at various times over the years, though I never got the sense that any one piece sounded 10 years older or newer than any other piece, which means Fell must be a remarkably consistent player. I was also struck by how all or nothing this music is... you've got to turn it up and listen closely to every single note for the music to really be rewarding. You get out what you put into it, as they say. When I listened to it at lower volume, while cleaning up around the house with the kids running around doing stuff, I was asking all kinds of questions of free improvisation as the music made its jagged and often obtuse way. Am I even able to listen to it anymore? Has it served its purpose? (Which seems to have been a two-year crash course in increasing my capacity for musical logic, somewhere in the aforementioned pre-internet 1990s, lessons that I still consider today.) Is that why the music no longer comes to life for me, because I've internalized all the lessons? Or is it simply not turned up loud enough?

Speaking of Alan Wilkinson, and hardcore British free improv jazz, Bo'Weavil also sent along a new edition-of-300 CD by him too, also of solo performances, this one called Practice. I don't think I've ever actually heard his playing before either. Right off the bat it connects more than Fell's stuff. It might be because I have it on louder, by myself at work, without kids running around, but also because it totally swings and reminds me more of Thelonious Monk. He doesn't even use any "extended techniques" until close to the 3-minute mark! But don't get me wrong, he certainly extends himself throughout the disc, and it's a long one at over 65 minutes. Great player though, he can get as blasted and extended as any of the other post-Brotz lions I've heard, but he's also very nimble and capable of lightly skipping stuff. He does a very good 8-minute version of "Lonely Woman" that takes that old chestnut and makes it new in certain ways. And wait, what's this, Bo'Weavil has also put out a new trio album in which Fell and Wilkinson are joined by their longtime cohort Paul Hession on drums! First time hearing Hession too as far as I know. And honestly, this one is kind of going in one ear and out the other. It's a live gig, so you've got some enthused audience reaction, which is cool, but the sound has more of a venue ambiance that isn't as crisp and in-your-face as it is on the solo discs. That means you've got to dig in even further to hang on every note (Fell's bass is particularly low in the mix, which is so common for live free jazz recordings that it almost seems like it might be a requirement), and it just isn't happening for me right now. Still sounds like a good high-energy trio, and I'll have to check it out on headphones. The title is Two Falls & A Submission and this one is an edition of 350 copies.

After the Fell/Wilkinson/Hession extravaganza, the previously listed new albums by Village of Spaces and Dan Melchior und Das Menace got another well-deserved go-round on the 5-disc changer, still in there from last time, both going on my "Best of 2011" list (due sometime in mid-2012). Then I switched to the turntable for more new stuff, because I got hold of a copy of the Blues Control & Laraaji collabo (thanks Zum) (sounds great on wax), and also because a new LP from Load Records is always a must-check for me. For something like 15 years Load has broadcast and distributed the worldwide voice of weird punk, weird heavy rock, and weird noise, and it's important to understand the weird, because thriving colonies of weirdness ensure biodiversity of the species, and biodiversity promotes survival during any sort of near-extinction scenario. Didn't think it was so humanistic, did you? Well it's not, I was actually talking about microbes.


Anyway, we've gotten not one but two new albums from Load this quarter. The first is Growing Over by Sex Church. I knew nothing about this band upon receipt, though it seems that they're from Vancouver BC, and this is a fine little LP of grinding dirge punk rock. Did I say little? Actually, it's kind of big and a bit overlong as an 11-song LP, but the band has a good heavy sound in which they know where to leave space so that the listener can begin to parse the words that are being sung, and breathe in between the impacts of various loud and amplified ensemble dirge rock moves. The cover art and album title even work together nicely. In an earlier post I called another current band of today "meat and potatoes" and it could apply to Sex Church too. It's meant as praise, because these are the bands that keep us nourished and grounded in between visitations from the divine. Such as....

Second new one from Load is a ripper by Skoal Kodiak, which is a band that has apparently been playing in Minneapolis for 6 years. Kinda weird that I just heard about 'em this month, because I thought I'd been keeping tabs on Minneapolis ever since Prince and Twin/Tone Records came along, and especially ever since the late-90s heyday of my all-time favorite Minneapolis label, the unfortunately under-distributed Freedom From. I've even kept tabs on two of the three members of Skoal Kodiak in the past... drummer Freddy Votel during his stint as the last drummer ever for The Cows (1995-1998, according to Wikipedia), and way back in September 2001 (believe it or not, six days before 9/11) I saw vocalist/electronicist Markus Lunkenheimer, credited on this LP with "confusion," perform a 5-minute solo noise set on modified bleach bottle at a Phi-Phenomena event that Freedom From staged in Minneapolis, to celebrate the then-concurrent Phi-Phenomena tour. A month later, as long as I'm fully disclosing, I even played guitar and saxophone in a band with Markus and Freedom From proprietor Matthew St. Germain and another guy named Bob. We opened 6 shows for Reynols on their 2001 US tour, and those were the only 6 times we ever played together. I don't even think I've seen Markus since, but believe me, Skoal Kodiak is ten (or 600) times better than our band was. They are another one of those trios that make a perfect triangle foundation, like ZZ Top, Budgie, Meat Puppets, or Sun City Girls . . . the rhythm section of Freddy on drums and Brady on bass (first names only) not only lay down a heavy noise-rock surface, they also give each tune a subtle and dementedly funky nightclub lope undercurrent that is very addictive. I know it's cliche to work in a Prince reference when discussing bands from Minneapolis, but track two "Hollidazzle" actually sounds like a runaway Prince production... not the popular stuff under his name, I'm talking about some of his weirdo new wave rippers like "One Day I'm Gonna Be Somebody" by The Time or "Drive Me Wild" by Vanity 6, only the Skoal Kodiak version includes transformation by lead vocalist into some sort of frothing were-Prince. Markus is particularly good in the traditional post-Yow post-Am Rep shouter/barker mode, and I think he's probably singing right into that modified bleach bottle, because his vocals are constantly melting into something more like strobelight effects at said theoretical funky nightclub. And where are all those crazy keyboard-type synth-type melodies and tones coming from? Is that the bleach bottle too?? I guess I could watch YouTubes. Either way, it's a hell of a formula and I think Skoal Kodiak is my favorite Load Records signing since Sightings. (And what label did Sightings' debut 7" come out on? Well, as a matter of fact it was......... Freedom From.)

2011-11-10T20:04:00.001-08:00

VARIOUS ARTISTS Ska Bonanza (HEARTBEAT)
KING TUBBY Herb Dub - Collie Dub (JIGSAW)
FUNKADELIC Maggot Brain CD (WESTBOUND)
JOVONTAES Things Are Different Here LP (HELLO SUNSHINE)

Ska Bonanza came up on the shuffle and sounded so luxurious that I was moved to tweet something about how third wave ska, especially during its 1990s heyday, got so terrible that I'm only just now, 20 years later, able to appreciate what a great band The Skatalites were. One of the great R&B bands period, especially if R&B is an creation of the entire African diaspora, and not just something that happened in the mid-20th Century United States. Here's a couple Skatalites burners featuring Don Drummond:

I also already tweeted about how heavy the Herb Dub-Collie Dub album is, released more or less anonymously in 1976, in the killer sleeve below. No artist or band credit, just "Mixed by King Tubbys" [sic] on the label. As far as I can tell, when the album was reissued in 2001 (in a much worse sleeve) it was billed as by King Tubby & the Skatalites, I guess in that the Tubster was remixing Skatalites rhythms, which is weird, because, uh, the rhythms on this album are not ska rhythms at all, right? They are slow roots rhythms? Unless I'm crazy, or Tubby slowed the tape down to like less than half speed, which isn't true...

2011-11-09T23:30:00.000-08:00

JOVONTAES Things Are Different Here LP (HELLO SUNSHINE)
THE POLYPS Ants on the Golden Cone LP (HELLO SUNSHINE)
YOKO ONO Fly 2LP (APPLE)
mp3s of VARIOUS ARTISTS Rock Steady Coxsone Style (COXSONE)
mp3s of CABOLADIES Psychic Birthmark (SMOOTH TAPES)
mp3s of TIGER HATCHERY s/t one-sided LP (PIZZA NIGHT)
an mp3 of "A Dread At The Controls" radio show, December 1978, JBC Radio, Jamaica (DL)
mp3s of VARIOUS ARTISTS Krypton Ten: Christchurch 1981-87 2LP (UNWUCHT)

More new music! This time it's two LPs from Hello Sunshine, a vinyl-only sub-label of Woodsist Records. The first is by Jovontaes, a band from Lexington, Kentucky, probably named after this dude. Lexington has been one of my favorite music towns ever since the Hair Police marched outta there in full riot gear over ten years ago (yes, it's really been that long). In fact, Hair Policeman Trevor Tremaine wrote a blurb for this record that says, in part, "[Jovontaes] emerge from (and possibly define) my town's peculiar skate/Kraut/nihil/garage axis," which is certainly enticing to this mind's ear. As for "skate," this record was recorded in a skate shop (with a killer name: Void) that one of the members owns. The "Kraut" descriptor also makes sense, because these are minimalist spaced-out groove instrumentals with a psychedelic edge, although it honestly took me a couple listens to even realize it. I dug the warm and fuzzy skate shop sound right away, but the grooves really didn't even register at first. The second time I was prepared for the elusiveness, and could enjoy that great shivery sound a little more, especially noting the subtle and potent low end (booming floor tom and distant crawling bass guitar). Still, very minimal stuff. Do I wish they made these jams more into songs? I'm not sure, and that in itself is something. Maybe it is in fact the "nihil." I'm also just noticing that the press release calls this "improvised music," which adds another layer of explanation. I listened to it for a third time last night, and it sounded even better. I think I'm about to listen to it again... it does go well with night-time... now playing, track 3 "Falcon", the best one on here... what was I thinking, these guys are totally grooving.....

Also on Hello Sunshine is an album by The Polyps, who is a guy I've never heard of before named Raf Spielman, who does a label I've never heard of named Eggy Records, but I've played his record like 5 times now, even more than I played the Jovontaes record, even beginning to approach the number of times I played the Stare Case record a couple months ago. I don't know what it is, but it's definitely something, and it's not chillwave, even as it layers electronics, drone, dream-sounds, goofball industrial damage, and slow Funkadelic voices until a couple weird shattered and gauze-wrapped pop songs wobble to the surface before sinking again... regardless of how much I like it (I honestly have no idea), he brings more the table than most . . . Ferraro, for example, brings even more but he doesn't bother to have a table to put it on... just dumps it on the floor... no matter what the style, music has to be foundational and architectural, and the reason I've listened to this record a few times is because it is.

My goodness Yoko's Fly sounds better than ever, not only for its time (1971), but for right now and the foreseeable future. A lot of the intense avant solo female styles that bubbled up from the underground in the 2000s, like the recently discussed Inca Ore, were already right here in full flower, and in my opinion this is Ms. Ono's masterpiece. Her Plastic Ono Band debut had the awesome opening double shot of "Why" and "Why Not," but they were also total John Lennon jam sessions, one fast, one slow, and I can't really remember anything about Side 2... oh yeah, that's when Ornette Coleman shows up! Talk about jam sessions! Fly does not shy away from those same extended Lenono one-chord groove-jams, and in fact even stretches one out to 16 minutes ("Mind Train"), but the 4 LP sides are brilliantly balanced by many uniquely crafted and memorable shorter pieces, such as the Fluxmania of "Toilet Piece/Unknown" and "Telephone Piece," pieces featuring Joe Jones and his invented "automatic instruments," even a few good old 4-minute-or-less songs like the intense "Don't Worry Kyoko" and the stunningly beautiful melancholy of "Mrs. Lennon," which was Yoko's first true solo single (as you can see her and John explain on The Dick Cavett Show before showing a video they made for it, clip below). And then on Side D, specifically balancing Side A's "Mind Train," we get the 22-minute non-verbal free-form solo-voice title track, a more potent statement of nudity than the cover of Two Virgins... if you ask me...

What's up with the iPod constantly pulling up another great Studio One rocksteady comp that I didn't even know was on there? Still liking the Studio One stuff better than the more acclaimed Treasure Isle rocksteady. It has a fuzzier sound, because it was a one-track studio (!) at this point and Coxsone had a certain way of gathering the musicians around the mic. At least I think that's what I read in a book, maybe Bass Culture by Lloyd Bradley or somewhere deep in the vastness of Solid Foundation by David Katz. Here's my choice cut from this comp, "Let Me Love You" (aka "Love is a Message") by a very young Jacob Miller:

More new(ish) music! Also with a Lexington, KY connection! I'm talking about the Caboladies and their 2008 album Psychic Birthmark! Still seem to always like this band better than the Emeralds! Funny how most of the "brand new" music I'm writing about is actually from 2008 or 2009! This Tiger Hatchery self-titled one-sided 12-inch probably is too... ah, it was recorded in 2009, released in 2010... time sure is flying... frying... fading away...

lovely image from the Mimaroglu Music Sales web store

The Krypton Ten double LP is a fantastic compilation of music from the Christchurch, New Zealand underground punk/rock scene, "previously released between 1981-87 on locally distributed cassettes & records." I'm surprised how very little I had ever heard about these bands before this... I guess Dunedin got all the ink. The only band from 1980s Christchurch I could've named off the top of my head is The Pin Group, who aren't even on here, and I've only even heard of a mere five of the bands that are: Scorched Earth Policy, The Axemen, Alec Bathgate, George D. Henderson, and Henderson's long-running band The Puddle. Apparently Bill Direen is on a couple of these tracks, but I only have MP3s and haven't read the apparently informative liner notes (this thing seems to have sold out of distros a couple weeks ago when I wasn't paying attention). Pretty much everyone else on here is completely new to me, like G.O.D. and The Limbo Dancers and Dillinger's Brain and Drowning Is Easy and so many more, and I swear there is not a dull moment over 30 tracks. And hey, Tony Rettman interviewed the Unwucht label founder/proprieter who put together this massive release, read it here.

SIENKO PREDICTS DANZIG TANTRUM!

2011-11-09T22:51:00.000-08:00

In earlier times, from The Real Glenn Danzig

Not only did I have to wince when I read this blow-by-blow account of Glenn Danzig being a Prima Glenna last weekend at Fun Fun Fun Fest, I also had to laugh, because the whole thing was more or less just predicted by longtime Blastitude contributing editor Chris Sienko! He happened to catch the Danzig Legacy tour when it stopped in Chicago on October 7th, and he sent me a great e-mail about it three weeks ago on October 19th, which included this particularly insightful section:

[October 19, 2011]

....Danzig and Doyle stomped out for one of four remaining times that Glenn's supposedly going to sing these [Misfits] songs. "I hope you fuckers are getting your rocks off, because this is it!" spat Danzig. Actually, his inner wants and needs were pretty well telegraphed through the whole show. "We're up here sweating our asses off for you guys!" meant "it's too hot in here." "This ain't no Tom Petty, motherfucker, so you better believe we're playing it loud!" meant "it's too loud in here." And "any other fuckin' act would be back in their dressing room right now, combing their hair in front of the mirror" meant "I wish I were back in my dressing room, combing my hair in front of the mirror." Just SAY you don't want to be here, Glenn! Then fucking play the songs we're here to see! The whole crowd chanted along with the wordless choruses and chants, and got all riled up for "Bullet" and "Last Caress." I think he did maybe seven or eight Misfits tunes, tops?! before stomping back off, after which the scrim again became the Danzig skull and he came out for two more of his current songs and "Mother." Couldn't end on a high note, could you?

2011-11-09T10:37:00.000-08:00

VARIOUS ARTISTS Mojo Rock Steady (STUDIO ONE)
PASCAL ROGE After the Rain... the Soft Sounds of Erik Satie (LONDON)
KURT VILE Constant Hitmaker CD (GULCHER)
VIVIAN JACKSON (YABBY YOU) Conquering Lion (PROPHET RECORD)
AUGUSTUS PABLO East of the River Nile (SHANACHIE)
CIRCLE Prospekt (EKTRO)
KING TUBBY Explosive Dub (CLOCKTOWER)
MORITZ VON OSWALD TRIO Horizontal Structures (HONEST JON'S)
SUN CITY GIRLS Funeral Mariachi CD (ABDUCTION)
VILLAGE OF SPACES Alchemy of Trust CD (CORLEONE)
DAN MELCHIOR UND DAS MENACE Catbirds and Cardinals CD (NORTHERN SPY)
ELEVEN TWENTY-NINE s/t CD (NORTHERN SPY)
SOFT MOON Total Decay EP (CAPTURED TRACKS)
BLUES CONTROL Local Flavor (SILTBREEZE)

Mojo Rock Steady is a superb rough-and-tough rocksteady compilation album. It was put together by Clement "Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One, who they say was surpassed as a producer by Duke Reid of Treasure Isle during the rocksteady years, but this just sounds tougher and more together than even Duke's Treasure Chest to me. Sure, Duke's stuff is a little more elegant and romantic, but that's precisely why I prefer Coxsone's streetwise sound. Just take the Sound Dimension jam called "Psychedelic Rock," which was renamed "Rockfort Rock" because a sound system in the Rockfort neighborhood adopted it as their theme song; the LP even features a tag added to the front of the tune in which an anonymous DJ introduces the tune as "Rockfort Rock," big-upping the neighborhood. This album also includes a few sublime jazzy rocksteady instrumentals such as sax master Roland Alphonso's "Take Me" -- Coxsone always was known as a jazz head, and an awesome jazz presence is where ska and rocksteady trump the American R&B they were otherwise so obviously influenced by.

Back in 2007 (has it really been that long?) I attended a live show by Circle and it was great, but today I wasn't feeling that Prospekt album at all really. It's from 2000, and the description I read made it sound like it was one of their best. On the other hand, their 2007 album Tower Featuring Verde is SO GOOD (and nothing like the live show I saw).

Finally catching up with the latest Moritz Von Oswald Trio double LP release, Horizontal Structures, released earlier this year. Side one "Structure 1" has got some kind of faraway ghost-of-Eddie-Hazel ticklish lead guitar going on, which is unexpected and nice, and I now see that it was played by Dominican old head Paul St. Hilaire, who has been collaborating with the Basic Channel crew for some time now. Throughout the album his guitar blends with the sci-fi rain-forest atmosphere of deep dubby percussion and surreal electronics to create another great release by the Trio. The rhythms seem even more overlapping and multilayered than they were on the Vertical Ascent debut, and there are sections on the download-only "Structure 5" that get so spaced-out they basically sound like Harry Bertoia.

Funny how just last post I'm going on about how I never listen to new music, and never talk about it on this blog, and then tonight, without planning to whatsoever, I spin something like 7 brand new and recent albums in a row. It was triggered by listening to WNUR on the way home from work. In addition to a great song (that I have now determined to be "The Light") from the self-titled Hush Arbors album that was released about 3-4 years ago on Ecstatic Peace (2008 to be exact), and which I once had a generic promo CD of that I failed to review at the time and unfortunately can no longer find, the DJ played two tracks from the Sun City Girls' swan song Funeral Mariachi. It sounded so good that I had to dust a copy of it off when I got home, the nearest of which was my lovely gatefold CD edition on Abduction, which made me do the unthinkable: turn on my CD player and use it to listen to music. The album sounded as great as it did last year when it came out and I played it constantly, and then, after it whispered to a gentle close, what should emerge from the speakers next but something wholly appropriate, with a similarly sublime recording clarity rendering still more slow, haunted, elegaic-but-smiling new American folk music. It turned out to be the new CD from Village of Spaces, which I put in my CD changer 2-3 months ago when I received it in the mail, but have not gotten to until tonight, because like I said, I very rarely listen to CDs. I believe this band lives in Maine, and they used to be called Uke of Spaces Corners County, and then just Uke of Spaces Corners, and then Village of Spaces Corners, and now Village of Spaces, and they've always been good, but this Alchemy of Trust album is really a their-masterpiece-to-date kinda thing. And then what should come on next and next in the ole 5-disc changer but two more very new releases, both on the Northern Spy label, the Dan Melchior Und Das Menace full-length called Catbirds and Cardinals, and the self-titled debut by Eleven Twenty-Nine. The Melchior sounded just as good as it did the first time when I tweeted about it, the third song "Forest of Tin" especially standing out this time with its haunting refrain of "Can you hear my feedback, feeding back/from deep within the forest of tin?"

Eleven Twenty-Nine, which is apparently blues lingo for a one-year prison sentence, is in this case the name of the guitar duo of Tom Carter (Charalambides, et al) and Marc Orleans (Sunburned Hand of the Man, et al). These guys have been duking it out in the underground for a good 20 and 10 years respectively, probably more, and there is no doubt that they are superb guitarists. Mr. Carter gets a life-time pass for the always-massive Charalambides (hell, he'd probably get one for The Mike Gunn alone), although in the mid-00s he was roving around the country guitar-slinging, and I personally ran across what seemed like 3 or 4 sort of ad hoc group-improv albums he jammed on in a row, and while I wouldn't call any of them "bad," none of them felt especially essential. In retrospect, I'm glad he was keeping his chops up, because now that he's in a highly focused duo with Orleans, who really seems to be at the top of his own game (stunning work on the new Meg Baird LP, for example), sparks are flying. These extended avant/blues/folk jams sound composed, but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't either, beyond the album's dedication/inscription to Jack Rose, which seems to fire the whole album up with his huge heartfelt spirit.

And then, when I give the CD player a break and head back to the ole iTunes album shuffle, the brand new stuff just keeps coming with the new four-song Soft Moon EP on Captured Tracks. This is a (one-man?) band based in San Francisco, and I'm not sure what makes his/their music better than all the other retro-coldwave retro-post-punk bands these days, but it really is. Why do I like it 100 times better than Cold Cave, for example? Well, it does have extremely fresh and well-produced hypnotic krautworthy grooves, and a great "mineralized being" vocal presence that communicates sharply written tunes. At no point does he even try to sing like Ian Curtis! Here's a song that also works an Eno/Roxy-style electronics solo and some out-of-nowhere bongo frenzy into the mix:

And wow, iTunes album shuffle knows what's up, jumping from Soft Moon to another band that is 100 times better than [insert closest competitor here], but I already said that last week: Blues Control, and their absolute megalithic masterpiece from 2009, Local Flavor. Still sounds wonderful.

2011-11-07T11:05:00.000-08:00

INCA ORE Silver Sea Surfer School (NOT NOT FUN)
SOUND DIMENSION "Heavy Rock" b/w "Heavy Dub" (COXSONE) (best horn line & trombone solo, great tune)
JACKIE MITTOO "Our Thing" (BAMBOO) (version!)
CAN Soundtracks (MUTE/SPOON)
PORTER RICKS Biokinetics (CHAIN REACTION)
PRINCE FAR I & KING TUBBY In the House of Vocal Dub (GRAYLAN)
MICHIGAN & SMILEY Downpression (GREENSLEEVES)
THE NEW BLOCKADERS & ORGANUM Salute (FRUX)
THE UPSETTERS Return of the Super Ape LP (UPSETTER)
INCA ORE Birthday Of Bless You (NOT NOT FUN)
GROUPER/INCA ORE split LP (NO LABEL)
INCA ORE Silver Sea Surfer School (NOT NOT FUN)

It's nice to have the Inca Ore record first up there, because when I list what I'm listening to on a day or a weekend like this, I'm always amazed by how rarely anything new or remotely current gets played, and since I list things in the order I listen to them it's even more rare for a recent record to be listed first, which is the only way its name will show up on my twitter and make it look like it's actually about new music, like a real music writer's twitter would be. Sure, I like plenty of new music, and I keep up pretty well, but whether it's iTunes album shuffle or LPs stacked by my stereo, it just tends to be older stuff. I guess I hold the controversial opinion that anything recorded in the 1960s on up can still be interpreted as technologically and culturally new. Even if we just started at a year like 1964 and worked towards the present, we'd be mining old music recordings and coming up with beautiful new (to someone) gems for as long as we have electricity and speakers. Strewn throughout the last five decades were vast deposits of musical gold that seem to be even more abundant than crude oil, and unlike oil, recordings of good music are extremely reusable.

Even the Inca Ore record was released two years ago in 2009, so this is hardly a timely mention I'm giving it, but it does seem to be her most recent, which makes it still current, right? Also, I listened to it twice just now, and I'm still not sure what to say about it. Maybe this record needs to be 40 years old before I can begin to grasp it. I really liked her Birthday of Bless You release (2008, also Not Not Fun), and her side of the split LP with Grouper (originally a cassette from 2007). Both of those seemed really focused, clearly stated, and legitimately spooky, and though Silver Sea Surfer School seems ambitious in new ways, which is a good thing, it also seems more stylistically jumpy and unsettled. So yeah, not sure, but I'll keep it on my iTunes for future shuffles to turn up. (Side note: the Discogs page for this record lists style as "Abstract, Noise, Poetry, Therapy." That's the first time I've seen therapy listed as a style... that could be listed for a lot of records, right? Discogs apparently already has it listed for 639. Blood on the Tracks isn't one of them.)

The YouTube channel that hosts the above Sound Dimension "Heavy Rock extended with Heavy Dub" clip is great and I've listened to a bunch of stuff on it this weekend. Great sound, pics of the original labels, lots of seamless mixes between A side tunes and B side versions, and a selection that looks to be entirely pre-digital. For just one great example, check out this mix of Sugar Minott's "I Need A Roof" with the Studio One "Consumer Dub." Thanks PabloWKingStoned!

Raise your hand if, back in the 90s, your copy of the Porter Ricks CD cracked a month after you got it because of that otherwise rad metal tin it came in! Now raise your hand if you forgive Chain Reaction anyway because the album is so awesome!

Two of the heaviest stylists in reggae history unite on the ephocal In the House of Vocal and Dub, Prince Far I the "voice of thunder," and you know what Tubby does (mix of thunder). Checked out the Michigan & Smiley album because in Check the Technique, KRS-One talks about how their song "Dangerous Diseases," big in New York at the time, was an influence on Boogie Down Productions, as was reggae in general. I do love "Dangerous Diseases" aka "Diseases," cut over one of my favorite dancehall-era rhythms which is indeed known as the "Diseases" rhythm (or sometimes as the "Golden Hen" rhythm, though I'm not sure why yet), and can be heard on a bunch of tracks like another fave of mine "Dance in a Montreal" by Brigadier Jerry. "Diseases" is a funny song too ("I said the most dangerous diseases/I said the most dangerous diseases/I'm talkin' like the elephantitis/The poliomyelitis"). That said, though I do dig a lot of digital '80s dancehall tunes, especially up to like '82 or so, and will surely continue to find more, these days I'm completely happy to spend most of my time listening to reggae recorded before the 1980s digital boom. As mentioned above, the well will never run dry (despite what Prince Alla might advise). (UPDATE: I knew the "Diseases" rhythm didn't start with "Dangerous Diseases," I just knew it!)

I don't really have an original edition-of-75 copy of the Organum & New Blockaders cassette on the Frux label as listed above, I just downloaded it off of a blog. It was recorded in 1984 and it's definitely killer stuff, grinding low-end synth, intangible electronics, clattering concussion/percussion, sounds of large objects being torn apart, perhaps more, perhaps even less... When it first came up on the shuffle I thought it might have been some early No Neck Blues Band... that group actually had a dark industrial vibe at first (circa 1992-1994 or so?), gradually replaced by a somewhat lighter extendo-groove kind of thing, and then fragmenting and reassembling from there. They are still going and I still like their music. I now wonder if the New Blockaders were a direct influence on those initial NNCK jams....doesn't matter of course, but I did just manage to write more about NNCK here than I did about the New Blockaders.....

Love these cheap Lee Perry LPs that are out there, I got Return of the Super Ape for $8.99 at Laurie's Planet of Sound this weekend, possibly Chicago's best non-Reckless record store. And if you really want some nice price reggae vinyl, hit up Ernie B!

Relistened to all three aforementioned Inca Ore records just now. The first two are indeed excellent, and while I still agree with what I wrote at the beginning of this post, I'm starting to get a handle on the third one. There's a tune called "Shine On from the Heaven Above" that really hits a yearning spaced-out spot...

2011-11-01T21:30:00.000-07:00

JAH LION Colombia Colly (MANGO) (Lee Perry-produced toasting record from 1976)
NICOLAS JAAR Space Is Only Noise (CIRCUS COMPANY)
PARAMETER Galactic Ramble (SHADOKS)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Duke Reid's Treasure Chest (HEARTBEAT)
MIGHTY DIAMONDS When the Right Time Come/I Need A Roof (VIRGIN)
BORED YOUTH Touch & Go EP (LOST AND FOUND)
nice 4-song reggae-on-random-shuffle playlist (see below)
SANTANA Caravanserai LP (COLUMBIA)
AME SON Primitive Expression (SPALAX)
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (INDUSTRIAL)

The Nicolas Jaar record is a nice one, which seems to work with some pretty hip contemporary sounds like deep house, dubstep, chillwave, autotune, pitched-down R&B, but actually does the unthinkable and uses them all to make not half-baked genre exercise but MUSIC (in this case just good downtempo haunting-yet-wry new-wavey soul tunes, comparable to another dry'n'wry electronic contemporary, Tin Man). Click here to listen to "Space Is Only Noise If You Can See" (which dare I say has Arthur Russell vibes).

Duke Reid's Treasure Isle label is generally regarded as the premiere label for Jamaican rocksteady, the transitional style between ska and reggae circa 1966-1968, and the Treasure Chest comp is two CDs compiling the greatest hits he produced during that period. Here's one you might recognize, "The Tide is High" by The Paragons. Some other greats include "Come On Little Girl" by The Melodians, the self-explanatory "Rock Steady" by Phyllis Dillon, and the exquisite Curtis Mayfield reimagination "Queen Majesty" by The Techniques.

I've sung "I need a roof / over my head" to myself at least 2,000 times in the last couple days, after listening to the Mighty Diamonds Right Time album a couple times. It's such a great song, although the version I've heard the most is Sugar Minott's, and I feel like I've also heard it as a truncated phrase echoing through seemingly ten different dub tracks over the years, or maybe just one, or maybe zero. I love the Diamonds' version too, especially the wonderful counterpoint from the background vocals. The Right Time album is regarded as a classic, although the sound always takes a couple minutes for me to adjust to... I'm more used to "dread" roots (dubbed-out, foggy recording, songs in minor keys, scary), and this is more "sweet" roots (more clean and dry recording, more major keys, wistful and melancholy). I just made up that dread/sweet distinction, don't go quoting me at Deadly Dragon or anything, and these are still sufferer's songs... when Tabby sings "I Need A Roof" it's because he lives in a tin shack and he really does need a roof.

The Bored Youth EP was supposed to be released in 1982 on Touch & Go, the same year as the debut Negative Approach EP, but it didn't get pressed up until someone in Germany booted it in 1990. According to their guitarist Jon Katz, as quoted in Tony Rettman's Why Be Something That You're Not? Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985, "I had just got a new amp and was having trouble getting it to sound right and Rob had a real sore throat, so we just decided to scrap the whole thing." Damn, sounds incredible to me! If this had been released in '82, who knows what history would look like? There might just be some strange butterfly-effect differences. You can listen to it on YouTube:

Random shuffle reggae playlist came out very randomly rocksteady (and speaking of the Duke, the middle two of these four cuts are on the aforementioned Treasure Chest comp): Ken Parker "Have A Good Time" (nice Sam Cooke cover); Alton Ellis "Cry Tough (extended version)" (one of the all-time great rocksteady tunes and rudeboy cautionary tales, here inna dub style); Joya Landis "Moonlight Lover"; New Establishment "Darling" (can't find the last one on youtube but it's a good tune)

French band Ame Son was formed by renegade members of a Daevid Allen backing band, and they've recorded spaced-out free-prog on and off since 1967, including Catalyse, a 1970 release on the notorious BYG/Actuel label. The Primitive Expression release gathers some archival material recorded between 1967 and 1976, and was apparently released in some form in 1976, and reissued on CD in 1998 by the almighty Spalax label. I wish I had a copy because I'm listening to the Mutant Sounds version and I'm not sure which tracks are from what time period. It's all worth a listen, and I'd like to give it a closer and more informed one, but I can tell you this, there is a stunner on here called "Je Vieux Juste Dire," which starts as a weird drony number with delicately sung vocals, and then develops into a highly involving 26-minute jam! Here's part one, listen to it while tripping on the Kirby-damaged cover art! (Or click here to listen to the whole 26-minute jam in youtube playlist form.)

And I leave you for today with a bonus embed of one more super-tough tune from the Treasure Chest!

#NOWPLAYING (WEEKEND ROUNDUP)

2011-10-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

BLUES CONTROL & LARAAJI FRKWYS Vol. 8 LP (RVNG INTL.)
PAUL CHAMBERS Blues On Top (BLUE NOTE)
COUNT OSSIE Remembering Count Ossie: A Rasta "Reggae" Legend (MOODISC)
KISS Destroyer LP (CASABLANCA)
KISS Hotter Than Hell LP (CASABLANCA)
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH The French Suites [Angela Hewitt, piano] (HYPERION)
LEE "SCRATCH" PERRY Super Ape (ISLAND)
SATWA s/t CD (TIME-LAG)
FLYING LOTUS Los Angeles (WARP)
PARLIAMENT Up For The Down Stroke LP (CASABLANCA)
MIGHTY DIAMONDS When the Right Time Come/I Need A Roof (VIRGIN)
JOHN CARPENTER The Essential John Carpenter Film Music Collection (SILVA SCREEN)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Written In Blood Volume 5: The Devil's Lullaby (GHOST CAPITAL)
MAHAVISHNU JOHN McLAUGHLIN My Goal's Beyond LP (DOUGLAS)

Oh man I got to hear a preview of the Blues Control & Laraaji album, due out from the RVNG INTL. label in November. What can I say, I loved it. Why is Blues Control so much better at deep new age than all the new new age scene heroes of today? Is it because they're over 30 years of age? I think that's part of it. As a wise man recently said, "never trust anyone under 30." Of course, much credit for the success of this music is due to Laraaji, also over 30 years of age and a legit deep new age veteran, who contributes immensely with great vocals, improvisational celestial intangibility... and laughter! A perfect appetizer for the upcoming Blues Control full-length, which will be their fourth 'proper' album if I'm counting correctly, and their first for the great Drag City label. (Check out these interviews with Laraaji and Blues Control by Andy Beta.)

Absurdly heavy and lyrical arco bass solo throughout "Yesterdays" by Paul Chambers, notably reverbed-out for 1957. Great laid-back guitar comping by Kenny Burrell gives it the swing and makes it a tune, so that Chambers doesn't ever really have to stop improvising. Nice to hear him go off, as I know him primarily as the rock-solid and absolutely team-playing bassist on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, although I'm sure I've heard him go off here or there without even realizing it, as he recorded about a dozen albums each for both Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and a whole lot more besides, which is very impressive for a guy who passed away at age 33.

It was bound to happen; at some point in the last couple years, young Claire Dolman, age 6, caught a glimpse of the band KISS in full regalia, probably in a commercial for Dr. Pepper during a basketball game, and when she learned that those monsters ranting about soda pop actually played music, she instantly became a big fan, fascinated with the idea of Monster Bands, even once overhearing the Misfits and correctly identifying them as a "monster band." Granted, her favorite Kiss song is "Beth," and she requested that tonight, so being El Padro Coolio I pulled out Destroyer, ON VINYL OF COURSE, the same copy I've had since I was way into monster bands myself, circa 1978. I haven't played it in a good 20 years, but it sounded great, just a really good 1970s metallic bubblegum pop record, right up there with Sweet Desolation Boulevard ... although I did play Side 2 first, which starts with the irresistibly goofy and lyrically randy Broadway-pop anthems "Flaming Youth," "Sweet Pain," and "Shout It Out Loud," before settling down for the real note-perfect show-tune action of "Beth," and then right back into the yearning sardonic night-time-world glam-pop majesty of "Do You Love Me?," its sassy lyrics co-written by Kim Fowley. Ah, but then it was back to side one and that oh-so cinematic (or should I just say Ezrin-matic?) "Detroit Rock City" opener... when the song finally starts, I always thought it was a good, dark, patient midtempo riff tune, and it pretty much is, but this is the first time I've listened to the song since watching the Chicago-made MC5 documentary A True Testimonial back in '02, when it premiered here in town before being quickly suppressed by members of the band, a state it is still in today. In the film, drummer Dennis Thompson is asked something, possibly about the MC5's influence on later bands, and after his answer, he closes with "Oh, and Kiss? FUCK YOU." I watched that almost 10 years ago, but tonight "Detroit Rock City" brought back the memory, and I understood it then, but now I really understand it. The refrain where they shout "Get up! Everybody gonna move their feet/Get down, everybody gonna leave their seat/Gotta lose your mind in Detroit Rock City," really sounds like they are playing dress-up in their Kick Out The Jams costumes, but in a really strange and rather cynical way, more like a big-budget fictionalized Broadway musical cash-in based on the career of the MC5 would sound like, and just imagine Bob Ezrin trying to dress up as John Sinclair. After that the band (or Ezrin acting on behalf of the band) wisely follows with another Fowley tune, "King of the Night Time World," pop-metal grandiosity that detours mercifully away from Grande Ballroom wannabe fantasies into their own comic-book bubblegum trip. And after that, "God of Thunder," sheez. Say what you will, it's 10 times better than any of the boring screamo doom sludge I'm hearing these days. Certainly no one has topped the demon-children sound effects. Basically all I'm saying is that not only is it legitimately heavy in a proto doom metal style, but it's also fun, which none of these new bands are, to which they'll say "That's the point," to which I'll say, "Which is why I don't listen." And "Great Expectations"? WTF? I'll just let #1 monster band fan Claire have the last word on it, because when it came on after "God of Thunder" she said, presumably directly to mean Gene himself, "What?? You can't do this! You were born and raised of the demons!" I tried to tell her that superstar producer Bob Ezrin was NOT raised by demons, but I don't think she was listening.

So Destroyer is pretty great, but Hotter Than Hell is still my favorite Kiss LP. It has an absolutely stunning cover design, especially the back cover, one of the craziest things I had ever seen at age 9 or whatever. Looking at it now, it still seems like the most successful musician-as-superhero band photos I've seen, which is all the more humorous now that we know how weak these four guys really are in real life. (Although what about Paul Stanley? Doesn't he have any problems? Hmmm.) Anyway, the cover was great enough, but then there was the sound of the album. Talk about proto-sludge! The band sounds like its playing every song at about 80% of the correct speed, the guitars sound bright, wet, muddy, and dry all at once... but yet it's still great. Can anyone tell me why? That's right, you in the front row, it's because of the songs. Everything tends to work when you have good songs, and this really is a memorable batch, one comic-book power-pop absurdity after another. Just dig how "Got To Choose" kicks off the album with an atonal guitar clash into a sludgy riff that is somehow becomes yearning molasses-slow power-pop love-song hogwash that has an awesome "oo-oo-ooh!" chorus hook! And then the next song is a churning and menacing body-horror stomper written by Ace Frehley called "Parasite"! And then, my god, "Goin' Blind," and if you don't know that unsettling power ballad masterpiece from Gene himself then I'm sure you know it from Buzz. And then Paul throws down the title track, which is probably the most blatant rip-off of Free's "All Right Now" ever recorded. "Hot hot, hotter than hell; you know she's gonna leave you well done." Hoooo boy. It really doesn't let up either -- I think "All The Way," "Watching You," and "Strange Ways" are also all great tunes, and the others certainly don't slow anything down. As funky and freaky as anything the Coop was making at the time.

Now I didn't switch from Kiss to Bach to try to impress you with the stunning eclectic breadth of my musical taste, it's just that Claire wanted to practice some ballet. I mean, she was cool about it; she tried to do it to "Watching You" by Kiss and kept up with it for well over a minute, but then she was like, "Can you just put on some classical music?" and who could blame her? I know I don't want ballet and Gene Simmons anywhere near the same room together. So Bach, here we come. By the way, there's this poster at the place where my daughter takes dance lessons that says "Dance is the only art in which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made." That's kinda been blowing my mind.

"Super Ape (In Good Shape)" Interlude:

"Lick the chalice / African knowledge / Move and groove deh / African roots deh":

"This is the ape man / Trodding through creation / Are you ready to step with I man?":

(I played Super Ape for the second time this week because it's awesome, and also because I came across this nice piece about it on Upsetter Station: A Lee Perry Magazine, and had to listen along while reading.)

Haven't really gotten into Flying Lotus yet. This is my 3rd or 4th try, and it's especially difficult when it comes right after Super Ape and Satwa, both albums that are light and airy, with lovely and rich room-sound in abundance, only to be yanked suddenly 30 years into the future and into a claustrophobic overloaded direct-into-the-board electronic recording with no air or room to breathe whatsoever. The songwriting too is more overload-oriented than groove-oriented.... okay, now, just past the one-minute mark of the second track "Breathe Something/Stellar ST," and a discernable backbeat and a somewhat melodic groove has emerged. Not bad, the beat and groove creates space, opens up some air, allows the track to develop an atmosphere. Hmm, track 3 "Beginners Falafel" is better still. Definitely some interesting futuristic grooves on here, I'm coming around a little, but overall it still sounds more like someone using their computer to put together jigsaw puzzles than it does someone making music.

More from Casablanca Records courtesy Parliament! I always thought Up For The Down Stroke was a top-notch underrated album, right up there with Mothership Connection. Worth it for the title track and "All Your Goodies Are Gone" alone, but then you get the 9-minute "The Goose" on top of it. C'mon, chant with me, "Ooh, ah, babe / you're so-oh sweet" (truncated promo single version):

And finally, I will leave you with this seasonal masterpiece:

#NOWPLAYING

2011-10-29T18:55:00.000-07:00

ASH RA TEMPEL Best of the Private Tapes (The Early Years) (FM SHADES)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Ouelele - Another Collection Of Modern Afro Rhythms (COMET RECORDS)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Assalam Aleikoum Africa Volume 2 (Traditional & Modern Folk Music of West Africa) (ANTILLES)
LOREN CONNORS Red Mars CD (FAMILY VINEYARD)
HAUNTED HOUSE Blue Ghost Blues CD (NORTHERN SPY)

We've all known a few older heads who've lent us some awesome LPs, right? This is how I got to have originals of, say, Skip Spence Oar and No New York sitting around my turntable for a few months, and also a copy of what is still my favorite contemporary African music LP comp of all time (yes, even in this day and age of reissued plenty), Assalam Aleikoum Africa Volume 2, released in 1976 on the Antilles label. Still haven't heard Volume 1, but this one is filled with heavy beauty and I immediately made a cassette dub of it from said older dude's copy 15 years ago. It's been close to me ever since, and in fact I just dusted it off this morning for at-work listening. (In case you're wondering: TDK SA100 with Thinking Fellers Tangle on the other side, actually a very good pairing!) The most absolutely you've-gotta-listen-to-it-right-now blistering track is the second one on the album, "Yeye Mousso" by Moussa Doumbia, which was re-comped here and here during the aforementioned 00's reissue windfall, but I think my favorite is this piece of grungy wailing fuzz-guitar soul, "Ahissa" by Kouyate Sory. And, if you look closely enough at that YouTube you'll find a generous link to a blog with more about these LPs and, yes, downloadability.

Two new albums from Loren Connors, one under his own name and one with his 'blues' band Haunted House. Other than one long-ago listen to his early acoustic guitar albums, I think I have loved every single note I've heard this guy play, mostly (if not all) on electric guitar, and that's quite a few (even for a "slowhand" like himself), going back almost 20 years. Some musical careers are like fire, and burn out quickly, but others are like rivers, steady, always flowing, always the same, always different. The Connors streak continues with these two brand new ones... while he is capable of very light and lyrical playing (the 2000 album Portrait of a Soul comes to mind), he also goes into territory that is quite the opposite, not only darker and more abstract, but something I would call downright abyssal. Parts of the 1998 album The Bridge come to mind, and a great album like Moonyean (1994, RoadCone) explores both the light and dark deeply and in various balances. Red Mars, recorded in 2010 with accompaniment by Margardia Garcia on electric double bass, now available on CD and download from the Family Vineyard label, is what I would call an abyssal work, groaning, haunting, distant, somehow both near-ambient and menacingly loud. Abyssal like deep space, and deep space is precisely what this record is about with its Sun Ra-worthy titles like "Showers of Meteors" and "Little Earth."

As for Haunted House, they are their own beast, a quartet made up of Connors and Andrew Burnes on guitar, Connor's wife Suzanne Langille on vocals, and, in the place of a traditional rhythm section, Neel Murgai playing a large Persian frame drum called a daf. This group played together for a couple years in the 1990s, releasing an epic CD called Up In Flames (1999, Erstwhile Records), but have been dormant ever since Burnes moved from NYC at the beginning of the 2000s. They rather suddenly reconvened in 2010 when he was back in town for a few days, and then a few months later got together again and quickly recorded their 2nd album, Blue Ghost Blues, now released on CD, LP, MP3, and FLAC by Northern Spy Records. The album sounds like it came together quickly, not because it's undercooked, sloppy, or hasty, but because it's fiery and urgent, pulsing and boiling with barely bottled aggression. Though I think Connors has a very distinctive style, I'm not sure which guitarist is doing what on here. I like to think he's the one playing against type, locking into a rather nasty and sometimes downright doomy chugging low-E pulse, nary letting it go for the whole album, and that Burnes is the one taking the more 'lead' guitar role. This higher-register distorted sound-shaping never seems to break into those trademark Loren Connor's wailing single-note cries... but who knows. The point is, the group is playing together as one voice, and the one doing the chugging lays down a rock-solid platform for the others to extrapolate on. Both guitarists are in excellent form, and Langille raises the ante with her own song-shaping vocal intensity, Murgai thundering in and around the pulse. This is a band that knows how to work together, whether their last gig was 10 years ago or 10 days ago.

NOW PLAYING

2011-10-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

BIOSPHERE Substrata (ALL SAINTS)
BURNING SPEAR Creation Rebel (HEARTBEAT)
BIG YOUTH Screaming Target (TROJAN)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Joe Gibbs Mood (The Amalgamated Label 1968-1971) (TROJAN)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Tribe Vibes Vol. 1 (STRICTLY BEATS) (the linked track is bonkers)
PHIL COHRAN & THE AFRICAN HERITAGE ENSEMBLE The Zulu 45s Collection (JAZZMAN)
ALVARIUS B Blood Operatives of the Barium Sunset CD (ABDUCTION)
GROUP INERANE Guitars from Agadez Volume 3 CD (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES)

I was listening to the Biosphere album after listening to a lot of Grouper, and one of his tracks in particular, "Times When I Know You'll Be Sad," made me think of her music. Just then I remembered a Q&A with Grouper in which she mentioned Substrata as a good album, or a favorite album, or a recently listened to album, which is why I got hold of it in the first place.

Just noticed another example of the Beastie Boys being way into Jamaican deejay records... "Solomon A Gunday" by Big Youth was sampled in "Funky Boss." Go to whosampled.com for details.

That Amalgamated Label comp hits a total late rocksteady/early reggae sweet spot, a bunch of great tunes and rhythms such as early Lee Perry stuff and other choice cuts like one featuring the very first sound system deejay Count Machuki. All produced by the great Joe Gibbs.

The Sun City Girls/Abduction/Sublime Frequencies axis brings us new CD reissues of two out-of-print LPs by Alvarius B (Blood Operatives of the Barium Sunset, 2005) and Group Inerane (Guitars from Agadez Volume 3, 2010). Alvarius B is Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls, and other than his contribution to the SCG album Funeral Mariachi, this is his most intensive work from a songwriting and production perspective, thematically unified (violent international underground economy intrigue?) and sonically brilliant. The CD reissue reveals all kinds of things I hadn't noticed or remembered from the vinyl. Check out the first two tracks and an awesome Morricone cover arranged for acoustic guitar and multiple AB vocal tracks. And check out the Group Inerane for more of that rolling desert-blues guitar hypnosis. Both discs and so much more available from Forced Exposure.

NOW PLAYING

2011-10-26T11:15:00.000-07:00

SHADOW RING The Lighthouse 2LP (SWILL RADIO)
MEG BAIRD Seasons on Earth LP (DRAG CITY)
GROUPER A I A : Alien Observer LP (YELLOW ELECTRIC)
SANTANA Caravanserai LP (COLUMBIA) (big soft spot for this heavy mostly instrumental jammer from '72)
WET HAIR/RENE HELL Flowers Of Light b/w 55 RN gaz split 7" (BATHETIC) (great Rene Hell track!)
CHOSEN BROTHERS/BULLWACKIE'S ALL-STARS/RHYTHM & SOUND Mango Walk b/w Mango Drive split 12" (RHYTHM & SOUND/WACKIE'S)
KEN CAMDEN Lethargy & Repercussion LP (KRANKY)
MERCHANDISE Strange Songs (In The Dark) LP (KATORGA WORKS/DRUGGED CONSCIENCE)
HIVE MIND Elemental Disgrace LP (SPECTRUM SPOOLS) as streamed at East Village Radio (welcome back Hive Mind, this sounds great)

BONUS VIDS

GROUPER live in Praha:

GROUPER "Alien Observer" (intense official video):

CHICAGO SHOW REPORT: Nautical Almanac, Stare Case, Piss Piss Piss Moan Moan Moan, Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk / BALL HALL / September 14, 2011

2011-10-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

roots frying: NATE YOUNG and JOHN OLSON of STARE CASE flank THE SHADOW DRIFTER

Now I know you're well aware that I simply do not write these, what are they called again... oh yes, long-form pieces anymore (that is anything longer than 140 characters), but tonight [now like three weeks ago -- long-form pieces are hard -- ed.] was such a blastitudinous night, such a study in sustained exalted blastopoetics, that I just have to take the plunge and tell you all about it. The evening began with me jamming a podcast special-guest style with Tyson T. at I Hear A New World studios. He's an old friend, and over the last few years he created and released a strange and heavy album that I wrote very nearly 140 characters about a while back. But that's a friendly tangent. I also enjoy his podcast because it really is, as the Blastitude slogan would have it, "about the music." He's done like 4 episodes and I think tonight we laid down #5. My contribution was an 8-song set of some of my favorite 1970s deejay tunes from Jamaica, two tracks by U-Roy the Originator, a bit of Welton Irie, the classic 1979 jam by Lone Ranger about that vampire "Barnabas Collins" (Ranger sez: Barney will chew your neck like a Wrigley), my favorite discovery of 2010 "Minister For Ganja" by Rapper Robert & Jim Brown (released on 7" in 1982), and "Stop The War" by Dillinger, from 1976. During our 'heavy conversation' portion of the podcast, Dillinger's lyrics about "that's what the prophets shall reveal... thou shall not steal, thou shall not steal" got me trying a little too hard to define roots reggae, because roots, like reggae itself, is both very simple and very difficult to describe. I wish I would've just said that it's a blown-out minor-key-laden protest/lament/revival music about the centuries-long biblical level of Jamaican ghetto suffering, but I just didn't have the words at the time.

That didn't stop us from blabbing though; we didn't even get into Tyson's modern dancehall playlist because I was going on about the History of Blastitude music book that I'm in the process of, ahem, taking notes for. (Coming sometime in 2012: The Two-Page Outline!) As part of my spiel I bring up the Nautical Almanac/Stare Case show I'm about to go to, a mere mile away from the IHANR studio and mere minutes away from starting, relating both bands to my bell curve theory regarding technological progress in music, wherein we have just left the plateau of the bell curve and are starting to work our way back down the other side. Music has been with us the whole time and will always be with us, but the technology has advanced rapidly over the last century, and therefore musical approaches have as well. The plateau was finally reached from roughly 1970-2010, in which time all of the final useful advances possible in musical technology, volume, speed, density, and communication have been innovated and experimented with. A ferocious run from punk to hardcore to noise and into the void tore the whole thing open, and now the dust has settled and we can see and use everything that got us to this potentially liberating zero point, all at once. The gadgets are still here but we can take them as we retreat back into the only things that have mattered throughout this entire curve of social history: singing, playing, creating with sound, having something to say, none of which even require electricity.

And whaddayaknow, all this blather starts to strangely tie right into the show I'm starting to become late for. The band Stare Case is a duo made up of Nate Young and John Olson, who you might know as 2/3rds of the long-running noise rock legends Wolf Eyes. The new band's slogan happens to be "BLUES ROOTS," and they mean it, and for them to come out of the noise scene, and particularly a key plateau band like Wolf Eyes, playing a quieter music with discernable musical motifs and tons of wide open haunted space, indeed represents a return to roots, a dialing back, a retreat from the oceans of noise back into everything that led up to it.

So yeah, I've gotta get to the show. Stare Case is the one band on the bill I HAVE to see, after being very intrigued by a 20-minute live youtube and an advance track from their new-release debut album on DeStijl Records, and I have to see Nautical Almanac too (for the first time since 2002), but sure, I would like to see Chicago-based openers Baby Birds Don't Drink Milk and the "gaddafi inspired jams" of Piss Piss Piss Moan Moan Moan too. Only so many hours in a day, etc. I get there with in fact 5-10 minutes left in the latter's set. It's dark in there and it seems like a cool tucked-away Humboldt Park loft space. The band is jamming, looks like a duo, with a young woman up front doing massed effected vocals and working a massed effected theremin. Young man drummer is playing a hard driving and extrapolative disco beat. Crowd is nodding, good vibe, meat-and-potatoes heavy experimental jamming of a sort that Chicago has always been good for cranking out, at least for the ten years I've lived here. After they're done, teardown and setup procedure slowly reveals that the next band is going to be Stare Case, and I'm feeling excited like a middle schooler at his first punk show. A band is going to do something special, and, if the cops don't show up, I'm going to get to watch and listen.

After they start playing, I get even happier. It might sound corny to you, but I'm going to say it because it's true: I've been listening to these guys make music for over 10 years now, all kinds of noisy jams, and I am honestly so proud of them for taking this step with Stare Case. Because it really is a bold step back, a true dial-down, and that takes a lot of guts to do in this age of wall-to-wall blown-out internet insanity. It proves that they really love and care about music, not merely trends that have correct sounds attached to them. It's like this Albert Einstein-attributed quote that I swear I just came across: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and moreviolent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to movein the opposite direction."Blues & roots, very sparse, patient, and earthy music. Young, who was/is the singer (and floorshaking programmer/electronicist) for Wolf Eyes, not only plays a bass guitar in Stare Case, he plays cleanly picked two-and-three note riffs and beautifully spare desert-blues solos that are definititely part of the good old pentatonic scale. Olson plays various reeds and wind instruments, as he has done with several bands before (most notably Graveyards), and his snake charmer lines come right out of quieter post-Coltrane post-Evan Parker modal/circular jamming from the 1960s on. And that's basically IT. Bass guitar and reeds. The rest is Young's vocals (certainly similar to his Wolf Eyes style, but quieter and sharper, and you can hear most of the words, which are very good spare monologue) and Olson's intermittent surges in incidental creep-zone electronics and steady simple shaker percussion. That said, the band never abandons its noise roots either. There was a point mid-set when they did a good 2 or 3 minutes of bare dark investigational ambience that could have come right out of a quieter part in a Wolf Eyes set, but here it worked its way out of or into another killer two-or-three note bassline, another utterly patient Olson drop-out, another SONG. Another BLUES song in fact. With audible ROOTS. Gig of the year, I mean the century, for me.

Nautical Almanac were great as well. You might say, in response to my bell curve theory, that Nautical is a plateau band that are more about the gadgets than they are the music, because they rewire circuits and broken electronics and then react -- maybe musically, maybe not -- to whatever noise it spits out. It's a good point, but it really doesn't matter whether you put gadgets or music first as long as you put soul and personality before both of them, and they always have. Tonight it was the Twig and Carly duo, Twig sitting down at the classic junk gear scrap table and running heavy flowing electronic shadow worlds, Carly running the environment via a sheet hanging on three tall tepee poles with home movies projecting on it, spilling off onto the wall behind it, on the wall opposite it, everywhere in fact, constantly crawling and jumping, Carly moving around with the projector cradled in her arms. It was a brain eraser, and I was worried if I would even be able to write about the show with Nautical being the last band. Not that I was about to pull a 'Cage and Feldman splitting after the Webern portion [see paragraph 3]' or anything....

And as long as everything is relating back to everything else, I should mention how the night ended. I was checking out the merch table, my mind already swirling with thoughts of roots, blues, reggae, noise, and much more, when some dude nearby started singing loudly and soulfully and with perfect pitch, "Is this love, is this love, is this love? That I'm feeling?" I was feeling it, because I love that song (you'll have to check out the podcast for my defense of Legend . . . although I call it Marley's "best work" which was totally incorrect, that would be the Soul Rebels and Soul Revolution albums he cut with Lee Perry), and I swear it set off scattered responses throughout the room, people answering back with "Is this love"s of their own and maybe even an "I-ee-eye-ee-eye-ee-eye... am willing and able..." or two. AND THEN, when I left the show a little bit later, and got out to the car after this incredibly blastifarian night of heavy roots jamming, what should be cranking on the FM radio, dialed as it often is to 97.1 The Drive, but, well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFRbZJXjWIA

ROCK DIS FUNKY JOINT

2011-09-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

Still reading that Check the Technique book, going down memory lane.....

Aaaaaaah yeah, I'm with this.......

ERICK AND PARRISH MAKING ECHO

2011-09-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Parrish Smith of EPMD on the track "You Gots To Chill" from the album Strictly Business, quoted in Check the Technique by Brian Coleman: "We use a ton of echo-chamber effect on that track, because that was always big. You gotta write about the echo chamber, please, for hip-hop. There's a lot of essentials missing in the game right now. I had two echo chambers myself. After we finished the song in the studio, Charlie [Marotta] showed us the button where the echo was and we could put it where we wanted. We were ODing on it, using it all over the place."

2011-07-28T07:59:00.000-07:00

Remember that anecdote in Shakey about Stephen Stills fighting a heckler at Big Sur? While wearing a fur coat? And then mumbling a "heavy" apology after returning to the stage? Well, it can indeed be found on YouTube, from the rarely screened 1971 concert film Celebration At Big Sur, and it's an even weirder scene inside the goldmine than I had pictured:

After Neil jams on the organ for a fairly rousing "Sea Of Madness" (nice to see a little footage of Greg Reeves on bass), the weird vibes start around the 4:00 minute mark. Don't miss Stills' "heavy" apology after the fight, although as goofy as his rap is, I have to admit the solo version of "4+20" that follows it is in fact pretty heavy, no irony quotes.

MUSIC FIELD NOTE #4080

2011-07-14T10:59:00.000-07:00

Clicked on a tweet from Dusted Inc to read a review of a couple new AMM CDs which led me to the whole story about how tabletop guitarist Keith Rowe quit the band in 2004, after Eddie Prevost criticized him and his playing style sharply, not in person, but in a book he wrote. You can tell I'm not following the scene anymore because I just found out about this contretemps. There's quite a bit more enlightenment to be had from the interview, like when Rowe says stuff like this:

AAJ: There is a strand running throughout this interview—the number of times you have referred to visual artists. [Picasso, El Greco, Whistler, Rothko, Degas...]

KR: That is what I am, and that is what I do on the instrument. What I am doing on the instrument is not making music. AMM was a philosophy and the vehicle for the philosophy was music. What I do is painting, and the vehicle for it is sound. There is no painting at the end of this process. I do other kind of painting where there is a painting. In this form of painting there is no painting and it is so heavily disguised that you cannot locate the painting.

The disguise comes from Duchamp. It was extraordinary that he gives the impression that he has stopped working but actually continues producing things. Everyone thinks he has stopped but he is still producing.

Read the whole interview here. I'm not listening to any Keith Rowe or AMM music while reading this interview, by the way (NP: Johann Sebastian Bach, The French Suites played by Angela Hewitt), just like I don't need to be looking at a Rothko to feel it, right? Wait, nevermind, there's a "related video" embed at the bottom of the page? Of course I'll pause the Bach and check it out:

Amazing point about how his laying the guitar flat was analagous to Jackson Pollock laying the canvas flat. Can't help but think of Derek Bailey soldiering on holding the guitar in the traditional style, which makes his avant garde achievement seem even more impressive. (And, speaking of tweets, and Derek Bailey...)

P.S. I think the above Rowe doc also might have actual footage of Tilbury-era AMM, and there doesn't seem to be any AMM footage at all on YouTube except for this oddity.

MARVIN GAYE "The Star Spangled Banner"

2011-07-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

Woops, the 4th of July came and went and I forgot to continue a Blastitude tradition: posting Marvin Gaye's incredibly heavy reinvention of "The Star Spangled Banner" that he performed before the 1983 NBA All Star Game. The only version that matters:

2011-06-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

The GROUP DOUEH show put me in a mood and I've been listening to NASS EL GHIWANE all morning because they have some of the most tranced-out banjo/guimbri/percussion jams of all time. They've existed since the early 1970s and have been described as "the Rolling Stones of Morocco," due to their regional popularity and rad rock'n'roll appearance. I first heard of them in the travel diary Derek Monypeny wrote for Blastitude #27. (Scroll down a bit for some Ghiwane goods.) Lots of stuff to hear by them via YouTube, and a superb career-spanning 2-CD set called Double Best was released this year.

And just in case you've missed it over the last few years because it's embedded 3/4th of the way down Derek's article, please check out this YouTube. It's not Nass El Ghiwane, it's Abdullah Chmairan and it is extremely heavy:

Sound of the Day: THE FUCKIN' FLYIN' A-HEADS

2011-05-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

One of the heaviest guitar bands of all time only made one record, and it's a 7-inch single released in 1980. It's a good thing they didn't put out a full-length, because anything longer might have torn a hole in the universe. Even though I love it, I'm not sure I could listen to 15 or more minutes of it at a time. The band was from Hawaii, they were called The Fuckin' Flyin' A-Heads, and their sound emitted a serious dark power from deep inside, with the added tension of them not seeming to care or even know... which means it could get worse at any moment. Even on the punk rock surface it's a pretty mean record, with a mad profane Hawaiian dude named Eric "Sep" Ishii snarling "I've got a SWISS CHEESE BACK" while his bandmate Howard Nishioka plays seemingly constant torrents of ludicrous metallic noise guitar. Side two "Watching TV" is even more profane and nihilistic, and it's faster too. Come to think of it, I would love it if "Watching TV" went on for 15 or more minutes. This band, however briefly, and even with their depraved lyrical content, is one of the few that has approached the unreachable sonic nebula of Les Rallizes Denudes. "We tried to have punk attitude, jazz abilities, blues' soul, acid-rock's freedom, and bohemian sensibilities. I still believe in it, I hope others do too." --Howard Nishioka

The 7-inch has been reissued exact repro style by De Stijl Records. Buy it here, and while you're there, read some great reminiscing about the band from Howard Nishioka and Eric "Sep" Ishii.

Tony Rettman interviewed the A-Heads drummer Dan Garrett for Viceland. In the intro, Tony describes an experience with the single a lot like the one I had: "Was this at the right speed? What kinda drugs were these guys on? This single made Flipper sound like Uriah Heep. I pondered more and more on it as I spun it ad infinitum."

SIDEBAR: Just before he embarked on the heavily psychedelic/industrial/punk/improvisational "fun piece of terroristic art" that was the Fuckin' Flyin' A-Heads, Howard Nishioka recorded and self-released an LP of cracked and funky Pacific Island electric folk & blues called Street Songs. Read about it and listen to it here and here... it's a fine companion to the FFA single... not anywhere near as outwardly heavy, but damn near as weird!

Song of the Day: FIGURES OF LIGHT "It's Lame"

2011-05-15T20:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was out driving around, checking out the radio... WNUR had a snoozer of a Northwestern U. baseball game on but WLUW had guest DJ Miss Alex White of White Mystery spinning some of her own 45s on the Minimal Beat show. Everything she played sounded good... the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" sounded heavier than ever to me and I'm guessing it was because of the vintage mix and mastering job on the old-and-scratchy 45 she brought in. I guess I've really only heard it on CD, or on FM radio via CD. She also played Status Quo "Pictures Of Matchstick Men," which always sounds good, a little more so when it's not by Camper Van Beethoven... a newer band from Calgary, Canada called Myelin Sheaths that sounded pretty cavernous... a song called "Pepperoni Eyes" by that band Personal & the Pizzas (I chuckled)... but the real head-turner was a skeletal yet blasting mid-set garage punk number with a distinct psychedelic edge, sounding surely pre-1980 and maybe even pre-1970, just two chords with some sort of dubbed-out pause after each chorus, minimal backing, and the singer snarling about how "Your life, it's just a dream, about as real as a bowl of steam!" He says that in two different verses! When I got home I ran to the stereo and tuned in the station, just in time for Miss Alex to back-announce what she'd played, and learned that the band in question was called Figures of Light, which led me to the internet and the further knowledge that not only had the song in question, "It's Lame," been released on a 45 way back in 1972, but that the singer I had just heard snarling those words had gone on to be my film professor at the University of Nebraska some 25 years later! Go get 'em Wheeler! He was certainly one of the more mind-blowing professors I encountered at UNL, and, because he was a still a bit of an old-school self-promoter, I knew he used to hang out at The Factory, was good friends with Gerard Malanga, and had made a ton of independent films. And yet, somehow, I had not been aware of his proto punk musical endeavors. Seems the band was formed in 1970 to accompany a Rutgers University multimedia happening in which they drove a motorcycle onto the stage and destroyed 15 television sets (or was it 27?). I wonder if any future Plasmatics were in the audience...

UPDATE: Download an archive of this radio show here!

ALICE COLTRANE live in Warsaw, 1987, with Ravi Coltrane, Reggie Workman & Roy Haynes.

2011-04-02T20:47:00.000-07:00

Absurdly heavy harp solo:

"Lonnie's Lament." Alice on piano. Ravi is good!

"A Love Supreme," Ravi ruling on soprano as well.

"We gotta stay fuckin' humble. The minute men! The tiny men! It's okay!"

2011-04-02T09:45:00.000-07:00

"In our sets we would do little jams sometimes, tiny little things like a minute long, freeform. Just as a release or just to reassert some kind of humility. Everything doesn't have an answer, everything can't be explained, everything can't even be put in the right question."

"You just gotta ponder, like in that way, way beyond state. Like the way before. You know, music's a link with the way before, before the verbal. I think that's why it's so popular with us, because it links us and then it's very obvious, with someone like John Coltrane, you know, there's a link. We found joy, we found meaning before we found language. Music was probably one of these ways, and that's why it's still with us and we hold it up as sacred."

"And D. Boon, beautiful lead guitar - just enough notes! So econo! Beautiful!":

"And again, I only played [June 16th] for him once... You don't know, it was the easiest thing teachin' D. Boon a song. I grew up with him. I just play it. He'd fuckin' play right into it like osmosis, just soak right into it."

All above quotes by Mike Watt from http://www.hootpage.com/hoot_watt-fournier06intrvw.html

"Some big thunder law forces me to eat shit." Nice, somebody posted all the lyrics for Double Nickels On The Dime on a webpage where you don't even have to close a pop-up ring tone ad before you can read it!

It's been over a month since I saw the Chicago band Econoline play Double Nickels On The Dime by The Minutemen in its entirety, all 45 songs (even "Take 5, D" and "You Need The Glory"!), and they were incredibly good at it, really almost perfect, and even though I'd barely listened to the album in years, their show stirred everything up again, all the thoughts and questions and answers and melodies, riffs, licks, change-ups, epiphanies, asides, jokes, poems, ideas... shit from all our old notebooks... and I've still got the vinyl out six weeks later, though I've been listening more to some sweet vinyl-ripped mp3s of the album on the always demonically handy iTunes. I know how all the song titles go, and I know how all the songs go, but now I can actually figure out which go with which! And, I can easily jump right to the specific track I'm reading about in Michael T. Fournier's Double Nickels on the Dime 33⅓ book, which draws heavily from his above-linked-and-quoted interview with Watt, so all kinds of deep cuts are getting suitably deeper examination, and naturally new favorites are emerging... I mean, "Spillage" with its transparent Descendants roots but played mellower, folkier, D. Boon-ier, with that good ol' "my stoned (police state) mind just spilled that line" refrain... "No Exchange" with its nothing-but-the-build structural flip (transparent Pink Flag roots) holding yet another beguilingly sweet D. Boon melody and a lovely bass melody from Watt... "There Ain't Shit On TV Tonight," always a favorite, given new light after being sung at the Econoline show by one of many guest vocalists, Ian Adams. He was in The Ponys but I know him as the guy from Happy Supply, so I knew he would be perfect for this sly bossanova pop (and then he stayed on stage, suddenly cast against type, and led a perfect barnstorming classic-HC singalong version of "This Ain't No Picnic"!) Let's see, what else... love the two wistful beach-town instrumentals, "June 16th" and "Love Dance"... love the all-time classic port-town beer-hall sing-a-long dirge "Themselves" (come on and join in with me, "And aaaall the men who learn.... to hate them!") ... love the intro Big Ben chime of "The Big Foist"... love it when he says "Some big thunder law forces me to eat shit"... "Jesus and Tequila" was always a favorite, how couldn't it be, but damned if it doesn't sound better than ever... Carducci's lyric is so spot on, not a word is wasted... it helps knowing the back story as recounted in the Fournier book (that Carducci wrote the song for a whimsically projected D. Boon country music solo album to be called Hard Working Man), and also that Bobby Conn tore that song up at the Econoline show. Other guest vocalist highlights were Rebecca Flores from Tyler John Tyler, who tore up "Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing," a guy from Pelican who tore up "Shit From An Old Notebook," Damon Locks from The Eternals who did some killer dancing to "Mr. Robot's Holy Orders," and a teenage kid named Ruadhan Ward from Girls Rock! Chicago, the organization which the whole show was a benefit for. She did "History Lesson Part Two," a challenging tune to do justice to, and she was 100% perfect for it... which made me realize how great the lyrics to that song are because even though they are so autobiographical that they use "real names," they are not particularly gender-specific...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY D. BOON (April 1st, 1958)

This is soul music:

So this is the third time I've been disappointed with a new Kurt Vile record after my first listen. The other two were the Fall Demons 7-inch and the Childish Prodigy LP, both of which I now love. I'm still not sure if I'm going to love Smoke Ring For My Halo, but I am currently on my fourth listen and yep, I'm liking it more and more. There's no denying that the album has Kurt's most radio-friendly clean production-sheen, which initially put me off a little, but I also think his songwriting is less immediate here than in the past. The first song "Baby's Arms" is really great, in fact it's one of KV's top 5 ever, but after that, the songs are taking a little longer than usual to insinuate. I'm pretty impressed by the album closer, a dreamy and shiny beast called "Ghost Town," and there's a nice reprise of his old song "Red Apples," with different lyrics, called "Runner Ups," the tune not immediately recognizable (I always enjoy Kurt's 'cubist repertoire' moves). The song "On Tour" reminds me of a slightly sunnier take on Neil Young's "Bad Fog Of Lonlieness," with the line "I see through everyone, even my own self, noooowwwww" striking as a good musing on the downside of traditional hardcore/punk inquiry and scrutiny (and here we were, just talking about that all-time punk inquiry classic Double Nickels On The Dime). So far, my favorite tune other than "Baby's Arms" is a great dreamy song in the middle called "Society Is My Friend," the Violators laying down their distinctive drone-rock dream-style, backing one of those KV concepts that you kind of roll around in your brain along with him as the song plays out. Yeah, okay, it's already happening, I like this album quite a bit, and that slick production that might've been holding me back might be just the thing to make it a break through to a bunch of other people... but I do hope they get to hear Constant Hitmaker too... http://www.matadorrecords.com/kurt_vile

The word that keeps coming to me regarding the Milvia Son label is "gross." Gross artwork, gross album titles, gross band names, gross typefaces, and of course, gross music. For example, they just sent a new 7" by their flagship band Bad Drumlin Grass, and it has a buncha gross naked people on the cover! They also sent an LP by one Jaki Jakizawa, and his grossly smiling hippie biker face fills the front cover via a gross screenprinting job, and the title of the record is Can You Feel The Juices?, which is totally gross! But, here's the kicker... gross isn't always a bad thing. Take the Jakizawa album. You could call it a synth record, and there are certainly a lot of synth records clogging the bins these days, but this one is a gross synth record. The A side is called "Period Fart" (hey, farts are gross!) and it's some sort of gross grinding synth techno-rave, a 13-minute excerpt from a jam that apparently went on for a few hours. It's goofy and kinda wrong, but hey, I'd much rather listen to it than some new "fully realized" album of very pleasant and of course very cosmic arpeggiator demonstrations packaged with full-color photographs of completely non-gross things like water and trees. And then Side Two, "Eros In Neon", isn't even gross. It's a more gentle synth soundscape that is actually somewhat legitimately cosmic, and certainly more loose, zoned, and malleable (both when it was performed and when it's subsequently listened to) than the work of any and all aforementioned unnamed equipment demonstrators.

As for that 7" by Milvia Son flagship band Bad Drumlin Grass, it features not only that gross picture sleeve but another left turn by the group. They did hardcore Saturnian blues and goofy punk improv on their first LP, they did some extended cosmic music of their own on their 2nd LP (also preferable to the work of all aforementioned unnamed synth collectors/demonstrators), and now on this 7" they're doing that classic avant-punk 7" move where the band does an avant-punk rock jam while a dude profanely rants over the top. Actually, it's not too profane, it's mostly awesome nonsense, except for one f-word... which apparently was enough for them to repeat the same song on Side B, but without the offending word! A clean radio version! What a weird hardcore punk improv novelty single. The music and vocals are actually excellent and kinda remind me of The Geeks. Milvia Son is giving this record away free for $3 shipping, go to milviason.com for details... If you can handle the cover art laying around your house, you should do it!

2011-03-05T17:42:00.000-08:00

Had to check out some ODD FUTURE aka ODD FUTURE WOLF GANG KILL THEM ALL aka OFWGKTA and no, I do not enjoy rampant violent misogyny, not even when they're "just playing," but anytime someone comes up with a track like this, I'm gonna keep paying attention:

Basically, that's one of the sweetest R&B songs I've heard in the last 20 years. Its creator is named SYD THA KYD, and she is the only female member of the collective. She plays along with their particular brand of dubious punk theater, but under that surface she's the one who quietly does all the engineering and mixing for the group. ("Syd the Kyd sits and makes sure the shit we record sound good.") Then I check out her tumblr and it's a deep, erotic, no-nonsense LGBT presence titled "get it, bitch." So what's really going on? Fuck being hard, Odd Future's complicated?

On that note, here's another deep and brilliant smooth-tip avant-garde hip-hop ballad from OFWGKTA member FRANK OCEAN's debut album Nostalgia, Ultra. Unreal:

You can download all this stuff and much more from their website, http://www.oddfuture.com/ And in case you haven't seen it, I'll leave you with the formidable video for "Yonkers," by the de facto leader and founder of Odd Future, TYLER THE CREATOR:

BEST OF 2010 revised

2011-02-28T11:13:00.000-08:00

OKAY, I know I already posted this once and that 2010 is already a distant hazy memory in these post-millennial times but I was just revising my Best Of 2010 list a little bit, plugging in a few more I forgot (thanks to the Permanent Records Best of 2010 zine for a couple reminders) and shuffling a couple other things around. Stay tuned because you know one of these days I'm gonna hafta add one more LP to make it an even 30....

1. SUN CITY GIRLS Funeral Mariachi LP (ABDUCTION)
2. CRAZY DREAMS BAND War Dream LP (HOLY MOUNTAIN)

3. MI AMI Steal Your Face LP (THRILL JOCKEY)

4. BALACLAVAS Roman Holiday LP (DULL KNIFE) This may not technically be the 4th best record of 2010, but considering its particular golden ratio between recorded excellence and public ignorance, this is where it ends up.

5. KURT VILE Square Shells 12" (MATADOR) This guy gets me every time.
6. ANIKA s/t LP (STONE'S THROW) Came out in November, didn't hear it until February 1st, have listened to it like 20 times since.
7. GRASS WIDOW Past Time LP (KILL ROCK STARS) I called this "progressive folk" on twitter and that's seriously what it feels like to me... with a sweet punk edge of course...
8. LOCRIAN The Crystal World LP (UTECH) Territories, also from 2010, was a definite "best one yet" and then they top it like three months later.

9. LOCRIAN Territories LP (AT WAR WITH FALSE NOISE/BASSES FREQUENCES/BLOODLUST!/SMALL DOSES)

10. LA VAMPIRES Meets Zola Jesus 12" (NOT NOT FUN) Best chillwave and witch house record of 2010 was neither chillwave nor witch house.

11. CLOCKCLEANER Auf Wiedersehn 12" (LOAD) My favorite Clockcleaner record is their last one ever.

12. PUERTO RICO FLOWERS "4" 12" (FAN DEATH) John Sharkey of Clockcleaner also turned in quite a good solo record.
13. INTERNATIONAL HELLO s/t LP (HOLY MOUNTAIN) Monoshock reunites under a code name and lays down some of the most serious psychedelic heaviness of their career. Compared to other sporadic but currently active post-Monoshock bands like Bad Trips and Liquorball, both of which I've enjoyed quite a bit, that arcane original chemistry really leaps out of the grooves.

14. EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING Rush To Relax LP (GONER) So nice to hear a "garage" rock band with actual breathing room in their sound.

15. MOUNT CARMEL s/t LP (SILTBREEZE) Incredible no-scene time-capsule heavy-rock soul from Columbus, OH. This interview illustrates that yes, they are serious about this.
16. GROUP DOUEH Beatte Harab LP (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES)
17. OMAR SOULEYMAN Jazeera Nights CD (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES) This music is all about keyboardist/composer Rizan Sa'id to me, Omar Souleyman is like his killer hype man. But yet the words Souleyman sings are written by poets.
18. M AX NOI MACH In The Shadows LP (WHITE DENIM) Just the album I was hoping he'd come out with.
19. TIN MAN Scared LP (WHITE DENIM)
20. SWORD HEAVEN Gone LP (LOAD)

21. DAN PECK TRIO Acid Soil LP (HEAT RETENTION)
22. MARY HALVORSON QUINTET Saturn Sings CD (FIREHOUSE 12) Dan Peck Trio and this are tied for my #1 Jazz Album of 2010.
23. U.S. GIRLS Go Grey LP (SILTBREEZE) 2nd best chillwave and witch house record of 2010 was neither chillwave nor witch house.

24. PURLING HISS Hissteria LP (RICHIE/TESTOSTERTUNES) This could be ranked higher, I just noticed it down here.
25. TOM SMITH & KEVIN DRUMM Mud CDR (KARL SCHMIDT VERLAG) Didn't know what to expect and it still took me by surprise.
26. KEN CAMDEN Lethargy & Submission LP (KRANKY) Solo cosmic improvisational electric guitar by member of Implodes. P.S. Implodes Black Earth comes out in April on Kranky and judging from an advance copy it's going to be on this list next year...
27. HAYVANLAR ALEMI Guarana Superpower LP (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES)

28. VOICE OF SEVEN THUNDERS s/t LP (HOLY MOUNTAIN)

29. SHAWN DAVID MCMILLEN Dead Friends LP (TOMPKINS SQUARE)

REISSUES/ARCHIVAL
DADAWAH Peace And Love (DUG OUT)

PHIL COHRAN African Skies (CAPTCHA)

PARSON SOUND box set (SUBLIMINAL SOUNDS)

LES RALLIZES DENUDES Heavier Than A Death In The Family (PHOENIX)

as usual all the archival stuff on Sublime Frequencies (OMAR KHORSHID, KOES BERSAUDARA, KOES PLUS, DARA PUSPITA, etc.)
BRAINBOMBS Urge To Kill LP (LOAD)
WITCH Introduction CD (SHADOKS)

SONG OF THE YEAR: Celebration "I Will Not Fall"

I feel like I hardly bought or listened to any 7-inches this year. The only one I can remember enjoying this whole entire year is that BRAINWASHED YOUTH goofery on RICHIE RECORDS... what does that tell you? Actually, I enjoyed that same label's BIRDS OF MAYA WITH HARMONICA DAN 7-inch too... could it be that they are The Only 7-Inch Label That Matters (in 2K10)? (Answer: Probably not, I just have a bad memory.)

CUTTY RANKS

2011-02-19T19:56:00.000-08:00

Reblogging this reminder by Kick To Kill of another of my all-time favorite youtubes, CUTTY RANKS live with the Stereo Mars sound system at a 1986 PNP Rally in Kingston. The minute from roughly 1:45 to 2:45 ranks even higher than Patti Smith's "You Light Up My Life" as one of the greatest vocal performances of the 20th Century.

Yet Another iPod Commercial

2011-01-12T19:26:00.000-08:00

Yeah, LPs are the best, but let's face it, I'm addicted to the iPod, so in its thrall that I even spell its name with the correct trademarked capitalization. Furthermore, I'm addicted to the album shuffle setting, one album at a time to infinity, always at random. At home, at work, and on the train, I have in fact had my iPod and iTunes on album shuffle for almost two or three years straight. The times in 2010 that I actually put on an album of my own choice, vinyl and CD included, could probably be counted on two hands... well, four... maybe six... okay, eight at the most (that's a mere 40 in a whole year, and at least 10 of those were the new Sun City Girls)...

How could I stop the shuffling when sequences keep coming at me like they did today and tonight, sweet gradational shifts through modern folk forms, from a Canadian man to two English women to an African-American man... it started late this afternoon with a concert by Leonard Cohen, live at BBC in 1968. All Leonard Cohen is great, his recent concert tours have looked exquisite, but my particular love is for the early stuff. McCabe & Mrs. Miller era. Songs Of Leonard Cohen (1967), Songs From A Room (1969), production by John Simon (who did Music From Big Pink) and Bob Johnston (who did Blonde on Blonde) respectively. The high young reedy voice, great lyricist, killer acoustic guitar player. To quote one extremely accurate YouTube comment, "wintery hymn(s) of the soul's interior!" These BBC sessions are gorgeous... forget those legendary producers I just named, the music here sounds as good as anything on the albums, and so does Cohen's singing. Lenny is one of those guys whose lyrics stay nested and emerge gently, and only on repeat listens, even when they twist like knives. Tonight the one that stuck was the 8th stanza of "Teachers": "I ate and ate and ate, no I did not miss a plate, well how much do these suppers cost? We'll take it out in HATE." I have no idea who the backing band is, even after googling for almost 10 minutes! (I guess some folk/rock mysteries are still sacred... though there was a mention somewhere of "Dave Cousins and The Strawbs").

And after the Cohen, the shuffle goes right into Bridget St. John and her album Ask Me No Questions. Can you imagine the gradational shift from 1968 Leonard Cohen to 1969 Bridget St. John? The voice goes from male to female, and the mood is different, but there is still so much in common. She is a decade younger, born in 1946, part of the global beat/folk/hippie boom, with acoustic guitar playing as idiosyncratic as her contemporary Joni Mitchell, but with a much different singing voice, deeper and richer, almost like a British Nico. And that's what a lot of this album is focused on, just her acoustic guitar and voice, with only sparse backing. Her songs aren't immediately hook-filled, but they are complex and intriguing and often lovely. Progressive folk for sure, like when she sings "And as for me I'll eat a buttercup sandwich and wait 'til the shower is over."

And then the iPod shuffle goes from 1969 Bridget St. John to 1967 Shirley Collins, can you believe that? Had to be on purpose... talk about gradational... another British lady singing beautiful folk songs in the late 1960s. Shirley is a little older, more Leonard's age, more pre-hippie, and for the intents and purposes of this album The Sweet Primeroses even pre-beat, in fact sounding like she could be singing from 500 years ago. Her voice is as clear as a bell and she sings over the sparsest of accompaniment, most notably her sister Dolly on Portative Pipe-organ (which she plays on six tracks... Shirley accompanies herself on 5-String Banjo for another four), which she plays at least 14 times more beautifully and hauntingly than this guy (who is fine, don't get me wrong... the costume changes are a plus, as is the cat cameo).

In a way, the shift from the Collins album to the next one is even more gradational; even though the change is from a British woman singing folk songs in 1967 to an African-American man playing fusion jazz in 1976, it took me a few minutes to even realize that it was a different album. I literally thought that Lol Coxhill himself, or someone like that, had been drafted by the Collins sisters for a rousing album closer, the old weird Britain meeting the new, if you will... but it was actually this odd mostly acoustic chamber fusion jazz LP by Michael Gregory Jackson that was released in 1976 on legendary label ESP-Disk. At that time the label was a bit past their prime, kind of like being on SST in the '90s, but this album, called Clarity, is a good one, some sweet, spiky, and exploratory 1970s music by an excellent and unconventional group: David Murray, Oliver Lake, and Wadada Leo Smith, all on horns/reeds/woodwinds/etc (no piano or rhythm section), while Jackson plays acoustic and electric guitars and sings occasional proto-neosoul vocals over a mix of composition and free improvisation. Almost as importantly, he's holding a cat on the cover. This was his debut, at the tender age of 23... he went on to record "career defining records on Arista/Novus in the 80s and 90s."

I swear these all came up today on random, in order, without me stopping the iPod. And after Michael Gregory Jackson, it jumped from folk forms (or did it??) and went into a perfect palate cleanser: the "T.V. O.D." b/w "Warm Leatherette" single by The Normal. As the brilliant A side came pulsing through the room, my son yelled from the next room "I LOVE THIS MUSIC!!" He was a little weirded out by "I don't need a TV screen/I just stick the aerial into my skin/let the signal run through my veins," but it was cool, I told him it was science fiction.

NEW RELEASES OF NOTE (DECEMBER 2010)

2011-01-09T18:55:00.000-08:00

M AX NOI MACH In The Shadows LP (WHITE DENIM) At the time of his interview in the most recent issue of Blastitude, Robert Francisco had yet to release any full-length vinyl as M Ax Noi Mach, but now that time has come and it fulfills all the promise shown on the 7-inches and the tapes like Chaser. Not only did quality-driven fellow Philadelphian label White Denim step up and pay big bucks for mastering in order to successfully groove the thick frequencies, but Francisco did his part and showed up with his best series of tunes to date. His music continues to never settle into any one obvious subgenre... power electronics would seem to the closest genre description, although his vocals seem rooted in 90s hardcore/grindcore more so than 70s/80s industrial... harsh noise doesn't fully work either, because what might start or otherwise sound like a harsh noise track is frequently pushed, via driving dance beats and that mastering job, into a radio-ready club dance feel (just listen to the way the opening track "Creeper" hits). And the real club hit on this album should be "Devil City"... I really want White Denim to bankroll an early 90s style hip-hop video in which Francisco lip-syncs out on the streets dressed in winter wear. They'll have to cut a censored radio version due to the gigantic hook based around the phrase "buncha fucking animals," but it'll be worth it. Side one closer "Fetico" is a weird quieter 'talking' track that nicely demonstrates that crucial trait of all music, the ability to change it up a little. (Some call it dynamics.) Side two is also very heavy and it has another (welcome) version of "Creeper" called "Creeper Sits." All in all, a perfect and readily available introduction to what this guy does.

PHIL COHRAN African Skies LP (CAPTCHA) Can't say how beyond-stoked I was to walk into Reckless and see this on the wall, a brand new funky colorful gatefold vinyl version of the wonderful African Skies by Phil Cohran. I did not know this vinyl release was in the offing, but I am familiar with the album, having bought a CDR version of it for 10 bucks off of Cohran himself a few years ago at one of his Ethiopian Diamond gigs (he's still doing it every other Friday night at 7PM, go to 6120 N. Broadway in Chicago for fine food and good music). In fact, familiar is an understatement, as this is possibly one of my favorite albums of all time, certainly one of my most-played this decade. It was recorded in 1993 for Chicago's Adler Planetarium, and not only does it sound excellent as a soundtrack to viewing galactic depths, but, with Cohran's extensive harp and frankiphone themes and solos over sublime deep string arrangements, it's also like experiencing ballet in ballrooms, fairy tales in bedrooms, and folk songs and stories on the savannah, without any rooms necessary. (And really it's just the deepest of cosmic jazz by one of its all-time great composers.)

GROUP DOUEH Beatte Harab LP (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES) For my money their best album yet. The first two were compilations spanning different years and different recording situations, but this seems to be a complete work of new material, laid down possibly in a single committed studio session. It's also his first album to be largely acoustic, with little (if any) electric guitar, and more traditional Moorish instruments such as the "tinidit (three string Mauritanian lute), ardin (kora-like harp played traditionally by women), tbal (clay drum) and the kass (tea glasses)." Apparently there is also Korg synth on here, but I haven't even really noticed it yet after three listens. The raw 'VU bootleg' thrill of the first 2 LPs is gone, but in its place are deep roots laid down with sweet clarity, and the interplay between Doueh's tinidit and his wife's ardin is unreal, sometimes like Joseph Spence jamming with at least three Magic Band guitarists all at once, the speed of the notes sometimes suddenly doubling or even tripling until the music sounds like a school of silver-jeweled turquoise hummingbirds bending backwards to fly concentric circles around a tiny heart-shaped cathedral made from golden vases at the exact center of your mind.

AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE #1. "To those of us who are here now, Noise Culture (as we're calling it on the cover) is really exciting and worthy of detailed investigation. There are differences between good and bad noise, and there are ways to explain this in print." So writes co-editor Chris Sienko in the premiere issue of this long-awaited and finally-published Noise Culture magazine, something that he's been illustrating for years with various online writings, many of them right here in Blastitude starting way back in early 2001, but it is a fine thing to have so many of his observations and opinions on paper and in such a nicely designed book (because really, this magazine is a book, as much as the Industrial Culture Handbook was a book). And there is indeed much, much more than Sienko's contributions, including a whopping 38 page oral history of the Broken Flag label (by the magazine's other editor, UK-based Steve Underwood of the Harbinger Sound label), and features on Carlos Giffoni, The Haters, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, Climax Denial, Sewer Election, Putrefier, the IDES label, the Apraxia label... and that's still not all. 164 pages, perfect bound.

One last note about some nice Cluster-related reissues coming to us from the Bureau B label... first off, there's a CD of the Cluster 71 album, their first as the well-known Moebius and Roedelius duo, created after they parted ways with founding member Conrad Schnitzler and changed the spelling of their name from Kluster. This is a truly groundbreaking album of "epochal, experimental electronics" that so many post-No Funners would still kill to create in 2011 (wow, that's 40 years later)... and if you're a fan of the later beat-driven pop-inflected Cluster albums like Zuckerzeit, this album will probably scare the shit out of you with its yawning chasms of deep-space noise that somehow always... seem... to.... BE.... GETTING... LOUDER.......... On a much prettier and more pastoral tip, Bureau B is also doing CD/LP editions of two solo albums by Roedelius called Selbstportrait and Selbstportrait - Vol. II. These were originally released on the Sky label in 1979 and 1980, and are completely solo recordings, one man sitting at a Farfisa organ and getting deep. The tracks are beat-oriented constructions with melodic cycles and improvisations playing out gently over the top, closer to the aforementioned Zuckerzeit style but with an additional aura of high-lonesome freedom of movement. Again, I think a lot of today's young chillmagogic artists would love to make albums like this, but let's face it, they just don't have the musical depth to do it... they're just gear-collectors and button-pushers who don't seem to have any idea how to improvise actual heartfelt and/or philosophical melodic statements. In other words, rad sounds but no songs, and these tracks, however "sketchbook" they may be, are ALL songs.

I LOVE THE STACK OF LPs BY MY STEREO RIGHT NOW, IT'S LIKE IT'S CHRISTMAS OVER HERE

2010-12-21T20:39:00.000-08:00

ALVARIUS B Baroque Primitiva LP (2011, POON VILLAGE)
CHRIS & COSEY Heartbeat LP (2010 reissue, CONSPIRACY INTERNATIONAL)
MRR # 331 (December 2010, Kylma Sota, Articles Of Faith, Total Abuse, Frankie Rose)
M AX NOI MACH In The Shadows LP (2010, WHITE DENIM)
ROSCOE MITCHELL SEXTET Sound LP (2009 repress, DELMARK)
KELAN PHIL COHRAN & LEGACY African Skies LP (2010, CAPTCHA)
ORNETTE COLEMAN Town Hall, 1962 LP (1997 reissue, GET BACK)
ORNETTE COLEMAN Dancing In Your Head LP (1977, HORIZON/A&M)
JOSHUA ABRAMS Natural Information LP (2010, EREMITE)
GROUP DOUEH Beatte Harab LP (2010, SUBLIME FREQUENCIES)
BRAINWASHED YOUTH The Trilogy 7" (2010, RICHIE/TESTOSTERTUNES)
KURT VILE Square Shells EP 12" (2010, MATADOR)
JOHN FAHEY The New Possibility: John Fahey's Guitar Soli Christmas Album LP (1968, TAKOMA, probably 2nd or 3rd pressing)
HAYVANLAR ALEMI Gurana Superpower LP (2010, SUBLIME FREQUENCIES)

2010-11-25T19:20:00.000-08:00

PETER "SLEAZY" CHRISTOPHERSON 1955-2010 Nice tributes at Brainwashed, and Holy Warbles posted a great early pic and YouTube.

ENO STILL SMART Great insight about improvised music by Brian Eno in his recent interview with Pitchfork: "I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time." -- http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/7875-brian-eno/

LAST COUPLE DAYS PLAYLIST:
MORTON FELDMAN String Quartet 2 (MODE) Listened to maybe half of this at work, in other words a mere 3 hours. One delivery driver who stopped by thought it was coming from the mail machine, and didn't even seem to think that was weird.
D'ANGELO Voodoo (VIRGIN) That guy from Time Magazine who said each song is like a cat waking up was really onto something.
SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE There's A Riot Goin' On (EPIC) After D'Angelo I had to go back to the source.
HARRY BERTOIA Space Voyage / Echoes Of Other Times (SONAMBIENT 1023)
HARRY BERTOIA Swift Sounds / Phosphorescence (SONAMBIENT 1024) Thanks to Holy Warbles.
BILLY BAO May 08 (PARTS UNKNOWN) Side A maybe not up there with previous releases Fuck Separation and Dialectics Of Shit but I like the side-long Side B cut quite a bit. Intense cover design. It appears that all Billy Bao releases can be downloaded at http://www.mattin.org/2_Billy_Bao.html.
OMAR SOULEYMAN Dabke 2020 (Folk And Pop Sounds Of Syria) (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES) Every album is very heavy. As I've said before, keyboardist Rizan Sa'id gets massive credit for this.
INGRAM MARSHALL Fog Tropes/Gradual Requiem/Gambuh 1 (NEW ALBION) A nice continuation from the Feldman and Bertoia, though maybe not as well known as either of them... "Fog Tropes" is a haunting and beautiful 1982 masterwork "for brass sextet and tape"... http://www.newalbion.com/artists/marshalli/index.htm
ERIC COPELAND Hermaphrodite (POST PRESENT MEDIUM) Interesting & weirdly grooving 2007 solo album from member of Black Dice... what the hell, maybe this fits in with Feldman/Bertoia/Marshall as the latest in modern composition from the Eastern Seaboard... or maybe it's more of a Byrne/Eno kind of thing this time, especially now that more African and Eastern reissues than ever are spinning on turntables in NYC lofts.
BRAINBOMBS Singles Compilation (LOAD) Finally an actual record... everything else was on MP3... this is the notorious Swedish band's earliest stuff, from 1986 to about 1989, when they released three or four 7-inches and appeared on some compilations. As I listen, I'm trying to decide who was better at late-80s bugle-and-noise bludgeon rock, the Brainbombs or America's own The Cows. Both bands started around the same time, and both have a remarkably similar approach, even though (I'm going to go ahead and assume that) the bands had never heard each other. Having seen the Cows play a show four different times, I can vouch that they could be a devastating live band. I've never seen the Brainbombs live (which makes most of us), but the recorded evidence here suggests that they could be pretty great at it as well. And, throughout their career, their recordings seem better and more natural than the Cows' ever did. I love a lot of songs on Cows records, of which I have like 5, but really all of their albums sound kind of terrible, as they never really figured out to record and master their gargantuan and grotesque live sound. (Their best album was their last one, Sorry In Pig Minor, on which they finally stopped caring about what they sounded like live and had producer King Buzzo encouraging their mischevious tendencies.) So, Brainbombs win on record, but I have to wonder if their vocalist gives off even half of the all-around entertainment value that the Cows' Shannon Selberg did. For all of his implied misanthropy, there was something playful about Selberg, including not only his well-done prop comedy but also his sly lyrics and the deceptively melodic way that he used his non-voice. The Brainbombs, of course, are funny in a different way that is more blunt and horrible. Either way, the Cows never did make a top-to-bottom album as good as Urge To Kill, the other Load reissue of a Brainbombs album, which I'm going to play next.

HERE'S A COUPLE FOR THE "MIDDLE 40" Ah, the Shadoks label of Germany, well known for their catalogue of what seems like over 100 reissues of different unknown 1970s progressive rock albums, not to mention their $43 list price for a single 12" vinyl record. They have reissued some records I truly love, like all-time favorites Rayne s/t and Africa by Amanaz, as well as Witch Lazy Bones!!, the stuff by Bunalim . . . Los Blops . . . Pete Fine . . . Terje, Jesper & Joachim . . . and surely more, but most of it I haven't heard, and most of it I've always suspected as being just decent, okay, middle-of-the-road... certainly of automatic interest due to one obscuro-European, South American, or African heritage or another, certainly filled with fine mild-progressive pop-folk-rock instrumental interplay, which is certainly in the service of catchy songs (or at least songs that sound like catchy songs even though they are not actually catchy songs). It's all fine but it's also often rather beige and gets buried under all the various layers of inoffensive pop-culture history, mostly with good reason. And that is mostly the case with this latest batch of Shadoks reissues. Three of them are by mild-progressive groups from turn-of-the-60s Iceland. The only real heavy group among them is called Odmenn, and Shadoks has reissued their first and only album, a self-titled 1970 double LP (list price $55). The two other Icelandic groups being reissued are Svanfridur and Trubrot, both of which sounded interesting and pleasantly rocking while on, and both of which I remember very little about, except that Trubrot had a somewhat charismatic lady singer named Shady Owens... but I only know that from looking at her picture in the high-quality booklet, not so much from actually listening to the music... I don't remember the Odmenn too well either, but it was my favorite and the only one I'd recommend to the serious archivists. We also received a new Shadoks reissue CD called The Cooperville Times by the South African duo of John & Philipa Cooper, which I thought would be yet a fourth nice-but-uninteresting slice of late-1960s progressive pop (I don't even like the Blossom Toes that much, why would I like a second-tier Blossom Toes?), but the South Africa origin gave it a little more intrigue (see what I mean... even when the music is mediocre, Shadoks is great from a multi-cultural perspective), and then upon actually playing the thing, it almost immediately won me over all the way with its gentle but firm and just slightly haunted folk-pop vintage, particularly on Track 3 "I'll Be More Than Satisfied," a John Phillips imitation so nice that it's almost as good as listening to John Phillips himself, with the added bonus of knowing that the singer/songwriter is, unlike John Phillips, probably not an incest-committing junkie headcase. (It is a rather quirky coincidence that this duo is called John & Philipa though, isn't it?)

SORT OF OFFICIAL TOP 100 BLASTiTUNES FOR 2010
1. CELEBRATION "I Will Not Fall"
2. CRAZY DREAMS BAND "Feels So Good"
3. KURT VILE "He's Alright"
4. THE BREEDERS "New Year"
5. EYEHATEGOD "30$ Bag"
6. WELTON IRIE & SOUND DIMENSION "Chase Them (ver.)"
7. FREE "I'll Be Creepin'"
8. LONE RANGER "Barnabas Collins"
9. LOW THREAT PROFILE "Time For Rebirth"
10. THE NECROS "IQ 32"
11. U.S. GIRLS "Turnaround Time"
12. WILLIE LANE "Hill Top Lane"
13. ALTON ELLIS "Live And Learn"
14. BILLY RILEY & THE LITTLE GREEN MEN "Red Hot"
15. THE CLEAN "Hold On To The Rail"
16. FEEDTIME "Ha Ha"
17. GROUPER "Hollow Press"
18. KEITH HUDSON "I'm Alright (Version)"
19. MECHT MENSCH "Acceptance"
20. NAMELEZZ PROJEKT "Obscure Impulses"
21. SARCOFAGO "Satanic Lust"
22. SCISSOR GIRLS "A Dedication To Cronies And Goats"
23. ALTON ELLIS & THE FLAMES "Cry Tough"
24. BARRY BROWN "Two House Department"
25. ERNIE BARTON "She's Gone Away"
26. BLACK SABBATH "Tomorrow's Dream" live 1972
27. BLUE OYSTER CULT "True Confessions"
28. COLOR DREAM "Untitled" (from Reminisce)
29. CURSED BIRD "A Page Of Madness (1926)"
30. DIM STARS "Monkey"
31. EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING "Gentleman"
32. THE GAYLADS "It's Hard To Confess"
33. GENE SIMMONS "Drinkin' Wine"
34. HAROLD JENKINS (aka CONWAY TWITTY) "Crazy Dreams"
35. HAYDEN THOMPSON "Love My Baby"
36. JACK EARLS & THE JIMBOS "Hey! Jim"
37. JAY TEES & BRENTFORD ROCKERS "Buck Town Version"
38. KURT VILE & THE VIOLATORS "Hunchy's Back"
39. LAUREL AITKEN "Mas Charlie"
40. LUNGFISH "Cleaner Than Your Surroundings"
41. MADBALL "Discriminate Me"
42. NIGHT KINGS "Bum"
43. NO BALLS "Forgetting To Suppress It"
44. PETER GREEN "Slabo Day"
45. RANK/XEROX "Basement Furniture"
46. ROY MONTGOMERY "Fantasia On A Theme By Sandy Bull (Slight Return)"
47. SCORPIONS "We'll Burn The Sky"
48. SICK LLAMA "untitled #8 from Put Down"
49. SILICON TEENS "Memphis, Tennessee"
50. SLICES "Medusa"
51. SUN CITY GIRLS "Voice Of America #3"
52. SWELL MAPS "H.S. Art"
53. THE THREE TOPS "Do It Right"
54. U ROY "Train From The West"
55. WARREN SMITH "Ubangi Stomp"
56. AGNOSTIC FRONT "No One Rules"
57. ANGST HASE PFEFFER NASE "La Bamba"
58. THE BATS "Made Up In Blue"
59. BERNARD FEVRE "Impressionism"
60. BIRDS OF MAYA "Ready To Howl"
61. BLACK DEVIL "No Regrets"
62. BLIGHT "Real World"
63. BO ANDERS PERSSON "Proteinimperialism"
64. BRETT FAVRE "[Side A of The Underlying Focus Upon Single Negative Entities]"
65. BURMESE "Only The Good Die"
66. CARAVAN "Golf Girl"
67. EARLY B "History Of Jamaica"
68. EDWIN BRUCE "Rock Boppin' Baby"
69. FAUST "Untitled - all on saxes"
70. FIRE ENGINES "Discord"
71. FONDATION "Quelque Part"
72. FOR AGAINST "Shine"
73. FUNGUS BRAINS "Hairbrush"
74. GILA "This Morning"
75. THE GLADIATORS "Don't Fool The Young Gal"
76. GLEN BROWN/KING TUBBY "Termination Dub"
77. GONE "Insidious Distraction"
78. GRASS WIDOW "To Where"
79. IKE & THE CRYSTALITES "Ilya Kuryakin"
80. THE INNER SPACE "Agilok & Blubbo"
81. J.F.A. "Count"
82. JAKOB OLAUSSON "Cornered In Your Circle"
83. JIM FERRARO "Remote Control Under The Couch"
84. JOHN TERLAZZO "Lookin' For Love (A Vision Of Love Lost)"
85. JOY DIVISION "Atrocity Exhibition"
86. KAREN DALTON "Little Bit Of Rain"
87. KITO-MIZUKUMI ROUBER "A5"
88. LES VAMPYRETTES "Biomutanten"
89. LILIDA MOLIPAVIR (AND SISTER) "Sept Ans Sur Mer"
90. THE MEATMEN "Snuff 'Em"
91. MICHAEL HOENIG "Departure From The Northern Wasteland"
92. MAX ROMEO "The Clock"
93. MOUNT CARMEL "Hear Me Callin'"
94. MRS. ARCHIE MACDONALD "Hi-Ri-Ri-O"
95. NICODEMUS "Dog Better Than Gun"
96. THE NORMAL "T.V. O.D."
97. ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER "[Side A of Ruined Lives]"
98. PEAKING LIGHTS "[untitled from Space Primitive]"
99. THE PIONEERS "Long Shot (Buss Me Bet)"
100. RANGDA "Waldorf Hysteria"

CHANTAL & BABETTE But seriously, I'd like to seriously recommend three films made by filmmaker Chantal Akerman in collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mongolte: La Chambre (1971), Hotel Monterey (1972), and News From Home (1977). All three were filmed in New York City while the Poland-born Belgium-raised Akerman was living there, and they make up Disc One of her recent Criterion Eclipse Series 3-DVD set. I had never seen them before and I don't think I even knew about them, but as a trilogy I actually prefer them to the (still great) Akerman/Mongolte masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, 201 minutes). If anything, these three films are documentaries... or are they memoirs? Long-form poems? Dramatic ellipses? Either way, if you've got the time (161 minutes total), watch all three in a row... you'll know it was all worth it when you reach the 10-minute tracking-then-stationary shot that closes News From Home, having gone from chamber to chambers to hallways to streets and finally the great outdoors (without leaving New York City). I would also highly recommend watching the first two as they were released (and presented on this set), without any sound. There's a 7-minute clip of Hotel Monterey on YouTube, but I don't wanna link to it because the uploader added some sensitive and austere piano music... perfect, of course, for the lingering shots of beautiful unoccupied furniture, but totally unfortunate when one has already seen the much more powerful silent version. So don't go to YouTube, just get hold of the Criterion, buy it, rent it, stream it, whatever, the important thing is WATCH IT.

NEW TOP 40 (2 through 40 to follow)

2010-10-24T09:32:00.000-07:00

1. SUN CITY GIRLS Funeral Mariachi LP/CD (ABDUCTION) I feel like the guy who cried wolf here, because as you may have noticed I like everything Sun City Girls do, even their terrible albums, and I always say so, but this time I REALLY LIKE WHAT SUN CITY GIRLS HAVE DONE. In fact, I think Funeral Mariachi can finally give Torch of the Mystics a rest and take its place as The Great Sun City Girls Album. Or at least the most recommendable Sun City Girls album; whether or not Mariachi is better than Torch is an apples-and-oranges comparison, but there is no doubt that Mariachi is, as the press release says, more accessible. A good 30 of its 40-odd minutes could be described as some sort of Italian-soundtrack MOR-music mood piece, made up of tracks that could possibly be played in a grocery store, or a dentist's office, without anyone present doing a double take. This is not a bad thing, and the reason is that it is done beautifully, and invested with unbelievably sincere emotion. After all, the album was conceived as the band's final album; it was begun a couple years before drummer Charles Gocher passed away in 2007, then finished a couple years later by the surviving Bishop brothers and associates, and cry-wolf be damned, the band has done a perfect job of creating this farewell. It's like their whole career of evil, all the confrontation, provocation, and outright shrieking, has been one long set-up to the final joke, which was to drop the masks and calmly and seriously record one of the most beautiful post-punk albums of all time. "Ben's Radio" is an incredible opening song, but not characteristic of the whole album. It's comical, jagged, and uptempo, the closest thing on here to their history of gnarly pranksterism, and it is followed by a couple more relatively feisty numbers (a triumphant song called "The Imam," which they were using as an opening segue into "Kickin the Dragon" on the Brothers Unconnected tour, and "Black Orchid," which kind of sounds like a sequel to "Cafe Batik" off of Torch, sorry to non-headz for the details), but at that point Funeral Mariachi begins to spread out and expand into the aforementioned Mediterranean beach-resort-in-heaven dreamland, with a widescreen lushness that is beyond any fidelity they have previously achieved, including such terrifically recorded albums as Torch and 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda. In fact, the way this album is arranged and performed is closer to something like Pet Sounds than it is any previous Sun City Girls album. It seems like a mostly instrumental album, but at the same time there are a lot of vocals; another song with clear lead vocals emerges on Side Two, called "Holy Ground," and I can say without hesitation that it is the greatest English-language song this band has ever composed. I mean, it's just that kind of album. I could sit here and draw superlatives from it for probably another 500 words, but I'll stop. All you have to do is go get it, in an LP edition of 500 (Forced Exposure still has some as of this writing, October 24), or in a nice non-jewel case gatefold CD edition of 1000.

2010-09-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

TOP 40

(in no actual order whatsoever except for #1 and #2 which are like a combo pack)

1. TOUCH AND GO: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine ’79–’83, by Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson, Edited by Steve Miller (BAZILLION POINTS). The entire original run of 22 issues, now reprinted in a one very big book. In case you didn't know, this fanzine, the work of two writers Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson, pulled together basically everything that happened in the USA after the Ramones & CBGBs, with the Midwest given its proper place as bands like The Fix and The Necros are covered right along with bands like Black Flag and The Teen Idles. And the UK, Japan, and more are covered too. Anyway, Tesco's so famous that I didn't even really know about the writing of Stimson before getting this book. His low-key pen-name "DS" must not've called too much attention, but now I can see what a great writer this guy was (is?). Plain, tough, honest, and, yes, passionate. Definitely some inspiring stuff here, although as another great music zine writer Jimmy Johnson recently said, "The words in Touch And Go can't be reproduced anywhere in the human language. It's the product of a time and a vantage point that can't be recreated." True, though I'm still ripping off their Top 40 idea for this post... stay tuned next week for the Bottom 40! Aw, forget it, we'll do it right now since it's so obvious: 1. Pitchfork website, 2. Altered Zones website, 3. Best Coast, 4. Best Coast saying "slow my roll" while smoking weed with Freddie Gibbs, 5. Vampire Weekend, 6. MGMT, 7. almost literally any band that sounds like Animal Collective... man, it's gonna be boring to think of 40 of these... oh look, somebody already did it for me! (Actually I like Zola Jesus and Tamaryn alright, and I might even like a couple other bands on that list, but the only other one I've actually heard is Best Coast.)

2. WHY BE SOMETHING THAT YOU'RE NOT: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985, by Tony Rettman (REVELATION RECORDS). I've been reading (and in fact editing and publishing) Tony Rettman's writings on hardcore punk since his January 2002 piece on the Killed by Hardcore LPs basically blew my mind and maybe yours too. Now it's almost a whole decade later and Tony's been busy doing various things, such as writing this definitive history of Detroit and Midwest hardcore. Great read, tons of photos and repros, great companion with the Touch & Go book, etc. Interviews with everybody except Corey Rusk, which isn't as big of an omission as you might think... the story of his involvement in the scene certainly still gets told.

3. THE GORDONS 1st LP. Way into the bass on "Right On Time."

4. FUNKADELIC Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On LP (WESTBOUND). From 1974, possibly their 2nd best album, possibly even their best. "Alice In My Fantasies" and "I'll Stay" double shot just basically destroys everything... and if all Side B filler could be as heavy as "Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts"...

5. TO LIVE IS TO DIE: The Life and Death of Metallica's Cliff Burton, by Joel McIver (JAWBONE PRESS) I don't know if I'd call it a great biography, but this book still does a great job of bringing Cliff to life as a friend, bandmate, and all-around well-adjusted music-lover. Until reading this, I didn't realize just how much his sounds, music, and melodic/harmonic sensibility has inspired me over the years, and how much it is always reverberating deep inside. Also keeping an eye on Jawbone Press... I've gotta read their book A Wizard A True Star: Todd Rundgren In The Studio!

6. METALLICA Kill 'Em All LP (MEGAFORCE)

7. METALLICA Ride The Lightning CD (ELEKTRA)

8. METALLICA Master of Puppets CD (ELEKTRA)

9. EDDIE HAZEL "California Dreamin'" on the stereo at Myopic Books.

10. THE BEATLES Let It Be CD (EMI). New remastered version, impulsively bought by Angelina at the counter of a Casey's General Store in Des Moines, IA during a car trip from Chicago to Omaha. Listened to it about 25 times on said car trip and its return... dude I love "The Long And Winding Road"... Sir Paul thought of it as a Ray Charles type song, which makes me like it even more, and wonder if this exists, and of course it does... definitely not as good as the Beatles, mainly because it's too slow...

11. sweet clutch of un-named ROBERT HOOD tracks on a mix CDR, will research and get back

12. RED FAVORITE s/t LP (STREAMLINE) This was slated for LP release a couple years ago on the Spirit of Orr label, but that ended up being a CDR-only edition of who knows how many, and has now been released on vinyl deservedly but quietly by Drag City's Streamline subsidiary. I got mine for a mere $8.99 used at Reckless, but it's a really fine psych-folk record of stony acoustic guitar dreamscapes augmented by carefully applied vocal support and some far-off ingredients that sound like the world's tiniest mellotrons or something. It's been in the works since 1998, and it indeed sounds very much like that year to me, when people still found out about new bands and even upcoming festivals by reading actual paper (or, for the futuristic, subscribing to the Drone-On list-serv) and the first Six Organs of Admittance LP had just come out of the shrouds of Northern California with hand-painted covers... if you were there, you'll dig the Red Favorite LP.

13. FREE s/t (ISLAND) I feel like bassist Andy Fraser doesn't get talked up enough regarding this band. Not only did he and Rodgers do all the songwriting, but he was also the perfect set-up man for the band's power trio sound... his bass lines grooved hard (the most important thing) but also (via tricky upper-register turnaround melodies) covered tons of arrangement space so that Kossoff and Rodgers could really stretch out their respective wailing styles.

14. UFO Phenomenon LP (CHRYSALIS) Possibly my 2nd-favorite Schenker-family hard rock record of the 1970s. (Right now Virgin Killer is still #1.) I'm not sure if Lights Out has aged as well, but this, UFO's third LP and first with Michael Schenker, still sounds great. For me it's ultimately because of their way with a hard edged folk ballad, especially on my favorite numbers like "Space Child" and the glorious "Crystal Light".

15. This YouTube of a rather feral UFO, live in 1975 on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. Schenker is pretty fantastic in this clip, though Pete Way is a little hard to take with his 'blatantly make love to the lead guitarist' move. I do enjoy the 'laying on back' move, though... he must be totally waysted.

16. CACTUS "Evil, Part One" live clip on YouTube. This should actually be in the Top 5 but I just remembered to put it on here. It was posted on Facebook.com a while ago by sometime Blastitude contributor Charles Lieurance, and it's been haunting me ever since, especially when it gets into Jim McCarty's extendo guitar solo throwdown, backed only by Carmen Appice's increasingly grooving/stomping drums. It starts really getting good around 3:26, and is also particularly unbelievable around the 5:40 mark.

17. PAUL KANTNER & JEFFERSON STARSHIP Blows Against The Empire LP. Got this weirdly heavy album for 4 bucks during a quick nostalgic visit to the most important record store of my life, Kanesville Kollectibles in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Also grabbed TANGERINE DREAM Stratosfear for 4 bucks, which remains a little more oblique at this early stage of listening.

18. BLUE OYSTER CULT "(Don't Fear) The Reaper." Along with all-timers "Vera Gemini," "Morning Final," "Debbie Denise," and new rising fave "True Confessions"... love Allen Lanier's wry lead vocal on that one, his only lead vocal as a member of the Blue Oyster Cult.

19. ALTON ELLIS & THE FLAMES "Cry Tough."

20. TODD RUNDGREN Something/Anything MP3s. Cranked while driving around in the 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The reason I'm not too into this Altered Zones type stuff nowadays is that it had already been completely done by 1974 or so, with actual songs, better playing, and much better recording quality. Sure, you could say that this music is simply the new DIY punk response to bloated corporate art rock, but this stuff is also bloated, intentionally, in all of its possible aesthetic choices, while basically saying "Yeah, but I barely wrote a song and then I recorded it terribly" as its only saving grace.

21. Snack of the week: FUJI APPLES WITH ALMOND BUTTER

22. EPMD Best of Mix by Cosmic Strictly Skillz Kev, and lots more Cosmic Kev elsewhere on the same notably Philly-themed blog...

23. DONNA SUMMER "I Feel Love." Live version... don't miss her doing the Robot and the Queen Tut halfway through... this "Last Dance" is cool too, I think from the same concert... basically the closest I can get to enjoying Broadway show tunes... and here's another great clip of a mixing session with Moroder for the Live and More album (1978)... dig her speaking fluent German...

24. THE CLEAN "Point That Thing Somewhere Else." Live version from Syd's Pink Wiring System.

25. EYEHATEGOD "Take As Needed For Pain." This page has the entire lyrics to this song as "Breast Fed From A Dog/Since The Day I Was Born/Severe Allergic Infektion/Lousy Lust Pimp/Narcotic Induced Hypo-Thermia," and I don't doubt that it's correct, even after listening to the song and not being able to really make out any of them.

26. SEALINGS. Here's a band that's pretty lo-fi, heavy, two guys playing guitar and bass to a drum-machine, song titles including words like "dead," "ghost," and "witch"... Altered Zones should be all over this! Could it be, have I SCOOPED the Zone? Anyway, these guys are from England and yes, they are somewhat lo-fi, but they have actual heavy riffs and strong vocals, so it doesn't matter. Driving and detached ("zoned" out, indeed!) and just melodic enough to remind me at times of... Nirvana? http://www.myspace.com/sealings

27. Chrissy Murderbot's Year of Mixtapes Week 26: Ragga Jungle. Nice spot around the 50-minute mark when heavy Cutty Ranks "Limb By Limb" remix gives way to what sounds like a chopped-in sample from "Live and Learn" by Alton Ellis, or some other Studio One single... and then a few minutes later Dawn Penn's all-time great "You Don't Love Me No No No" makes an even-more-ethereal-than usual appearance.

28. HAWKWIND Space Ritual. "Welcome to the oceans in a labeled can/Welcome to the dehydrated lands/Welcome to the self-police parade/Welcome to the neo-golden age."

29. VARIOUS ARTISTS Greasy Truckers Party. I LOVE BRINSLEY SCHWARZ. (And HAWKWIND.) (And MAN.) (Not so much MAGIC MICHAEL, but sure, why not, him too.)

30. TANGERINE DREAM Frankfurt Universitat 6.19.1971. (live bootleg downloaded from this WFMU page, links may still be active)

31. As always, the first four FAUST albums. Especially the debut, which surprises me every time, for some (wonderful wooden) reason.

32. JOHN COLTRANE Live At The Village Vanguard Again! LP (IMPULSE!) One of the truly sick jazz lineups of all time with Coltrane joined by his wife Alice Coltrane on piano, Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax, long-time bassist Jimmy Garrison, and Rashied Ali on drums. Love the band photo on the cover... what a buncha nerds! Except for Rashied, who looks cool as hell. Anyway, there are two songs on here, old favorites "Naima" and "My Favorite Things," and the band takes them so absurdly out, while remaining so absurdly musical, that it's just mind-scrambling. On "Naima" Pharoah sounds like he's playing his sax inside a giant fishbowl for like six minutes straight. Plus, David S. Ware is on this record... he was in the audience!

33. YAHOWA 13 I'm Gonna Take You Home (from the box set on CAPTAIN TRIP). Wow, no matter how soft your spot may be for the Golden Sunrise album, this is possibly the best Yahowa-related album other than Penetration, and it has a far better cover than Penetration, so you know.... Very raw but well-recorded live power trio jams that actually remind me favorably of their Swedish contemporaries Trad Gras och Stenar. Yod's singing only ruins it in a couple places!

34. DEMDIKE STARE Symbiosis CD (MODERN LOVE) Wow, this is like the 2nd band on here from this decade! I'm getting so contempo! This might even be a "witch house" band, are you with me Altered Zones? Thing is, they are "witch house" without trying, because they're from over there in England, while Altered Zones seems to exclusively promote bands that are really trying hard and have like 7 superimposed triangles per blurry image and/or band logo.

35. TIN MAN Scared LP (WHITE DENIM) Oh hey, this is new too! Also roughly 20 times better than anything ever thought of on Altered Zones. Minimal techno but with completely narco-fogged pop vocals. Like 80s synth pop with a house music twist ... but the vocals are played back at 16 RPM! (Those alt-zoners love it when shit is slowed down! It's totally influenced by DJ Screw! It's just like you've been drankin' dat sizzurp!)

36. SCISSOR GIRLS We Space With Phantoms CD (ATAVISTIC) Released in 1996 but I still can't believe Azita's bass playing, such cool rhythmic patterns over the rock-solid drums by Heather M.

37. INCANTATION Onward To Golgotha CD (RELAPSE). Really good technical but ferocious death metal from John McEntee's long-running Johnstown, PA based band. This is their debut album from 1992, and look how good they still are 17 years later, in this live clip from 2009!

Also, this live in Mexico clip from 2003 has a nice eerie look...

38. DADAWAH Peace & Love LP (DUGOUT) AKA Ras Michael & band, heavy Jamaican album from 1974... don't file under dub, this is deep and slow Nyabinghi-derived groove. Should also actually be #1 on this list.

39. "Regard du Fils sur le Fils" ("Gaze of the Son upon the Son") by Olivier Messiaen. Steven Osborne, piano.

40. LINDSAY BUCKINGHAM "Trouble." I've been in love with this song since I first heard it 29 years ago on the clock radio that sat beside my bed. Drums are by Mick Fleetwood, but according to Wikipedia they only used a 4-second loop for the entire song! I'm actually not sure if that's true listening to it... there are little two-hit pickup fills throughout the song, seemingly in different places. These may have been overdubbed later by someone else, but they sound like Mick's style to me, something he would play live. Either way, I'm not surprised if it is a loop, as the song is such a great example of that subtle new wave technoid feel that was always Buckingham's ace in the hole.

POST-PUNK

2010-08-30T11:52:00.000-07:00

"Clause one: Rough Trade and dot dot dot agree to make records and sell them until either or both of the parties reasonably disagree with the arrangements. Clause two: We agree that once agreed recording, manufacturing, and promotional costs have been deducted, we will share the ensuing prophet equally."

Yeah, that's basically it, the entire manual on How To Fairly Conduct The Music Business. Except that nowadays there aren't that many records to sell. There's still plenty of great music, but I can't see a record company like Rough Trade ever existing again, unless all personal computers suddenly stop working. That's a little cynical, though... couldn't a band still sell 30,000 copies of a record on this level? That's what the "TV O.D. b/w Warm Leatherette" single by The Normal sold. For all I know, maybe Pitchfork-approved bands can still sell 30,000... how many copies has the Best Coast album sold? I guess what I'm really asking is couldn't a GOOD band still sell 30,000 copies of a record on this level?

Anyway, I'm way into all this 1978-1984 stuff right now because I'm reading Simon Reynolds's book Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. I was never really a big Reynolds fan, having read his techno history Generation Ecstasy and various random articles over the years, but this book is just great, gathering up all the stray ends of an amazing time when music exploded with creativity and individuality. Plenty of great descriptions of the music, like this one: "Another Cabaret Voltaire hallmark was the dehumanizing of Mallinder's voice via creepy treatments that made him sound reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being."

So many sweet tunes, like "TV O.D." (better than its more famous B side "Warm Leatherette")...

Thomas Leer "Private Plane"

Desperate Bicycles "Smokescreen"

Cabaret Voltaire "Nag Nag Nag" (so killer!)

Orange Juice "Falling and Laughing"

Scritti Politti "Skank Bloc Bologna"

And last but totally the opposite of least, Public Image Limited doing "Death Disco" live on Top of the Pops in 1979. Keep smilin', Jah....

BEATLES TALK TO PETER SELLERS

2010-08-11T23:35:00.000-07:00

This is actually kind of a creepy vid. If Yoko is a witch at 1:42, delivering a rather desert-dry drug riddle ("shooting is exercise"), well then John and Paul are rather warlocky, John with the harsh drug patter and Paul chiming in with a desert-dry "Too much, Pete" as they seem to want to get rid of Mr. Sellers, who, consummately talented as always, knows when to play the (American-accented) straight man, complete with early exit.

HALTERED GROANS DOT COM presents CHILL PROTO-HYPNAGOGIC BEACH-WAVE FIND #2!

2010-07-31T20:27:00.000-07:00

"TODD IS GODD"

ALTERED BONES DOT COM presents KILLER PROTO-CHILLWAVE FIND!

2010-07-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

Dig these Manuel Gottsching zones, yo...

"SORT BY PLAY COUNT"

2010-05-25T10:47:00.000-07:00

Got a new computer in January and for the last 4 months I've been loading up the iTunes, 1723 songs and counting. I thought I'd post some "Sort By Play Count" rankings because it's actually very accurate to what my favorite tunes have been so far this year, and I like how 4 out of the top 5 all ended up being records by great lady singers of today. Of course, these are not necessarily the albums I've listened to the most because I still listen to lots of LPs and CDs and whatever. Anyway:

1. CELEBRATION Electric Tarot (9)
2. CRAZY DREAMS BAND War Dream (7)
3. KURT VILE He's Alright 7" (7)
4. THE BREEDERS Last Splash (5)
5. GROUPER/ROY MONTGOMERY split (5)

6. (tied with 4 spins each, in alphabetical order) EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING Rush To Relax , JAY TEES & BRENTFORD ROCKERS "Buck Town Version", KURT VILE Childish Prodigy, KURT VILE God Is Saying This To You, KURT VILE Live on WFMU, KURT VILE & THE VIOLATORS The Hunchback EP, LOW THREAT PROFILE s/t, LUNGFISH Pass And Stow, LUNGFISH Sound In Time, NAMELEZZ PROJEKT Winter, Alchool, Benflogin, NO BALLS Come Clean, SARCOFAGO "INRI", SCISSOR GIRLS We People Space With Phantoms, SCORPIONS Fly To The Rainbow, SWELL MAPS A Trip To Marineville, U.S. GIRLS Go Grey, WELTON IRIE & SOUND DIMENSION "Chase Them (Ver.)"

CELEBRATION's Electric Tarot project is an ongoing concept where the band is recording a song for each card of the Tarot deck, and then posting them online for free. When they decide to release an album or EP of the songs, or some of the songs, they will do so on vinyl, and so on... sort of a slowly evolving internet-only concept album, and you can hear and/or download what they've done so far at the website. Sounds cool to me, especially if it keeps leading to beautiful and majestic rock songs like "I Will Not Fall," with its suspended and then surging yearning, beautifully sung by Katrina Ford. I've been clicking on this song over and over... 9 plays on iTunes and several more on YouTube itself, where I first came across it, I think via the indefatigable Arthur Magazine webpresence. Like this:

I definitely got swept up into the new CRAZY DREAMS BAND album, or pulled into its undertow, right when it came out and on through doing the interview for the new ish. Haven't listened to it so much in the last month, just once or twice, but both times it immediately got me right back in the thick of it.

GROUPER's last full-length Dragging a Dead Deer Up A Hill was her best one yet, but the 4 newer (?) songs (aka the Vessel EP) on her side of a split LP with ROY MONTGOMERY are yet another huge leap forward/inward into hushed/chilled quietude... this time mostly backed with solo electric piano? Roy side is also great, a 18-minute in-concert solo guitar raga.

Oh man, THE BREEDERS Last Splash. Can you believe that album? Did you know it went Platinum less than a year from its release date? I wonder if they really made a lot of money with that... we all know record companies aren't necessarily quick to pay... but I digress from the main point, which is that Last Splash is an album of beautiful rock music that a million people have heard. I like it better than Pod (but I do need to revisit Pod). Got it back out to spin "Divine Hammer" a few hundred more times (meaning I guess 5) and I love that song just as much as I ever did. In the process, I remembered how much I also loved every other song too, especially the fever dream free fall opening number "New Year"and the surging, album-framing King Crimson riffage of "Roi" and "Roi (Reprise)." (After all roi does mean king.)

Still lots of KURT VILE getting played around here. What can I say, the songs are as good as the sounds are as good as the songs are as good as the sounds. It doesn't happen as often as you might think. All of his records have been good so far, they really have, and the 7" on the Matador label, released with his Childish Prodigy full-length, really is a perfect three songs... and none of it is on the LP. The A Side, "He's Alright," is included as a bonus track on the CD version, and it's another dreamer in the "Space Forklift" vein, but in a more major key, with lyrics getting into new brotherly places ("The silhouette kid swinging on a swing/Scrapes his knee and blood it brings/He shows his friends he's alive as he brags and he jives... hey/He's alright, he's alright, he's alright.........yeah"). On side 2 we start with one of Vile's trademark Frip Jobs, that is a short interlude for heavily treated electric guitar, and this one, "Farfisas In Falltime," is one of the most beautiful and dense ones yet. Last song is another KV trademark, the wry and sweet solo country-style acoustic number, this one called "Take Your Time." Some fine post-Jansch guitar playing going on here.

Reggae hasn't gotten a huge foothold yet like it has on my old computer's iTunes. But it will. Most played track so far is JAY TEES & BRENTFORD ROCKERS with "Buck Town Version", the B-side of a Studio One 45 release of "Buck Town Corner" by the Jay Tees. Can't find a youtube but maybe this link still works.

My favorite LUNGFISH album is Sound In Time but my favorite song is "The Trap Gets Set" from Pass And Stow. (Actually it might be "To Whom You Were Born" from Sound In Time...)

No idea how the NAMELEZZ PROJEKT got in there but they're a "black metal/alternative" two-man band from Brazil that chooses goofy names for their demos, not to mention their band. I mean, I know where I got the mp3s, I downloaded them on a whim from The Cosmic Hearse, I just don't know how they got ranked so high. Wait, I know why it is... because whenever this weird-ass 21-minute demo comes on shuffle, I never turn it off or jump ahead. Ever. No matter how inept a drum hit, how thin and boring a guitar tone, how meandering the song construction... I just can't turn off their crude 2-man basement riffage. It's entrancing. They really do create a unique sound together. Always trust in the Hearse... for example, one of the best appreciations of Cirith Ungol ever written...

NO BALLS is a Brainbombs side project, I think? Don't have this record, only the mp3s. (I would like to point out that out of the 20 records mentioned above, I do physically own 9 of them, which I think might actually be a high percentage for this day and age.) It's okay, not bad in the Brainbombs' repetition/grind department, but frankly what it seems to be missing is their deadpan shock vocals. Not as good as Coloured Balls, anyway.

I am digging the U.S. GIRLS album. A notable step forward from her first, which was also good. Also dug this interview on Pitchfork... don't miss the embedded video for "Red Ford Radio" -- both song and video are great.

NOT A COINCIDENCE

2010-04-25T22:11:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I'm on the internet and I hear Hank Shocklee say this to the Red Bull Music Academy (starting around the 50 minute mark):

"I'll tell you a really cool trip: Go back and take a cassette, nobody fucks with cassettes any more but you can get some really, really cool distortion effects from cassettes. You take a piece of music, record it on to a cassette, and then distort the shit out of it, and then rerecord that again. That’s a different sound as if you were to go in and put a plug-in on it that had an effect. You are not going to get the same sound. There is a warmth to that distortion that’s there, there is a certain amount of enjoyment that you are going to listen to when you hear that. That’s the reason why rock 'n' roll is not doing very well right now as a music because the compression techniques are not the same."

And then, a mere 10 hours later, I'm reading the wikipedia page on that 1968 song "Jumpin' Jack Flash," by that band the Rolling Stones, from a time when rock'n'roll was doing pretty well. Keith Richards says this about how the song was recorded:

"I used a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic tuned to open D, six string. Open D or open E, which is the same thing - same intervals - but it would be slackened down some for D. Then there was a capo on it, to get that really tight sound. And there was another guitar over the top of that, but tuned to Nashville tuning. I learned that from somebody in George Jones' band in San Antonio in 1964. The high-strung guitar was an acoustic, too. Both acoustics were put through a Philips cassette recorder. Just jam the mic right in the guitar and play it back through an extension speaker."

NOW PLAYING

2010-04-22T21:48:00.000-07:00

V/A Men With Broken Hearts CS, or at least mp3s of it. This is a mix of old country songs released by or with the help of Mississippi Records of Portland, Oregon. Great to hear an earlier version of "Tennessee Stud," a song I previously only knew from its 1994 version by Johnny Cash. Here it's by one Jimmy Driftwood, who as far as I can tell is the writer, and who recorded this in the 50s or early 60s, and who almost sounds like Eugene Chadbourne in his subdued/reverent mode. And it's followed by some proto-Alan Vega drunken reverb yowling from Tex Ritter on "Rye Whiskey" -- hey, that's John Ritter's dad! -- which is followed by the even more deranged "Mule Train," this one by "Tex" (quotation marks theirs) which I can only guess (and hope) is Tex Ritter again... voice sounds the same. And definitely don't miss, just a couple tracks later, Pete Drake's "Forever," a beautiful "talking steel guitar" performance that got up to #22 in 1964, a good decade before Mssrs. Frampton, Walsh, and Perry used the device in a more hard rock setting... speaking of beautiful, it was also Pete Drake who added so much dream tone (sans talk box) to Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay" 2 or 3 years later.

Here's "Forever":

And this is just a reminder:

6/20/10 EDIT: That was supposed to be Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay" from Nashville Skyline, but I guess you'll have to look it up yourself. Or buy the CD. Or a beat-up used copy of the LP for 5-10 bucks. Plenty of people bought the 45 of the song when it came out in July 1969 and went #7 US, #5 UK. Not only did Pete Drake play the pedal steel, but Charlie Daniels himself played bass and guitar on the track. Kenny Buttrey is on drums, and studio janitor Kris Kristofferson held the cowbell for him. Wikipedia also tells me a hilarious story about this song:

Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers has stated in interview that Dylan offered the song to them backstage after an appearance by the duo at the Bottom Line in New York. [citation needed] Phil asked Dylan if he had any new songs that they might record, and answering "yes", Dylan picked up a guitar and proceeded to sing the song so quietly that the Everlys thought they heard Dylan sing "Lay lady lay, lay across my big breasts, babe." Thinking it was a song about lesbians, Don Everly declined the song, saying "thank you, it's a great song, but I don't think we could get away with that." [citation needed] Dylan did not question them about it and went on to record the track himself. Months later, they heard Dylan's version on the radio and realized they'd misunderstood the words. The Everlys felt they'd missed a big opportunity and later recorded the song on their EB 84 album.

2010-04-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

BLASTITUDE #28
NEW ISSUE ONLINE NOW / APRIL 11th, 2010
CRAZY DREAMS BAND / BULBS / M AX NOI MACH / SIKHARA / REVIEWS

2010-03-07T21:26:00.000-08:00

What was I saying about BBC music documentaries? Well, how about...

"Rather than simply using the electronics to be a kind of an amplification for acoustics, we were actually trying to use electronics for their own sake. But without the kind of pretentiousness that tended to be around. I think I was proud that we were the only people who didn't say that we were influenced by Stockhausen." -- Michael Moorcock

"In each provincial town there'd be three or four people who had some kind of access to cannabis, or maybe a bit of LSD, or maybe some form of speed... when Hawkwind played, you'd see those four people right in front of the stage with a look of complete -- you know, just HOME AT LAST." -- Nick Kent

As tipped by WFMU's Beware of the Blog (warning: Samantha Fox content)

WEIRD BAND ALERT continued

2010-03-01T18:44:00.000-08:00

I hadn't seen this before, a trio lineup of Kraftwerk playing a ridiculously heavy version of "Ruckzuck" on German WDR TV in 1970. Ralf Hutter is playing Hammond organ, or is it "a modified electric organ called a tubon (made by Swedish factory Joh Mustad AB)"? Florian Schneider plays the killing flute riff, and someone is doing a fine job keeping up back there on the drums... it's Klaus Dinger, right? (Another website said it was Wolfgang Flur.) When they lose the main groove it gets a little unfocused, but they certainly maintain the punk edge throughout. The crowd looks legitimately stunned, but also appreciative and interested.... and the trio sound is so killer, I initially thought it had been overdubbed later... but I really think it's live...

2010-02-28T19:37:00.000-08:00

Quick shoutout to the BBC Network for making so many good music documentaries. I can't imagine ABC, NBC, CBS, or even the mighty FOX network itself have made any documentaries about the same era of American music that are this consistently good. I don't even think PBS has (but if someone can correct me with some YouTube links please do).

Krautrock:

Synth Britannia:

Prog Rock Britannia:

Jungle:

Here's a bonus embed of part 2 of the Jungle doc, just so you can go to the 2:43 mark and see some serious studio business by an MC whose identity I can't quite figure out other than "Rodney":

Not to mention other awesome shows like Julian Cope's Modern Antiquarian...

and of course...

(not to mention)...

SCORPIONS Virgin Killer

2010-02-25T20:16:00.000-08:00

Thanks iPod shuffle for reminding me that all of those incredible lost 1970s private press hard rock albums that have surfaced on blogs and $19-$41 reissues the last few years may be cool but, at their best, are approximately half as good as Virgin Killer. I've been listening to this album since I was about 14 years old (replacement cover edition, thank god), at which time Duke Wisdom and I became (I'm assuming, probably correctly) the only two residents of Fremont County, Iowa to be full-fledged members of the Cult of Uli Jon Roth. Don't get me wrong, any Dieter Dierks-produced Scorps album is gonna be good... everybody in Fremont County and a lot of other places loved 1980s radio hits like "No One Like You", "The Zoo," and of course "Rock You Like A Hurricane." All fine tunes, and there were many more, but there was just something on fire about 1970s Roth-era Scorps... the tunes were punchier, and the guitar playing was far beyond other fine but notably more lethargic Hendrixians of the day such as Trower and Marino. Check out "Catch Your Train":

P.S. Here's Roth telling the story of how the album's striking title and beyond-dubious original cover came about [via blabbermouth.net]: "The lyrics incidentally were a take-off on KISS, whom we had just supported on a tour. I was fooling around and played the riff of the song in the rehearsal room and spontaneously improvised 'cause he's a virgin killer!' trying to do a more or less way-off-the-mark Paul Stanley impersonation. Klaus immediately said 'that's great! You should do something with it.' Then I had the unenviable task of constructing a meaningful set of lyrics around the title, which I actually managed to do to some degree." C'mon, Klaus... Paul Stanley impersonations are always fun and should be supported when in the practice room, but everybody (except Paul Stanley and the members of KISS) know that they should never be used for actual song ideas... maybe this wasn't yet common knowledge in 1975-1976.

P.P.S. You may already recognize Dieter Dierks as the producer of several krautrock classics... a whopping 13 out of Julian Cope's Top 50.

RIP SHIZUKA MIURA

2010-02-18T20:40:00.000-08:00

I was just now doing the usual hasty three-days catch-up with my Google Reader feed when something made me stop scrolling... a Feb 16 post on the Root Blog referring to a Feb 15 post on the Ongaku Blog about the medication-related death of Shizuka Miura in late January. In this day and age when basically every week seems to bring a flurry of RIP tweets and posts and blogs and retweets of the news of the death of another great soul-touching musician, I couldn't believe that this particular news had taken almost a month to get to me. Her long-running band always was underrated. They were named after her; she played guitar, sang the songs, and was, I think, the principal songwriter. In 1994 they released a CD called Heavenly Persona on the venerable Japan psych label PSF, and during the following year came the album that really knocked my younger self out, Shizuka Live on the Persona Non Grata label. They really didn't have any other official releases, but both of these records are gloriously desultory documents of their blown-out and deeply melancholy acid-ballad sound. A lot of attention will be rightfully given to the beyond-explosive lead guitar by her then-husband and former Fushitsusha member Maki Miura, but it is Shizuka's guitar playing and singing that set the tone of the band absolutely. This video posted by the Ongaku Blog is an excellent example. If the band's stage presence doesn't grab you, just minimize the browser and let the waves wash over.....

GRASS WIDOW

2010-02-14T15:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a couple recent posts on the Kill Rock Stars blog I've been watching a bunch of YouTubes by this band over and over again. This is really entrancing stuff... hard-hitting, fresh and punching rhythms that underpin an ethereal triple-vocal attack. In an interview at the Brontosonix blog they say, "When we were first writing songs in Grass Widow we were like, "Are people gonna like this? These songs feel really good to play-but what does it actually sound like?" There was really no pre-conceived notion of how we wanted to sound. I guess our main focus was pushing the borders of our ability and that is what Grass Widow is."

The video for "Tattoo" is a cool in-the-studio documentary thing, and that live set at the Brooklyn Museum is excellent, with sound that is really present and intense. (Same two vids that KRS posted, but check out the related vids too.)

weird band alert: KRAFTWERK

2009-12-27T00:22:00.000-08:00

2009-12-20T15:15:00.000-08:00

NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE Danny By The River aka Winterlong aka Electric Prayers (BOOTLEG)
PINK FLOYD Animals (COLUMBIA)
BASIC CHANNEL Octagon/Octaedre (BASIC CHANNEL)
EL JESUS DE MAGICO Scalping the Guru (COLUMBUS DISCOUNT)
DON CHERRY Live in Ankara (SONET)
NENEH CHERRY Homebrew (VIRGIN)
DESMOND DEKKER Rockin' Steady: The Best of Desmond Dekker (RHINO)
ERIC B & RAKIM Paid in Full (4TH & BROADWAY)
ANNE BRIGGS s/t (4 MEN WITH BEARDS)
BOB DYLAN Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (COLUMBIA)
BROSELMASCHINE s/t (SPALAX)
COLLIE RYAN The Hour Is Now (SEBASTIAN SPEAKS/YOGA)
ANNE BRIGGS s/t (4 MEN WITH BEARDS)
NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (REPRISE)

The Neil Young & Crazy Horse show is from 1969 in Cincinnati, the then-standard opening solo set by Neil followed by the then-standard closing electric set by the original quartet of Neil on guitar, Danny Whitten on guitar, ~~Ralph Talbot~~ Billy Talbot on bass, ~~Billy Molina~~ Ralph Molina on drums, all four on vocals, and I'm surprised to find that this is the second Crazy Horse bootleg in a row where I've preferred the acoustic set to the electric. I mean, it's still a good listen with plenty of good jamming, but for laser-beam live-band interplay you still can't beat the studio takes on the Everybody Knows LP. Sometimes that's just the way it is. On that night in Cincinnati "Down By The River" was 19 minutes long, which is maybe a few minutes too long, and nowhere do Whitten's rhythm guitar stabs snap the whole band to breathtaking attention like they did in at least two places on the LP version. Gonna have to put that one on later, as well as conduct further research on various other live NY hypotheses....

I can't let go of the El Jesus De Magico album, or maybe it won't let go of me. I never quite 'get it' when it's on or quite 'remember it' when it's over, and I'd even go so far as to call it 'uneven'... but yet there remains something really compellingly despondent about its slow-grinding, jammy, psyched-out grooves.

Wow, the iPod shuffle played a 1978 album by Don Cherry and followed it with a 1992 album by his stepdaughter Neneh Cherry. Both albums are terrific, the one by Don an easily overlooked live set recorded in 1969 at the US Embassy in Ankara (Turkey), with a local rhythm section, which is pretty cool when the drummer turns out to be the thunderous Ofay Temiz. Side two is really cool, all tunes segued, some spacy jamming on various Turkish folk themes giving way to a Cherry composition that gives way to a sweet version of "The Creator Has A Master Plan" (always good to hear Don sing) that gives way to a definitive DC two-flutes-at-once coda called "Two Flutes." As for the Neneh album, it was the thoughtful and delayed follow-up to her big-selling1989 debut Raw Like Sushi. I've been listening to it since the year it came out, and I still love every song, even when she and Michael Stipe himself fist-pump their way through "Trout," the ultimate show of Lollapalooza Nation camaraderie. Stipe is actually straight-up rapping on this one and I don't even care, it just makes me want to get a smart drink and check out information tables in a chill-out tent.

Having a nice evening with Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, which I just might be ready to declare the 4th-most-underrated Dylan album of all time. It first shuffled up at about 4:45PM, right as I was getting off the train and walking over to the grocery store, opening with a sweet ten minutes or so of instrumental three-chord tone-poem played by combinations of Dylan, Roger McGuinn, and Bruce Langhorne on guitars, with none other than Booker T. from the MGs on bass. And of course "Billy" is a great song in all its iterations, and of course "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" is one of the greatest of all songs, and hearing this stuff reminds me that I can check out the director's cut of the movie sometime soon, which is a nice feeling... James Coburn's finest hour...

Broselmaschine album remains incredibly deep... don't miss the track 7 "Schmittergung" with its near 10-minute kosmische spoken word extensions.

If you were wondering, the list of albums at the top of this post is of the albums I listened to today, in order. The first eight came up continuously in one iPod album shuffle playing session, but after Eric B & Rakim I broke shuffle and played the sublime 1971 full-length debut Anne Briggs album because I overheard a co-worker upstairs playing it in passing and wanted to hear the whole thing back in my office downstairs. And now, after playing the Briggs once, and then starting the iPod back up a couple hours later with a fresh album shuffle, it has gone right into four more early 1970s folk albums, right in a row: first Dylan (1973), then Broselmaschine (1971), then Collie Ryan (1973), and then the fourth one being the Briggs album again! Okay, I'll call the Don Cherry > Neneh Cherry sequence a fluke, but this has gotta be taste-recognition software, right?

2009-12-20T09:46:00.000-08:00

CONQUEROR Hammer of Antichrist (FIFTH DIVISION)
SUN CITY GIRLS Tibetan Jazz 666 (CLOAVEN CASSETTES)
GUNS & ROSES Use Your Illusion II (GEFFEN)
VIV Sea Shells Listening (PEBBLE)
COSMIC JOKERS s/t (SPALAX)
THE YOUNGER GENERATION "We Rap More Mellow" (BRASS)
SEQUENCE "Funk You Up" (SUGAR HILL)

Still mostly bored with black metal, but there is something about Canada (see also Wold), which would after all be an appropriate musical heir to Norway, another resource-rich decadent suburban caucasian lifestyle happening on the next harsh-but-lush wintry continental shelf just 3000 miles across the pond, and it was with these heavy latitudinal thoughts of the climes of the great northern earthen pole in mind that I had a good listen to the Hammer of Antichrist CD by the Canadian "BESTIAL BLACK DEATH DEVASTATION!!!!" metal band Conqueror just this morning. The disc compiles two of their records, the War Cult Supremacy full-length from 1999 and the Antichrist Superiority demo from 1996. War Cult Supremacy has a better recording and is a powerful album, but I just don't think the riff onslaught trances out as much as it does on Antichrist Superiority, and yes, it's probably because it's easier for me to get lost in the grimy depths of demo fidelity. Either way, it has an overall raw and hungry surging power where the full-length sounds just a little more clinical and well-fed.

Put on Use Your Illusion II just to hear opening track "Civil War" and took it off soon after... the Izzy Stradlin tune is okay, though not as good as the stuff on the Ju Ju Hounds album... I love "Yesterdays," but after that was just not in the mood to sit through the Dylan cover, even if the delirium of "Get In The Ring" did await on the other side....

That's Sea Shells Listening by VIV in the upper right, image from Sound Projector magazine)

VIV is a group from the Brighton, England area... they sent a 3" CDR two or three years ago (under the name of Vole) and it was good and fresh-sounding improvised music, essentially free jazz but with a strong folk and prog undercurrent, a group tone that has come even further to the fore on this superb new full-length called Sea Shell Listening. Standard instruments like saxophones and drumkit mix uniquely with marimba, tapes and electronics, folk-style acoustic guitar, and other intangibles for big long tunes that are in fact mostly swells of dynamics and tone, certainly as close as anyone else has gotten to late-period Talk Talk playing the sound of strong flower petals breathing quietly after a thunderstorm.....

The debut album by the Cosmic Jokers is about as deep into pure ambience as 1971 kosmiche rock got while still sounding like a rock band (i.e. keys, guitars, bass, and drums, sometimes even vocals), more specifically a mean rock band... not overtly, but it's in there... with German rock, no matter how beautiful or celestial, the meanness comes via a certain starkness of instrumentation and tone.

I'd never heard of this The Younger Generation 12" before but it's from 1979 and features Cowboy, Kid Creole, Melle Mel, Mr. Ness, and Rahiem (aka The Furious Five without Grandmaster Flash being mentioned on the label, although he is mentioned in the lyrics). Melle Mel sez: "Rap like hell and make it sound like heaven." Sequence song is also a slammer, take it from someone who knows...

EEEEEEEE RECORDS

2009-11-20T11:01:00.000-08:00

At first I thought it was another nondescript underground paste-on CDR noise label, but upon closer inspection of the xeroxed pasted-on artwork (and a clarifying e-mail from the label CEO) it became apparent that EEEEEEEE (that's 8 capital E's to be EEEEEEEExact) is a reissue label, digging up obscure cassette-only underground stuff from the 1980s and giving it a new strange life.

First disc I put in was by Exploding Head Trick, described as a Rock In Opposition band from Minneapolis, extant from roughly 1986 to 1993... now there's an undocumented slice of musical history. I've never really understood R.I.O... I've barely even listened to Henry Cow... I've never even read the R.I.O. wikipedia page. You might even say that I've always been in opposition to Rock In Opposition, which may be why Exploding Head Trick sometimes sounds to me less a part of an important lineage in Progressive Rock History, and more like they're in some sort of "all about science" musical that my kids might go to. It's mostly in the earnest vocal melodies sung by the main guy, but also the incredibly perky 1980s instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and prog violin by the main lady, who also sings some nice Cocteau Twins style arias here and there). That said, the instrumental musical interplay can get surprisingly complex and even excitingly raw. I've listened to it three times already so it's certainly not terrible... but I still don't understand Rock In Opposition.

Next on the stereo was Face In The Crowd and a reish of their 1985 cassette Sax And Drums And Rock And Roll, which the EEEEEEEE website promotes as part of the UK DIY movement, but I don't know.... just because it's post-punk and a British band is doing it (itself) doesn't automatically mean the music is essential listening. Other than weirder saxophone and some dirgier songs, this kind of sounds like a run-of-the-mill angry pub rock band to me. And maybe that suits them fine, except the "run-of-the-mill" part. I think it's a recording of a gig, kind of a boomy audience recording quality... again, not bad, cool artwork too (pictured at the top), and it does keep the label roster unpredictable, but it's probably my least favorite of the bunch. See for yourself, the whole album is available for download via the label website.

Actually, at least part of me would say that the most ambitious EEEEEEEE release, the Girls On Fire 5-disc anthology Girls Who Grew Up To Be Arts Administrators, The GOF Story Vol. 1-5 is my least favorite, which is funny because the label CEO thought that it "may be the most Blastitudinous" of his releases. Why do people think I only like the weirdest stuff? Hmm, maybe it's because I've been posting reviews of really weird music on the internet for almost a decade... either way I would definitely call it the hardest to listen to in its entirety, and not just because it's 5 discs. Girls On Fire is the work of Leslie Singer, who was a founding member of DC band Psychodrama and later decamped to San Francisco where she recorded and released five cassettes of her varied rants, over guitar tweak-out (I Think About Jackson Pollock), intricate and relentless drum machine terror (In My Blood), outright sheets of noise (Confessions Of A Shit Addict), and more (the other two discs I haven't listened to yet). Those descriptions might make it sound more listenable than it may actually be, as the ranting is pretty constant and the music rarely gets to breathe on its own, but with five long and involved releases that came out from 1983 to 1985, the Girls On Film oeuvre is no slouch in the history of solo power electronics.

As for my FAVORITE of the EEEEEEEE bunch, it's gotta be the album by Harry Zantey, hardcore industrial solo EMS synth,"recorded live, one take, no overdubs," and released waaaay back in 1981 in Australia. He was a member of the original Sydney-based 1970s lineup of Crime and the City Solution, but this is a lot heavier, scorching and dark stuff.

And my second favorite has gotta be the 1986 cassette by Sons of Bitches. Synth industrial nerd weirdness from Providence, Rhode Island. You can't help mentioning Ralph Records when describing this because of the synth sounds and sardonic approach, and these guys are vocally and textually even dorkier than the Residents. Thing is, they do it in a very musically interesting way. The vocals are not of central importance, and they know the secret of good synth/industrial/noise music; that it must not only contain the sound, but be aware of the silence on the other side of it. There is a novelty pop feel that may be too much for some, with totally silly keyboard tones plinking away while a guy named Oblivion David Stomach grumbles in a joke grumpy voice about syphilis and other stuff, but it's a surprisingly varied album, with a lot of extended instrumental forays, so stick with it. It also made me think of The Terrifying Sickos... first time a record has done THAT in, well, ever. (Probably because I read about them earlier today in a Hattiesburg, MS scene report WFMU blog post by DJ Brian Turner.)

Anyway, get in touch at http://EEEEplusEEEE.bravehost.com if you'd like to check this stuff out.

OTHER HITS OF TODAY:
RICHARD YOUNGS Beyond The Valley Of The Ultrahits (SONIC OYSTER)
HAIR POLICE Strict 7" (TROUBLEMAN UNLIMITED)
MICHAEL MAYER Immer (KOMPAKT)
KEITH JARRETT Dmitri Shostakovich: 24 Preludes & Fugues op. 87 (ECM)
EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING Primary Colours (AARGHT!/GONER)
CONQUEROR Hammer of Antichrist (FIFTH DIVISION)
JUAVVES "Muy Aburrido" ("Sounds Like: if you were to like smoke weed then go surf and like while you're on top of a sick wavve you were to take a sick bong rip and smoke more weed.")

2009-10-19T06:05:00.000-07:00

J.J. CALE Naturally (SHELTER)
FATHER YOD AND THE SPIRIT OF '76 Kohoutek (CAPTAIN TRIP)

Love J.J. Cale, here with his 1971 debut album, featuring songs that were better-known through inferior cover versions, like "Call Me The Breeze" and "After Midnight." My favorite song right now is the honey-sweet ballad "Magnolia."

Here's a sweet live version that seems to be from sometime in the 1980s...
all hail The Tulsa Sound...

The debut album by Father Yod and company is frustrating. The instrumental work on it is pretty great, featuring the long-running Djin/Sunflower/Octavius gtr/bs/drums trio augmented by excellent keyboards and surprisingly accomplished R&B-style female backing vocals. Ah, but then there's the singing/preaching of Father Yod, crashing through all of that atmosphere about 2.8 times louder than the rest of the band combined. Believe me, I have a lot of respect for the man and his teachings, I just wish he had some volume control. I think progressive.homestead.com says it best: A little bit 'incredible strange' or over the top of odd singing vocals, not always with the best voice in an improvisational manner.

2009-10-18T18:59:00.001-07:00

VARIOUS ARTISTS The Smithsonian Anthology Of American Folk Music (SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS)
HORNER PARK JAZZ BAND live at Horner Park, Chicago
KURT VILE Childish Prodigy (MATADOR)
MUDBOY Mort Aux Vaches (STAALPLAAT)
TELEVISION #3 ("Little Johnny Jewel" 7" & assorted demos, bootleg) (CHICAGO MEDICAL SOCIETY)

"Kassie Jones" by Furry Lewis seems like it's 10 minutes long, with a totally circular feel as the guitar part cycles and lyrics come and go, always changing while the rhythm stays the same, occasionally landing on a refrain ("On the road again... I'm a natural born Eastman on the road again") while interesting little chestnuts bubble in and out of consciousness. ("I ain't good lookin' but I take my time" . . . "Memphis women don't wear no shoes" . . . "Gonna shake it like Cheney did, like Cheney did.") It is over 6 minutes long, which makes it the longest song on the Anthology, I think. Here's the first half of it:

And here's a version he did 40 years later:

The Horner Park Jazz Band, a 14-or-so piece big band of all kinds of delightfully casual veteran amateur musicians, really made my day today at a fall/harvest/pumpkin type festival in Chicago's own Horner Park. Two guitars (one lady who strummed chords the whole set, couldn't really hear her, and a guy who played some sweet leads here and there), plenty of brass (including crucial baritone sax), a guy playing a well-miked piano that had been wheeled outdoors... I would say the (excellent) drummer was a good 70 years old, and the kit he was playing might've been even older... honestly, hearing them interpret swing classics reminded me of a Sun Ra band doing the same, the better players carrying along the lesser players with a lot of soul/spirit/fun.

New Mudboy album is a good one, to these ears his most solid long-player yet. Does not come across as a solo keyboard album quite as much as This Is Folk Music did, but yet still hits hard with plenty of heavy solo organ. A couple quirk-threatening 'carnival' moments, or at least one early on, but he stays the course with focused material, does some interestingly evil-sounding things with heavy vocal breathing, and then builds that bridge from the 1960s to the 2000s with pulsing celestial monochord zone-out for most of the last half of the album. Comes in an tri-hinge plywood deal. (Oh, I guess Mort Aux Vaches is a series Staalplaat releases in collaboration with the Dutch radio station VPRO. The name is French for "Death to Cows," which is the French equivalent to "Fuck the Pigs" and it comes from May 1968.)

Speaking of casual, still can't believe how casual Television's 1975 debut record "Little Johnny Jewel Parts One and Two" was and is. And how much great jamming it exudes regardless.

DON CHERRY 1978 Swedish Documentary

2009-10-17T20:32:00.001-07:00

2009-10-17T18:20:00.000-07:00

POPOL VUH In Den Garten Pharaos (THINK PROGRESSIVE)
TRAD GRAS OCH STENAR Mors Mors (1/2 SPECIAL)
PINK FLOYD The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (CAPITOL)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Siamese Soul - Thai Pop Spectacular Vol. 2 (SUBLIME FREQUENCIES)
GRATEFUL DEAD Two From The Vault (GRATEFUL DEAD RECORDS)
TOWER RECORDINGS The Galaxies' Incredibly Sensual Transmission Field Of The Tower Recordings (COMMUNION)

For some reason I think I still prefer the early synth/percussion duo Popol Vuh albums (Affenstunde and In Den Garten Pharaos) to the devotional rock/chamber music albums with guitars and Djong Yun on vocals (like Hosianna Mantra and Einsjager & Siebenjager). Here, let's have a little battle of the bands:

VS.

2009-10-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

TOM KARLSSON: Pojknacke LP (LYSTRING) Not sure where this LP is from, but it came fairly anonymously, in a stark white gatefold sleeve adorned with meticulously repellent hand-drawn artwork, at least on the inside sleeve and the labels, and I kind of wanted to listen to it once and get it out of the house... but the music is excellent. Having lost the one-sheet, I was thinking it was an album by sort of mysterious harsh industrial/power electronics band or project called Pojknacke, but the internet tells me that Pojknacke is the title, and the artist (musical and presumably visual) is actually Tom Karlsson. Hey, at least he was helpful enough to draw "A" and "B" as part of his label art, no one does that anymore! (And his name is on the spine, along with title and label, I just hadn't checked yet.) Anyway, this really is some sort of early-style harsh industrial album, but with a welcome profusion of quiet space, room for some jarring off-kilter samples, obscure but agitated European speaking voices that may even be samples themselves but mostly probably not... eventually some serious subtle (on side B not so subtle) heavy avant-rock improvisational jamming... a couple out-and-out tunes with goofy ranting punk vocals... it doesn't all work equally well, and it's maybe 10 minutes too long, but it's still really good.

2009-10-16T05:53:00.000-07:00

VOID Live at the 9:30 Club
TOWER RECORDINGS Furniture Music For Evening Shuttles (SILTBREEZE)
BLANK DOGS Mirror Lights (DRONE ERRANT)
ROXY MUSIC Stranded (VIRGIN)
ARBOREA s/t (FIRE MUSEUM)
MORBID December Moon demo
DON CHERRY Eternal Rhythm (MPS)
DUTCHESS AND THE DUKE She's The Dutchess, He's The Duke (HARDLY ART)
RUSTED SHUT Hot Sex (DULL KNIFE)
TERRY RILEY Persian Surgery Dervishes (MANTRA)
BOB DYLAN Self Portrait (COLUMBIA)
DIALING IN The Islamic Problem (MUSIC FELLOWSHIP)
TOM KARLSSON Pojknacke (LYSTRING)
ENUMCLAW Opening of the Dawn (HONEYMOON MUSIC)

Having the Tower Recordings album come up on shuffle this morning was quite synchronicitous (if that's a word), as just the other night at the Kurt Vile show the Os Mutantes song "Delmak-O" came over the PA in between bands, and as its lovely tones and incongruous mid-song raveup emerged through the bar noise I remembered what a great song it was, literally the only Os Mutantes song I've ever liked, and how I was introduced to it in 1998 by a Tower Recordings cover version, track two of the Furniture Music album, and how I should pull that album out and listen to it for the first time in years. Well hey, thanks iPod, no pulling necessary... but it's funny about Tower, I did listen to their Fraternity of Moonwalkers album a couple times recently, and it didn't really hold up for me. In the mid-late 90s, when I listened to it a lot, it was pretty exciting, I guess because Matt Valentine was, as Dave Keenan would have it, "inventing free folk"... still, MV then was more of a sketch artist, a ringleader, a sweet guitar player, but not exactly a strong tunesmith, not the kind of guy who takes hold of a song and stuffs it into your soul, more like a guy who makes cool flickering patterns when you close your eyes. Which is cool, but not too deep or heavy, and to me it hasn't stood the test of time. This is still their best album though, or 2nd best behind their would-be swan-song big-band six-song jam-out released on LP and CD in 2004 as The Galaxies' Incredibly Sensual Transmission Field Of The Tower Recordings.

Okay, okay, I enjoyed this Blank Dogs cassette EP alright. It ended 45 seconds ago, and I think I can still remember how one of the songs went, which is a first.

I love it when I'm listening to a Roxy Music album and random Bryan Ferry lyrics pop out like "Through silken waters my gondola slides/and the bridge... it sighs." Not to mention, "Tous ces moments/Perdus dans l`enchantement/Qui ne reviendront/Au Jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais..."

Arborea album is still holding up very well. Eerie husband & wife folk music from Maine.

May not've checked out Dutchess & the Duke but the main Termbo guy was so genuine in his year-end love for their debut album that I went ahead and did it. I don't think I'll ever like it that much, but there is some undeniably good songwriting here, however indebted to Jagger and Davies it might be. The "You fucked me in a phonebooth" hook really works. Haven't heard their new album, Sunrise/Sunset, which came out last month.

Brief thoughts on a few more new records... Dialing In is one Seattle woman doing some field recordings/loops/pedals/vocals overlays with a wild dark atmosphere, powerful and interesting but also kind of all over the place and confusing. For example, I'd like to tell you the name of one really good track with this grinding looping low-end, and I think it's on side B, but the sides don't have any text on the labels, or even "A" and "B" in the run-out etchings, and both sides appear to have 3 tracks (judging from banding) but there are 7 titles listed on the sleeve... so I really don't know what the track is... that's what I mean by confusing. But it's 'good confusing' enough that I want to listen again. [Though it's now a couple months later and I can't say that I have - ed.] The Tom Karlsson LP is really good, rather disturbing, and reviewed elsewhere. Enumclaw is a member of the Philly synth/kosmische band Niagara Falls playing solo. His LP, like the parent band, is extremely faithful to its inspiration, which is 1970s synth-based German cosmic music, no more, no less. So still no points for originality, but the album does get some for beauty, with long tracks that sit in a nice simple compositional space that's a little more tranquil, direct, and memorable than the most recent Niagara Falls LP, Sequence of Prophets.

2009-10-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

PUBLIC ENEMY Fear of a Black Planet (DEF JAM)
CLOUDLAND CANYON/MYTHICAL BEAST split (NOT NOT FUN)
VALET Blood Is Clean (KRANKY)
AFRIKA BAMBAATA & THE JAZZY 5 "Jazzy Sensation (Bronx Version)" (TOMMY BOY)
USTAD AMJAD ALI KHAN Indian Classical Maestros Vol. 2, Sarod (KITCHENS OF INDIA/VIRGIN)
CREAM Strange Brew: The Very Best of Cream (POLYDOR)
BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE II The Globe (COLUMBIA)
THE FROGS My Daughter The Broad (MATADOR)
OUTKAST "Phobia"
PAVEMENT "The Unseen Power Of The Picket Fence"
BEASTIE BOYS "It's The New Style (live)"
ABBEY LINCOLN "You And I"
ORNETTE COLEMAN "The Alchemy Of Scott LaFaro"

Side B of Fear of a Black Planet, at least Side B on the cassette, is such a serious run of burners. Super experimental helter-skelter Bomb Squad madness but still completely slamming.

Was impressed by the Silver-Tongued Sisyphus 12", and here's another nice head-turner of a track by Cloudland Canyon, uniquely wispy cosmic drone with eerie/airy vocals. I was a little surprised by the other side of the split, on which Mythical Beast kinda sound like Sinead O'Connor replacing Jean Smith in Mecca Normal to sing a heartfelt ballad. I was also surprised that I kinda liked it!

"Uniquely wispy cosmic drone with eerie/airy vocals" describes the Valet stuff pretty well too... also a haunting, intriguing, not-run-of-the-mill drone/song album. Kind of has a more digital than analog edge to it, with the song aspect emerging in surprising ways.

Listening to the sweet old-school hip-hop breakdown in the middle of Afrika Bambaata & the Jazzy 5's "Jazzy Sensation (Bronx Version)" got me and co-worker talking about how such breakdowns might be a disappearing art, which turned into a bit of a "kids these days" rant, about how contemporary hip-hop is so wall-to-wall produced, with excitement/energy/breathlessness/showbiz/compression, that nothing as casual as a breakdown can ever happen again... we decided that "It takes patience and humility to play a breakdown." (I actually said this.) Of course, maybe there's tons of sweet breakdowns in contemporary hip-hop... ultimately I just don't listen to enough of it to say. Haven't even listened to the latest Raekwon or Ghostface albums.

Anyone else peep these CDs that came for free with the grocery store purchase of delicious microwavable Indian food on the Kitchens of India label? Virgin Records has their name on the CDs, and the music is incredibly choice... it all sounds like it was recorded a while back, before MIDI and Pro Tools, before hip hop and techno and pop hybridization, just straight classical music played masterfully on acoustic instruments. Not sure exactly when it was recorded, but there is this on the fine print of this particular CD: "C & P 1996 N A Classical Audio Cassette Co. Mfg in India by: Jet Speed Audio Pvt. Ltd. 111, 7 Udyog Nagar, S.V. Road, Goregaon (West), Mumbai - 63." Looks like they were hitting the cassette vendors, Sublime Frequencies-style.

Heavy line: "I'll stay with you 'til my seas are dried up." Goes well with heavy riff. And whoah, check this out, I feel like I'm at a really good (and well dressed) Cream practice:

The Globe by Big Audio Dynamite II is such a guilt-free guilty pleasure, that somehow holds up very well in 2009. Wait, I know how: good tunes, fun experiments. Everything Sandinista was too out of shape to get to is on here. I never got into the Happy Mondays at all but I sure like it when Mick Jones tries to be them.

Co-worker dusted off The Frogs My Daughter The Broad but I can't really talk about it right now. Suffice to say that I can't believe how much we still lol'd at just about every song. What I'd really like to mention is the sweet mix-tape I made 12 years ago to round out Side B, after the 5 or 6 Frogs songs it took to get the whole album on a C90. Incredible opening with literally the only good thing about the entire Higher Learning movie, the song "Phobia" by Outkast from its soundtrack. Here's a youtube... check out the intense spoken intro and then the way that beat finally drops in at 1:23 underneath Andre's funky-ass creepazoid rapping. This ain't "Hey Ya"... I was actually scared of him then.

Followed that up with this humorous Pavement classic... I must've been cleaning out good tracks on otherwise lame comps, looking for an alternative to No Alternative. I'm not a huge Pavement fan, couldn't care less about this upcoming reunion or whatever, but I always liked 'em fine and not only do I still chuckle at this song, more importantly the guitars sound awesome.

Yep, the comp theory is correct, as the slammin' live Beastie Boys song is ~~from some Free Tibet benefit type thing~~ also from No Alternative, and the Abbey Lincoln cut is a wonderful Stevie Wonder cover from this 1992 Enja Records compilation. This all comes from working in a record store that had a lot of promos laying around in the early 90s. The Ornette track isn't from an otherwise lame compilation, I just put it on here because it's bonkers, recorded in 1961 by Coleman/Cherry/Lafaro/Blackwell.

Oh, here's that Beastie Boys track, it's awesome.

2009-10-14T21:17:00.000-07:00

We'd go and check out the Rasta sound systems, and the message to us, which we heard through sound systems like Jah Shaka, Moa Ambessa, Coxsonne was so compelling that my political and spiritual consciousness was increasing. We'd hear these messages in the music through sound system, and we'd want to go and check them out deeply, seriously. This is what roots and culture does, it's literally, musical reportage, African talking drum culture transported within the inner cities, Griot culture. Sound system has this way of IMPARTING INFORMATION, informing, spiritually, politically, culturally. It raises awareness in all these ways, and as young black British guys, we were especially sensitive to these messages, these modes of communication. I have to say, the young white kids, the punks were very open to it too. We had our strong messages in the music, "Burn down Babylon" "Dub down Ian Smith rock", "Babylon fall", "Wicked man drop", and the punks had their own strong message too, so there was a common ground in these respects. Listen to those early Pistols tunes: Both were interested in some kind of destruction and regeneration, a reinterpretation of the "reality" that had been presented to us.

from Don Letts interview at 3AM Magazine

2009-10-14T06:01:00.001-07:00

DARKTHRONE Ravishing Grimness (MOONFOG PRODUCTIONS)
SUN CITY GIRLS The Handsome Stranger (ABDUCTION RECORDS)
CIRITH UNGOL Frost and Fire (LIQUID FLAMES)
ASH RA TEMPEL Best of the Best of the Private Tapes (FM SHADES)
REACTION BAND on YouTube
THE OUTLAWS "Green Grass & High Tides" (ARISTA)
all JOHN FAHEY on shuffle
KURT VILE Childish Prodigy (MATADOR)
all KURT VILE on shuffle

Ravishing Grimness was the first Darkthrone album I heard, and now, almost ten years later, it might just have turned out to be my favorite of theirs, which means that it's more or less one of my favorite of all black metal albums. I realize that's a controversial opinion... this album probably isn't even considered black metal... where's the style police when you need them? Anyway, it's got epic tunes, most of them up around 6 and 7 minutes in length, and most importantly with a rock-solid and simple low-end riff approach as opposed to the tinnier tremelo-picked atmospheres of some of their other releases (and black metal in general).

Frost and Fire is the debut LP by Cirith Ungol, self-released in 1981. It's good, but not as doomy overall as their 2nd album King of the Dead. In fact, there's a post-Aerosmith proto-G&R rat-skank funk-metal undercurrent on this one, at least in a couple places, most egregiously track 6 "Better Off Dead." Not that there's anything wrong with that... and there are other good and better tunes on here, too ("Frost and Fire" and "I'm Alive" are great crawling Tim Baker screech-power anthems), but even with the 7-minute absurdly-titled two-guitar instrumental ballad "Maybe That's Why" being a particularly nice, gross, and uncalled-for album closer, it is still the King of the Dead that reigns supreme.

DC Go Go music doesn't really make it out of the DMV (that's D.C./Maryland/Virginia, I read it on urbandictionary.com)... here in the Midwest you have to go and seek it out. Last time I checked in was 2002, when this documentary called The Pocket, made by a couple DC hardcore/indie guys, played at the Gene Siskel Film Center... I don't think it's on DVD. It was a pretty good film, though next time I'd like to see more music and less Rollins and Mackaye... you know, "less talk, more rock." What I remember from the few occasions where a performance clip broke the 2 minute mark was something a lot different than the upbeat and bouncy EU/Trouble Funk stuff that made brief pop-chart appearances in the 80s, more like a lumbering beast emerging from shadows like an unholy cross between rap music and stoner metal with absolutely nothing to do with the Judgment Night soundtrack. Maybe it somehow came from the same place DJ Screw was coming from when he slowed hip-hop down into a dark dank beast around the same time in Houston. Tonight I was thinking about that sound (still haunting me 7 years later) and started poking around for it on YouTube, and got into this Reaction Band stuff, which is going on right now, and it's even crazier, that world's-slowest-steamroller feel developed into something progressive and symphonic, like an epic pop music, without sacrificing any of the brutality. Forget any kind of hip-hop related head-nod backbeat, groove or tempo, this is surging music with a life of its own that seems to follow the heavy chanting and swaggering of the vocalists. Throw in all the percussion that has always marked the style, heavy psychedelic echo on the mics, over the top church/soul singing shot through with super-raw sex lyrics, cinematic keyboard interludes (and sharp horn-section stabs once the rhythm gets going), an uncanny ability to layer tempos (double-time bounce on top for the dance floor and that monstrous half-time underneath, really a doom backbeat if there ever was one, for working the room), and then take it all to the stage, "every Friday night":

Love this "swag beat" with the flute hook, it surfaces throughout the Le Pearl vids... kinda reminds me of Kraftwerk "Ruckzuck"!

For some reason I have "Green Grass & High Tides" on my iPod, and nothing else by The Outlaws. Wait I know why, it's because the song rules. During my youth I always appreciated when this song came on late-night deep-cut classic-rock radio out of Omaha. Hell, I always appreciated it when ANY song longer than 9 minutes came on the radio. Still do, on any station, anywhere.

As I previewed in yesterday's post, seeing Kurt Vile & the Violators live last night really got the Childish Prodigy album to click for me today. I was already coming around to it, as early as the second listen, but man, now it just sounds perfect, from the slow, bellowing new version of "Hunchback" that opens it (including the lines "slither up just like a snake upon a spiral staircase," borrowed from another Kurt song "Beach on the Moon," which is itself a melancholy solo reworking of Kurt klassik "Freeway"... what kind of fractured mosaic is this guy putting together?), to the weird fingerpicking shouter "Dead Alive" that follows it ("You tell me a good man is hard to find, what was that??! YOU BETTER REWIND!!!!") to the lovely "Overnite Religion" and it's Jimmy Page undercurrent (an overcurrent in this performance), to the epic trance anthem live favorite (and debut video!) "Freak Train," to another Zeppelin III style solo ballad called "Blackberry Song," to the rather gloriously shoegazey Dim Stars cover "Monkey" (never heard the Dim Stars, always thought it would be more aggro than this), to "Heart Attack" which opened last night's show so well, to "Amplifier" (more Zep 3, this time with some of that trumpet he didn't dump), and then the key late-album head-turner, the 6-minute plus "Inside Lookin' Out," which floats the album home on a Bo Diddley-beat magic carpet, powered by Trbovich's spacey harmonica and Vile's serious blues shouting. The way he sings "GOT THE BLUES SO BAD!!!!!" and how well it works makes me wonder how Vice Magazine could call this album "blues rock" as an insult.

RIP DICKIE PETERSON

2009-10-13T17:03:00.000-07:00

Like King Coffey sez "The man invented psychedelic punk." And as classic as Vincebus Eruptum is, Outsideinside is even better.

2009-10-13T16:57:00.000-07:00

JEFFERSON AIRPLANE Surrealistic Pillow (RCA VICTOR)
SILOAH Sukram Gurk (GARDEN OF DELIGHTS)
SUN RA The Antique Blacks (SATURN)
KURT VILE & THE VIOLATORS/THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING/PLASTIC CRIMEWAVE/KEN CAMDEN live at the Empty Bottle, Chicago

"Comin' Back To Me" is such a great forlorn psych folk tune. Really love Surrealistic Pillow, from top to bottom, ever since I bought it for a dollar back in the mid-80s... I was not a hardcore kid... After Bathing At Baxter's may be 2nd best, but I don't think it comes close, it's like saying Radio Ethiopia is better than Horses just because it's weirder.

Thanks iPod album shuffle for bringing up Sukram Gurk, which I haven't listened to in a few years, but of course remains an underknown classic of wrecked German heaviness for a select few hundred (couple thousand?) listeners. Siloah started as a commune-style large-group folk/chant/wasted band (their s/t debut, also great) but somehow mutated into a psychedelic waysted organ trio for this, their second album (only constant member is vocalist/guitarist/organist/guru/hairfarmer/painter Thom Argauer). "Feast of the Pickpockets" remains my favorite song and song title. I used to hate the later-recorded slick/pop bonus track "She Is On My Mind" but today I found myself suddenly loving it.

Even having listened to a good 40 or 50 Sun Ra albums over the last 20 years, every couple years another one comes along and floors me, and tonight it was The Antique Blacks. This is one of the most present and least murky sounding Arkestra recordings... it's still a raw live recording, but with really sharp sound, and the content is very heavy -- tons of organized noise, definitive spoken word, and gospelized anthems driven by that funky electric piano (a rather possessed version of "Space Is The Place," for example). Recorded live in Philadelphia in 1974. There's also a bunch of under-credited wild electric guitar on here, which has led to some amusing speculation... from the definitive Campbell discog: "Curtis Fukuda says the guitarist was 'a medium height Afro-American of lean build', putting the quietus on intriguing rumors about Ted Nugent, who told Melody Maker that he once made a session with The Ra. John Gilmore says that Dale Williams used his wa-wa pedal a lot but thinks 1974 is too early for him; he recalls a guitarist named Sly around this time."

Speaking of Philly, been wanting to see Kurt Vile & the Violators live for awhile and finally got my chance on this night at the Empty Bottle. Babysitter couldn't come over until late so I missed Ken Camden's opening solo guitar set which got some rave reviews and Terry Riley comparisons from people. I missed Plastic Crimewave playing solo too, but unfortunately did see The Love of Everything play plodding emo singer/songwriter stuff for awhile. The place was quite packed (not bad for a Tuesday night) and when the Violators promptly came out the crowd was revved, myself included. While the band sat quietly, Kurt started out solo on shimmering reverbed-out 12-string acoustic and played a superb version of "Heart Attack." Very fun to hear his wry lines like "You better get your head re-screwed on!" live... wouldn't have minded a few more solo songs, but the band joined in for song two, a huge-sounding anthemic number that I didn't quite recognize but it was great and the crowd loved it. The drummer is awesome, the three-guitar attack is huge, Jesse Trbovich is a great utility man (playing crucial sax and harmonica and maybe more), and the atmosphere in the place was triumphant like it was the E Street Band playing a Saturday night at the Stone Pony in '74. (Okay, I don't really know what I'm talking about there but you know KV has gotten some apropos-enough Springsteen comparisons, and there was something like a "hometown heroes at their home-away-from-home" thing happening at this show that was legitimately exciting.) That said, it wasn't a perfect show... the vocals were kind of low and mumbly, which may have been the mix, or it may just be that KV's talking blues style doesn't always cut live like it does on record. They did a shruggy version of "Good Lookin' Out" from the Hunchback EP that seemed like it was barely 2 minutes long, and a couple other songs suffered a similar fate. And, as great as the three guitars sound together, the Carduccian in me thinks the band would sound better still with a bass player. All that said, I really dug the show... getting into the whole Violators approach has really made the new Childish Prodigy album click for me after initial reservations, and there were a lot of great performances -- versions of "Freak Train" and the Dim Stars cover "Monkey" especially come to mind, as well as two set-closing solo numbers ("My Sympathy" from God Is Saying and "Slow Talkers" from Constant Hitmaker) that really tied a nice bow on the whole thing.

P.S. it's 10/23/09 and the Violators are still on tour!

Oct 23 2009 9:30P Spaceland Los Angeles, California
Oct 24 2009 8:00P fernwood Big Sur, California
Oct 25 2009 9:30P Casbah San Diego, California
Oct 27 2009 8:00P Modified Arts Tempe, Arizona
Oct 29 2009 10:00P Bash Riprocks w/ Thomas Function and Yussaf Jerusalem Lubbock, Texas
Oct 30 2009 9:00P Mohawk w/ The Black Angels Austin, Texas
Oct 31 2009 8:00P Lounge on Elm Street w/ Giggle Party and The Aquaholics Dallas, Texas
Nov 1 2009 8:00P Sang House Fayetteville, Arkansas
Nov 2 2009 9:30P Hi-Tone w/ Lovvers & Drug Wars Memphis, Tennessee
Nov 3 2009 10:30P 529 w/ Lovvers & Carnivores Atlanta, Georgia
Nov 4 2009 8:30P Local 506 Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Nov 5 2009 9:00P Black Cat w/ the New Flesh Washington DC, Washington DC

2009-10-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

TOMAS ANDERSSON "Asthma (Magas Remix)" (FUNK NOIR)
MAGAS "Whiskey Nights" (PUNCH)
KRAFTWERK Computerwelt (KLING KLANG)
BULBOUS CREATION (ROCKADELIC reissue)
MOON DUO Killing Time EP (SACRED BONES)
BOB DYLAN World Gone Wrong (COLUMBIA)
DEEPCHORD PRESENTS ECHOSPACE The Coldest Season (MODERN LOVE)
DEERHUNTER Weird Era Cont. (KRANKY)
DAVE E & THE COOL MARRIAGE COUNSELORS Searching Through Sears 7" (CHRISTMAS PETS)
LOCRIAN Private Series 7" (BLOODLUST!)

I played the Magas remix of the Tomas Andersson tune and the kids perked up at the robot voices ("is that a boy or a girl?") and the driving low-end rhythm. There was some dancing going on. When it was over I said "Well that was a good rock'n'roll song." Claire said "That wasn't rock'n'roll!" and I said "What was it, electronic music?" and she said "Yeah!" and then Phil went ahead and put it out there: "It wasn't rock'n'roll because it didn't have any guitars in it!" Kids say the darnedest things... I thought I'd respond by following up with Magas's new solo hit "Whiskey Nights" (from the Violent Arp 12"), a song that asks the musical question "Who sez an electronic one-man band can't play rock?" Halfway through Claire said, "Actually this one IS rock'n'roll!"

Next I put on album shuffle and it brought up Kraftwerk. The kids didn't comment at all on its rockness or non-rockness as they were too busy singing along (even though they were hearing it for the first time) and having their minds blown by robot voices counting 1 through 4 in Spanish.

After that the shuffle finally got to some actual Phil-certifiable rock music with guitar in it, but it was a downer anyway as the band was Bulbous Creation, heavy doomy hard blues rock, apparently from Kansas City and self-released in 1970. I downloaded it a good year ago off of some retro/obscuro blog, and there it silently sat on my iPod hard drive until now, popping up on album shuffle for the first time ever, and hey, it's pretty goddamn heavy. I might just put it in a trio of 'killer biker psych private press classics I happened to discover in 2009,' along with the Fraction and Circuit Rider albums. (If you think the first song is good but a little soft, stick around for at least track three "Satan.")

Still not blown away but I like this Deerhunter album better than Microcastle, which is the only other one I've heard, and probably will ever hear. Really like the vocals on "Vox Humana," for example, and the songs do have a general cottony dreaminess that I could probably get used to. Cotton doesn't really stick, though, does it... actually "Slow Swords" is a killer instrumental, and "Weird Era" is a nice Dead C-style improvised amp barrage... OK, I'll keep this one for now...

Dave E getting heavy a capella: "An unmade grave and a guy named Dave/and out of the sky flies a love that will never die." That Locrian 7" is holding up well too, as far as heaviness goes.

2009-10-09T06:23:00.000-07:00

HAWKWIND In Search of Space (UNITED ARTISTS)
HAWKWIND Doremi Fasol Latido (UNITED ARTISTS)
THELONIOUS MONK The Best of Thelonious Monk (BLUE NOTE)
DUKE ELLINGTON The Best of Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra (CAPITOL)
WNUR played "Sonic Reducer" by Rocket From The Tombs on the drive home from work
BOB DYLAN s/t (COLUMBIA)
CARL CRAIG & MORITZ VON OSWALD ReComposed (DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON)
BILL ORCUTT A New Way To Pay Old Debts (PALILALIA)
CHANDELIERS Dirty Moves (HBSP-2X)

Of my two favorite Hawkwind albums, I always liked Doremi better than In Search of Space. The tempo never really seems to get off the ground on the latter, earlier album, at least not for the rather lugubrious 15-minute opener, but listening to Doremi right after it, I start thinking that its tempos never really pick up either, and that In Search of might in fact be the deeper document. Either way, side two deep cut "We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago" is a good one, blown-out street-style eco-punk protest song with some killer hand percussion.

WNUR played "Sonic Reducer" by Rocket From The Tombs on the drive home from work.

First Bob Dylan album still rules.

As for newer music, this 2008 Craig/Von Oswald disc is as fantastic as advertised, and if by chance the endless heraldic classical micro-melodies via high-pressure post-Riley trumpet loops that is "Movement 2" freak you out a little, go straight to "Movement 4" for some of the most killer chill-funk I've heard in awhile, with textural linkage to the wide-open arrangements of the current Moritz Von Oswald Trio, and an incredible 2-minute segue into the following track "Interlude."

Bill Orcutt LP has been turning heads and it is a serious piece of work. His guitar lines are both as noisy as ever and more fluidly complicated, a devastating combination. Just listen to the appropriately titled side two opener "My Reckless Parts." But even with that, this is not strictly a 'guitar' solo record... unless wild overtones are playing tricks on me (and they very well may be), I think it's more of a 'singing guitarist' solo record (his credit is "4 String Kay, Voice"), and that's the real ear-turner here.

Chandeliers are a Chicago group I've heard some actual 'local buzz' on, and they had some good myspace tunes, so I picked up this edition-of-250 Dirty Moves album at Reckless. Before needle hits groove I'm slightly concerned that they'll be a little on the jazzy/quirky side, mainly because they're using the 'lots and lots of equally short songs' LP template... anytime an album goes over 20 songs, I frankly worry a little... not many great non-compilation and/or non-grindcore albums with that many songs, are there? Rare examples of success would be Double Nickels On A Dime (21.5 per LP), Bee Thousand (20), God Bless The Red Krayola And All Who Sail With Them (20), and.... I can't think of anymore right now. There' s not even any great hardcore records that are over 20 songs, are there? And here the Chandeliers album has a whopping 31 tracks, and one of them on Side B is even titled "Ravecrunk," but then I finally play the thing and, just a couple minutes in, I'm already won over because these guys are here to play music. No vocals to really speak of, no tricky stops and starts or sudden silences, just hardcore instrumental grooves. There are some overly cutesy electronics here and there that indeed confirm suspected quirk potential, but only in a couple places, and tastefully fleeting; mostly these are hardcore focused grooves of funky, grubby, exciting new trance electric rock music. Next I'd like to hear 'em hone in on fewer grooves, perhaps with something like a 45RPM 12" approach, but hey, maybe that's just not them... either way, I'll be paying attention.

2009-10-08T05:53:00.000-07:00

DESMOND DEKKER Rockin' Steady - The Best of Desmond Dekker (RHINO)
DE LA SOUL Buhloone Mind State (TOMMY BOY)
EMTIDI Saat (SPALAX)
DAMION ROMERO Missing Link (HANSON)
DON CHERRY & THE JAZZ COMPOSER'S ORCHESTRA Relativity Suite (JCOA)
DON CHERRY Brown Rice (A&M)
BOB DYLAN John Wesley Harding (COLUMBIA)
ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS Another World EP (SECRETLY CANADIAN)

Buhloone Mind State is so good. It might not be the best De La Soul album, but I think it's the one I listen to the most. And it actually might be the best. "Breakadawn" is certainly an unbelievable tune.

Mind currently being blown by the original 1975 Moki Cherry tapestry sleeve for Don Cherry's Brown Rice album. I didn't know this existed, or that it was a 70s album... due to the funky/synthy nature of the title track, I always thought it was an '80s release and that weird DC photo on the CD was the original cover. Behold:

Also turns out I was DC-uninformed in another respect, as I had no idea he ever had a heroin habit, let alone an alleged 20-year heroin habit. (He used to score for Billie Holiday, says Tessa Pollitt.) Now I'm finding people on the internet saying "Brown Rice" is an ode to H... man, I always thought it was strictly an awesome ode to the joys of organic whole foods.

Pssst, hey, all you folks like me who dig Antony & the Johnsons but aren't supposed to talk about it because your buds only listen to Aussie punk or something, this Another World EP is seriously good. It's only five songs, but it's right up there with the masterful I'm A Bird Now (although after one listen a while back I don't think the newest full-length The Crying Light is quite as strong, correct me if I'm wrong about that). Anyway, I don't see why anyone who digs say Roxy Music Stranded and Arthur Russell World of Echo, to name a couple, wouldn't dig this.

2009-10-07T06:44:00.001-07:00

MINCEMEAT OR TENSPEED Strange Gods (ZUM)
BLUES CONTROL Local Flavor (SILTBREEZE)
GAS Konigsforst (MILLE PLATEAUX)
BURGER/INK [Las Vegas] (MATADOR/OLE)
KRAFTWERK The Man-Machine (CAPITOL)
KRAFTWERK Computer World (ELEKTRA)
BUTTHOLE SURFERS Locust Abortion Technician (TOUCH & GO)

Tonight I could've gone to see the Butthole Surfers and then Faust (been hearing good things about both tours) and I opted for neither. It didn't help that the Surfers were scheduled for a one-hour set that had to be over by 10PM due to it being part of an all-ages show called the "Riot Fest." I stayed home and listened to Locust Abortion Technician instead, watched Curb Your Enthusiasm s7E3 ("He was apoplectic, Larry! Apoplectic!!"), and now I'm going to be in bed by 11PM. (Next day edit.... I was sure I made the right decision until reading this from King Coffey's twitter: "The Metro in Chicago wanted us to show only "G" rated footage. We responded by showing ONLY penis reconstruction footage.")

2009-10-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

SUN RA Nothing Is... (ESP-DISK)
KIM PHUC Wormwood Star 7" (CRIMINAL IQ)
POPOL VUH Affenstunde (SPALAX)
PADDED CELL Night Must Fall (D.C. RECORDINGS)
MI AMI Ark of the Covenant 12" (LOVERS ROCK)
Collective Voice Podcast #274 (24.01.08, includes spotlight on Blues Control/Watersports)
UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE Waveform EP (UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE)
BLUE OYSTER CULT Secret Treaties (COLUMBIA)

The key track on the Sun Ra album for me will always be "Exotic Forest." Incredible atmosphere on this one, percussion clusters and flocks winding their way over & through Ronnie Boykins's bass ostinato. Sweet memory of freaking out to this track late one night in like 1996 while driving on a back-road highway somewhere in Ohio in the middle of a two-day road-trip from Omaha to NYC. (Was not on drugs other than caffeine, don't worry.) Kim Phuc single is a rager. Very heavy, legit intensity level, terrific recording. Go Pittsburgh. Here's their myspace. Popol Vuh sez "It's monkey time!!!" Padded Cell album is so-so, fun and groovy if you happen to be in the room when it's playing but overall a case of 'rad sounds, no songs (retro funky lounge we-should-be-doing-soundtracks division)'. What is it that makes Mi Ami and Underground Resistance -- bands that are also arguably playing something that could be called "dark disco" -- much better? I think it's level of commitment... Mi Ami and Underground Resistance have really absorbed and digested the ingredients they work with, and thus the notes they play are coming from somewhere deep inside, where with bands like Padded Cell, the notes stay outside the body, comfortably resting in the same retro context they were found in. The only thing they touch them with is their fingers, arranging them around in different rad patterns from track to track.

2009-10-05T09:22:00.000-07:00

GRATEFUL DEAD Live at Old Renaissance Faire Grounds (Veneta, OR) 1972/08/27
MOOLOBALI TRAORE s/t (SUPER SOUND)
CYMANDE s/t (JANUS)
NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS The Boatman's Call (MUTE/REPRISE)
O.P.M.C. Amalgamation
LIQUID LIQUID s/t (GRAND ROYAL)
OMAR-S 004 EP ("Day"/"Night) (FXHE)
PATTI SMITH Easter
MRR Radio #1160 (this was great)

2009-10-04T12:07:00.000-07:00

JIM O'ROURKE The Visitor (DRAG CITY)
HIGH PLACES s/t (THRILL JOCKEY)
SOFT MACHINE Third (COLUMBIA)
KEITH JARRETT Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues op. 87 (ECM)
FRIPP & ENO (No Pussyfooting) (ISLAND)
FRIPP & ENO Evening Star (EG RECORDS)
SCRIBBLER My Old Lady 7" (STUMPARUMPER)
GHOST HOSPITAL D+ 7" (TEEN APE)
GONE TO CROATOAN They 7" (EOLIAN)
ANCIENT SKY s/t LP (PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE)

O'Rourke and High Places albums spun while frying up some potatoes and veggies with 4-year old daughter, cozy inside with window half-open on a cold and sunny fall day. Drag City and Thrill Jockey, pretty sweet, can't complain. Another sweet memory is this time like 19 years ago, during my sophomore year in college, when I had to go move my car late at night and I turned on the radio right in the middle of the most blasted free-form rock organ playing I had ever heard up to that point. (I guess Stevie Winwood's work on Hendrix's "Voodoo Child" was the previous champion... or no, Live in Japan, duh.) It was the local Lincoln, Nebraska community radio station, KZUM 89.3 FM, and I sat in the car and listened for a while until, realizing the song wasn't gonna be a short one, running back to my dorm and calling the DJ. He told me it was Soft Machine, from the album Third. When I picked up the album used a year or two later, I learned that the track was "Facelift" and the organist was Mike Ratledge, but my favorite side turned out to be Robert Wyatt's majestic and serpentine "Moon in June" composition. Also loved the band photo in the gatefold and would spend minutes at a time peering at it, assuming I would eventually find drug paraphenalia. I don't believe I ever have... see if you have any luck (click for a nice larger view):

No pussyfooting: (No Pussyfooting) is kinda boring. Cool as an experiment/provocation album, but the follow-up Evening Star refines and improves on the ideas, and so does the Fripp & Eno-worshipping career of Heldon, whose debut came one year after No P.

Also listened to a few unknown-to-me new releases, hoping to write reviews which may appear sooner or later...

2009-10-03T19:50:00.000-07:00

CHEAP TRICK "Tonight It's You" (EPIC)
KING TUBBY & FRIENDS Dub Like Dirt 1975-1977 (BLOOD & FIRE)
THIN LIZZY Jailbreak (MERCURY)
VELVET UNDERGROUND White Light/White Heat (VERVE)
SLY & THE FAMILY STONE There's A Riot Goin' On (EPIC)
DEUTER Aum (KUCKUCK)
OST Wild Style LP (ANIMAL)
DIMINISHED MEN Shadow Instrumentals LP (ABDUCTION)
MOON DUO Killing Time EP 12" (SACRED BONES)
PRUNALOG SUSAN PENTAGRAM 23 7" EP (TRIGGER ON THE DUTEN-DO)
BURGER/INK [Las Vegas] CD (MATADOR/OLE)

Had to check and see if Cheap Trick's "Tonight It's You" was still as glorious as it was when I was 15 years old. And, despite 80s production (by 70s master Jack Douglas, no less) and dorky video, I'd have to say it pretty much is. Tonight's other heavies: "Guidance Dub" by Tubby, all-time fave "Runnin' Back" by Lizzy, "I Heard Her Call My Name" of course, Burger/Ink "Milk & Honey" (or for a youtube example, "Love Is The Drug [Paris, Texas]"), "Military Cut (Scratch Mix)" by Grand Wizard Theodore & Kevie Kev Rockwell (sounds insane loud on headphones), and Sly Stone's "Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa," one of my all-time favorite jams... saw a guy online call it "ghastly funk," which is perfect. It's almost 9 minutes long, and I think I could handle 9 hours. There's A Riot Goin' On continues to amaze in new ways, and I've been listening to this album for 20 years now. Now that I'm aware of Bobby Womack's uncredited contributions to this album, I feel like I'm hearing him all over the grooves... the loose and spindly funk rhythm/lead guitar lines that percolate throughout this tune have gotta be him (this sweet little column on "Tele funk" agrees)... that's probably him on background vocals too...

(Man, do read that Tele funk thing, it's nice. Off the foundation of Steve Cropper came Catfish Collins, Leo Nocenticelli, Freddie Stone and Bobby Womack, on up to pre-Purple Rain Prince and King Sunny Ade! And, doesn't it seem like the Tele funk window has really come and gone? I mean, who's gonna pick up a Telecaster and play Tele funk today? I don't know, maybe there was a Tele on the last Erykah Badu album or something, but I doubt it.)

(And in case people are forgetting, Bobby Womack had an awesome look, really one of the great rock'n'roll glasses-wearers.)

The Deuter Aum album came out in 1972 and looks like this:

Great cover and a fine 'middle second tier' krautrock album, with some genuinely cold new age synth textures (especially towards the end of Side B) tempered by a nice folk music circle-jam feel that crops up in a few places.

I was underwhelmed on my first two listens to the Diminished Men LP on Abduction but on my third it's really getting somewhere. Sure, this Seattle band plays a sort of avant MOR, soundtracky modern-day surf instrumentalism that would seem polite enough to go down just fine as bumpers to just about any arts & entertainment reporting on your actual local NPR station, but, because their overall presentation is contained and controlled and stays well within the bounds of Randall Dunn's high-quality production aura, it's only now that I'm realizing that they play these themes rather ferociously, and that the stuff in between the themes is actually pretty out there. "Sutures In" is basically a solo synth noise jam and would probably never be an NPR bumper.

I didn't expect too much out of Wooden Shjips subset band Moon Duo, the same way I don't expect much more out of Wooden Shjips than a one-chord rock bassline repeated over and over on top of a backbeat, maybe with some vague rock shouting in the background. That's pretty much what's here, with more or less the same overall dynamics, the debt to Spacemen 3 and Suicide maybe even more explicit. The thing with Wooden Shjips is that even though you don't expect much, they can still be pretty good, and that's true of Moon Duo as well. Now I did say "pretty good," not "great," but as far as a cool-sounding and underwritten record from Sacred Bones goes, I'll always take a spaced-out 7-minute drony jam that barely pretends to be songwriting over some 3-minute drony non-song that actually acts like a song (to the point where people on message boards commend the artist for his or her "songwriting"). I say if you don't write anything too special, try to get good at jamming instead. These guys have gotten pretty good at it.