Central Target

FREE DOWNLOAD: Neptune Balance: "Midnight Interlude"

2011-07-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

We here at the Central Target Recording Label wing of the Research Labs pride ourselves on the fact that our very creed is not to pester our artists or give them deadlines. The idea is for people to make music as they want, not as they need. So imagine our surprise when we took the elevator down to the comm center (it's right past the hovercraft dock) and checked our e-mail to find a message from Neptune Balance. No note, just an attachment called "[TBA]". Then also imagine our surprise when it turned out to be a slice of ambient acid techno that sounds like the music at your town's chic-est bar in 2039. It's robot soul with a little dusting of metal-on-metal. Touches of classic Detroit techno like Carl Craig, with something a little skewed to a halfway point between Aphex Twin's earliest material and the insistency of dance music like Daft Punk. That's not to say it sounds like any of those acts... it's just too damn irresistably slippery to put our finger on. We don't know what it means, if more is forthcoming (as in "To Be Announced"), or if it's something else altogether. We thought we'd share. Not only is it worth your time, but it's worth us thinking about changing that "don't push the artists for more tunes" rule.

GET IT. HERE. NOW.

Here's her blog. Pictures of her in the shower. No kidding.
nep-bal.tumblr.com

FREE DOWNLOAD: The Spirit Three: Complete Discography

2011-07-01T20:54:00.000-07:00

There are some major changes coming to Central Target, including a flood of new (free!) music from The Spirit Three as well as several new artists, including Neptune Balance, ofthemetro, Midway, Lazer Mouse, and several others. We promise, things are percolating, but until then, help yourself to what you might've missed, by checking out the complete discography of The Spirit Three, including the Spirit Three Live EP series, one-offs, and other fuzzed-out guitaradelicism. And as always here at the Central Target Research Labs, it's free as can be. Enjoy catching up!

Meatland: Secret Transmissions From CTRL

DOWNLOAD "MEATLAND" HERE

1, Control Codes
2, Bad Dollar
3, Today I'm Hiding Planes Behind A Telephone Line
4, Backdoor Wisconsin (Bavaria)

All tracks recorded live (one take)
Recorded March 6th-14th
at Central Target Research Labs, Boston, MA
M Hiltz - all guitars, drum programming
no synthesizers were used on this EP.
Front Cover photo and layout by CTRL Design
special thanks to ofthemetro, Cliff at "effects", Mike Walsh, and Sweetcheeks

Part Six of the Spirit Three EP series

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Wartime: Missing Pieces (Outtakes & Rarities)

"This is a collection of session outtakes and unreleased tracks. Some of them will sound familiar, as some of the tracks were simply more of what was initially released... just a few feet down the tape from where the one you know ended. Or was it before it began? How long did some of these tracks go on? Are all the recordings so far excerpts from much longer pieces of music?

Of note is the live recording from 2007, which was the first public performance of the Spirit Three, although at that time, the project was going by the name 'Midway Strange'. That composition, 'Time Is Violence' was first recorded at this performance, but had been playing in one form or another every hour since approximately 1998. "

- M

DOWNLOAD "WARTIME" HERE

1, Drone Musik (Double Pink, Two Blue)
2, Somewhere Last Night, After You Left
3, Interlude, Variation 2
4, Split Decision
5, Melted Zip Decay
6, No Johnny, I Don't (The Well Of The Souls)
7, The Day After Revere (Wonderland, Pt. 1)
8, Closed The Park
9, Coedar
10, First Strike, Second Run
11, Time Is Violence [Live 2007]
12, The Crack In The Wall

Recorded 2007-2010
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA
Uncle Fester's, Bloomington, IN
M Hiltz - guitar, bass, baritone guitar, piano, programming
Front cover by Upstairs Design
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake, Shannon, and ofthemetro

Part Five of the Spirit Three EP Series

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Who's Your Doctor? EP

DOWNLOAD "WHO'S YOUR DOCTOR?" HERE

1, Cold Shore
2, The Weeping Angels
3, Like Driving
4, Four H/L
5, Amelia

Recorded 2009-2010
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA
and Le Office, Boston, MA
M Hiltz - guitar, baritone guitar, synth, sequencing
Front cover by Upstairs Design
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake, Shannon, and ofthemetro

Part Four of the Spirit Three Not-So-Live-Anymore EP Series

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Churchill UFOs

DOWNLOAD "CHURCHILL UFOs" HERE

1, Overture To The Thirteenth Act
2, The Lake By The Chapel
3, Interlude, Variation 1
4, UFO-15
5, Interlude, Variation 3
6, Repeat Motel Motif (Took The Shuttle)

Recorded live, Sep. & Oct. 2010.
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA
Live to 1-track digital recording.
No overdubs.
M Hiltz - guitar
Front cover photo by Ed Albers, Upstairs Design
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake and Shannon

Part Three of the Spirit Three Live EP Series

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Kelly's Revenge (drone recordings 2010)

DOWNLOAD "KELLY'S REVENGE" HERE

1, Women In C#
2, Kelly's Revenge [Ringer]

Recorded Sep. & Oct. 2010.
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA.
Digital multitrack recording.
M Hiltz - guitar/bass/synthesizer/signal processing
Front cover photo by Ronnie Dobbs
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake

Bonus Release in the Spirit Three Live EP Series

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Sarah's Prize

DOWNLOAD "SARAH'S PRIZE" HERE

1, Wrong Bus
2, After Last Night
3, You Forgot

Recorded live, Sep. 9th, 2010.
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA
Live to 1-track digital recording.
No overdubs.
M Hiltz - guitar
Front cover photo by Shannon Barker
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake and Sarah Strahl

Part Two of the Spirit Three Live EP Series

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Full On Dub Kick

DOWNLOAD "FULL ON DUB KICK" HERE

1, Check The Corner
2, Full On Dub Kick
3, Prelude To Wonderland
4, Wonderland, Pt. 2
5, Right As They Brokey In

Recorded live, Sep. 8th, 2010.
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA
Live to 1-track digital recording.
No overdubs.
M Hiltz - guitar and processing.
Front cover photo by Shannon Barker
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake

Part 1 of the Spirit Three Live EP Series

Central Target Now Mobile Device Friendly... Happy Early America Day!

2011-07-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks to our friendly host's new mobile device translation capabilities, our mobile site, centraltargetmobile.blogspot.com will no longer continue to be updated. it will remain available, but since becoming irrelevant, why do the work?

now, even customized for your mobile device viewing: centraltarget.blogspot.com

Go on, click it. You know you want to see what happens.

BREAKING NEWS: MF DOOM LUNCHBOXES SEIZED BY CUSTOMS OFFICIALS

2011-06-30T22:47:00.000-07:00

Border patrol agents in Boston have seized 183 copies of MF DOOM's deluxe "Operation: Doomsday" lunchbox sets for copyright violations. From the CBP news release:

BOSTON—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers in the port of Boston identified and seized a shipment of counterfeit Music CD’s for Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) violations. The Manufacture’s Suggested Retail Price of the pirated CD’s bearing images of the Marvel Entertainment character is estimated to be $87,664.

On May 23, CBP officers targeted a shipment containing 2,925 sets of music CD’s packaged in lunch-boxes at the Container Examination Station for an enforcement examination. During the examination, CBP officers observed the boxes bearing the image of what appeared to be Marvel Entertainment’s “Dr. Doom” character, which is a trademark recorded with CBP. Further inspections reveled the image was deemed to be possibly piratical and the goods were detained for a through investigation. When CBP sought a letter of authorization for use of the CD trademark from the importing party, the importer signed and submitted a CBP Form 4607, Notice of Abandonment. Subsequently, all counterfeit lunch-box sets, 183 boxes, was seized for IPR violations on June 20.

You heard it here first, kids!

Neptune Balance: "Caution"

2011-05-23T03:21:00.000-07:00

Presenting "Caution", the debut track by Neptune Balance -- a beloved member of the Central Target family. An EP is in the works, but until then, listen to this until your ears start to bleep.

Find it here:
http://nep-bal.tumblr.com

Get some. You'll like it.

Keeping The Urge Alive: Dive, Captain, Dive!

2011-05-16T22:49:00.000-07:00

It's 2011. And I just purchased a newly-recorded Urge Overkill album. On vinyl. When are we?

At 16, an older friend tipped me off to the joys of Urge's masterpiece - Saturation. I call it their masterpiece because to my mind, it's where their (too early for irony) '70s rock-god image-mongering met the effortless hooks of savvy ex-punks. They were loud, hooky, and catchy as the flu. Over the years, I've eventually come to the conclusion that I prefer the previous album The Supersonic Storybookfor it's alternative guitars and Exit The Dragon for its beautifully ragged Exile On Main Street "everything's-faling-apart" atmosphere.

As good as each of those are, Storybook is too ragged, and Dragon is too wiped-out to really register as "the one". No, for sheer summertime adrenaline, Saturation is the one to go with -- glossy and shiny as a new pair of sunglasses, and stomping like a mammoth. Riff after riff, thundering drums, and enough "whoo hoo hoo"s to get anyone smiling.

Now, as many years have gone by since Urge Overkill's last record in '95 as the years I had under my belt when I first heard them. And they sound no worse for wear on Rock & Roll Submarine. I have no idea what that ridiculous title means, but love seeing that "UO" logo on an album. The cover is wonderful, as is the interior blueprint of what would be included INSIDE a giant, spherical, multi-story submarine/lair (tiki bar and bowling lane are ESSENTIAL). But what matters is what's inside the grooves, maaaan. It's no instant summer classic, but this is the followup that Saturationdeserved but never really got. Enter The Dragon had more in common with the disheartened rawness (production-wise and emotionally) of the indie rock of the 2000s, but despite evidence of aural lessons learned from Dragon, the sounds here are mostly cribbed from the lumbering rock monsters of the past. As far back as Americruiser's "Ticket To L.A.", they've been working Marshall-stack classic-rock riffs into something modern and sassy enough for the (now-aging) Gen X. With the added bonus of this decade's audio engineering, they manage to polish most of these pummelling progressions to a burnished sheen.... not in a derogatory way, more like the way Cheap Trick could manage to be heavy and rockin' and raw and just a little bit slick on their earlier albums. Like the way a band like... say... Urge Overkill managed back in the day. With layers of flanged guitars and interweaving harmonies, Rock And Roll Submarine sounds more like a record the band might have made in an alternate timeline after Saturation made the boys the mega-stars they so clearly believed they were.

But what about the SONGS? Well, they're solid. Urge always wrote great riffs, and backed them up with cool arrangements and good vocals. The drums pound, the bass pulses, and the guitars churn out memorable riffs left and right. Sure, it's a new rhythm section, and previous drummers Jack Watt and Blackie Onassis each had their own style, but it was never the rhythm section that made you listen to Urge, right? By adding new drummer Brian Quast and bassist Mike Hodgkiss (from the ever-awesome Gaza Strippers), Nash Kato and Eddie "King" Roeser are now free to double up the guitar crunch. The pair, reunited inexplicably after some Dino Jr-level infighting in the late-'90s, once again step up and deliver their trademark "badass rock'n'roll" vocals (a groovy style, not a judgement call), and it sounds perfectly... well... right. I can't quite put my finger on it, but all the pieces just add up to a great album.

Of course, many reviwers are writing this reunion off as some weird nostalgic joke. But the more I think about it, nobody makes records like this anymore. Straightahead rock and roll records, highly self-aware, but delivered with enough swagger that it backs up the (self-)hype. Surprisingly, the presence of Urge Overkill into the 2010s is far less irony-laced than I expected, since the previous incarnation is now primarily remembered as "early users of indie-rock irony" or "that band with that Neil Diamond song from 'Pulp Fiction'". Their velvet smoking jackets and turtlenecks seemed like an insane gimmick in an era of dour po-faced seriousness. So it's actually refreshing that by leaving smarminess largely to the wayside, Urge Overkill comes across as one of the LEAST "affected" rock bands out there. They're no dummies, so this isn't without humor (the back cover of the album features a submarine sandwich -- get it?), but they leave that to the trappings, not the music. Rather than load up the '70s conventions, this is a lean, mean rock record. A completely absurd value statement, to be sure. When Urge is one of your most direct and honest bands, the cosmic balance has been upset. In an era of high-concept albums and theatrical rock shows, it's pretty refreshing to have a quartet of guys go out and unapologetically rock the fuck out.

Amen.

Transmission Intercept: Neptune Balance/CTRL

2011-04-16T03:26:00.000-07:00

[begin transmission]

[static]

-- begin tracking: Central Target, remote login--
-- LOCATION: appx. 42.362603,-71.062274 --
-- trace source: [begin trace] --

[begin message]

FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION.
NEPTUNE BALANCE IS REAL.
BEGIN PREPARATIONS.

[end message]

-- track source: Boston, MA --
-- track sender: CTRL, Neptune Balance --
-- monitor radio waves, track financial input --

[directive: maintain current status. Re-assess on Friday.]

[static]

[end transmission]

Wrote For Luck, Not For Skill

2011-04-10T06:39:00.001-07:00

While going through a "Madchester" phase this week, I came across a review of the Happy Mondays' Bummed that stated that in Manchester at the time of the musical movement (circa '88-'91), if you were a music fan, you had to pick a side of the fence: the Happy Mondays or their contemporaries and fiercest rivals The Stone Roses. The rock and roll pedagogy has stamped that The Stone Roses is (subjectively) the superior recorded artifact, but that could be because it was the band's (ostensible) debut album. And far be it from me to say it's not impressive -- in fact, it's one of my all-time favorite albums. Desert island stuff.

But you know what? I think I'd have to side with the Mondays.

Just because an artist perfects a form doesn't mean they're the truest avatar of that movement. And one could successfully argue that the Roses not only helped pioneer the sound of dance beats meeting funky indie guitars. But they sounded refined, tight, and shimmering. While the Mondays clearly leaned on their producer in the studio (not hard to do when you're working with Martin Hannett and a pre-trance Paul Oakenfold), and maybe it was Shaun Ryder's hoarse holler, but something about the same mixture of pop guitars and polyrhythms in the Mondays' hands sounded dangerous and vulgar, but irresistibly seductive. It's the thuggish edge that made Oasis heroes and Blur a cult act in the U.S. (until "Song 2", but still...). It's what some friends and I used to call "music school syndrome". Not that technical ability or craftsmanship necessarily matters in what makes "good" art, but the loose, ramshackle, and dangerous element of the Mondays just edges out the magic of about half the Roses' oeuvre. I'm not saying it's without it's charms, but that first Stone Roses album sounds pretty "pop classiscist" after nodding your body to some of the tracks on their rivals' masterstroke, Pills 'N' Thrills 'N' Bellyaches. Club music could be considered, despite it's often dire lack of lyrical or melodical virtuosity, one of the most direct antecedents of the original spark of 1950s rock and roll. That might seem like sacreliege to any self-resepecting rock geek, or even anyone who owns a Beatles album, but roll with me here. Rock and roll was music for people to go to a bar and dance to, then probably go home and screw. It's crass, but true. I've got collections of old R&B and rock numbers from the mid-'50s that are easily among the most vulgar and horny things I've ever heard -- and I own three different 2 Live Crew albums. The Mondays were barely musicians in some cases, if the live recordings I've heard are any reliable evidence. But they got up, got messed up, and probably got laid on some crazee psychedelics. I was always a little irritated by Oasis' claims that they didn't care about Blur when they clearly took great care to stoke the media-created rivalry, even on the records.

But the Happy Mondays seem like they truly didn't care about the Roses' messianic status in the pecking order. They couldn't be bothered. It's the same reason I prefer the Stones to the Beatles. I can't deny that the Beatles wrote more accomplished pop songs, but those three notes to "Satisfaction"'s main riff say a lot more to me than the entirety "A Day In The Life".

And the Soup Dragons are awesome, no matter what you say.

A Brief Inside.

2011-04-09T06:58:00.000-07:00

While watching the documentary about Blur, No Distance Left To Run, and seeing their performance in the Rough Trade record shop in London, I've decided that one day, I'll need to take a pilgrimage there. As a rock music history fan from the U.S., I realize Rough Trade began life as a bricks-and-mortar record store before becoming a seminal post-punk and indie record label. But coming from this side of the ocean, I've always seen and used the term "Rough Trade" (in the musical sense) as an aesthetic signifier, describing a certain post-punk, pre-Britpop alternative music ethos and sound established in the U.K. in the early-to-mid 1980s.

Actually going to the store might be the closest I've ever come to physically stepping into an abstract concept. A physical example of a philosophical movement, a la the Bauhaus building or Warhol's Factory. Heavy stuff, man.

Goodbye, Musicland... I'm Glad You're Dead

2011-04-06T23:44:00.001-07:00

Found online, in the comments section at avclub.com:

"[The mid-to-late '90s] must have been the absolute worst time for music. Pre-internet downloading, post-alterative radio and MTV. You just had to buy a CD from FYE for $18.99 and hope it didn't suck.

Fortunately, another decade's gone by, and hipsters have it made now. We all have instant access to entire worlds of alternative music. If you told me to listen to a CD by the Residents in 1999, I would have drove around town all day and not found it. Now I can get Eskimo from Amazon for $8. If you told me to listen to an unsigned band from Terre Haute, Indiana, I can find their music. It's a music lover's wet dream."

-commenter "Raymond Luxury-Yacht"

An interesting point. It sort of runs parallel to something David Thomas of Pere Ubu said a few years back in an issue of The Big Takeover, about the digital era de-valuing music. Back in the day, when I plunked down that $18 at Musicland for who-knows-what, I STUDIED it, I pored over the liner notes. I memorized lyrics. If the artist thanked a band and I liked the album, I'd work to track down something by the thanked bands (sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn't). Now, with a terabyte of music and Wikipedia at my fingertips, so much of it seems so... ephemeral. I find myself less deeply invested in the art of obsession as I grow older because suddenly, I don't have to drop 40% of my weekly busboy income on a couple of new albums. It costs me little-to-nothing to take a risk and check out music I've never heard. Back then, when it took all of my resources, it was a different story... having to cast your lot and stick with it. Food for thought.

It's reminiscing about that period that made me realize why I'm not following the lead of many other bloggers and posting YouTube links and embedded MP3s in my writing. While I work in a multimedia format (the internet), I'm a writer a heart. And the inspriration to become a writer stems from the years of having to hunt for any information on an artist to better understand their art... wading through and filing away articles and books with dizzying written descriptions of music. It's like word jazz, improvising over a theme inspired by the subject. Capturing the tenor of what you're describing, assimilating it, and then adding your own fingerprint is the game. Greil Marcus, Simon Reynolds, Lester Bangs, David Fricke, Clinton Heylin, Marcus Gray, Everett True... all of them have, at one time or another, written pieces that serve as an "artist cover" in another format. And all of them have inspired me to go buy an album without hearing a note by the band in question. Some of them seem to aim for a piece of writing that echoes the subject's own creative achievements. They're not reprinting lyrics, or following musical notes on a staff. But they, through their own language, capture the communicative esssence of the subject so beautifully, that there's not only no need for an acutal audio soundtrack, but if you DON'T know the record, you can roughly conjure it up in your head. I knew what to expect from Pere Ubu a few years before hearing them. Not what they sounded like, but how they sounded. A shaky, high voice desperately yelping postmodernist nightmare poetry over a fractured slashing of antonal guitar despair and jagged synthesizer stabs? Sure, you might have the notes wrong, you might not know the lyrics -- but you can get the spirit. It's almost too easy to point to Lester Bangs (eternally over- and underrated), but his pieces on Miles Davis and The Stooges have a tactile quality that take it above strightforward music criticism in the "news reporter" sense. You could smell the electric heat of the amplifiers and feel the battered black Tolex hanging from a used Fender guitar amp. It's writers like Bangs that made writing about music an interesting art form in itself. Some writers fall more on the academic end of things (Reynolds, Marcus, Savage), while some (Bangs, True, et al.) are more visceral and immediate... almost free-associative at times.

In that $18-an-album world, I would have to have faith that when Jon Savage raved about the fizzing raw nerves and beauty of the Buzzcocks, that his description would carry over to me, communicate to me the essence of the music, and if I decided to muster up the courage to take a gamble, it was an educated risk of my hard-earned pennies. And if the writer was good, it often paid some wild dividends. That's why I don't tend to post a bunch of links to live videos, etc, very often. I'd like to see if the writing can stand on it's own as a creative force. Why gussie it up with digital bells and whistles when it's the prose that's the point?

In Praise Of Vini Reilly: Post-Modern Guitar Heroism As Forefather

2011-04-05T22:05:00.000-07:00

Part One: In Praise Of Vini Reilly

I first became aware of the Durutti Column when I was about 16, coming across their entry in the old-fashioned paper edition of the All Music Guide. It sounded, at the time, like something I’d be interested in later, once I'd successfully gotten around to finally hearing all the great records that were on my "essentials list"... in part because it sounded like they'd fit my sensibility, but were clearly more in the "esoteric intelligentsia" category of pop music... something I strove for, but hadn't arrived at yet.

Of course, the review of their initial album mentioned something about the original pressing's sandpaper sleeve (meant to destroy the records around it on the shelf), and I loved the idea of experimental guitar music in an immediately post-punk context. My limited worldview had already exposed me to things like Joy Division and some of their Manchester ilk, and while I loved the rock-crit approved UK Post-Punk Scene, it wasn't exactly easy territory to wade through... especially outside Cincinnati, Ohio…. for a perpetually broke 16-year-old.

Once I hit college, I eventually heard some of their stuff, and even picked up that first album, The Return Of The Durutti Column, when it got remastered. It was likeable, agreeable stuff, but apparently not dark or challenging enough for my taste at the time. Despite the early presence of mad genius producer Martin Hannett, it wasn't obviously and immediately boundary-pushing, so I filed it back under "seems like I'll dig it later". The same thing happened after seeing the portrayal of Durutti frontman/founder/constant Vini Reilly in the film 24 Hour Party People -- it made for a great running gag about his agreeablity in the face of no visible encouragement, but he was more a comic relief. The music was something I'd warmed to, but as I'd been digging into the pop music that immediately followed Reilly's initial work, it had the effect of hearing Big Star after you've heard the Posies – a diluted impact, squelched by decades of descendents. It was still interesting, though I didn't fully get the appeal at the time.

After devoting myself to the pursuit of more experimental music, I needed to make a conscious effort to go back through my record collection and assess some more of the "pure guitar experiments" -- Fripp & Eno, late-period Slowdive, Neu!, etc. When I finally got around to a few Durutti Column albums, what surprised me most when I really listened to it was just how STRANGE the music was, but with a spirit that was inviting. It's as lopsided and unpolished in many ways as the Fall, but it's aim isn't to shake the listener out of a comatose humdrumity through jagged noise and repetition... it's as music, to PLAY, to make sounds, to act as a soundtrack to life. However, while most music under the “ambient music” tag often makes the effort to become almost inaudible, supporting the natural webwork of sounds that make up white noise, Reilly seems as though he's trying to camouflage his music... not make it blend in, but with production choices and rhythms that could almost be mistaken for music from another room, or a car passing an open window. It's not an attempt to hide the fact that it's music, nor are the sounds TRYING to explicitly mimic real-world sounds (for the most part... those "bird" synths that start off the album largely blow that argument to hell), but to make you hear music and natural sound in the same manner. If you listen to this and drone music long enough (hearing the sub-harmonies skitting around once your brain resets its "baseline silent") you'll start to hear music EVERYWHERE in weirdly synchronized rhythms. It's eerie. You'll eventually have to cleanse your brain with some early Prince records, and when that statement is true, something has skewed wildly. But that's another musing for another column.

Punk allegedly got rid of the guitar hero. Post punk was built on a framework that largely rejected that “big rock show bombast” mentality as excessive, showy, and unnecessary. What makes post-punk identifiable musically is that it's music is clearly built on a foundation of punk rock... you needed punk to have happened to make it. And that close to it chronologically, guitar "heroes" were few and far between... the stigma and shame simply would have been too much to bear for any forward-thinking axe-slinger. It wasn't until three or four generations after post punk that many of the American underground bands would bring traditional technical values back into the vocabulary with bands like Dinosaur Jr and the Meat Puppets. In late-70s England, however, there were a few players who didn't agree with the "guitar is outdated, synths are the way forward" outlook. Rubbing against the times, people like Vini Reilly decided that the guitar wasn't dead, it just hadn't been explored in every direction yet. Taking the blues out, taking the sexuality out of the "rock god" allowed players to use the instrument in not necessarily new, but non-traditional ways (at least, in the rock context). The difference between Reilly and his brethren is that he was often concerned with sounding pleasant.

Speaking generationally, Vini Reilly could be considered (bear with me here) the Eddie Van Halen of the UK post-punk set. Both players attempted to push the limits of their genre (experimental pop music/heavy rock) with new technologies and sounds. Eddie used super-high-gain amplifiers and "hot" guitar pickups to get that blasting, crunching sound that allowed him to innovate by using double-tapping and other tricks of technique (prodigious talent likely didn't hurt). Reilly used tape delays and primitve synth circuits to re-shape his guitar tones and atmospheres into something that the mainstream hadn’t really attempted yet, beyond gimmicky novelty tracks. Led Zeppelin and Beethoven may have given birth to Van Halen, but Brian Eno and John Cage were the fathers of the Durutti Column.

Part Two: Solipsistic Soliloquy

While recording the other night, the thought occurred to me that my latest method of composition is recording a series of what some might call "micro-loops", and layering them until a common composition reveals itself. For example, 8 seconds, while a long time for a single musical phrase, is still a very short amount of time. Using recording equipment, I've found myself layering these loops over each other for hours. Each loop is only roughly 8 seconds, but when 50 of them, in various keys and rhythms and tones play at the same time, something else tends to emerge. Practically, it's simply the law of averages... the loudest notes to emerge will be the ones that were played the most times at a synchronized point in the loop. If I hit "E" more often than any other note, you'll hear "E" pop out of the din more often. But there's usually no set destination to the compositions as they're being recorded, and while my ear is trained for music, it's not trained for theory.

But sonically, what happens when the layers are stacked up over and over and over is a strange effect... one I'm certain that musicologists have studied, but one I hesitate to investigate, for fear it will kill the magic. What happens is that melodies that you never played begin to appear through the sonic haze. Repeating melodies, due to the simple technology that's being used to record these looping musical phrases. Since each note in the phrase could recorded at a different time -- a different point in the layering process -- it likely has a different technique applied to the actual guitar playing, or has an entirely different tonality to the guitar, or a differing "sonic space" due to more or less reverb on the surrounding notes in the composite phrase. These phrases begin to make themselves heard after enough layers mesh that it's hard to hear specific phrases on their own in their entirety... somehow another layer was recorded louder, or with a more distorted tone, drowning it out, taking over the melody, before a chorus of seven layers of guitars glide over a single chord, or bend and sway sickly under the thrall of a vibrato dip. To put down the instrument and hear the ghosts inside the music composing melodies and songs that I've played but never ACTUALLY PLAYED... it's somehow magical to me. Haunting. As though these melodies were already there, floating through the air, waiting for someone to rip open the air and pluck them... tuning into some frequency beyond my control.

Standing there, listening to the recording playing back, a symphony of guitars - moaning, singing, crying, laughing, screaming... all humming underneath a haunting melody that no one ever played. But it's there. It exists. Sometimes it's even beautiful. But no one played it to make that sound. It's truly collaborating with the technology, rather than using it to my own ends. I'm not enough of a technically accomplished player to perform the melodies in my head. I'm not enough of an expert on the electronics and technology to know exactly what effect that turning one knob on my effects bank will do. German electronic composer Klaus Schulze once laughed and told an interviewer that no matter how he tried, he wouldn't be able to replicate the beautiful analog synthesizer sound he was making for them the next day. There's an element of chance, an element of danger in recording and performing without a net, without playing established music in an established genre. Gang Of Four spoke on the “Sound Opinions” podcast recently and confessed that their earliest songs were punkier than the music they later became lauded for, and in their estimation, there's a safety zone to learning how to write a song that goes "verse/bridge/chorus, verse/bridge/chorus, key change, out"... but they point out that in a way, that's not playing in a style, that's playing in a genre. Everyone has to start with genre, that's how you learn. My genre was punk. Some people start playing and play country. Some play classical. You play to a form, a format that inspired you. It’s a latticework the vines of your musical tomato plant grows up. But according to bandleaders Andy Gill and Jon King, the goal is to attempt to stretch beyond genre and reach beyond it to where the art is being created free of genre restrictions, be they form or tone (i.e. punk has to be angry) to really SAY something, be it lyrical or making a musical statement. Now, rather than tying myself to the pop music genre restriction, I'm working toward a different and new (to me) method of composition, one that allows for a percentage of chance and intuition to work simultaneously, rather than polishing my abilities to succeed within form. It's the very essence of coloring "outside the lines" -- it's dangerous, but can be rewarding. It can be just awful sometimes, but you never know if you'd hit a progression that moves your spirit if you don't take that gamble. It's the essence of jazz, applied to quasi-melodic (OK, "not entirely dissonant") electronic experimentation with a good old wood and steel contraption generating the sounds. Primitive human technology filtered through cutting-edge technology has a magical way of forcing the humanity of the "driver" through to the end result.

The beauty of the process is the crafting of each track live... listening to the looping, loping melody, adding a spare, interlocking part, attempting to tentatively integrate into the whole, in and out of what's already there, and then once successful, moving on to new sounds and ideas. By relaxing a mentality of absolute control over what I INTEND the end result to be, and simply letting it develop naturally (not predicting a fatalist, it's allowing me to create melodies in an automatic fashion. I provide the impetus, the ghosts in the machine tell me how it's supposed to sound when it's all done.

It's completely uncommercial, equal parts inspiration and chance, but it's something very, very pure. In fact, the last time I watched 24 Hour Party People, I even got a little choked up when the film's version of Durutti Column supporter/benefactor (and Factory Records head) Tony Wilson attempts to lift Reilly's spirits after a spartan Tuesday night crowd (ok, an empty room). It's a moment that stands as a testament to Wilson's belief in the power of rock and roll, and why we're all here in the first place. He puts his hand on Vini's shoulder and assures him, "Whatever we acheive, the important thing is that you make... wonderful music." And really, isn't that what making music should really be about?

The Dirtbombs Start The Party (Again)

2011-04-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

When I heard about the Dirtbombs' new album, Party Store, I was fascinated. As a card-carrying member of the 'Bombs fan club, and a lifelong fan of primitive early techno music (too many "synthesizer magic" demonstrations in elementary school, and "3-2-1 Contact" episodes on electronic music tech. A few years as a kid in Europe at the dawn of the '90s didn't hurt), it seemed like a really strange choice for a group as sweaty and organic as the combo that put out the garagey Dangerous Magical Noise and the R&B covers masterpiece Ultraglide In Black. But something about their last album hinted that all was not well at the mod shindig these groovy soulsters were rocking. 2008's We Have You Surrrounded kept the band's two (biggest) strengths intact: a slicked-back sense of how to inject groove and soul music into a rock format, and a vicious intensity that masked some seriously dark undertones. To an armchair socilogist like me, Surrounded is one of the finer records of the latter half of the last decade because it captures the tenor of the times so well... a post-9/11 terror state... bombings, riots, Egypt and Libya on the verge of collapse... it ain't exactly the second Age Of Aquarius. Along with Gorillaz Demon Days, it managed to merge a rocking-in-the-face-of-it spirit with a one-eye-over-your-shoulder reality check.

So what happens when you end up in an about the worst example of urban decay (sorry, Detroit!) in one of the bleakest times in memory? You look back to see what your predecessors did in times of strife. In this case, they danced.

The late '80s in Detroit were nobody's idea of a Garden Of Eden, but in a testament to the human spirit and the effects of psychedelic club drugs, some brilliant minds were creating what, to them, were the updated sounds of the European jet set. What happened, of course, is that their creations got away from them and became some combination of the Iron Giant and a lumbering Johnny Appleseed, changing the face of the pop music landscape for the next, oh, thirty years. But this isn't really about what happened in electronic and pop music from 1990 onward. This is about what it sounds like when the times around you don't look good... when there's no money, no love, no peace, no future, and you realize there's nothing you can do So you just... fucking... dance.

Don't forget that bandleader Mick Collins has been denying the Dirtbombs' status as a "garage rock" act since the band's inception. Every time I read an article with the man, he's frustrated at being pigeonholed. I mean, it has to be a little tounge-in-cheek, because as anyone who's seen them live can attest, they put the sweat and blood into crashing drums and fuzzed out guitars like nobody's business... it's pretty close, Mick. But he's always categorizing the group as a "dance band", and at first glance, it's hard not to wonder if this concept (garagey combo plays TECHNO songs?!?) isn't some kind of contrarian impuse to say "YEAH, JERKS - WE ARE A DANCE BAND, SEE?". My faith in their abilities made me want to check it out, but even a devoted fan like myself was skeptical that it could be a success. It seemed more like the type of album that's usually mentioned in conversation as "Oh, you know, they're all good, except of course for that techno covers one, but that was just a weird one-off experiment". Depending on your taste, its a charge that could be levelled against any genre-exercise album (Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue", The Byrds' "Sweetheart Of The Rodeo", etc). I didn't doubt Collins' love of the music: as a longtime Detroit scenester/supporter, I can't imagine he wasn't jacking to some of the futuristic sounds of Derrick May and Model 500. He's been threatening a Dirtbombs "bubblegum" record for years now, too. But jumping from being a MASTER of one genre to even being "pretty good" in another... that's a tough move, Mick. So this album was approached with a little caution.

On first listen, it was just a surprise to hear the MC5-like sound of the band's ramalama constrained to such a repetitious form... but luckily, years of damaging my brain with Fall albums and Krautrock bootlegs kept me on board. I was intrigued. Had some things to do. Put it on later... and well, I pumped it into the CTRL Sound Department's speakers, strapped on my guitar, cranked up the fuzz, and played along ALL NIGHT.

The Krautrock mention up there isn't without a point... the early "Bellville Three" (techno pioneers May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson) material was essentially an update of the sounds Kraftwerk were making at the time, modelled for ritzy club play, but if you trace that back even one more link in the chain, Kraftwerk were simply the first all-electronic Krautrock band. If you can imagine what Kraftwerk's best-known songs would sound like on traditional instruments, you're simply regressing to early Krautrock pioneers. It's then strange to go FORWARD in time, from Kraftwerk to their disciples, to imagining transferring those electronic grooves on organic "rock" instruments, instead of the other way around. The difference? The Dirtbombs have soul on their side. They make these robotic grooves swing and bump rather than click and thump. As several reviewers paid far more than me have already pointed out, the Dirtbombs play everything like they're going for the jugular, so to hear them so savagely attack these minimalist phrases and extended rhythmic grooves with the same brutal intensity that they tear into a Motown cover. Or, for that matter, a Brian Eno cover. Or even an INXS cover. These guys (and girl - Ko Melina, of the highly underrated Ko and The Knockouts) don't fuck around. Ko delivers her finest vocal performance to date on this album, cooing in the "diva" counterpoint role so often necessary on these old techno and house songs. Lethal doses of inventive arrangements, thanks to the unconventional twin-bass, twin-drummers lineup, leads to a ton of danceable rhythms pumping out of the speakers. Guitar squonk abounds, too... the band hasn't abandoned their love of thrashing tempos, incisive guitar lines, and more fuzz than the chins of a Portland hipster bar.

So I think it's great. But will anybody else? Fuzz fans with an affinity for a VERY specific type of dance music (hard to find on albums as it was a 12" singles genre, and dance music is so forward-moving, much of it is considered "old and useless" within a year), it seems like a pretty niche market, geared mainly toward... myself? I genuinely have no idea if the band expected a market for this type of album. Open-minded listeners with a penchant for repetition and fuzz will fall in love with it, but its easy to imagine a lot of casual fans from the rock end of the spectrum being turned off at the near-complete lack of hooks and even vocals. It's not an instrumental record... but there's not much "singing" to be found. Technophiles will steer clear because it's a crunchy rock act playing ancient songs. If one even has a distaste for techno beats and repetitious buzzsaw faux-sequencer lines, this isn't your cup of tea. The band hasn't simply adorned their songs with the trappings of another style, a la the '97 "year of drum 'n' bass", but the Dirtbombs swallowed, digested, and completely recreated this style within the parameters of their style. Whether this is a good thing, or even a necessary thing, is the subjective element here. As a fan of both highly-specified categories, I'm in lurve. But if you're not... you might be better served by the singles comp. Buy this and give it a listen -- it makes better background music than you might think, but there's a high probability this isn't something for everyone. But I just spent about 3 hours pushing a tube amp to new levels of overdrive to rock along with one of the last great "rock and roll bands". So I guess that's a pretty positive review.

intercept: CTRL NEWSWIRE

2011-04-01T00:47:00.000-07:00

[begin transmission]

[static]

-- begin tracking: Central Target, remote login--
-- LOCATION: appx. 42.362603,-71.062274 --
-- trace source: [radio device blocked by weather; report to 'storm force'] --

[begin message]

THERE'S A NOR'EASTER BLOWING, AND WE'RE CURRENTLY HIDING OUT IN PLAIN SIGHT. CHECK YOUR LOCAL STATION. THINGS HERE MOVE PRETTY FAST. BUT NOT AS FAST AS WE DO.

LIVE-IN-THE-STUDIO REMIXES LAST NIGHT WHEN THE SPIRIT THREE AND NEPTUNE BALANCE COLLABORATED AT CTRL ON A 2-HOUR TRIP-HOP PERFORMANCE.

PLANS ARE CURRENTLY UNDERWAY FOR A NEPTUNE BALANCE EP BEFORE SUMMER 2010.

THE SPIRIT THREE IS EXPECTED TO COMPLETE A NEW EP IN THEIR LIVE SERIES NEXT WEEK, WITH AN ONLINE RELEASE TO FOLLOW SHORTLY THEREAFTER.

WE'RE CURRENTLY IN TALKS WITH SHAKE AND LAZER MOUSE ABOUT NEW MATERIAL, AND MAY BE ANNOUNCING ANOTHER NEW SIGNING TO THE LABEL SOMETIME THIS SPRING.

FINALLY, AFTER SOME LEGAL WRANGLING, IF ALL GOES WELL, WE MAY DIG INTO THE ARCHIVES TO PROVIDE A GLIMPSE AT THE ORIGINS OF THE COLLECTIVE. THINGS ARE AFOOT. NO JOKE.

SURREPTITIOUSLY,
MIKEY SHAKE

[end message]

-- track source: Boston, MA --
-- track sender: CTRL, Primary Agent --
-- monitor radio waves, targ--

[directive: terminate sweet potato supply WITH EXTREME PREDJUDICE]

[static]

[end transmission]

transmission intercept: CTRL expanding/begin surveillance

2011-03-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

[begin transmission]

[static]

-- begin tracking: Central Target Hub Ultra-Linear Unit (CTRL, C.T.H.U.L.U.) --
-- trace souce: Northeast United States, likely on land, Earth --

[begin message]

Hello out there.

Since our last announcement, things at Central Target have been heating up. More communication breakdowns, less all-night Zeppelin parties, and fewer lyrical drops into the communiques.

Fa fa fa... wait, never mind.

I've recently spoken to my trusty new business partner, who shall remain temporarily nameless, but is now 1/2 of the Central Target Recording Label. He's a master of music and a titan of industry. A gentleman AND a scholar. Please wish him welcome, everyone. He'll be operating out of a new secret lair we're opening in Cleveland. I've seen the video screen in the control room... like the bridge of the Enterprise. Secret rooms, parking structure, indoor roller rink... truly incredible. But you read right up there when I said Cleveland. No, we're not relocating -- we're EXPANDING. That's right... we're oozing west, kids.

Despite the best efforts of our helper monkeys, our communications center is not fully operational. But don't worry. Despite the fact that we here at CTRL are somewhat quiet, we're more than comfortable... spending our days in chic lounges and recording studios, making music. Some of it pounding, some of it haunting. In the immortal words of one Mr. Hammer, "It's all good." While we expect the release of significantly more music than has been previously offered, we're also expecting a bit of a quiet period on the release front for the next 4-6 weeks (although other content should still continue to be updated intermittently). But don't lose hope, true believers, not only will we continue to ape the style of beloved childhood narrators... we're also going to hit it hard and hit it good as soon as we regroup. Figuratively speaking, of course.

We're currently in the process of deputizing some collaborators... accomplices if you will. Much like television's "the A-Team", we've been keeping our eye on several potential staff members/contractors. It could even be you. Just know that we're watching, and that at any time you might be called into the most dangerous, fabulous, secretly powerful cabal of artists to which you've ever been privvy.

Hang tight, boys and girls... and just remember the slogan I heard from Kevin almost a decade ago. I'd paraphrase, but it would just lose something in the translation.

More soon, once we contact our girl in Dorchester, once we refuel the brain trust, and once we run the electric bill sky-high at 3:30 AM. Trust me, it will make sense later.

Gotta run.

Diabolically.
Mikey Shake

-- track source: Boston, MA... Cleveland, OH --
-- track sender: CTRL, Head Agent --
-- monitor radio waves, no hard line installed --

[directive: determine purpose of CTRL, halt world domination]

[static]

[end transmission]

intercepted: transmission from CTRL remote location

2011-03-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

-open transmission-
-static-
-receiving message-
-sent from: Central Target Research Labs, Northeast United States, Earth-
-subject: "This Year's (Business) Model"-
-NOTICE -- HIGH PRIORITY

-begin message-
The Central Target Recording Label -CTRL-, is not a record label. It's a label for a "collective" -- without the baggage that term now carries, thanks to some ill-advised misappropriations. It's a group of like-minded musicians who make unconventional music. Members of many of the groups have mixed and matched in various musical combinations over the past decade. The idea behind CTRL as a "recording label" is as an outlet for people to put music out into the world in a dedicated channel, acting as a brand, a flavor, a seal of approval. A stamp that the content of the music comes from a certain sensibility. Not a specific "artist/label" relationship. Not yet. The particular musical content isn't necessarily of a common theme, other than the fact that it's not interested in charts or trends, or even commercial domination.

There is no end goal to the content unified under the -CTRL Stamp Of Approval- -image quarantined: delete- umbrella, other than a drive to create music, regardless of audience. It's what makes a musician record a composition by themselves, for their own satisfaction. That drive is what fuels this group of artists. That's why we're going to begin by giving it away for free Central Target. There's no other motive behind the music to their creators felt the need to create it. In the spirit of Factory Records, "our bands have the freedom to fuck off" -check for DNA on statement-. For now, it's simply a way for a coterie of like-minded people to share what they make with other people who may like the same thing, As well as to provide greater visibility for each by the "strength in numbers" survival strategy. Seems simple. Sharing music online? What a concept...

But beyond rock-crit jargon and lofty philosophies and some silly posturing, really.. the point is that Central Target will now be providing the world with some more wonderful new music by several incredible artists. Three, in fact, for starters.

<1> Neptune Balance
close your eyes on a city street and just listen to the music that thousands of individual moments are making simultaneously all around you. it changes course at any given beat -- reflecting that gentle wash as you stop trying to hear something and just listen to it. love, hate, passion, reflection... laughing, screaming, or crying. it could be any of those moments you're overhearing at once - only stretched out long enough to swim in. electronic music that weaves in and out of the human condition.

<2> Lazer Mouse
It's the overloaded sugar rush of that big smear of icing on the corner of the cake. There's no better sound than the sound of cruising around town looking for a good time -- this is the soundtrack to that good time. Buzzing, crackling, infectious punk rock music... sweet with a serrated edge. Music to feel better to.

<3> The Spirit Three
Echoes without a source, it sounds like remembering too many things at the same time. Difficult to pinpoint, but layered textures that let just enough light through to spot half-forgotten melodies that dance around radio frequencies like ghosts.

Please welcome the new members to the family (and there may be more in the future), and we're looking forward to hearing wonderful things in the future.

Meanwhile, the communications center at the bunker is still inactive, which means this was snuck into a television news station in downtown Boston -locate^terminate source- so that we could transmit it worldwide. More analyitical pop culture editorials should soon be forthcoming, and if all goes well, we intend to bring you more music before the month is out.

-sender-Mikey Shake-x-
-title-President/Editor, CTRL-x-

-begin program: "track sender"-
-end message-
-static-
-end transmission-

The Spirit Three - Meatland EP

2011-03-15T05:34:00.000-07:00

Meatland: Secret Transmissions From CTRL

DOWNLOAD HERE

1, Control Codes
2, Bad Dollar
3, Today I'm Hiding Planes Behind A Telephone Line
4, Backdoor Wisconsin (Bavaria)

All tracks recorded live (one take)
Recorded March 6th-14th
at Central Target Research Labs, Boston, MA
M Hiltz - all guitars, drum programming
no synthesizers were used on this EP.
Front Cover photo and layout by CTRL Design
special thanks to ofthemetro, Cliff at "effects", Mike Walsh, and Sweetcheeks

Part Six of the Spirit Three EP series

The 100th Post

2011-02-19T06:33:00.001-08:00

We've made it to 100 here at the CTRL! It's with that in mind that the information in the following comminuque is both technical and philosophical... isn't that what each and every one of you faithful readers comes here for?

The Central Target Research Labs are up and running, with a library, lounge, galley, communications center, recording studio, nearby escape route, and an in-house exotic eatery.

Despite the toll that the relocation has taken on us all, several projects are in the works, including the production of a soundtrack for a lost 1960's biker/exploitation film, a review of the latest album by Detroit music legends The Dirtbombs, new Spirit Three material, as well as a series of random and insightful dispatches originally created between 1:00 AM and 7:00 AM.

However, despite the best effors of our tech team, we're currently without a way to broadcast these, as a freak accident has knocked out our comminications equipment. So, all of our efforts are currently self-contained, until a way to jack into the system presents itself. Then, we'll naturally flood the channels with new updates. Until then, hold tight.

We're working on it, don't worry.

So until then, I'll leave you faithful followers with the following postulation.

I was watching the 1987 film version of Less Than Zero (a longtime favorite book of mine, but I'd never seen the movie), and found myself wondering if a plastic, shallow, day-glo wasteland of superficiality presented in the film is somehow preferable to a twitchy, paranoid existience where imminent doom is never far from anyone's mind. Of course, years spent decrying the artificial, dead-inside gloss of the late 1980's makes (and a naive longing in my adolesence for "gritty reality") this is a bitter pill to swallow, but as defeatist as it may seem, it sure seems prettier than the alternative.

Grim, huh? It's February. Let's not get too peppy for another month, people.

Thoughts Found Online: A Quick Update For The Faithful

2011-01-27T03:02:00.001-08:00

'Found thoughts' for you... an excellent point about the state of most "indie rock" (the musical 'style', not the act of being a band/artist on an independent label) and its influence derived from Radiohead, who, for the LAST TIME, I do enjoy.

"What strikes me most about them is the absolute lack of playfulness in their music. Everything about them seems absolutely calculated and simultaneously stoic and histrionic. Nothing about them feels immediate.

There's also the matter of their influence on independent rock since the release of "OK Computer." I feel like a large percentage of music championed by Pitchfork and their ilk is derived from or greatly influenced by "OK Computer" and its followups and the musical principals extolled therein. The punk values of "indie" throughout the 80s and 90s where replaced with prog rock values."

- "PB", avclub.com reply boards, Jan. 2011

Interesting. When confronted with the question of how I could come up through the same "pre-indie" channels of alternative rock and punk, yet feel so distanced from the state of current "indie rock" (i.e. "blog rock") is because I approach it expecting the same punk-derived value system (both musical and philosophical) I encountered in the "alternative" scene throughout college and the early years of the current environment. I'm looking at it as a punk, they're looking at it the way prog-rockers would, which, to my mentality, is anathema.

And don't worry, faithful readers, Central Target has not forsaken you. We're simply in the process of updating the new and improved Central Target Research Labs.(CTRL). The lab equipment has been moved in, there's still some light cleaning to do, and we're desperately in need of that phalanx of teenage Swedes to shuffle things around, but it's coming along nicely. Here's a snapshot from the "moving-in" process:

We may be taking January off in the "Spirit Three Live EP Series" after the relocation and the sad passing of a member of the Central Target family, but we will be back in force, and rest assured that January is not going to pass without some type of surprise.

Switchblades & Lollipops,
Mikey Shake
Central Target Research Labs

Two Roads, In A Wood... blah, blah, blah...

2011-01-04T05:29:00.001-08:00

Self-taught musicians tend to learn by listening and playing along to things, whereas more trained players are taught the "right" and "wrong" way and focus on accomplishing a superior performance. Which might explain the fact that bands like Joy Division and bands like Dream Theater exist under the same category of "rock music".

The Central Target Research Lab

2010-12-16T03:01:00.000-08:00

Well, 2010 is winding down, so it's time to keep running from the Man, as always. We here are proud to announce that we're moving into some new digs... the new Central Target Research Lab. It's essentially a private new hideout/base, replete with an in-house Indian restaurant, a recording studio, media center, library... and it's all "transport adjacent" for a quick underground or airborne getaway. If we can get that team of interns (forced labor) we're hoping for, there might even be a tiki bar.

We'll be keeping you updated with pictures of the installation as it progresses, but please forward your hate mail, marriage proposals, and kinky photographs to the new address:

Central Target Research Lab (CTRL)
Secret Lair, Deep Underground
Boston, MA 0212

(No C.O.D.)

How To Be A Grouch: Top Seven Of 2010

2010-12-15T08:37:00.001-08:00

So it's that time again. I'm spurred on my by my colleague's mention of his impending list... and my own guilt about not really even thinking about mine in ages. See, 2010 was big for me. Got a good job that I like, that lets me write professionally... got married... moving to a nice new place before the year is out... and more specifically around here, started up a new musical endeavor of my own... which has tended to make me listen to more ambient/drone/experimental stuff than I have in the past.

So maybe, I've just been busy... maybe that's why I'm finding it so hard to muster up a top 10 albums of 2010. Scrolling through the digital Post-It (TM) that I've been keeping on my laptop for years... the one that says "Best Albums Of The Year"... it's December, and I've only got eight. The ones I've been thinking of adding would take my pool of candidates up to 13. Not the glorious two-or-three dozen I've had in some recent years to sift through and really decide what cut my jib the past 3-6-5. Nope, a slim, trim 13. So screw it. I'm calling it off. There will be no top ten this year (*waves arms in that "simmer down" motion to quell outraged threats and hysterical sobbing*)... no, not this year. In this year, I present to you a top SEVEN. Not a TEN, a SEVEN. There were plenty of albums, new to me, that I heard that I liked. A medium-sized percentage of them were even from this year. Several were even albums I really enjoyed listening to over and over, but they were like flings... nothing that really stuck. So here's a short list of what I REALLY, REALLY liked,

7. Wu-Tang Meets The Beatles - Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers
I just found this a week ago, and the earliest date my completely half-assed search for info on it pulled up was in January, so there. It is what you think it is, just spliced 'n' diced Beatles bits with the Wu-Tang swarmin' at you like a bad fever dream. Not revolutionary, in this post-Danger Mouse world, but it's a good example of how far sampleadelic culture has come since a JBs break first got lifted by an enterprising DJ. Well-done, with surprising sound quality and a nicely-put-together cover. The best part? It's the most fun you'll have if you're that rare breed that straddles a line between Liverpool and Shaolin. The re-contextualization appeals if you're jaded by hearing another Beatles song ANOTHER time, and it's fun to hear tales of feudal ghetto warfare over psych-pop breakbeats.

6. Sade - Soldier Of Love
My adoration for this record is based almost entirely on the title track. Most of the rest doesn't begin to live up to that pinnacle of (in my opinion) her career. But it's good enough to get the whole album on this list. Low on the list, though, but still... It's a great album, but my god, that song. It wouldn't have such power if it weren't sung by a returning champion we didn't understand... we hadn't seen her dark side. Hearing the jagged, murky landscape of this song, traced with a voice that is older, more nuanced... but still familiar? Fantastic.

5. The Dead Weather - Sea Of Cowards
I'm a Jack White fan, yeah, but I'm no patsy. I've said it before, but if Jack wants to make it on my list, he's gotta earn his keep. Lucky for him, it was a thin year, because this ain't his finest-ever. But so what? A greasy, sexy profanity of an album, it's dark, angry, sexually-charged, and loud. It's primitive, thudding, grinding rock music. Electric guitars turned up to "loud" and banged on rhythmically. And it's pretty great. And if he keeps making these, I'll take back most of the good things I said about the second Raconteurs album. promise.

4. Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroid
I can't really give a fair description of this record, because I don't really know how I'm supposed to be listening to it. Is it coming from an R&B/soul angle? Because it doesn't make sense as an R&B album. It's not a "rock and roll" album either. And forget pop, this is almost (nay, certainly) willfully weird. And that's its best trait. The songs are great, the presentation is great, the experimentation is great. One of the only reasons this wasn't my favorite album of the year is that it felt "still a little unformed". If Monae can keep her artistic freedom for another album or two, those will be the ones that really knock it out of the park. Like Prince, circa Dirty Mind... we'll be looking at it in ten years as the great warmup that's also a classic in it's own right.

3 Malory - Pearl Diver
It's the sound of dreaming about clouds while floating underwater in bright sunlight. Pensive, layered, thoughtful, beautiful.

2. Ceremony - Rocket Fire
Cold but human, noisy but pretty. I can't listen to it quietly, because there really is no quiet in there. Ceremony wraps synth-pop drum machines in the gauzy wrap of fuzz and static. If you're in a city sometime, close your eyes and listen. Start to isolate sounds... the radio across the street, honking horns, people yelling, that white-noise of a hundred thousand people moving around? Now fix in on the way that nearby construction saw's whine is rubbing against the screech of bus breaks down the street... now bring in that jackhammer a block over. Pummelling, pulsing rhythmically, but not too loud... just an insistient, continuous machine-gun "brrrap-brrrap-brrrap-brrrap". You suddenly realize the synchronization of those sounds... or your mind somehow glues them together... and you hear, in your head, just for a second, the way the sounds make some alien type of music together, like they're playing off of each other... that's what Ceremony sound like.

1. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
...speaking of albums that will be better appreciated later. It's funny how after all those years of Albarn getting Ray Davies comparisons for his incisive Brit-life lyrics, he'd years later slide into that other Ray Davies role, that of underappreciated storyteller, the weary poet with a fondness for humanity, but not much hope that anyone will listen until it's too late. The way we can look back on some of the Kinks' mid-period work and ask "How was this a commerical failure?" This is great pop, it's danceable and it has catchy hooks. It's conceptual - after all, the band is made up of cartoon character ape-people who live in a floating fortress. It's post-modern pop music that makes a patchwork out of its genres and guest stars, painting slashing swathes of memorable (con)texture over unfamiliar backgrounds. It's social commentary, in a not-too-veiled way. It's the tabloid story of a phoenix-like second-chance career run from a former Buzz Bin bad boy, who's both a Royal National Treasure and a one-hit wonder. Here he's making the most personal album of his career, and even if it's not his best, it's his bravest yet.

Special extra credit to albums by Erykah Badu, John & Exene, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, School of Seven Bells, Manic Street Preachers, Black Mountain, High On Fire, Beach House, and several others my mind is far too full to conjure up right now. Nice job!

The Spirit Three - "Wartime (Missing Pieces)"

2010-12-07T04:05:00.001-08:00

Outtakes & Rarities

"This is a collection of session outtakes and unreleased tracks. Some of them will sound familiar, as some of the tracks were simply more of what was initially released... just a few feet down the tape from where the one you know ended. Or was it before it began? How long did some of these tracks go on? Are all the recordings so far excerpts from much longer pieces of music?

Of note is the live recording from 2007, which was the first public performance of the Spirit Three, although at that time, the project was going by the name 'Midway Strange'. That composition, 'Time Is Violence' was first recorded at this performance, but had been playing in one form or another every hour since approximately 1998. "

- M

DOWNLOAD HERE

1, Drone Musik (Double Pink, Two Blue)
2, Somewhere Last Night, After You Left
3, Interlude, Variation 2
4, Split Decision
5, Melted Zip Decay
6, No Johnny, I Don't (The Well Of The Souls)
7, The Day After Revere (Wonderland, Pt. 1)
8, Closed The Park
9, Coedar
10, First Strike, Second Run
11, Time Is Violence [Live 2007]
12, The Crack In The Wall

Recorded 2007-2010
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA
Uncle Fester's, Bloomington, IN
M Hiltz - guitar, bass, baritone guitar, piano, programming
Front cover by Upstairs Design
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake, Shannon, and ofthemetro

Part Five of the Spirit Three EP Series

"The Defilers": A Grammatically Acrobatic Film Review

2010-12-07T02:36:00.000-08:00

While its sick violence and rampant mysogyny is unrepentant, "The Defilers" plays like nothing so much as a David Lynch film, with its themes exposing the brutal perversion underneath the sweet, sweeping soundtrack strings. However, this film has the added benefit of being ACTUALLY of the cinematic period that Lynch so lovingly and painstakingly recreates. The first blush of "anyone with a camera and a few friends" making their own small-scale masterpieces. It's just that "The Defilers" is of that era's "just give 'em sex and violence" exploitation wave. It's the air of low-budget, Golden Age Of Hollywood aspirations, combined with a punk rock sense of "cut the shit, get to the good stuff" that makes it riveting. However, it's the under-trained but highly ambitious cinematography, combined with the aforementioned collision of graphic thrills, faux-Hollywood glamor (and the attendant campy low-budget production value, acting included), and the disconcerting is-it-real-or-just-for-shock saturation of sadism, sexism and violence, that makes it damn near psychedelic.

Ram It Down: A Point Of Entry For Judas Priest To Deliver The Goods

2010-11-26T07:25:00.000-08:00

After spending time, once again, debating with the best man at my wedding over the merits of Iron Maiden versus Judas Priest, I decided to commit: I'd listen to the nominal entirety of Judas Priest's discography, since, as a Maiden Man (uhhhh..) I was LESS familiar with the collective work of Priest. Granted, the tone of my analysis was not unbiased, since I was essentially comparing Priest, who I don't know really well, although I really like them, to Iron Maiden, who I already know I love. But I figured all it would do is make me like Judas Priest more, since I'd be more familiar with them, right?

So I dove in. On Thanksgiving. Five days after my wedding. Seriously. We drove to Thanksgiving dinner rocking out to Stained Class. Loud.

I love my wife.

So... here's my take this week in the case of Priest v. Maiden.

If each of these bands were a movie trilogy, Priest would be Max Max. Hot, sweaty, vaguely futuristic, most certainly surly, a little violent, but rooted in greasy machines. It will start out great (Mad Max/Sad Wings Of Destiny-Sin After Sin), get over-the-top awesome (The Road Warrior/ Stained Class-Defenders of The Faith), then peter out while doing the things you love in a familiar but tired way (Beyond Thunderdome/Ram It Down-Turbo). Iron Maiden, on the other hand, would likely be Lord Of The Rings -- probably went on too long, had lots of stages you could have done without, but when you're done, it's usually the more awesome stuff I remember.

For ME, I think my preference for Maiden comes from two things: context and production. Judas Priest sounds dated to me, thanks to their attempts to stay contemporary. A forgivable sin in the early 1980s, when all the technology to MAKE those sounds was new and wild, but now all that chorus on those guitars smothered in gated reverb remind me of the soundtracks to a million Saturday afternoon movie closing credit themes. Defenders Of The Faith is a particularly egregious example, which buries some of the band's best "hard era" songs in a digital reverb din that makes it impossible to separate from inages of Remo Williams duking it out with Action Jackson on top of a half-finished skyscraper. Maiden had their own production problems, to be sure (some of the synths on the post-Powerslave era are a bit airy to belong of an Iron Maiden record), but it seems like they held out LONGER for one reason or another, with simply a greater percentage of their so-called "classic period" sounding less specifically of its time.

The worst effect of this is on the dueling guitars that made each act so brutally awesome. Whomever it was that botched so many production jobs for Priest certainly owes K.K. Barrett and Glen Tipton their apologies. "Here's an idea for you, audio scientists: if you're going to have dueling lead guitars, why don't you give each of the players identical tones, so you can't distinguish between who's playing what!" Oh wait, you did that, and dampened the brilliance of one of the best twin-guitar lineups since Scott Gorham and whoever else was in Thin Lizzy at the time! Maiden's albums seem to have a distinction in tones between Dave Murray and Adrian Smith that allows you to hear another aspect of the guitaring that differentiates the two even further: melodies. Downing and Tipton RULE, alright? And while I would love to be in the front row banging my fucking head while they rip up some guitarmonies, on (overproduced) record, too much of that same tone turns into sort of a chorus-y, phased mush. It's to the players' credit that this isn't noticeable unless you're listening with a critical ear. Their soloing is astounding, and the riffage and melodicism of the solos is brilliant, but poor production harms it, and I've even listened to the remasters for this comparison. It's hardly the band's fault, and again, I'm sure that in the room it's practically a religious experience, but on record, and that's all anyone really has to go on, it's a little same-y. Maiden seems to utilize counterpoint melodies in the lead guitar parts, rather than intricate harmonies on the same melody. Which is a different beast, really, with a different number. But if you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison... I prefer the intertwining melodies version.

I wouldn't be stupid enough to compare Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson to Judas Priest's Rob Halford though. That's a fool's game. Both these dudes are as good as metal/rock vocalists come, and that one's strictly down to preference. However, we can talk lyrics. Maybe that's where my "mid-80s rock tone" pre-condition jumps in. Because honestly, my "bands to trilogies" metaphor up there didn't come out of nowhere. Judas Priest were bad boys, singing about cars and sex and being badasses (leather-and-studs image notwithstanding). Iron Maiden's Steve Harris was a nerd, through and through. He wrote about history and fantasy literature... a song based on the 1960's pop-art TV show The Prisoner? Dork. While the lyrics on either band's oeuvre of dust sleeves are all pretty silly, the macho strut of Priest somehow (and I don't pretend to understand why) comes off as sillier. Which makes me a complete nerd, but if you've read this far, you're pretty comfortable with that fact.

But the obsession with say, "hot rod metal" vs. "dragonslayer metal" has one other hidden facet -- the fact that they had different ancestors. Sure, they can both be traced back to early proto-metal like Sabbath and Zeppelin. But Maiden leaned a lot harder on European musical influences, while Priest was undoubtedly more fueled by American music. The boys in Maiden were more likely to incorporate some classical passages in with their galloping sound, with phrases that recall what many 20th century ears hear as the "old fashioned" central European sounds of movies featuring wizards and warriors. Add to this the scales of the British folk tradition (of which you can certainly hear shades in some of Iron Maiden's mid-period albums), there's a foreign medieval-ness to their sound that appeals to me. It's got just a little more of that "Battle Of Evermore"/Jimmy page version of Olde English folk to add a different texture. Judas Priest, on the other hand, are basically a blues act. Blues as filtered through John Lee Hooker's electric guitar, Elvis' frenzied gospel intermingling, Keith Richards' simplification of technique, Jimi Hendrix' amplification of sound into an almost physical element, and the giant scope of Zeppelin. But make no mistake, despite a few proggier moments on their earlier records, had they not discovered that their strengths were speed and aggression, they could have made a string of albums that sounded like Foreigner. Thank god they didn't, and once they found that recipe around the time of Stained Class, they transformed into a piston-pumping machine of greasy, full-throttle open road juggernaucity. (Nice, huh?) Of course, Maiden aren't off the hook either. Original vocalist Paul DiAnno often gets the blame for the less-than-awesome vibe of the first two Iron Maiden records, but it's lazy to attribute it solely to him. Bassist and songwriter Steve Harris was writing interesting songs that showed the path they would later take, but let's not mistake "interesting" with "very good". I like them, they have their charm, but each of these bands is allowed a few early missteps. I'm looking at you Rocka Rolla.

So ultimately, the bands certainly share some characteristics, but were separated by several years in making their first albums and really didn't sound all that much alike to music nerds. Once again proving that we're all wasting our lives, because in the grand scheme of music history, I don't see why I should even be able to distinguish between the two bands.

So, in short, I'm really, really glad I plowed through all that Judas Priest. i discovered at least 4 absolutely awesome records (Stained Class, Hell Bent For Leather, Unleashed In the East, and the almighty Screaming For Vengeance), none of which are marred by awful production. Incidentally, the last great Priest album, unmentioned here, is Painkiller, where the band finally caught up with the '80s thrash scene that they influenced. Brooooootal. I still prefer Iron Maiden, but I like my "epic fantasy rock" more than I like my "cars, sex, and being awesome" badass anthems.

Of course, Kiss annihilates both these sets of wimps with one giant ball of fire, but that's another column.

The Spirit Three - "Who's Your Doctor?" EP

2010-11-14T00:36:00.000-08:00

UPDATED LINK - DOWNLOAD HERE

Recorded 2009-2010
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA
and Le Office, Boston, MA
M Hiltz - guitar, baritone guitar, synth, sequencing
Front cover by Upstairs Design
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake, Shannon, and ofthemetro

Part Four of the Spirit Three Not-So-Live-Anymore EP Series

The Spirit Three - "Churchill UFOs" EP

2010-11-01T15:27:00.000-07:00

DOWNLOAD HERE

Recorded live, Sep. & Oct. 2010.
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA
Live to 1-track digital recording.
No overdubs.
M Hiltz - guitar
Front cover photo by Ed Albers, Upstairs Design
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake and Shannon

Part Three of the Spirit Three Live EP Series

The Spirit Three - "Kelly's Revenge" EP

2010-10-08T23:24:00.000-07:00

drone recordings, 2010

DOWNLOAD HERE

Recorded Sep. & Oct. 2010.
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA.
Digital multitrack recording.
M Hiltz - guitar/bass/synthesizer/signal processing
Front cover photo by Ronnie Dobbs
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake

Bonus Release in the Spirit Three Live EP Series

The Spirit Three - "Sarah's Prize" EP

2010-09-26T00:23:00.000-07:00

DOWNLOAD HERE

Recorded live, Sep. 9th, 2010.
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA
Live to 1-track digital recording.
No overdubs.
M Hiltz - guitar
Front cover photo by Shannon Barker
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake and Sarah Strahl

Part Two of the Spirit Three Live EP Series

Don't Kill Me, I Want To Be A Messenger

2010-09-16T03:19:00.000-07:00

"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'" - Kurt Vonnegut

The Spirit Three - "Full On Dub Kick" EP [Live]

2010-09-09T06:33:00.000-07:00

DOWNLOAD IT HERE

Recorded live, Sep. 8th, 2010.
Front Room Studio, Boston, MA
Live to 1-track digital recording.
No overdubs.
M Hiltz - guitar and processing.
Front cover photo by Shannon Barker
Layout by M Hiltz
Special Thanks to Shake

Part 1 of the Spirit Three Live EP Series

Ladies And Gentlemen... The Spirit Three

2010-09-08T06:22:00.000-07:00

The news has stopped for a few minutes, maybe I can wedge in a little overcooked musing on something or other... shall I give it a go?

I've recently been faced with an interesting creative challenge. With my interest in creating straightforward pop waning, I seem to spend a lot more time making experimental ambient music. Now, this is a strand of my musical diet that has always been there (since about the time I bought my first delay unit in high school), but has rarely bubbled to the surface, since it seemed tantamount to musical self-abuse - sure I have fun doing it, but does anyone really want to hear it?

The principal stumbling block is that in a mindset where repeatability is a key - i.e., it's no good unless you can repeat the process and get the same result... scientific musicality, in essence - an activity in which rolling around in sound, largely improvised, and unique to that performance seems somehow, well... false. Not bad, but not "real", whatever that entails.

But that was my own hang-up. In a world where recording exists, and in a medium (experimental music) where the recording and sonic manipulation is a given factor in the end result, it just doesn't matter... you only have to be able to do it right once. And sometimes, not even that, thanks to multitrack recording. Suddenly, the idea of it being a necessary factor to be able to play the same part the same way every time seems not outdated - after all, I still love pop music - BUT more than anything, it seems quaint. Suddenly, I'm working in a different field, with a different set of rules than before, and I'm finding that these rules offer a freedom of form that leads to new avenues of creativity.

The most interesting of which is that this inclination to experimental improvisation has been bubbling under for years. In 2004, we made the first Shake EP. It was intentionally primitive garage rock, inspired by the Oblivians, Cheater Slicks, et al. Only one of the songs was "written" before the recording session, and that was only in the most basic form, as it was only two different two-note riffs over a thumpy beat. The point was that between getting home and going to bed, the goal was to create, and then have the creation exist as a separate entity, outside my head, before the day was through. That forced creativity can create some excellent accidents, and is freeing in that there's a certain sense that it doesn't matter what the end result IS, simply that there is an end result, a product created for whatever purpose. In my mind, that physical end result of spontaneous creativity, whether subjectively good or bad (I had a metalhead plumber friend who LOVED the Instant Record EP and garage rocker friends who hated it), is the key to the whole thing, and the reason to even do it in the first place. What matters is that there is now a thing that wasn't. That didn't exist before you created it. And if one keeps doing it, one gets better.

Naturally, there are some hidden clauses in that freedom - i.e., I'll respect your right to make something like that, but there's a "minimum competency level" that my aging ears have begun policing. However, that level is still pretty low. I'm willing to listen to just about anything if that spark of mad creativity is there, even if the result is (and it usually is) less-than-aurally-pleasing. Of course, I don't want to make music that sounds shitty, but again, if that spark, that audible drive to push somewhere new is present, a bum note seems like a lot less of a problem and a lot more like a byproduct of improvisation and spontaneous creativity.

So now, I'm faced with a dilemma. I've come to terms with the fact that I have a limited audience... embraced it, even. Granted, I'd like my friends, whose opinions I respect, to LIKE it, but it's not necessary. Do I keep going down a road where I'm making music that pleases me with the sole intention of creation of an artifact and the enjoyment of making it? Or do I declare that art is invalid without an audience, and perhaps attempt to focus the energy on something more appealing to a wider group, thereby increasing my chances of this so-called "art" (blech) reaching a larger crowd?

The answer, of course, is the former. It doesn't matter whether or not anyone will hear (or if they do, care for) the music, it matters that this is a piece of something that wasn't there before. Sure, it might not be appealing, but it is an honest, true-to-life of a creative endeavor. It isn't forced, it isn't striving to fit a pre-determined style (it's not like I'm doing anything innovative, but I have no particular influences beyond "they play droning, heavily-effected guitars in a repetitive manner". There are a wondrous number of groups and players that have experimented with feedback and modulation. This is just another one. But the "keep doing it and get better" mantra fails me a bit when it comes to something this inherently structure-light. Without the classical pop format, the rules for whether or not something is good or bad get much more blurred. Right now, when I listen to the free-er end of avant/ambient/psychedelic music, my primary scale is "Is it boring?" That's not a lot of pressure to perfect a style, to be sure. But what if there were JUST enough pressure to keep things moving forward on a practical level, in a resolutely static style of expression? With a certain amount of pressure from a deadline, that's how. A deadline for a record series. One per month... a single at worst, and an EP at best. Some will be better than others, some will be worse than most of them. But they will be, and they will each have something appealing about them.

So please, in addition to Shake, welcome The Spirit Three into the world.

[And no, the name actually has nothing to do with Spiritualized and Spacemen 3... that's just a happy coincidence. You get an EP named after you if you're the first person to comment and say where the name comes from.]

Help The Aged: Counting Down To The Year 2000 (When We're All Fully Grown)

2010-08-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

As a certain type of youth, there's a certain appeal to a certain type of adulthood. The period between becoming a grown-up and becoming an adult. Adrift, probably surviving on cigarettes and whatever drinks you can scam a girl into buying you, and distinctly outside the norm. Over-educated and underpaid, you probably think you're under-appreciated as well, a self-absorbed intellectual, fascinated by social strata, since it's so easy to stand outside it, because who'd want to be a part of that anyway?

Which brings me to Pulp. To an American tennager in the mid-90s, Pulp held the seedy allure of an exotic sort of rinky-dink glamor, the kind that only that specifc kind of demographic above could create. They were certainly adult, what with their songs of sex and pubs and bad break-ups, and all the drunken hopelessness that comes with that. Their songs sounded like people making do with whatever they had, because none of it mattered anyway, but as Pulp frontman/mastermind Jarvis Cocker put it, "there's nothing else to do." Pulp comes across like a combination of Mississippi blues and Johnny Rotten: we're singing to make ourselves feel better... but there's really no future. I could never tell whether the group (whose spiritual guide is Cocker, without a doubt) was truly sticking up the common people, because they were all so clearly educated and intellectual in ways that "the masses" they often describe could never be.

Just like Jon Spencer, it's not so much a spokesman role, but works when you take Pulp/Cocker as an advocate and supporter - they love the realness of these people, the messy, visceral down-to-earthness, but, like Ray Davies, are ultimately just drawing sketches from the outside. I can sit in a bar near the docks at Chelsea and peoplewatch, and maybe even strike up some conversations... but I'm not one of those people. They're good people, but that's not me and it never will be. I'm not denying that Cocker probably grew up poor, and scraped to get by, and may not be a rich rock star (er, may not HAVE BEEN a rich rock star), but just like D. Boon and Mike Watt, coming from blue-collar doesn't necessarily make one that... sometimes you end up special, not like everybody else. Just like the country club set occasionally spits out a slacker with a contempt for it, a genuinely fey and pretentious poet can sometimes rise from the roughest background. That's not a slight... but something tells me ol' Jarvis wouldn't have done too well working down at the mill in Sheffield. But their examination of that segment of society, filtered with the "wasted art-school youth" of their backgrounds, had a way of making the tragedy of young adulthood seem romantic. And that romance is seductive. It's intoxicating.

There's an appeal in rooting for the underdog. We all know that. There's also an appeal in sticking it to authority, who tell you how things are supposed to be. In their prime, Cocker and Co, managed to do both... dancing in wood-panelled bingo halls with regular people on Wednesday night, flipping the finger to the establishment who had no time for the common folk. I think they had the right idea... it's all falling apart anyway, and none of us have any money, so why not have a little fun?

What's funny, is that on the other side of things, now that I am an adult (nominally), gently easing out of that period of my life, is just how nostalgic tracks like "Countdown" and "Mile End" make me for my own situation BEFORE I got there. Listening to songs of misspent young adulthood make me nostalgic for the years of adolesence when I listened to songs of misspent young adulthood looking forward to it. A therapist might have a field day, but some of my best memories of adolescence involve desperately trying to claw my way out of it. Granted, mine weren't as full of sordid sexual encounters and disco-going (I can't stand most clubs... something tells me i'd enjoy a disco in the UK in '94 a little more than most of the trance clubs these days...), but it's just funny how... well, CHARMING their brand of dirty-mirror, low-rent sleaze seems with the benefit of hindsight. Hedonistic and ever so dramatic, but charming nonetheless.

I should point out here that Pulp only briefly touched this magic observational balance. Let's say a couple of albums and a handful of singles. Their other work is wonderful, but it doesn't have the same sort of charm. In fact, almost as much as I loved Different Class and His 'N' Hers, I was listening over and over to their messy "sophomore" album (first album post-hugeness), This Is Hardcore all through my senior year of high school. I even have the band's logo from that album cover etched into my backpack in white-out if you don't believe me. Apparently that record was a giant cocaine-fuelled nervous breakdown set to music, but its soul-inflected film-noir sound spoke to my more dramatic (and depressive) tendencies. The title track in particular is a party-stopper. I'm serious. The buildup where the guitar comes in will KILL anything in the room with it's bashing bleakness. But it's worth hearing. It's just not the low-budget Roxy Music mod/disco of their "classic" period.

Britpop seduced me after I started to move beyond what grunge and alternative rock had become - a big, label-fuelled cash-grab full of artfully coiffured guitarists in silk shirts and leather pants, who'd been playing Poison licks only 3 years prior, but now they had a lip piercing and a tattoo. Oasis spoke to my populist tenencies. They wanted to pull my heartstrings with supersized anthems, and I damn well wanted those strings pulled. It was a good deal to cut. Blur spoke to my intellect... painting pictures of the way modern life in the suburbs really was, pulling back the curtain on convenience and showing the hollow core. A bit too clever for it's own good, but not pulling any punches and inspiring. But Pulp... Pulp spoke to my sense of romance. I wanted to be able to meet up in the year whatever with my friends, once we were all fully grown. Get sloshing drunk and wander around all night. I wanted to remember the sordid details of staying out all night fuelled by loud music and cheap alcohol. And now, listening to this music that painted pictures in my teenage mind of a life that I hadn't lived yet, I wanna go back to those days again. Not forever, just for a while. And Pulp can get me there fast.

The Universal And The Fractal

2010-08-24T04:39:00.000-07:00

At the risk of stating the obvious, sometimes greatest hits albums do serve their purpose.

I tend to follow the Bruce McCullough edict that "greatest hits albums are for housewives and little girls". Rarely does a band have a hand in choosing what's selected, so what you end up with is a smattering of what some label rep thinks is the best assortment of hits, usually in chronological order. That order usually stinks, because it exemplifies how a band fell off after their initial spark, or took forever to get going, making it an album you rarely reach for (I'm looking at you, Soundgarden). If it's not in strict chronological order, it's often in some random jumble that sticks 3 weak songs back to back (to back!) right in the middle of the playtime, leading me to turn it off once it gets boring.

But sometimes, a band is so good... that it turns out right.

The Best Of Blur is one of those times.

Now, I was late to the band. I felt pretty cool for finding their '97 self-titled (traded to a guy in school for an Alice In Chains EP). I was firmly stuck in my punk phase, and even with broad tastes, hadn't really dug up much of the U.S. deep underground. For a teen swimming in the dizzying Second New Wave Era of '94-'98, who needed to look much farther? But it was a sad record, still packed with hooks, and the strangest, most gnarled production texture ever. Of course, by the time I made this epochal discovery, they'd risen and fallen as the biggest band in England, and led by future Gorilla (and then-aspiring agitator) Damon Albarn, their snide Kinksian British POP competing with Oasis' more thuggish lager-rock and ultimately turned their backs on their musical homeland, indulging guitarist Graham Coxon's fascination with American indie and lo-fi acts like Pavement and Sebadoh. But what did I know? I was a 15-year-old.

Of course, over the years, I became a massive Blur fan. I could identify with their perfectly suburban take on modern life... a certain distaste for the obsession with newer, sleeker, faster, prettier, easier... at the expense of preservation. Without a sense of history, all that shiny plastic may be alluring, but as Blur would say, it's mostly "rubbish". They probably ended the '90s as my favorite of the Britpop wave, just edging out Pulp's sordid backroom glamo(u)r. I liked Blur because I WAS Blur. Smartass, arrogant, bored, frustrated, ultimately hopeful, but not terribly optimistic. They were nostalgic for they way things used to be, they way they SHOULD still be, but didn't seem to be anymore.

After a canon of classic Britpop, an experimental lo-fi branching out, the difficult follow up ("13", and then an interesting denouement (Think Tank) without musical director Coxon on board, they all went their separate ways, before '90s nostalgia kicked in and their later work, initially dismissed in the U.K. as Yankophilic dilettantism, found itself suddenly "ahead of it's time". They came back, did a reunion tour, everybody loved it... cool.

But that's all framing details. Their greatest hits package works because at face value it's a collection of better-than-average songs in a thoughtful sequence that highlights their individual quality and the sustained strength of the songwriting and kaleidoscopic reach. But forget all that... greatest hits packages work in one of two ways. For the casual consumer, they say "hey, here's a band whose songs that I heard I liked, I should get this, those and others I like are probably on there without all that other stuff to wade through!" And those people would be right. But I look at one and usually say, ok, knowing what I know about this band, how well does the album collect representative highlights that I'll like from this band?" As a fan, listening to The Best Of Blur is like watching a half-hour of really good previews for great movies you've already seen.

A fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole"... you've seen these... they look like primitive computerized psychedelic art. Well, this album plays like one. Each of Blur's albums has a very particular mood set over it, and while there's often a lot of room for movement, and maybe it's just the state of my life when I acquired each album, but the sequencing and track list of TBoB is like a volley of memories flooding back. The *ahem* highs and lows of "Beetlebum", and the rush of "Song 2" bring to mind that scrappy, dirty, raw guitar vibe of that self-titled album, before zooming away on the funkified wheels of the slick and dancey "There's No Other Way", from their debut album, which managed to synthesize Madchester baggy and lush shoegazing (and which I seem to like a lot more than anyone else seems to). From there, it flits around, but the emotions are programmed correctly, giving no pretense as hanging together cohesively in it's kaleidoscopic reach, but working like a stack of photographs pulled from a box. flip through them, know they're from different trips, then mix and match. It's amazing how effective the songs are, which is obviously credit to the strength of the writing. Their first classic, Modern Life Is Rubbish is almost completely ignored, but not only is that album very, very unified, it's also very, very British. And not that these boys have ever really HID their heritage, but it would be very insular to put much of that on a greatest hits, innit?

Moments from Parklife hit hardest, though. When the bouncier title track or "Girls And Boys" pop on I want to put on my docs and pogo around the room, but "To The End" and "This Is A Low" bring with them, even in miniature, the resigned nostalgia for a time clearly past that made Parklife such a powerful album in its entirety. That's the magic. That each of these moments, sequenced this way, bring with them all the complex statements that the albums were attempting to communicate as well. so when I listen to "To The End", I feel like I've spent all day with Tracy Jacks, and the trainspotting Englishman who feeds the pigeons, and those kids who just got back from a Bank Holiday rave on Majorca. And we're all at the dog track, having a pint before getting home to watch the telly, and I just remembered that you can't go back to the way it used to be. That's a pretty complex feeling to deliver in just a few minutes. Now, as I said, it's the SONG'S job to do that (and lest anyone forget, this is a BRILLIANT handful of songs), but the sequencing makes sure that you never linger in one area too long. Within a few minutes, that same imaginary "self" is whizzing through his teen years to the strains of "She's So High". It's complex and messy, and not even a perfect analogy, but what is?

Of course, I'm probably wrong. My sick, desperate psyche is probably searching for some greater meaning in life right now, and I'm just strongly identifying with some emotional signifiers that I had connected with during a particular emotional development phase when I was younger and am suddenly finding myself looking for solace in the "simpler" days of high school and college... a respite from the hectic responsibility of the adult world.

But someone who put this together made sure to place "Song 2" second on the track order. I've seen countless "best of the '90s" CD comps with that track... and most of them bury it late in the teens.

So there's hope...

I Have Seen The Future Of Rock And Roll...

2010-08-21T12:30:00.001-07:00

It was after lunch. I had fish 'n' chips and a couple of scotches. We wandered across the street, to the giant flat City Hall plaza at Government Center. The bustle of the crowd on a breezy, cool summer day was intoxicating... or maybe it was the scotch.

After several minutes of wandering around the so called "Green Fest" aimlessly, while my traveling companions searched for free loot to fill their outstretched arms, we stumbled across them. They played their songs to an open area, full of a dozen folding chairs and a smattering of hula hoops, which were strewn about the concrete, being picked up by children and hurled around by surly teens. it was a motley crew on stage.. on the riser in back was a young drummer - and when I say young, I mean under 16 - and a keyboardist... head down, determined, fleet-fingered, and inaudible. And she was probably over 70 years old. Up front was the real draw.

To the left side was a singer with a tambourine playing only 16th notes over every moment... loosely in rhythm, louder than the sky ripping in half. How he managed to mic his tambourine while lifting his arms above his head to do that 'Magilla Gorilla with the DTs' "dance" is beyond me. I can only aspire.

To the right was a guitarist, gamely playing away while trying to man the soundboard at the same time. He'd seemed to make only one miscalculation in all the excitement, turning his chorus all the way up and his reverb all the way down... it was like getting punched in the face by 1980s Top 40 radio.

In the middle was a female singer. Looks shouldn't enter the equation when it comes to talent, and thank goodness she didn't have any. Of either. She sang from pages on one of those cheap silver music stands like I had in middle school band... her note pages blowing in the breeze.

Why did she need the note pages? Because these weren't just any songs they were singing... no, no, no... in the spirit of the Green Fest, these weren't simply SONGS.. they were standards you know, but with the lyrics (GET THIS!) reflecting the importance of the environment. Suddenly, I felt my hands float upward, taking my limp arms with them... because now I finally knew the meaning of the term "heavy handed". Over the din, I could make out snippets of a playlist assembled only by a madman... and just after they wrapped up what I can only describe as an experimental, avant/free-form version of Joe Cocker's "Feelin' Alright", I knew from the second the falsetto began. Echoing in my swirling head, I could just make out the words... "In the jungle, the mighty jungle... the lion is going extinct...."

I was transported. I still don't know to where.

Now, for all the accusations leveled at me about being a music snob, I still claim innocence. There may have been a time, yes. But I enjoy music from all walks of life. I have more guilty pleasures than I can count, and firmly believe that if someone truly loves something I abhor, that's wonderful... good for them for finding something that they love. I might not see eye to eye with that person, but never will I say that someone shouldn't enjoy something they love as long as it's not harmful to anyone. I might knock the music as an opinion, but that's my opinion for my little sphere. And the courage it takes for people to stand up in front of a crowd -ESPECIALLY an indifferent one - is an act of bravery. Putting yourself out there in front of a large group and displaying a skill of some kind is terrifying for most average people - I know it is for me. So I applaud their effort and courage and wish them the best in the future.

It was a dizzying combination of sight, sound, and intent in front of me blaring out of that tent. That said, they were easily the second worst band I've ever seen.

2010-08-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

So I'm watching TV, and an old movie I love comes on... I decide to stick with it, because it's such a magical film I never walk away without a spring in my step. Plus, I didn't really have anything else going on that day. As I'm watching this sequel of sequels, I find myself wondering about a particular plot point, which had never crossed my mind before. However, upon investigation, found that the ORIGINAL version of the script had a brief scene in which this plot point is addressed. However, it took quite a bit of digging to find, and as I know many of my readers are interested in fine cinema as well, thought I'd reprint it here. I submitted contact information with the original writer, and will certainly remove the post if he returns his thoughts in a litigious manner.

Deleted Scene From "Escape From L.A.":

(Scene: Medical Exam Room, right before Snake Plissken is sent out on his mission to get the President's daughter back. Or something.)

President Charly: This is a vitamin shot, Plissken... after the L.A. STD Wars, you'll need it.

(medic injects poison into Snake's neck)

President Charly: (less than a second after the injection gun makes that "hiss" sound) (yelling) Ha ha! No it's not! That was a POISON giving you only a few hours to complete my tasks and get back here and get the antidote from me before it kills you! (evil laughter)

(Uncle Ben or whatever that actor's name is twirls his moustache between his thumb and forefinger so you know he's evil, like when he was the bad guy in "Three Days Of The Condor". The one with Robert Redford. Man... that movie was pretty good. But the fashion and hair were SOOOO '70s! And wasn't the book called "SIX Days of the Condor"? What happened to the other days? Oh, wait... ummmm...)

Snake Plissken: Damn it! Not AGAIN! it's just like last time (looks into camera) like when this happened to me the last time I had to ESCAPE from NEW YORK!

(camera lingers extra beat on close-up of Snake with that "Captain Ron" smirk on Kurt Russell's face)

(profile shot of two men facing each other)

President Charly: What, you don't think stranger things could happen?
(long beat)
Look around! This used to be a STARBUCKS... (beat)... IN L.A.!

(both turn an look at the camera with a quizzical look, tilting their heads)

(that "wah-WAHHH" tuba noise)

(oh, and if that Biff Robertson guy is dead or whatever, just see if Rip Torn can do it. He probably needs the work, poor guy.)

(end scene)

OK, so that part up there was something I made up. Yeah, I actually DID write that, not some other guy.

I'll be taking my Oscar now, please.

Hanging On For Dear Life: Ceremony's "Rocket Fire"

2010-08-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

In the music press, it's virtually impossible to write a review of Ceremony's work without mentioning the joint history shared with current noise-rock toasts A Place To Bury Strangers. I made an effort to avoid doing it and it ends up being the lead-off to this review. The two bands shared members in a Virginia band called Skywave, whose work is also excellent... but if A Place To Bury Strangers is the sound of a giant explosion, Ceremony is closer to the jet that dropped that bomb blasting into the stratosphere, blasting away so hard it feels like it's going to break apart. No more or less powerful, simply sleeker... and far more propelled. And they've never sounded better than on their new album, Rocket Fire.

It's a journalistic risk to recite the basic facts from a band's bio sheet, but for a group with such a sparse web presence (usually confused with a Bay Area hardcore band with the same name, who sounds NOTHING like our noisemakers in question), it might not hurt. Based around a guitar/bass duo and a drum machine, the band has released two other albums, or an album and a demo... or two albums and a demo... hell, I do this for a living and I'm having trouble pinning down just where their discography begins and ends. Like I mentioned, info on these guys is sparse.

Too sparse, in fact, for such a divine sound. If one end of the noise/shoegazer revival of the past few decades explores how to make noise into music (The Vandelles, APTBS, Ringo Deathstarr), Ceremony falls toward the other end, who use the noise for songs that would probably be just fine without feedback or static. They're all the better for it, but an ambitious tribute band could recast most of these tunes as spare, wiry, Luna-esque pop and the melodies would stand up. The shades of electronic-tinged post-punk (errr.. New Order comes to mind) certainly act as sonic touchstones, and the noisy, blurry sounds of some of the original shoegazers certainly aren't far off... but Ceremony doesn't quite sound like the Telescopes, or Ride, or the Swirlies, or any of the others from "back in the day", really. Sure, there are distant vocals, feedback crashes, white noise, and hissing programmed hi-hats. Sure, it could be described as a "wall of sound". You could name several bands that remind you of this one... but you'd still be a little off. I remember My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" being peppy and uptempo and danceable, but the speeds and hair-raising sounds on display here combine like an adrenaline rush.

The jet analogy above, however, has another layer... even if their tracks aren't all truly uptempo, there's a fantastic feeling of hanging on for survival, lest any of us fall off... and that urgency makes things feel breathless, even when the tension releases a little bit. Imagine trying to keep your grip on a seamless steel jet at 30,000 feet. It keeps pushing higher and higher, the sky gets darker and darker... and just when you think you're about to go weightless, things kick in and away you go again. It's no new concept that the enjoyment of a substantial amount of shoegazer music depends on one's ability to appreciate subtle variation within a fairly specific template... but Ceremony is able to keep Rocket Fire thrilling by focusing on (work with me here) variations of that subtle variation.

While that may sound like a microscopically silly way to praise...well... anything, the point is that the band takes comfortable and established concepts (lovely melodies filtered through the "shoegazer" sound), makes it feel riveting through their own abilities as sonic alchemists (subtle variation number one), but then -- most importantly -- plays with that jet-engine rush by tightening the tension and releasing it over the course of about an hour. By the end of it, you're simultaneously satisfied and wrung out.

Despite the logistical headache that fact-finding turns up very little info, there's something refreshing about a lack of ephemera about Ceremony. It hearkens back to a simpler time, when a good record stood on its own. Granted, technological development had a lot to do with it (I was a teen in the mid-to-late '90s), but I remember when a good record was it's own background info. Check the credits and thank yous to find other good bands, but that's about it. Before I could check Wikipedia pages or add bands on Facebook (and let's not forget following their minutiae on Twitter), all a band could give was a good album. If it was good, it was good, if not, then who cared? Ceremony is making me forget about all the information overload, and the fact that Rocket Fire keeps revealing secrets on the 9th or 10th spin is telling me all I really need to know.

A Record Review, Finally.

2010-08-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

For all the discussion on the ultimate purpose of art, sometimes it can all be boiled down to the fact that most people want their art to either reflect their emotions or help them escape them. Sometimes, these tasks are one and the same, and that type of moment can be transcendent, but it's a rarity. No, the nuts and bolts of it is that we either want to recognize our own current situation -- whatever that might be -- so that we don't feel like the only one, or we want it to give us a little vacation from your problems... to help us forget that we've got troubles, and allow us to forget them, leave them behind... be it for a minute or ninety. You can either laugh at the ridiculousness of a comedy, or be brought to tears by a drama, but ultimately it's escapism vs. solidarity.

The new album by Malory can give you both.

Malory is a German ambient band, not a lone woman. Their first album, Not Here, Not Now (2000) is absolutely enthralling, if not exactly innovative. Weaving ambient tapestries of not-quite-sure-what-it-is-making-that sounds and haunted production, it might be one of my very favorite albums of the past ten years, if only for the depth it brings. It's not melancholic, it's not euphoric, it's not contemplative, and it's not propulsive... but it's almost all of those things at once. Shades of Brian Eno are obvious, but without sounding derivative, the band manages to synthesize the best aspects of ambient pop from the last 25 years, from Slowdive to fellow Europeans The Ecstasy Of St. Theresa. Malory, however, is solidly in the Ramones camp; not in sound, but in the fact that while they don't have much stylistic diversity, they excel at their language of choice.

The new album, Pearl Diver, could be called more of the same... which is something I'm sure that would not be taken as a compliment by the band, but is met as one of the highest regard. Over the course of four albums, only the subtlest of changes has been rolled out... this album certainly has more hooks and vocals than the early work, but it's hardly a detriment - although, to be fair, I'm still not sure if it's an improvement. Some of the band's earliest Slowdive influence has receded, but the guitars are no less gauzy and the vocals no more emphatic. Once again, the melodies unfurl like slow motion parachutes, the percussion is often a wispy pulse from a half-remembered dream... in short, it's a beautiful aural vacation.

However, this isn't an example of cut-and-dry "reflection vs. escapsim". At least, not for this writer. While the tones and timbres are blurred... unclear... the melodies and music of it all is so utterly human, so primally basic, that you'll think most of the melodies on here are lullabies that you can't quite remember. No matter the mood, I keep coming back to this album again and again and keep finding that it's there to both reflect my feelings as well as escape them. If I'm feeling down, the gentle hum is there as consolation, and I keep finding myself lost inside its depth. If I'm feeling good, it's like doing the backstroke through clouds on a warm night.

I'd initially intended to go into detail about particular songs, but that would be doing the album a disservice. While you absolutely could listen to an individual song, it's best taken as a whole, even if you don't take the whole at once. Each bite is better knowing it's part of a larger tapestry. I was recently reading an interview with one of the members of German electronic pioneers Cluster, who said that while many other musicians were concerned with where the song was going, they preferred to swim in drones and static music to really create an environment, rather than continually move forward. By establishing a "space" using whatever sonic devices one chooses to use, it makes it all the more powerful and dreamlike when that whole world shifts just a little.

Now that's an album.

Too Much For Twitter...

2010-07-10T07:53:00.001-07:00

I read a 2008 quote by Parker Posey this morning which basically explained how while she was working on both a TV project and a play at the same time, she enjoyed seeing how the mechanics that made up each medium differed. "I like going into different worlds and seeing what's backstage, ya know?"

I agree. While I absolutely adore being lost in the fantasy of good TV or film or theatre, it's seeing how each works differently, the organs that must hum and pulse and process each differently that fascinates me.

The irony, of course, is that I'm writing this on camera, but "behind the scenes" in a television studio. Realizing that I agreed with Posey while actually in the process of enjoying a backstage world was pretty funny.

When It Rains, It Rocks... Top Albums of 2010 (So Far)

2010-07-08T02:58:00.000-07:00

Talk about a drought.

2009 was one of the most overwhelmingly good years in recent memory for a music fan of my rather peculiar taste. Old favorites, new discoveries, a mixing of styles and even some genre surprises. There was nearly enough to make a list of the twenty best, rather than ten, and while 15-20 might've been a little stretched, it wouldn't have been filler for the sake of filler.

So what the hell happened?

I don't want to sound like I'm denigrating the artists who you'll read about below -they've all done great work, and would deserve a place in contention even if this year were flooded with other good releases. It's just that they've stood remarkably alone. There have been a few "good, solid" albums that I've really enjoyed and will continue to listen to that just aren't what I'm looking for in a "best of" wrap-up (Ted Leo... I'm looking at you!), but those listed below are certainly ready to slog it out when December hits, in the supreme year-end roundup.

5. The Dead Weather - Sea Of Cowards
I have this theory about Jack White. He knows that rock stardom is fleeting, and immortality comes only as a martyr or a legend (or both). He's no fool, and he's no con man either, no matter what his Tesla-spouting snake-oil salesman persona might indicate. He's as real-world shrewd as he is eccentric, and ever since he got his foot in the door, he's throwing out everything good he can do... the man just wants a legacy before Boethius's wheel throws him back down to the dirt once again. But none of that's important, really. This is, just like last year's album, a greasy slab of voodoo blues. It's the Exile to the White Stripes' Aftermath. There's really no better or worse, it's just that one's about overall vibe and the other is about songs. Lead singer Alison Mosshart is less enamoured of aping White's vocal style this time around, but the band grinds like The Birthday Party if they were mainlining crude oil. No highlights to pick, because this bastard's one big oozing grease smear.

4. Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - I Learned The Hard Way
Like The Dirtbombs, the Dap-Kings are almost guaranteed a place on my list anytime they grace us with a record. It's not that I'm enough of a fan that I'll accept anything. It's just that they only really do one thing, but they do it better than anyone else. A 60's soul album cut in Brooklyn by a bunch'a youngsters and a force-of-nature soul singer. The songs and production are tight as a drum on this one, but if you liked their previous work, you won't have any surprises. Except maybe for how much you like it despite having heard their book of tricks before. Of course, I still love to watch breakdancers at work, so there are just some performance arts that seem to thrill every time. This is one of them.

3. John & Exene - Singing And Playing
OK, so this one isn't fair, really. I had the good fortune of being woken up to go see John Doe and Exene Cervenka play an acoustic, Storytellers-esque performance to a seated crowd. Apparently, before the tour, they went to a friend's place and recorded this EP of low-key new tunes, covers, and material from their time fronting punk legends X. Not only was the show an absolute thrill, but the CD-R EP that played in the car ride home was the perfect extension of the night. Recorded about two weeks before I purchased it, it's the sound of two people, who love to make music, doing it very well. Get your eBay finger working.

2. Sade - Soldier Of Love
Even if this wasn't a great record, the title track would have at least put it up for consideration. Sade, it should be noted, was music for my mother to listen to up until I heard this track. The soundtrack to hot summer days en route to a mall in Virginia, sandwiched between Phil Collins and The Police. Someone convinced me to give it the single whirl... it was only a click away to stream... so I gave it a shot. Every so often, R&B music seems to capture the times better than rock (which is a uniquely navel-gazing form, for all the alleged social change it's capable of). In the late-90s, it seemed like the robo-funk-hop of Timbaland and the Neptunes perfectly summed up the future-looking, crest-riding, hedonistic party that we were all headed to, intoxicated with our own self-assuredness. It's clearly a different time, and "Soldier Of Love" embraces our own (circa 2010) twisted solipsistic tendencies in an increasingly bleak world. For all the hope that's been bandied about the past couple of years, things have been pretty grim lately... for lack of a better term, it's been a fucked-up decade to become an adult. Wars that can't be won against enemies we can't understand... political unrest and division, society tearing itself apart at at the grey concrete seams. The vocalist's metaphor for emotional war plays out over a jittery, paranoid groove torn from Massive Attack and filtered through recent Prince. Far and away the best thing on a record full of grey, conflicted moods, it's an excellent starter for a day of wrapping yourself up in paranoid bad vibes, because they're the only armor you have.

1. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
Speaking of bad vibes... these simians aren't usually dancing the night away. I'll admit, that while the first Gorillaz album was good, I saw it as the Britpop version of Prozzak... a successful but restless pop star has a fun dalliance into assumed cartoon character personae and multimedia experiments, plays some good songs, and then a "let's get back to reality, shall we?". I was wrong. Their second album, Demon Days, was, to my mind, the finest example of "post-millennial, culturally relevant musical cross-pollination" in the last decade. Which is to say it managed to summarize those darkest of days by throwing everything in the mix and sounding contemporary without dating itself. The key to the whole thing is that, well... it still cares. We might be completely fucked, but there's still a chance for redemption. It doesn't offer it, but it lets you know that some of us might make it out of this alive. If Sade was a bad night alone, this is the album for the day after. Guest stars float in and out of the mix over sounds that aren't easily pigeonholed... once again tossing hip-hop, dub, rock, world music, et al, into a musical Cuisinart. Lofty concepts would be interesting enough in print alone, but this is a great album... and doesn't everyone need something to listen to after the end of the world?

Brighton Rock

2010-07-02T03:42:00.000-07:00

Perhaps, Richard...

But vitriol was the order of the day. In hindsight that last post could be seen as a meta-example of the very argument itself: transcendent writing must bring an understanding of humanity to the table. A sudden rush of emotion filterted through a creative outlet. I'm not saying it WAS transcendent Pulitzer material, but it's far more interesting to my sensibility as a READER than a rational recounting of emotional reactions days after the fact. Isn't it that same drive that inspires a poem to be authored, or a song to be written? That mad rush to grab an instrument of any kind and trap the animal, to contain it so that it can be shared with others, and exorcised from your mind? After all, what is art if not life simply filtered through the artist's perception? It's a shame that all that was taken from it seems to be the desire to write about "sore ankles" and "smelly markets", because to a certain sensibility, it's the aggregation of that type of detail that make up the human condition, and makes whatever flights of fantasy an author creates ring true.

Few people care about the nuts and bolts of a disagreement if they don't understand the context and weight that each side brings to the table. Perhaps that's an oversimplification, but it's not inaccurate. Many (but I'll concede that certainly not all) audiences prefer to ask why the clock has a bird in it, and what that means, rather than request a schematic for the mechanism. I respect that, but personally find schematics crushingly boring. I'd rather be reading Hemingway. And I hate Hemingway. I'm almost done with his works, but can't find the time these days.

Shoehorning one type of creativity into another shape simply because that's what the audience says they want does everyone a disservice... it gives the audience a weak approximation of the original spark, and usually only presents them with something they already know and like. That's fine and dandy to *ahem* "give the people what they want", but that impulse to be populist often stifles what might have been a truly inspired creative moment otherwise. That's the impulse that creates "cover bands" in local bars... picking up a guitar and playing someone else's songs over and over. Sure it's fun, and there's a place for interpretation, but there's no soul to grinding out recreations of someone else's actual creativity. It's an artistic dead end. Write your own! Even if it's malformed or ham-fisted, it's undeniably authentically artistic, and represents some aspect of the creator at that moment. Not all interpretations are bad, but interpreters, no matter their technical gifts, are rarely artists in their own right. There is a place for "confined" creativity (in this case, writing), but rarely does that transcend the forced template of its medium into a place that makes it truly artistic. In case our antagonist has ever been to Goodwill or, perhaps, St. Vincent de Paul, he might've seen thousands of books that meet any given set of criteria, but are lost to (or under) the dust of time because they had no soul, all they were was a set of writing rules that could have been passed out by any college writing instructor.

While this antagonist, who we can call "Duke", made a very valid point for the practical benefits of understading the technical qualities of the medium (i.e. brevity and a less self-aware persepctive), and is certainly well-informed and well-read enough that his opinion shouldn't be considered wrong, his taste is limited by the value system that he has defined over the years, learing what he likes and dislikes. He's entitled to filter out things that don't interest him, after all, why waste time when you know what you like? If what an audience likes is pre-determined, and an artist doesn't fit that finite scope, why should that artist try to "move the mountain". It's easier at that point in life to not waste time with that which doesn't interest them.

Which is a perfectly reasonable course of action. But one that precludes a truly objective sense of critical analysis.

But this is a music blog. While many find Ornette Coleman's untethered sonic experimentalism inspiring, others find it too "free" (in the jazz sense). I'm a fan of Coleman's work but know that "Duke" doesn't like jazz. Why attempt to play him Rashaan Roland Kirk or Miles Davis' On The Corner? To break it down to the rock metaphor that my readers tend to think in (and expect, becuase there's nothing here but consistiency): some people find Dylan's "With God On Our Side" inspiring. I find it didactic and tedious, no matter how it succinctly sums up the racial and political discord that was happening at that moment. I want more than reporting on the facts. Plenty of people turned their noses up at "Maggie's Farm" and "Phantom Engineer" at the Newport Folk Festival in '65. Pete Seeger was on the other side, looking at something that wasn't his, and since it wasn't something that was a part of him (an important contrast to "him being a part of IT"), he may have understood it, but it wasn't something that he could viscerally, emotionally connect to in any positive way. So he chose to wave around an axe and look for the power lines. It would be churlish to compare "Duke" to Seeger, because to do so would unfairly imply ignorance that isn't there.

I'd rather be a Bob Dylan than a Pete Seeger any day.

Have fun on the "Ariadne". Hopefully your German comes in handy. Of course, if "Duke" was right... I shouldn't even know what any of that means. The irony, of course, is that he made the mistake of giving me that in the first place. Hope this one wasn't too long like the last one...

-Harry

A Letter To Holly Martins

2010-06-27T19:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Holly,

A great man once said "you're full of shit". He said it to me about 5 minutes ago. I'm pretty sure he was drunk. The argument was that great writing is based on economy of word. That's a cliche originated by someone who can't write, no matter what Plithy The Elder may have said. Nobody asked Faulkner and Steinbeck to 'keep it simple, stupid". Great writing makes the reader feel, makes them connect to something that's bigger than both the author and the reader. There's a bigger energy to be tapped into. The goal is to make the reader feel. Whether it's to feel what the author feels, to feel what the author wants the reader to feel, or to feel an imagined idea that emanates from neither is irrelevant. Ultimately, it's art. It exists independently of either, to hopefully succeed in whatever the author's intent was, but ultimately successful simply if it can represent anything. Anything at all. After all, these are just complex lines on a blank page.

However, what a reader wants is ultimately at stake. No audience will ever be swayed if they've decided what they like. I once gave a great man an album by Johnny Cash that based on evidence, was convinced he would like. It was a masterful comeback album, and no matter how much I pushed, he wouldn't listen to it with open ears. No matter what The Man In Black was saying, this listener decided it wasn't for him, and no amount of convincing would sway the mountain. A year later, the mountain called and offhandedly mentioned just how good it was after they'd picked the album up on their own. The audience must come to the art, and the art cannot move that mountain, and a smart artist should eventually realize that they've got better things to do than waste their time trying.

Writing cannot exist without a voice. It loses its life, becoming merely lifeless adjectives on a page, waiting to be strung together. Every writing has a voice, and no matter how prominient, it must be present.

I've spent the first part of this first-person narrative deyning that voice and find as a reader that it's insufferable, boring reading, suitable for fans of encyclopedias and Dan Brown novels. This great man argued at great length with me, over a great deal of wine, that a writer must get outside themselves to be truly great. This writer finds that to be completely ignorant of turly great writing. A great writer must be they eyes of every reader. If that makes said writer selfish by inserting themselves into a discourse, then that writer be damned (and I am, many times over). Let the audience read the true-to-fact adventures of Graham Greene and be happy that the details were accurately portrayed. Thank goodness Van Gough accurately portrayed the blaze of brilliant stars, and thank those stars that Monet was able to trace the finest, photorealistic detail of his landscapes.

Of course, the above is laughable in many ways. While brevity is critical (not to mention the soul of wit) , it's not everything. If brevity and economy of writing were truly the be-all-end-all of written communication, there would be no poets other than William Carlos Williams, and his writing is as awesome in its technical skill as it is boring. "Jaws" was on TV last week, and could easily be contained in a 30 minute serial where 3 men board a boat and kill a shark that has attacked people. "The Third Man" is simply a story of a drug smuggler faking his death, and not telling his friends. Had Welles (or Reed, depending on who you believe) not included the infamous "Cuckoo Clock" soliloquy, there might be no soul to the film, there might be no heart that makes the reader think that any of this matters either way. Simply conveying information in a effective way is the sign of a weak writer (which I have to do in a different fashion professionally), and if that pleases the reader, it may have achieved exactly what it was supposed to with who it's supposed to, but will never transcend that feedback loop and become art. Which is why I've never read more than one and a half John Le Carre novels. They're engrossing from a structural plotting perspective, but read like a transcription of a spy mission from back at HQ. There's no point in recounting details unless they make the reader understand the human element. I want to feel Smiley's heartbeat as he evades the enemy, to smell the fish stand next door, to taste the blood and feel the ache in his ankle. A writer must balance being an everyman, while still being themselves, giving every OTHER man a perspective from which to pinpoint where THEY stand. We've all smelled fish tasted blood, been afraid. Those who care about the (non-plot-essential) name of the fish stand or what type of bandage is on the ankle miss the point, and aren't who should even waste their time reading. They'd be better served doing something themselves, or at the very least, finding a writer who will give them what it is THEY want. Writing about that objectively is a waste of time and/or ink. You can't please everyone all the time, and it's a fool to try.

As this is a blog, it's selfish writing. I could have re-edited this as a series of wonderful third-person senteces that gave the reader the details, but that would be doing them a disservice. I don't assume my writers are stupid, or aliens coming down to earth and I have to explain things to them, because I don't want to waste my time writing to idiots. People are not evil, nor stupid. People consume art because they want to know what THAT artist's perception of the world is, and any other choice is simply collecting details like so many blank stamps. Can you picture a museum full of identical paintings? Sure, they fit the criteria, but are worthless to anyone who cares what it means. It's the difference between a bureaucratic memo and a poem. Why spend an afternoon looking at paintings when you could look at photographs that are much more accurate, right?

Apparently, by that logic, the true poet of the 1960's was not Allen Ginsberg, but Walter Cronkite.

That's a perspective that I do not share. As a person rather than simply a writer, it's recently been suggested that my personality is hung up on itself. The irony of mentioning this in my writing is not lost on me, after all, sir, as I told you earlier, I may be naive, but I'm not blind. As heistant as anyone SHOULD be to consider themselves an artist, no artist can truly remove themselves from the creative equation and remain an artist of any stripe. I write because I have to, and I'm pretty sure some of you will, if not follow, at least understand the persepctive. If not, you're wasting your time with this, and I suggest you look elsewhere.

See you in Vienna, and I'll call you if I make it to the States again... tell Valli I said hello.

Love,
Harry

---------------------------------------

PS...

To have someone apologize for giving you a gift that helped you become who you are is a humbling thing. Humbling and tragic, because to have a gift you value described by the giver as a mistake is crushing.

"Thanks for that dog you gave me all those years ago."

"Oh, no problem... it was a terrible dog, I wish I'd just put him down."

"Oh.... well, thanks anyway."

An artist (and again, implying that I am one is certainly bringing up some bile in my throat) should never forget where they're from, but sometimes, they realize that their life has moved to a different place. A place where their understanding is different. A place where they truly become themselves, and a place that they couldn't be had they not been given what they were, even if the giver doens't understand what they gave.

Sometimes the greatest gifts are accidental and misunderstood. While they may cherish what they once thought and where they once were, it snaps into focus that no one can truly go home again, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. And there comes a time in everyone's life where they have to face that fact. Maybe, just maybe, they'll be able to read between the lines and know when to call a cab.

"Wait... doesn't 'What's The Story, 'Morning Glory'' really just translate to..."

2010-06-15T08:51:00.001-07:00

"...'what's up, Boner'?"

Never mind.

Anyway...

I've got a math equation for you.

THESE...

...plus THIS...

...multiplied by THIS...

... equals a whole MESS of fun.

Not much writing happening here recently, on account of all the writing I've been doing elsewhere. But I'm trying to make sure to practice more. Hell, once there's enough worth recording, I'll do that, and then maybe post it here too. Who knows? This is principally a "thoughts on popular culture" blog. But who cares? I'm my blog, and I'll do as I damn well please!

Anyway, I took these for other purposes, but thought I'd pass the love along, so that you, Dear Readers, can see the softer side of your humble narrator. And now here's a picture of a cat. Because that's what The Internet has done to me.

Back soon with more rantin' and ravin'.

"Hey Baby... You Wanna Play 'William Tell'?"

2010-05-29T04:57:00.000-07:00

Did you ever hear the one about the boy who got what he wanted? He had to fight tooth and nail to claw his way back to doing what he wanted on his own.

Your humble narrator recently got a job working as a writer. Professionally. Which is one of the more thrilling things that's happened over the past two head-spinning years, and a lot of things have happened. The negative effect is that the last thing on my mind is creative writing... after a 1 A.M to 7 A.M. shift of writing concise sentences about death and destruction for the morning news. While I wouldn't trade it for any other job I've ever had, it doesn't make it easy to do what I love in the way I love to. Any thought of writing... I mean real self-giving writing... has been buried in the back of any part of my mind, underneath a tarp that covers "run a marathon tomorrow" and "look into an all-bran diet".

I've been wanting to. Trying to. But it's been brutal.

Until now.

To help things along, I've been revisiting those things that made me fall in love with the written word in the first place. A few months ago, my radiant fiancee bought me a copy of J.G. Ballard's complete short stories, and after chewing through selections from that and a used copy of High Rise, I remembered that Ballard was a master at creating a nightmare of the same ingredients that make up everyday life. Modern life as horror, twisting technology with humanity. Which is a fascinating way to look at things... the idea that what is exactly the same as always has always been completely different, and nobody has time to notice. It's brilliant. But it wasn't enough. So I went to the source.

William Burroughs wrecked my brain. Once my teen mind got past all the graphic depictions of pederasty and heroin abuse, I understood that his brilliance wasn't as a storyteller, it was as a conceptualist. His art was utilizing both the meaning and the actual physical combination of letter symbols to make up a word. By (literally) chopping up sentences and recombining them to create new meanings from the way "Part A" juxtaposed with "Part B", which completely dislocated the meanings of everything before and after, his words and meanings became completely intertwined... just as he severed their connection. Sure, people say he could be a mean-sprited junkie, but if you had all the damage going through your head that he did, you might give him the benefit of the doubt. Or you might not. All that matters is that his work was brilliant, and devouring Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, Naked Lunch et al... revealed to me that not only was there a LOT more to the world than my eyes had seen (and I'd been all over Europe), but there was a lot more inside that had yet to be investigated. It was like it helped to unlock something that was always there but couldn't be described, simply because I'd never seen it before.

It's funny... just a few days ago, I was reminded of having dinner with my parents when I was about 15. We were always a family that had a sit-down dinner almost every night, they insisted. My mom once asked me what I'd been reading lately. In my sullen teen cloud of discontent, I told her that it was some guy called Burroughs...

"He was a Beat, you probably haven't read his stuff."

Then she told me about the time she meditated with Allen Ginsberg. Very few moments in my life have I been so shocked.

The older I get, the less I realize I know. Moving from where I was to where I am drove that point home in a wonderful way. I feel humbled and awed by things almost constantly now. Nearly every day, something happens to renew that feeling of discovery.

I've missed it.

ON NOTICE

2010-04-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

Worlds are colliding...

In a personal side note to this usually very academic blog, I just recently discovered how to properly mic an amplifier. Prior to this point, I had amassed a large amount of musical equipment with which to play around and have fun with and not record. My recording setup lent itself to one particular sound (a very DIFFERENT sound), so that's what influenced my writing and recording. Now that I can learn to record that OTHER side of my style, recording is a high priority...

Which is a feeble attempt to explain the absence of recent updates.

More are coming, maybe with surprises, maybe not, but rest assured that your faithful typewriter-chained monkeys here at Central Target HQ are working and tapping diligently, preparing an invective that will MELT YOUR BRAIN.

Check Back Soon...

It Ain't No Modern Miracle: A 32-Years-Late Counterpoint

2010-03-27T03:38:00.001-07:00

In a recent article, I made reference to my longtime love for The Clash - which should be no surprise to anyone who's ever read my music writing, or whom I've talked with about punk rock. I love the band despite their many shortcomings, and in my reignited passion for them the past few weeks, I've switched back into "research mode", digging up tons of information on them while pumping their music through my headphones. The first of their albums I'd ever heard was a crackly, chopped-up tape dub of Give 'Em Enough Rope made for me by an 80-year-old man who lived across the street from my grandma. The same man who sold me a stack of punk and garage LPs at age 15 for a dime apiece (I was helping him sort out the "junk" from his recently purchased garage-full of albums). It was on the same 90-minute high-bias tape as most of the first Modern Lovers album (a good tape). I listened to that tape over and over and over that summer as I stained the new back porch for our neighbors, so my opinion is most certainly biased, but even so: why the hell does everyone knock that album so much?

Let's do some math. There are ten tracks, five of which ("Safe European Home", "English Civil War", "Tommy Gun", "Last Gang In Town", and "Stay Free") are stone classics. Of the other five, three ("Guns On The Roof" "Drug-Stabbing Time", and "All The Young Punks") are good, but a bit "Clash-By-Numbers", "Cheapskates" is an attempt to stretch out their sonic template a bit, and "Julie's Been Working For The Drug Squad" is topical, stylistically-divergent filler. Not bad, but it doesn't add much to a powerful record.

So why all the hate, general public?

If we work backwards, I'm willing to concede that "Julie" could have been left off, but it doesn't do a lot of harm there, and would probably fit better on the more freewheeling London Calling set, thanks to it's barroom piano. "Cheapskates" as well - I've always liked it, but it's not a great song, I'll admit.

So that's the bottom of the barrel. If "Guns On The Roof" didn't have the same exact riff as "Clash City Rockers", it would be a lot more forgivable, and does fit into that "Mott The Hoople Syndrome" of writing songs about the trials and tribulations of being in The Clash, along with "All The Young Punks". Some of the self-importance of the lyrics is offset by the brilliant arrangements of guitarist Mick Jones. Jones never really got his due (as many before me have stated) as a masterful arranger, and (unlike his bludgeoning contemporaries in the punk scene) wove tapestries of guitars to rise above the three chord blur that kept a lot of bands in the punk rock ghetto that The Clash escaped. Which brings me to "Drug-Stabbing Time". Not a great song, maybe even weaker than "Julie" in a way, in that it's so much of a musical step backward in an album that pushes to move forward.

Which leaves us with five amazing songs, and an unfairly slandered producer. I'm not saying that Sandy Pearlman is completely innocent, but he seems like a good enough dude, and for the world-beating scope of the music this band was writing, the muscular sonics he brought to the early Blue Oyster Cult albums he produced make (no matter what any punk purist says) perfect sense for the ambitious music The Clash were making at this point. BOC might have been the epitome of "non-punk" in 1978, but heard today, their first 3 albums sound more like Radio Birdman than Led Zep. Anyway, a smart musical director and arranger (Jones), combined with a producer who knows how to make things sound BIG (Pearlman), isn't a bad combination, unless all you want is wiry scrubbed guitars and inaudible bass.

So, the songs are slower (therefore longer, this wasn't a structural overhaul - it's still verse/chorus/verse), more "expansively" arranged, and less immediately topical (not as many "ripped from the headlines" songs as the self-titled debut). But what is there, under those parameters, might be among the best minutes the Clash released.

"Stay Free" is a favorite of mine. I love pop songs, and on top of that, when I discovered this album, I could identify with the protagonist of this song. I don't understand being on the dole in London in 1977, but I know what it's like to be a teenager dreaming of rock stardom, practicing my guitar "daily in my room", and getting into trouble. The bass-and-drums breakdown before the solo, the heart-tugging bridge... it's a charmer. It belongs in the middle of side two, but it fits perfectly there as a nice album track.

The bass guitar is what makes "Last Gang In Town" so great. The timing is a little rough, but that sells it. I already have a vision of the band as a gang of outlaws (I know they're art schoolers in reality, but why not give into the myth?), and it's just a solid "badass" song, with great Joe Strummer vocals and another good guitar arrangement. "English Civil War" is much the same, with a nice musical and lyrical reference to the "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" chant of the U.S. Civil War, and although there are few specific ways to recommend it (above others) in writing, isn't writing about music like dancing about architecture?

The lynchpins of the album, though, are so good that it's almost a shame they're stuck as the first and third tracks, even though one makes a perfect album opener. "Tommy Gun" has a nice Topper Headon touch with the machine-gun-emulating snare rolls, but it's once again Jones' suitably "epic" lead guitar playing that offsets a great chord progression and reaching vocal with even more emotional depth. It's beed deservedly hailed as a classic, and should be on any collection that attempts to round up the best moments by the Clash. The vocals are hurt, angry, demanding scathing justice for someone who will chop down innocent people... it's a personal reaction to a political subject, which is far more profound than merely reporting on it, or supporting/condemning it. I don't care about whoever it is that's willing to die for their cause in the lyrics, but I do care about how Strummer feels about it. That's one of the clever tricks of this songwriting team: even if you don't agree with all their political views, they're not telling you about the problem, they're telling you about their perspective on the problem. I watch the news every day for at least 2 hours, and I'm sick of it. I want to know the human side of these stories. The Clash can do that like no other band.

What does that leave? Ah, yes. "Safe European Home". For years, on my fuzzy cassette, I could only make out impressionistic snatches of the lyrics, trying to piece together an image when you only have half the pieces of the puzzle. It's the story of Strummer and Jones' songwriting trip to Jamaica (the reggae-loving bassist, Paul Simonon, is apparently still irritated at being left behind). They get there, get robbed, expect to see the rude boys and sound systems they've been listening to for years back in London, only to end up run out of town, scared for their lives, glad to be back and safe in their European home. Knowing more about the band's story, it's especially heartbreaking to hear how they were so thrilled to go, but the reality was so different from the fantasy... instead of lighting spliffs and vibing to some heavy dub, they were almost knifed and escaped with the clothes on their backs. The fact that they were largely honest in the lyrics is commendable - it would have been easy to write a song about the great time they had being punk outlaws in Jamaica, but why not be straightforward. "This isn't myth, this is real!"

Those powerful lyrics about the realities of fantasy are wrapped up in some of the most explosive three minutes and fifty seconds I've ever heard, and I've listened to a lot of goddamn rock music. It blasts out of the gate with a downstroke guitar stun, but cracks in half after the first line for a jumping-bean bassline and a call-and-response vocal. The chorus is a jarring, jagged call to arms. After being wrung out with more of that, suddenly, the skanking guitar line you almost hadn't noticed (but was playing underneath most of the song) becomes the only thing you hear, other than what seems to be a collection of only backing vocal tracks. Now that this other guitar is the fixture, a rhythm section fades up underneath it, playing in a slightly different tempo and style than before, marrying the TNT rock 'n' roll of the opening with a lithe, snaking, and above all, sheet-metal-metallic reggae sound, creating a coda for the song that surpasses any other famous rock and roll coda you've ever heard. It makes "Layla" look like a crackwhore. If this isn't the best song by The Clash, it deserves credit by making you absolutely believe that it is during it's play time.

(All) that said, why does this album get such a bad rap? I understand the U.K. press' initial backlash, in that with the Sex Pistols punk throne vacated after their implosion, the new kings were traipsing off to make an epic (label pun intended) hard rock album. On top of that, it didn't sound like it was recorded in a living room, and few of the songs were addressing the current issues in England at the time (furthering my assertion that purist punk should be viewed much as folk music was, or Public Enemy's theory that rap music was like "black people's CNN"). So maybe the initial reaction of "This isn't punk!" is justified, but as late as 1999 I was still getting shit for wearing a t-shirt with the cover on it. The contention then was it was a flaccid, overworked follow-up to a classic gritty record, probably still influenced by the original '78 review from Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. I like Marcus' writing, and I certainly respect his opinion on the matter, but I'm not afraid to stand up and say that I think he was wrong then. That was 30 years ago, though; maybe he's changed his stance since, and I don't know about it.

Coming from a particular aesthetic view of the world, Rope must have seemed shocking after ONLY HEARING their first album. With hindsight, the Clash weren't just a great punk band, but one of the very best rock 'n' roll bands, as borne out by their follow-up, London Calling. But the world hadn't heard that when Rope came out. I'm willing to accept the badmouthing up until about 1980. Then the game changes. Was the world so much smaller in 1997 that a 20-year-old review from Rolling Stone still held that much sway over public opinion? There weren't that many info sources back then (before the rise of the current state of the 'net), so I guess a long review like that could taint public opinion enough that many critics afterward would have just lazily regurgitated from THE source of music news, before people realized that R.S. was a stapled supply of backup toilet paper. The fact that the only CD version of the album until '99 was one of the most poorly-mastered CDs in history doesn't help. The Clash were among the most deserving of a remastering campaign, as the initial versions of their album on CD were among the most abrasive, tinny, and anemic transfers ever. The used, beat-up LPs sounded better, and when the released the live album in '99, it was the first time I'd ever heard a real decent kick drum on a Clash song.

So you can keep your derision, you can save your "sophomore jinx" bullshit. The only reason that Give 'Em Enough Rope isn't considered an immediate classic boils down to punk didacticism, sloppy journalism, and the fact that it was bookended by The Clash and London Calling. So then next time I'm playing it (loudly), you can fucking keep your lazily regurgitated complaints. I'll give you some rope, you do the rest.

[For this and all other album reviews, I strongly suggest heading over to grooveshark.com, who I am in no way affiliated with. Lots of free streaming music, and a great way to listen to songs from this album for free from anywhere without having to buy it first.]

Either Side Of The Divide

2010-03-26T01:42:00.000-07:00

I was just reading an A.V. Club article about "pop culture that makes you feel old", and while I got a good laugh and startle at the fact that there are college sophomores who can't envision a world without new episodes of The Simpsons and Law & Order, it reminded me of another piece I read on the changing tide of pop-cultural savvy. The author suggested that when I was a teen in the mid-90s, it was important to be conversant in pop culture if you ran in the circles my friends and I ran in. References to '70s cop shows, able to quote Ghostbusters, and have an intmiate knowledge of Saturday Morning Cartoon Culture. And while some of the hip young elite of that era are still working, and still using that knowledge for good (a la Robot Chicken), they're the old guys, with the new generation (which I'm straddling the line of) not caring about any of it.

Now, I'm technically part of the "Generation Y" subset, and while I would love to distance myself from that as much as possible, I will only say that it's true that I was way more interested in the culture of people 5-10 years older than I was, and didn't have much time for the cultural interests of my peers. Which makes me both precocious and a snob. I was a clever kid, so I tended to follow not my high school cohorts, but what I read was happening elsewhere in the world. I missed out on a lot of "moments", but I stand by my choice.

So what happened? Where did Weezer's references to Kiss go? Why did nobody care about Thurston Moore's favorite breakfast cereals from the early '70s, as reported in Grand Royal Magazine? What happened to sitting around a record store and debating the guy behind the counter about which (still-sorta-obscure-even-then) Big Star album was the best one to get first? Why won't anyone believe that Urge Overkill's Saturation is amazing?

9/11 happened.

Boom! Didn't think I'd go all Giuliani on you, huh?

Now, I got a lot of crap from my friends about how I was stuck in the '90s when I was just post-college, wearing my Dinosaur Jr t-shirt and listening to Sonic Youth's Dirty 'cause it was sassy, maaaan. (I never did that last one). But that's what I knew and liked at that point, a line of taste that had been established only 5 years prior, but even by that point they were the "good old days". Who gives a fuck about the merits of the goddamn Smashing Pumpkins if you're worried about getting blowed up all the time? Our leader (ostensibly Slim Pickens from Dr. Strangelove) was reacting to the biggest attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor or earlier by waging TWO wars (can't say he wasn't ambitious)... suddenly our thoughts on the potential drug metaphors of H.R. Pufnstuf seemed a whole lot less important.

There was a gap where we were all freaked out, and when the dust settled, we young people found ourselves on either side of a large cultural divide. There were those who were old enough to entrench themselves, and those young enough to reset. I was on the former team. I have an additional theory that the younger set had their "irony circuits" scrambled in the shakeup as well, their "irony training" was disrupted prematurely. I understood the humor and culture jamming when I saw Adam Yauch in a Madonna t-shirt. Yauch was a former punk rocker turned rapper, Madonna was the queen of plastic pop in the 80s. Yes, recontextualization was fun, playing with semiotics was a good laugh, but this group (I say "younger", but it's a mental thing, I guess) ended up taking a lot of this at face value, scrambling the point. I see Rivers Cuomo extolling the virtues of Def Leppard, the first level I get is "he's talking about a crappy hair metal band, but he's in a catchy alternative band. That juxtaposition is ironic." The second layer below that is I happen to know that Cuomo, in his teen years, was actually a big metal fan. OK, even another interesting layer. But what I don't do is hear that and say "Rivers thinks Def Leppard is awesome. I like Weezer. Def Leppard must be awesome." Simplistic thinking like that is why we have people who have tricked themselves into liking crap like Journey. But the difference and value of being attracted to something directly vs. a few levels removed is another discussion.

My point is that after the dust settled (sorry), while amateur ironists and pop culture archivists like myself put that stuff on the shelf for a while. Other things took precedence, like being in our 20s and not being blown up on a plane. Things got grim. Things went from the kaleidoscopic Beastie Boys to the Ballardian imagery of Radiohead. Everyone said that OK Computer was ahead of its time. They were 5 years right. The first half of the decade, to me, sounded like a coma patient hooked up to a frayed wire, making it twitch. Whatever I listened to (especially older music) sounded like a dusty dream from the past, like finding a photo album in the attic. How could I listen to Pet Sounds in the intended way when we could all die at any moment? The navel-gazing anxiety of Death Cab For Cutie and Spoon seemed far more solipsistically appropriate for the moment than anything else, and even the larger-than-life stuff went from celebration to redemption as Coldplay, Travis, and their ilk flourished, while granddaddys U2 left behind their most interesting experimental phase (Achtung Baby - Pop)to reclaim their throne of overbearing, pandering Epic Rock... that I thought they realized better after Rattle & Hum.

And now I'm a relic. Most of my cultural peers, who were a little older than me, are now occupied with kids, careers, families. They'll occasionally pull out their LP copy of Check Your Head or Emperor Tomato Ketchup, but that's about it. I don't often connect culturally to my peers, due to my dislike of Dave Matthews and today's indie rock. And I'm starting to slip gently into that point where everyone more than 3 years younger than me is an idiot with terrible taste. I don't give a fuck about American Idol, and I sure don't care about this Lady Gaga crap (shitty dance pop is shitty dance pop). So what now?

I don't know. Does it matter? It's only pop music...

Get Damned Or Get Out

2010-03-22T01:14:00.000-07:00

I've stepped away from rock music for a little while. I was just getting tired of whatever I was hearing. Every time I'd listen to a 4-piece guitar/bass/drums/vocals rock band I'd think "Heard it already!" and let my attention wander. So I dipped into some jazz for a little while (which isn't generally my thing, but it was pretty palette-cleansing), then electronica (heavily trip-hop), and one of my other loves, heavy instrumental dub reggae.

It was the dub that was critical in leading me back to rock recently. My nominal introduction to quality dub music was Mikey Dread's remixes and productions for the Clash, whose dub works I went back and listened to. Specifically, I wore the grooves out on the second side of the original Black Market Clash EP, which has "Bankrobber/Robber Dub" (not the version that's on the CD version!) into "Armagideon Time" into "Justice Tonight/Kick It Over". There's a fantastic bootleg out there that collects all of the Clash's dub material called "This Is Dub Clash". I won't post it here, but if you're inclined, maybe google it to see what comes up, or you could compile it yourself.

Anyway, dipping back to the Clash, one of my first musical loves, lit the pilot light on my rock-based listening again. Rock music still sounded like tired garbage, except for the purest, most incisive rock music out there, so over the past few days, I've slowly been reloading my wiped iPod with pure rock or punk bands, the bands that have the energy and madness and hooks and drive that seduced me in the first place. While the Ramones are practically a prerequisite for any "Mike's Favorite Music" assessment, it's been the U.K. punk that's really turned me over. My first punk interests were almost exclusively British and late-'70s. What I've found is how my perspective has changed. It would take a miracle for my idealized opinion of the Clash to change, but where I once saw the Pistols as trailblazing heroes, I look at them now as a bunch of peacocking brats whose way of giving authority the finger is recording about two amazing albums of noisy classic rock. I still love them, but the pose becomes more evident to me with each passing year. The Buzzcocks are the band I would most likely be in if I were in that era - classicist, catchy, relationship-obsessed songs, and maybe a little vulgar but not really very offensive. The older I get though, the band that really surprises me over and over is the The Damned.

The Buzzcocks (or even the Undertones, if you want to get all Irish about it) are the band I would most likely be in, but the Damned are swiftly becoming the band I would most like to be in. Unconcerned with politics, always there to undermine the gravity of the situation with a well-placed pie in the face, they weren't afraid to experiment sonically with weird psychy touches and funny effects (although the second album illustrates this well, it sadly wasn't very good), and under all the "we're just here for the beer"/class-clown image, they were a lethally potent rock band.

Listen to "New Rose". Producer Nick Lowe made those drums sound like I want every drum I ever record to sound, the band is flailing with manic intensity and stumbling over itself, there's a little "rock history" nod with the whispered Shangri-Las intro, the hook is enormous, and it's all over in under 3 minutes. Oh, and the b-side of this, their first single, is a Beatles cover. Huh? Even though it's admittedly the best song on the first album, the whole album is great in almost exactly the same ways throughout.

Not only that, but once they moved away from the ramalama Stooge-punk that left with founding guitarist Brian James, their more experimental work is just as good in completely different ways. Machine Gun Etiquette is funny and rocking and silly and colorful, The Black Album pushes punk into gothy psychedelic power-pop, and Strawberries is a backstep into poppy punk, but it may even be the best yet. They got no respect, were constantly shit on by the punk rock elite and those that believed what they were told by said elite (even me - reprints of the Pistols' magazine articles and interviews from the era were taken as gospel by my friends and I in that pre-"everything's on the internet" era), but in hindsight, until their dramatic fizzle in the mid-'80s the Damned were cranking out great-to-better-than-average rock albums, and when they came back in the mid-'90s, they were back to being great. Now that's impressive. "Least likely to"... yeah, right.

Because We All Want More Lists...

2010-03-13T02:47:00.000-08:00

Alright, so here's the first go-round. I've been racking my brain for 5 months, and this is the best list I can come up with, although I'm sure I'll be obsessing over additions and corrections for most of the NEXT decade. Here's the "contenders" list for the "Best Albums Of The Decade". The list is made up of albums that were important to ME in some way, or reflected a particular aspect of the times to me in a specific way, or whatever. Not the "best collections of notes" or "most relevant to the most people", but all personal, and somewhere in between. If I do it right, what it SHOULD do is give a pretty clear idea of what new music I've been listening to over the past 10 years. However, it might be prudent to note the fact that my favorite musics include styles that peaked years ago, so this doesn't reflect the heavy listening to classic punk or garage rock or shoegazer or dub or any of those other styles that nobody is really making anymore.

The plan? To take this randomized list and divide it into two parts - the semifinals, baby. One side of the line will get a rose and move on, the others are going to have to go home, maybe a checkup at the free clinic, and then their own lists, VH1-style. Just kidding, I think. Although we'll see. Once we've whittled it in half, we're hoping to have a conference with Mister Brent over at Dogdoguwar, where we discuss the merits of our respective choices, now that all the turn-of-the-decade hullaballoo has died down, we can do it right. Without further ado... your contestants!

The Raveonettes - Chain Gang Of Love
The Strokes - Is This It?
The Big Pink - A Brief History Of Love
Dinosaur Jr - Beyond
A Place To Bury Strangers - s/t
Spiritualized - Songs In A&E
Joe Strummer - Global A Go-Go
Basement Jaxx - Rooty
Daft Punk - Discovery
M.I.A. - Kala
Malory - Not Here, Not Now
Luna - Romantica
The Postal Service - Give Up
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Johnny Cash - American IV
Guided By Voices - Isolation Drills
Fountains Of Wayne - Welcome Interstate Managers
Primal Scream - XTRMNTR
The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
Asobi Seksu - Citrus
Madlib - Shades Of Blue
Danger Mouse - The Grey Album
Gorillaz - Demon Days
Queens Of The Stone Age - Songs For The Deaf
The Dirtbombs - Dangerous Magical Noise
The White Stripes - White Blood Cells
Modest Mouse - The Moon And Antarctica

Floating Away On Detritus Of Pop Music

2010-03-11T01:34:00.000-08:00

Part of the charm of getting older is that you get to get bitter about what you view as the idiocy of youth... and specifically youth culture. As I spent my teen years as one of those weirdo cranky outsiders, it's actually quite nice to get less bitter as I get older, but it coincides with a downturn in the quality of popular music. If I were 27 in the early '90s, I could be an alt-rock type, in the late-90s, I could have been a Stereolab-loving aesthete, while still taking ironic pleasure in the harmless but vapid pop charts. Ten years out, there is very little mainstream pop music that's worth listening to.. and that's coming from a guy who's willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. To quote a writer named Huw Jones, from Slant Magazine:

"These days our stars are force-fed to us by Simon Cowell and reality television, our chart-topping singles merely cover versions of songs that were cutting edge decades ago, and the entire concept of "pop music" is relegated to fodder for our celebrity voyeurism: penned by the talented, performed by the beautiful."

Which is why I am thrilled to tell you that I love the new Gorillaz record.

Will it top my "best of 2010" list? Probably not. But I love the idea of a resigned pop star piecing together some entertainment through a motley group of outcasts and also-rans, making a record that sounds contemporary simply because it stands in such sharp relief to the prevailing trends of the day. Title allusions aside, this album reminds me of nothing so much as Wilson the beach ball from Tom Hanks' Cast Away - this is an album made to make oneself happy, to keep yourself active and happy, lest you become swallowed by the blackness of it all. It's got a touch of melancholy that things aren't as good as they could be, but it's still making an effort... and by continuing to hold on, it's the most hopeful record I've heard in years. Pretty strange stuff coming from a group of cartoons led by a former popstar.

I was cautious. Albums this loaded with name guest-stars are usually a red flag to me (see Massive Attack's "Heligoland"), but when Snoop Dogg's voice comes wafting out of the speakers, it triggers a strange familiarity. Here's an artist who hasn't been crucial in almost 20 years, but his voice is so comfortable, it gives you a way into the moaning keyboards and lurching beats. Every review I've read of the album makes note of the "weirdo grandfather" vibe that Lou Reed's appearance gives off, and the doomsday declamations of the Fall's Mark E. Smith... but these are just signifiers for nerd-types like myself. In a project this conceptual, the creators are banking on your familiarity with these voices - they want you to listen to this thing pre-loaded, so that you can appreciate the cast of characters. It really does help if you know past work and history by the likes of Reed, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, and De La Soul. It's like casting them all in a play, but typecasting every one of them. When your brain flips through a rolodex of larger-than-life characters, it's concpetual shorthand. They're not just bringing a performance to the table, they're bringing everything they've done. But by playing to type, pop listeners with no interest in the Velvet Underground will still get the "vibe" of the dry declamations by Ol' Lou.

Of course, none of this would work if the music didn't hold up. And as many have noted, the melange of modern styles that Gorillaz have combined since their first record in 2001 has become less state-of-the-art and more State Of The Union. Combining hip-hop and pop and electronic and indie rock in a highly-concpetual [i.e. cartoon] fashion is no longer as confusing and surprising as it once was, so instead of dwelling on the squelching hooks, we can focus on the emotion behind it. Musical leader Damon Albarn (you like how I didn't mention him until this far in?) long ago made his reputation as a pop writer, and on the last two or three Blur albums (depending on how you look at them) gave us his gift for setting moods through textures. And if the haunted machines of the first two Gorillaz albums didn't clue you in, his under-heard work with The Good, The Bad, And The Queen showed us that he could craft deep nests for throbbing bass grooves (courtesy of The Clash's Paul Simonon, who appears here, along with his Clash bandmate, Mick Jones). This album is nowhere near as fresh as the first one, but its depth isn't even discovered on the third or fourth listen. The pop is poppier, the murk is murkier, and by cobbling together something that stands as its own pop island, floating further and further away from Simon Cowell's mainland, waving goodbye, and ready to cobble together something from whatever it has left, one has to wonder why more people aren't building their own islands out of the scraps that nobody else seems to want anymore. Again... not bad for a bunch of cartoons.

Like A Virgin (?)

2010-02-17T15:52:00.000-08:00

"When I was a weird, lonely teenager, The Modern Lovers painted a perfect picture of an imperfect young adult world. I could see exactly what he was talking about and it resonated with my teenage sensibility. Now that I've moved to Boston, and soaked up the vibe of the city (so important to Richman's senisbility), it cast those songs in a re-lit (not new) light... bringing the two together strenghtened the magic (like the rocks in 'Temple Of Doom') that the album makes in my head, refreshing it, but it's so good because it still sounds exactly the same, in exactly the same way. Now that I'm in Boston, I hear it the same way I used to, but just like before I had all this baggage. So it has the weird effect of making me walk around in the exact same mood I would get in when I was fifteen. Weird."

2010-02-14T06:44:00.000-08:00

Trip hop has gotten a bad rap. I was there when it became the blandest fodder for the tasteful elite, becoming background music for dinner parties and art openings. Most of its finest practitioners have not only denounced the name (which fits the style perfectly, but more on that later), but have moved on to other styles, attempting to distance themselves from the loping haze of the style they themselves pioneered. Massive Attack's Heligoland was an overguested step in the right direction after the stuttering glitch of 100th Window, Tricky has gone off the rails into critical respectablilty and tasteful irrelevance, Portishead disappeared for a decade before returning with a great album that they have yet to follow up, and Nightmares On Wax have been hit-or-miss, with solid moments next to missteps like 2002's vocals-heavy Mind Elevation. While I agree that market saturation might have instigated a holdoff, what happened to turn this into a musical whipping boy?

Trip hop, the term, has been much derided, but I have to agree with Simon Reynolds' assertion that not only is it a handy shorthand, but it's a highly descriptive term. The hallucinatory spatial disorientation caused by the presentation of mutiple samples with multiple ambiences is grounded by a steady, loping breakbeat, taken from the funky grooves of hip hop's history, then rubberized, tenderized, and left to gather dust. It's psychedelic and resolutely urban - sure it sounds good in the 'burbs, but this is human music for concrete jungles. The edgy darkness of some of the best records make you wonder what's around the corner in the alley, and the soulful samples and oft-present "haunted diva" provide some human reassurance. It's groovy, it's not in a hurry, and it's been known to tickle one's brain and alter their mood. When I find myself listening to Mezzanine on repeat in the grey, rainy late autumn, I know I've got to pull myself out a funk.

What happened? There's always the theory that if it was cool ten years ago, it's lame now, sure. We're in the midst of a DayGlo Revolution, and things have been pretty grim. The economy's in the toilet, the housing market dropped out, unemployment is spiking, nothing is getting done cause everyone's stubborn - this is not the time for a grim 'n' gritty soundtrack. People need to dance their troubles away to popclash or whatever today's irono-disco-new-wave hybrid is. If Maxinquaye were a "major label new release" album today, it would inspire mass suicides, cause that is DARK, man. But for whatever reason it's out of vogue right now, mark my words that some variation of it will be back in a BIG way in a few years.

What Time Is Love?

2010-01-30T07:07:00.000-08:00

Forget part two... I don't even remember what I was going to write about anyway.

For those of you that have been following us here at the Central Target Research and Sound Laboratory, you'll realize that while this is a music blog, it's not really about music. Music is merely the frame with which to hang a given topic on, providing an ostensible topic for the moment, but usually elaborating on whatever I've been thinking about in the real world. Incidentally, I realize fully that it's poor writing to explicitly lay your literary devices on the table within the same work you're using them. However, while to you this blog might be entertainment, but to me it's a project of "personal journalism", so let's not quibble.

The thing is, I've been very taken with certain types of electronic dance music lately, specifically the Detroit school of early techno music and the minimalist work of Richie Hawtin's Plastikman project that I have, as of late, found difficulty finding a respective perspective to latch on to.

In high school, I finally began to investigate electronic music, after years as a punk. As a media-saturated child of my age, techno and dance music seemed like a wild, colorful adult world, and based on the imagery of 1980s dance club culture, it was very, very adult. Conversely, as a boy, I spent a few years living in Vienna, Austria (with my family - I wasn't just a globe-trotting preteen). It was 1989-1992, and acid techno and house were exploding all over Europe. It was absolutely omnipresent, and there was still enough E-influenced, Day-Glo good-naturedness to it that a part of me has always believed that it really was the dawning of a new era in culture. The early 90s were a culturally cool time anyway, with the coked-out decade of greed winding down and an explosion of multiculturalism. Although I didn't understand the social framework at the time, it felt like everyone was walking around with their eyes open and embracing vibrancy for a while. I loved the squelching soundtrack of acid house music, and ever since have always had a soft spot for it. By the time I hit high school 5 years later, my tastes were a lot more elitist, preferring the jittery, brainy end of electronica (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Warp Records) to the ass-shaking end of things.

As I've mellowed my position with age, I've noticed that there's a ton of intellect in the better dance music, and the late-80s/early-90s Detroit scene is a perfect example of this Zen minimalism. The "Belleville Three" have all made wonderful records, both dancefloor-ready, and cerebral enough to stand up to armchair listening. However, it's Plastikman (one of the several aliases of producer Richie Hawtin) that's been eating up a lot of my listening time. Minimal to the point of being subliminal, the tiniest change in the music can warp the beat into another rhythm, building brilliance out of only the barest essentials. His second album, Musik, is a masterpiece.

On the other side of the spectrum is my love of dubbed-out ambient house. The Orb, in this writer's opinion, stands above the pack as a favorite. The rubbery, intergalactic psychedelia of their first few albums is the soundtrack of an outer-space journey in your own head. Tinkling atmospherics and soft, cotton-wrapped beats eventually gave way to ambient noodling in their later years, but everything they did up to (and sort-of including) Orbvs Terrarvm is worth checking out. In fact, see if you can track down the full 39-minute version of "Blue Room", the longest single ever to top the UK charts, with a memorable TV appearance featuring the band members in space suits, playing chess in front of footage of dolphins. Trippy.

Since I've spent so much time between headphones, though, I find myself without anything to say about the music, as there is little vocabulary in the rock dictionary to capture the essence of some of this intensely introspective music. I've always looked at electronic music (dance-derived, rather than the electronic experimentation of early artists like Stockhausen) as running on a similar but parallel universe to the rock sphere since about 1977 - just as rock has developed sub-genres and stylistic diversions, so has this electronic music spawned acid house, techno, trip-hop, trance, drum 'n' bass, gabber, microhouse, and on and on and on. There's so much to dive into that with this introspection phase, I've just been cruising around in my own head for a few weeks. How do I hang my hat on that?

Realizing today that I've been neglecting my writing duties, I've decided not to change my listening from a techno and dub diet, but to dig deeper, to push further, to peel back the layers and really find something to say about this music. Maybe an album review of AFX's Analogue Bubblebath 3 (one of the greatest acid techno records ever), maybe a reflection on the co-opting of psychedelia from guitar-based rock to the mindspace of bedroom beatniks, or maybe just me blathering on and on about just how good 808 State is. We'll have to see.

Part 1: Clearing The Field

2010-01-02T02:33:00.001-08:00

Sometimes it's easy to get complacent as a fan of anything. When you're immersed in something, it's easy to forget the boundaries, and easy to forget that there are very few innovators in any given field. I listen to a lot of music, so sometimes, it takes something extreme, something that I rarely listen to, to shake me out of my jaded state and really make me perk up. Quality is not the issue, as it's easy to hear and appreciate a great record that still fits within the boundaries of "normal" music.

I put on some James Chance & The Contortions today and it was like I'd never heard anything so aggressive in my life. Now, the funniest thing is that yesterday, I was listening to The Birthday Party (R.I.P. Rowland S. Howard), and felt the same way. I often forget that sometimes I need a brain cleansing. So many "confrontational" bands or musicians are simply "confrontation signifiers", throwing out all the established imagery, conjuring up an image of danger or confrontation without actually being so. And there's really nothing wrong with that. Art is art, it is not life. Art is a representation of aspects of life. However, when (specifically) music is authentically confrontational, there is a certain "magic ingredient" that is almost palpable, but hidden in the spaces between the notes - it can't be quantified, but it's obvious when it's present.

It's easy to get wrapped up in this world of signifiers, but it makes it incredibly powerful when dosed with the real deal. And No New York, the compilation of No Wave heavy hitters, sounds like the real deal. So does the Birthday Party's Prayers On Fire, but it's Chance and his ilk that I'm listening to right now, and it's so disconcerting that I'm having trouble keeping my thoughts straight enough to type. It's not the knowledge that early shows often ended in actual physical confrontations, sparked by Chance himself, in an attempt to shake the jaded NYC audiences out of their complacency - it's that this music often sounds dangerously close to coming apart at the seams. "Dish It Out" is the sound of frantic, sweating fear.

On Thanksgiving, my mom makes a cranberry walnut salad that I love. It's tasty, but so tart that it completely cleanses the palate... something that this raw nerve, live-wire music can do. After hearing something this harrowing, it's easy to lean back and just enjoy the nuances of something that's not so intense.

And while I'm listening to these records now 30 years out, this is not the only era to generate bands like this. However, it is a rare occurrence. If you ever spot one live (and it will most likely be live, since bands this electrifying aren't usually around long enough to properly document), take heed. Both in the cycle of rock music and one's listening habits, palate-cleansing, cranberry salad moments like this are like forest fires... clearing the debris for something new and fresh to grow. Which is why it's serendipitous when the universe draws me to music like this at the same time it presents me with the sonic alternative, which we'll be discussing next time on Central Target, in Part Two...

Top Ten Albums Of 2009

2009-12-09T06:29:00.001-08:00

It takes a special breed of person to make end-of-year top ten lists of a given category. I don't mean "special" as in exemplary, or somehow a cut above. I mean "special" like "he wears a helmet in the bathtub." Interestingly, though, that demographic dovetails nicely with the type of person who might think that their ranting and hyperbole might be interesting to the whole wide internet. So here's a list of Mike's Choices for the Top Ten Records Of The Year. The year might not be over, but unless the Young Jeezy record or 30 Seconds To Mars or Rod Stewart albums is going to COMPELTELY BLOW MY MIND, I'm going to call it a wrap on the year. These are ranked, largely, by how much enjoyment I got out of them, how much I liked them, how much I listened to them. There is no science, other than the decades-long mental warping I've incurred. Not terribly empirical, but it seems to work for me. Comment, people, comment!

10. The Flaming Lips - Embryonic
I didn't know they still had it in them. It's not that their past few records have been bad (except maybe that last one), but even at their most fried point in the early years, they were never this... spaced out. The trippiest, freakiest, most acid-drenched head record of the year. Totally deserving of any year-end roundup.

9. The Raveonettes - In And Out Of Control
I've never considered them one of my favorite bands, but it seems like every year the Raveonettes release a record, it makes my top ten list. This year's is no different, in that it's completely satisfying, sounds wonderful, and has good songs. I just can't get enough of their surf/noise/spy guitars and cooing backup vocals. Last year's Lust, Lust, Lust was a comeback of sorts for a band that never went away - it was just a great, lean, dark rock record. If you like almost anything else on this list, you'll like this record. I guarantee it* (*this is in no way a guarantee).

8. Varsity Drag - Rock 'N' Roll Is Such A Hassle [Live]
Ben Deily left the Lemonheads in '89, put out a record with his new band, Pods, in 1994, then disappeared to have a real life until '06, when Varsity Drag debuted on record. This career-overview live disc shows that while he hasn't been prolific, Deily has certainly been consistently excellent. Everything from early L-heads songs up through 2009 material, it's a fantastic collection for anyone who likes good punky rock songs. Considering how good these songs are, I don't think I need to sell it any further.

7. Sune Rose Wagner - Sune Rose Wagner
It doesn't sound like a Raveonettes album, but it couldn't have been made by anyone who wasn't in the Raveonettes. Gossamer, drifting, dreamy - I hate to fly, and this record put me at ease from Cleveland to Boston. All the Spector-esque arrangements you've come to love, but like Dylan's Time Out Of Mind, it sounds like it's being recorded by ghosts. It's beautiful, and the fact that it's all sung in Danish makes it even more ethereal. Forget the Cocteau Twins, this is what dream-pop should sound like.

6. The Dead Weather - Horehound
I'm no great champion of the Kills, singer Alison Mosshart's main gig, but I've got no beef with them. I am on record as being a Jack White fan. So what's the deal with this ill-received project? Voodoo blues. Dark, oozing, psychedelic evil grooves. And it's fantastic. I do like the White-sung tracks a little better, but there's not a truly weak track on this. People didn't like it because it didn't sound like the White Stripes, didn't have big hooks, wasn't catchy. So what? This is way more Captain Beefheart's Mirror Man than anything by Buddy Guy. If you wrote it off, try it again. If you haven't heard it, now's the time to get on board.

5. A Place To Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
Having been angry that I slept on their self-titled first album, I was thrilled to hear about this follow up. Where the first album was a collection of recordings cobbled into an album release, this is the first one recorded as an album. What does this mean? Sonic cohesion. Every one of these static and reverb epics flows into each other, sounding like a monolithic call to feedback arms. It's a good year to be a shoegazer.

4. Early Day Miners - The Treatment
Not so much the sound of a band changing... more like snapping into focus. After several albums of hovering, beautifully longing soundscapes, tunes that felt like memories, a sharpening of hooks and shortening of tunes makes this feel like a new band. Post-punk seems like a touchstone, but it's hard to put my finger on just what this sounds like. Danceable rhythms, mercurial guitar lines, and hooks. Lots of hooks. A surprise? Maybe. Fantastic? For sure.

3. Dinosaur Jr. - Farm
With some of the more jagged edges sanded down from the unexpectedly amazing Beyond, what we have here is an imminently satisfying collection of wistful melodies and extended soloing. If you like Dinosaur Jr., you'll love this record... but if you don't like the band, this album might just win you over anyway. Barlow's rumbling bass guitar and Murph's furious tom rolls build a structure to hold up swirling, winding, neo-psychedelic explorations wrung from Mascis' Jazzmaster. It's impressive that any band could make a record this good, much less one that broke up less-than-amicably 20 years ago.

2. The Vandelles - Del Black Aloha
Coming from out of a buzz-less nowhere with their debut EP, they followed up with a full-length that did everything you would want a first album to do after a killer EP... more of the same, but deeper. Sonically, it's halfway between some wicked surf band we've never heard of and a blast of feedback like a bucket of cold water in the face. Once again, Jesus And Mary Chain comparisons aren't inaccurate, but it's more than just sounding like a good band that makes this a great record. Thrilling sonics, oceanic reverbs, swaggering hooks... it's got what a good rock record needs to have.

1. The Big Pink - A Brief History Of Love
Huge without being silly, atmospheric without being limpid, it's just booming, thundering neo-shoegazer of the finest variety. Maybe not the best record of the year on a technical scale, but I've listened to and enjoyed this album more than any other this year, and it only came out in September. Bits of everything from My Bloody Valentine to the Jesus and Mary Chain to New Order are folded into the mix, but without ever really sounding specifically derivative. I heard the "Velvet" single and had to go out that day to get the single, just to have a real physical copy of it. I haven't done that in years. It's that good, and there is no hesitation in me naming this my favorite album of the year.

--------------------------------------

Psst... are they gone?

Also-Rans: This was too good a year for music to constrain it to the top 10. There were several excellent records this year that just barely didn't make the cut, but deserve one more largely-unread blog to sing their praises.

ofthemetro - "April Is The Cruelest Month/Roboboogie": honestly, there would have been a place for this at the grown-up table if it had been more than 2 tracks. It was a best albums list, but this is only down here because of a technicality. What does it sound like? Electronic music that sounds HUMAN. That should be all you need to know. http://www.myspace.com/inastationofthemetro

Asobi Seksu - Hush: More dream-pop than shoegazer, it shows that you can strip huge things down, and if they're really good, they'll stand up. This does, and it's beautiful.

Death - ...For The Whole World To See: pre-punk, Motor City Dirtbombs-esque garage'n'roll that proves that obsessive record collectors deserve to be listened to from time to time.

Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown
Far better than I expected, not an earth-shatteringly amazing record, but it's nice to hear a band that I know are honest about doing what's good about big, huge, old-fashioned rock music.

Madlib - Beat Konducta, Vol. 5-6: Hazy hip hop fragments from the underground's best (I said it) producer.

Sonic Youth - The Eternal: solid, tight experiments from the kings and queen of avant-alterna-rock. Fantastic.

Metric - Fantasies: Haunted, danceable modern pop. It SOUNDS perfect, and probably would if it sounded different, too.

Mos Def - The Ecstatic: Not enough hip-hop on my proper list, but not for want of trying. After being written off for a couple of albums, Mos Def comes roaring back with his best since his debut.

Spinnerette - Spinnerette: hard-edged Rock that shows that Brody Dalle is a lot more than a punk screamer. Almost made number 10 up there.

Tonight May Not, In Fact, Be The Night

2009-12-04T13:27:00.001-08:00

Since the dawn of well-recorded music, the fidelity has been a subjective factor in the listener's enjoyment, whether they know it or not. Those who are largely unaware of how audio recording works might not realize it, but that "something about it" that people often refer to when talking about their relative appreciation of a particular recorded work is most likely the constructed sound of music in a way that our ears wouldn't normally hear it.

Since the advent of multitrack recording, this problem/benefit has been compounded. In the early days, microphones and tape would pick up a performance live, as it was performed. But being able to record parts or instruments individually, a crafty recording engineer could now put each element in it's own space, so to speak.

For instance, you could make the drums sound like they were in a small, highly reverberant concrete room, but make a guitar or piano sound like they were down a long metal hallway, while putting the bass right next to the listener's left side. Of course, these are all illusions created by the signals your brain gets about REAL space... it's all a trick.

In some eras of popular music, certain production tricks became the standard, and often, eras with a higher number of standard "tricks" are what sound dated. Certain chorus effects and reverbs can come together to instantly scream "1980s". It was a colder, more digital sound than what was prevalent in the '70s rock arena. Until the legion of dimwit new-new-New Wave revivalists invaded the rock underground, the prevailing opinion was that "70s sounds were warm and natural and therefore good, '80s sounds were cold and harsh and bad". Now, aside from the phramaceutical trends of the ages, this is often true, in a purely rockist sense of the word. Some of those '70s classic rock moments stand up to the "timelessness" test because they have the same sound that people have had through the ages. Warm overdriven guitars and drums that sound like they're in a medium size room are going to be familiar sounds.

However...

There was, in the 1970s, a particular production sound that was so weird and unnatural, despite all of its concessions to normalcy and regularness, that sound more unnatural to me than even the weirdest stuff from '85. So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I humbly submit two stone-cold-classic records that I have a hard time listening to - not because of the harrowing lyrical content, but because of the bizarre production values. Ladies and gentlemen: Tonight's The Night and Berlin.

"B'whaa?" you may be asking. These are what, to some eyes, should be my favorite albums by each of these artists. Harrowing raw-nerve lyrics set to road-burned melodies at the trough of each artists' downward spiral. Confronting the darkest impulses of the human condition. Considered by many their respective artistic peaks. Maybe so, but I pull them out so infrequently that I couldn't sing you most of the songs on either of them, even though I love them. The problem is that I haven't been able to pinpoint why.

The closest I can get is that every instrument has been over EQ'd to death. My ears don't hear like that. You can't spend weeks getting the drums to sound just the way you want them and then set the other instruments to an entirely different set of calibrations. This problem isn't quite as apparent on Berlin, which is largely a collection of "piano and strings" showtunes anyway. But I've been in a lot of rooms with a lot of sloppy rock bands, and while all the playing and activity on Tonight's The Night is "correct", the sound of it isn't. I'm betting that coke and quaaludes have something to do with it, too.

Are there others? By that I mean good records from the pre-punk '70s that just sound wrong to you? I'm sure somebody out there could come up with a good list.

[Redacted]

2009-11-30T05:12:00.000-08:00

So, I don't do this often, but I wrote a pissy post this morning about a particular record label that I would now like to redact. Pissiness limply tossed at an irritiating but ultimately peripheral antagonist is no way to live one's life. Confident, incisive, heat-seeking ire is the way to go about it.

So, post redacted (cause it was poor, unfocused griping), but the point still stands, if you had the chance to read it.

My Little Blue Window/Radio Silence

2009-11-28T02:44:00.001-08:00

Recently, a lot of my listening has been taken up by one Mr. Elvis Costello, or as some of you may know him, "Declan MacManus: International Art Thief". I've been a huge Costello fan since high school, which may explain why I wasn't exactly a ladies' man, but it was also reassuring to know that there were other angry nerds out there. My Costello listening never really ceased since then, but for me, it's certainly more of an autumn/winter thing, and I've recently pulled out my EC discography from its digital crate.

It seems that whenever I pull out ol' Declan's records, I not only discover new things about the records that I love (which is most of them, but I'm certainly partial to his '77-'80 output, from My Aim Is True to Get Happy!!), but I usually discover a new record once a year or so. Apparently, I'd never cleaned my ears out to bother to listen to his 2002 "comeback", When I Was Cruel. it seems to be the weird, dark, seething record that he was threatening to make back in '91 with Mighty Like A Rose. The great thing about Elvis is that he's never really been pigeonholed by people who know his music. Sure the "angry young man" image sticks in people's minds, but he's always been as stylistically shifting as even David Bowie, he just changes shape within the "post-New Wave songwriter" boundary. Everything on When I Was Cruel seems dark and muffled, giving it a similar vibe, if not exactly sound, of groups like Massive Attack. That haunted, dark, angry sound is a welcome refresher to those of us who love Costello's razor-sharp wordplay. I've been on record since I was 17 as digging his Burt Bacharach collab, but that was a little sweeter - nobody can pen a put-down like Costello.

Back in '02, I was doing summer duty at a mall record store when I was home from college, and we were pretty restricted as to what we could play (thanks, GloboCorpMedia, Inc.), but When I Was Cruel certainly got lots of play from me, but I wasn't giving it a fair shake, cause I was young and angry, and it wasn't This Year's Model. So I've heard the record, but I'm 7 years late in getting to it's glorious, muffled anger - so what's your point, Mike?

My point is that I'm sick of the Day Glo, pseudo-cheerful 80's retroism of today. It's like people have fooled themselves into feeling things that they're not actually feeling. I'll freely admit that I don't understand why anyone would live at that surface level all the time, but I think that some of these people genuinely think that they feel certain things, but it's all ironic, and some of them don't even know it:
Teen2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen1: (shakes head) I don't even know anymore.

Maybe it's because we're coming out of a dark time, and some of the people in their late teens and early 20s weren't properly emotionally equipped to deal with being plunged into a paranoid era about 8 years ago. The '80s were pretty Day Glo and there was the constant threat of nuclear war. It's back again. But I was old enough to deal with it. And I'm bitter. Bitter at those people, bitter at the spirit of the era, bitter that nobody else seems to be feeling what I'm feeling. Ignoring it with solipsistic dance squiggles and silly haircuts doesn't protect you from fear - you have to fool yourself when all is said and done.

So I'm going to start writing some lyrics for the album I've got in the can. And they're going to be bitter. Because nobody else seems to be doing it with any articulation or conviction. Fuck this dance music. Things might be getting better, but bopping to reheated, rehashed Synth-Pop horseshit isn't going to make this any better. Duran Duran was bullshit then, and their progeny still are. You can't dance your troubles away when the world is falling apart. They say that those that don't know their history are condemned to repeat it, and apparently they've never heard the tale of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

Don't Know About You, But...

2009-11-22T05:48:00.001-08:00

i-ron-y: [ahy-ruh-nee, ahy-er-]
5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.

------------

So, I'm going through my thrice-a-year Pixies binge, because I'm pretty convinced that they might be in contention for the highly unexpected position of "one of my favorite bands ever".

I didn't really like the Pixies when I first heard them.

Annette, a manager at the restaurant I worked at in high school, loaned me Doolittle... passing it along to me like it was a secret. I assume this is the way people with older siblings find out about cool music. I had to mooch off my friends' older siblings. This would have been about '96 (I think), and I just didn't get along with the record. It was a little scratchity, almost too quirky, and the screaming wasn't really my bag at the time. I was just out of my "nothing but hardcore" phase (done with screaming), and the mysterious ambience of Guided By Voices (which she also loaned me, at the same time) held a lot more sway over my listening habits. Everything about the Pixies seemed so out front and clear and flat, like a photograph or film, while GBV was murky and deep.

But I diligently taped it, and kept going back to that cassette ever couple of weeks. I didn't really like it, but I couldn't help but want to listen to it more - it was like a compulsion. I didn't feel like I needed to like it, but it was so alien to me, I just wanted to see if it was as strange as I remembered it being. Naturally, as happens with most listeners (usually earlier than it did with me), I had some sort of epiphany with that record, and it was like a sudden, jolting realization when I understood I was listening to it wrong. I was taking all my preconceived notions - about it being a seminal "alternative rock" album, an influence on Nirvana that never broke through 'cause it was too weird, and the way that fans a generation ahead of me talked about it - and filtering through that.

All I had to do was open my ears and realize that it was just great music, you know? These were pop songs. Skewed, fractured, with scratchy mariachi guitars and screaming and stomping, but they were also 2:30 pop tunes. Shortly after I had this realization, I finally understood why Weezer had constantly been pegged as Pixies soundalikes. "Debaser" could have been on the Blue Album with a different vocal track. The more I listened, the more I liked it. The more I liked it, the more I listened. It was a good time to be an obsessive high schooler.

As I kept writing songs, in my so-called "punk rock" attempts to get away from "classic rock" songwriting (rootsy, verse-chorus-verse, maybe an acoustic guitar), I was drawn to the way their songs were short, like punk, and they were just played wrong as well. Where my primitive tunes had 8 bars of verse, 8 bars of chorus, 4 bars of bridge, 8 bars of chorus again, these Pixies albums were full of moments where they'd play a riff 7 times instead of 8, giving it this weird push-pull, with unexpected changes that actually SURPRISED me. And if Black Francis was the heart of the band, Kim Deal was the soul. She was what really hooked me overall. The frontman was scary, screaming like a deranged hobo about aliens and whores and surrealist films, but Deal's charming normalcy and audible sweetness was reassuring - as though to say "Hey, I know this is weird, but it's cool Go with it... it'll be a fun ride." As prickly as Black Francis seemed (as though he'd flip out at any moment), Kim had this sort of "Oh, Charles...!" vibe that didn't defuse the insanity, it just made it seem like a lot more fun.

All of the records are good, although my favorite often changed. Doolittle is probably their objective best, the most realized combination of fucked-up weirdness and hyper-catchy spazz-pop. Lots of my friends claim that Surfer Rosa is, like, THE ONE, and I know a few people who think that Trompe Le Monde is the best thing they did, due to the combination of heaviness and texture (the keyboards on that are actually really good). I'm the only person I know who really likes Bossanova, thanks to my love of surf music and space rock, although I know it's probably their weakest album. My favorite is Come On Pilgrim, not because I think it's their best, but because it's the most unique. All the songs sound like they were recorded live, in that order, on the same day, over the course of about 45 minutes. No super hits (no pop magic like "Wave Of Mutilation" or "Velouria"), and every one of those songs is catchy, but sounds like no other song I've heard before. And it was their first EP! How does a band do that?!?

What's the point of all this rambling? I'm coming to terms with the fact that while they've always been a band I really liked, and obviously thought was great, they may have just edged up into that rarified strata of "Mike's Favorite EVER Acts", up there with The Ramones, The Clash, Elvis Costello, et al. I would not have expected that the band I put on in high school and though "Too shrill. Too quirky." would end up a perennial favorite. And I stand by my assessment the other day. I am in the "Breeders" stage of my life right now. I no longer FEEL the way these songs feel. But they sure do compliment each other well.

Bedhead Residue: More Scrapings From The Bottom Of The Top Of The Decade

2009-11-19T13:35:00.001-08:00

The Strokes - "Is This It?"

I was wondering if I should even consider mentioning The Strokes in my (too-long-dormant) discussion of the Best Records Of The Decade (TM), and I've decided it's going to be necessary. Whether they make it in to the party remains to be seen, but I liked First Impressions Of Earth much more than I expected to, and besides, the NME list is out today, placing the Strokes at the top.

To shift gears for a minute and get all political, I'm of the opinion that no matter what else Barack Obama has done for the country, he's unified a large part of it. What will happen remains to be seen, but the idea that so many people were so fervent about making the administrative change, that he brought unity to the people, a sense of activism, a push to DO rather than "have done for". People being lazy, after the election, slid back to their old ways, largely, but for a minute there, it was one icon inspiring all of US to make something happen.

The Strokes were the Obama of their day.

I heard from every damn angle about this band when their first EP came out and the press went wild. The banned album covers, the trebly, buzzing sound coming from a dirty guitar through an amp. Touchstones of everything from Television to the Velvet Underground. People were STOKED. And this was a good thing. Sure, it may have ended up being a big ol' disappointment overall, but that garage rock revival had a lot of cool music bubble up to the charts. The Hives? America should be GRATEFUL for that happening after the sugary pop of the late '90s. The Strokes (well, the press surrounding the Strokes) reminded everyone that rock 'n' roll was still there, and in the process, made a really good garage-pop record. "Last Night" still sounds like Tom Petty, riffs are lifted here and there from some of your tamer (but hipper) punk forebears (New York Dolls, I'm looking at you!), but it's a neat little album with a sexy cover and one track that caused some post-9/11 lyrical stink. But it opened the gates. People were trying to market the VINES as a garage band. They were awful! But no matter, it reminded everyone that you can crank up and amp, bang on a riff, and howl out some hip jive and you were a rock and roller.

It's the music that matters, yeah, but there are always certain trappings that influence the tunes, and these boys had it DOWN. Sure, they were rich kids playing punk, but weren't Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine just prep-school runaways? Wasn't Lou Reed just a grumpy English major? Artfully mussed hair and perfect Beatle Boots might not make the album, but they sure help sell it. And sold it was. I had a stick up my ass (based on The Wilco Principle) about being told what I had to like. So I resisted. I knew about the White Stripes already anyway, and that was more my bag. I'd rather listen to the Oblivions or the Gories than something that Spin Magazine told me was "hot". Who cares about all that. It's a good rock and roll record.

Context aside, Is This It? is a really good record, that I heartily enjoyed once I got past my pissy contrarianism. Taken IN context, one of the best records of the decade. Just avoid the one that came after it.

Beat It, I Wanna Hang Out With The Psycho Mafia

2009-11-19T08:59:00.001-08:00

It's never good when you're having a foul day by 8:30 AM. Too many people around me spitting negative vibes has cast its long shadow over me - I'm only human - and now I'm seething, gnashing, lashing out. I'm feeling pissy and just want to be left alone. Anymore, when I'm in this mood, I don't tend to want to thrash about or pound pound pound my head to clanging electro-industrial beats like I did in my youth. Anymore, it's something low and rumbling like Tricky, or something fully crotchety like The Fall.

I never used to like the Fall all that much. I filed them in with early Gang Of Four as "post punk that everyone seems to love, but is a little too dissonant and dry and amelodic for my taste". I was, of course, gravely mistaken. I knew, however, that I just hadn't heard the "right" entry point, out of their 2,487 albums and EPs. I think the first one I had was a cassette of The Infotainment Scan in middle school. Eh. Not the best point to start at on either count. I heard that they started kinda Northern UK Punk-y, so I picked up Live At The Witch Trials and Early Years and liked 'em, but as a punk fan, they struck me as a case of a non-punk band doing the punk thing, and doing it quite well, but it felt like by enjoying them, I was shortchanging a band that, apparently, was quite a bit more than that. Sort of like really digging on Joy Division's recordings as Warsaw, or the first couple of Police singles - they're all good work by bands that went on to do more interesting things in related fields. But to define those bands by that work would be rather limiting and shortsighted. I was lost as to where to go next, so I tried a few, some were good, some weren't. I guess I was just lost in the wilderness for a while, largely put off by the prickly Mark E. Smith.

The older I get, the more I like Mark E. Smith, in that he might be a complete prick, but he makes no bones about it. He doesn't hide it, and you just know that that's what you're getting.

"Fuck off."

Today, it's been This Nation's Saving Grace. For a while, this "mid-period" for the band seemed a little overproduced, a little les "raw" than the early stuff that I guess I liked, but right now, I want to hear one noisy riff, repeated over and over with frustrated, grey, clanging vigor. I want to hear it decay and start up again, like some sort of broken machine, repeating it's head-nodding, rhythmic fervor over and over and over. The Fall, as music, is equivalent to watching a band like Pere Ubu from outside the room, only to have the door slammed in your face for peeking in. They don't give a rat's ass about you. Or anyone. Not only is it surprising that they release this music to the public at all, but that they release it in HUGE volumes. But even still, they don't care if you buy it, really. Which I guess is what made the music so impenetrable for me for so long. It's completely uncompromising in a way that so much avant music wasn't. Where Beefheart and the Residents created a new language for you to listen to, The Fall just play droning vulgarities in a language you already know, only they're not talking to you. They don't go out of their way to be weird or difficult, they just are.

So bug off, everyone. Leave me alone. Leave me with my Fall LPs.

Can't Fight The Breeders

2009-11-15T06:13:00.001-08:00

I'm getting older, I realize. See, nowadays, I want to live at the Breeders, and visit the Pixies. I realize that this statement might seem silly and crazy, but when I was a youth, I was amped up and wired and on edge and constantly on the verge of freaking out - i.e., my reality was similar to the vibe I get from the Pixies' oeuvre. I used to like to vacation in the Land of the Breeders, a hazy, noisy, pretty place with mountains and pretty harmonies. No less rockin', but a little less spazzoid.

Now that I've mellowed with age, I often feel a certain placidity and calm, and like to occasionally get nuts and bounce off the walls. Unfortunately, other than rounding up some singles 'n' b-sides 'n' stuff, I didn't have a lot of background music for that feeling. The Breeders haven't been the most prolific band of the past 20 years... 4 albums? The enjoyable but less-than-epochal Title TK aside, however, each of them has been downright magical.

There are very few recording acts that just completely confound me. I'd like to think that I'm a pretty well-versed music consumer and creator. I know how certain sounds are made, and I know how to achieve that, and how it all fits together. I may not always be able to speak the language, but I can understand what you're saying to me. However, there are those rarified acts that I just can't fathom how they put together that sequence of sounds and timbres to make the music I'm hearing, and often, the Breeders are one of them. The way the Deal sisters put the parts of a song together is completely confusing to me. Which could be part of the appeal. The best part of it, though, is, much like the Early Day Miners, the wizards behind the curtain are almost completely without pretense.

Maybe it's the Deal sisters' Ohio roots, or the down-to-earth mentality I keep seeing around Boston (Kim's temporary home in her Pixies days), but it seems like a completely unaffected piece of primitive art. To assume that the Deals are some kind of savants is doing them a major disservice, though - don't underestimate these women. They know their field, to be sure. But part of the reason that everyone loves them (in the same way people love their Dayton neighbor, Bob Pollard), is that they seem like people you could know, regular people, who have this other side to them that creates this magical atmosphere. Maybe it's her deadpan Midwest accent, but Kim Deal has always reminded me of someone who could have been my babysitter when I was a kid. A little older than me, waaay cooler, but still wouldn't mind eating cereal and watching cartoons. The key, however, is that this side of the band is never distinct from the lush, jagged, hauntingly crushing music that they can whip up like a fever dream. It's not distinct, and in fact the music would be weaker if that side of the personality wasn't visible through the haze.

The Breeders, though, like myself, have mellowed with age. Their 2009 self-released EP, Fate To Fatal, is a wonderful follow-up to the stellar Mountain Battles. There are lots of stories about these people, including nasty band break-ups, drug addcitions, arrests, bad feelings, back-biting - but all that really, truly feels in the past. Like Mountain Battles, there's a sort of, err, "elder statesmen" vibe to this, that says to me "been there, done that, who cares? let's just kick back a little..." It's not that the songs are lacking anything, but without the constant threat of everything suddenly falling apart, the four songs here are allowed to breathe a little bit. There was a day when any new music from the Breeders was met with baited breath, simply due to the scarcity and the event surrounding it all. Despite the fact that it's now a different era, the fanbase is still there, and it's actually nice to hear music like this without the crushing weight of anticipation. It seems like it's nice to the band, too, becuase this feels a lot more alive and organic than most of the other records I've listened to this year. Add it to the list!

[Bonus points to any reader who can tell me why I found the title of this post so damn funny when I wrote it.]

Gettin' SAD: Keeping Your Chin Up In The Clutches Of Autumn

2009-11-04T13:19:00.001-08:00

Fall is once again upon us (at least those of us up here in the Great Northeast), and I've only seemed to make that definitive the night before last, when I put the new album by Early Day Miners on the turntable and let that slow swell of mood once again creep over my very soul. Not bad, per se, just a sort of isolated loneliness that is hard to combat, no matter now much happiness and how many loved ones you surround yourself with.

I'm one of those guys that gets SAD (that's seasonal affective disorder, kids) like clockwork, and the fact that I've been off the Prozac for far too long is putting me in a very melancholic state of mind. Perusing the upcoming album release calendars tells me that, barring and huge surprises, the EDM record will probably be the last "great" album of the year in my book. I mean, the Tom Waits live album will be fun but not revelatory, the Nirvana set at Reading '92 will certainly be enjoyable, but I've had a bootleg of that for years. Where does that leave me... the abysmal new Weezer album? This time of year is usually the point where I tend to stop looking forward for a few minutes and just exist. Lately, that's meant a lot of Brian Eno and "comfort music" - perennial favorites that I know so well I don't really need to LISTEN to them, just have them there as a companion. Some dub reggae, the Clash, Stooges, and the aforementioned Nirvaner (Boston pronunciation).

So what now? There's a debate in my mind as to whether to make a concerted effort to uplift my mood with bright, jangly pop that could make even the heaviest heart step lighter, whether to compliment my mood with autumnal music to ponder the great questions, or whether to explode it all and start listening to things that are so unrelated and all-over-the-place in mood that I don't know what to think and I'll just find myself confused. The problem with the first option is that most of that jangly power pop is ultimately of the blues tradition of singing a happy melody to cheer yourself up. Seriously, Altered Beast or Bandwagonesque or even the first Gin Blossoms album is beautiful, but once you listen to the lyrics, you'll be reaching for the nearest razor blade. The problem with the second option is that if I lean too hard on the "complimentary" music, it could teeter things too far to that side and I'll end up worse off than I am now. When you have evocative music to be plaintive to, it's easy for that to snowball. And as far as the third option... well, The Residents alone cannot sustain a man.

So the big question is, what makes for good autumn music? Right now, I'm leaning toward some psych-flecked Mod pop from the mid-'60s - The Creation, The Smoke, Nuggets II - because it's peppy enough to keep me upbeat, but most of the lyrics are so evocative and impressionistic that they don't really SAY anything to me. It's too cold out to really rock out to some sweaty garage rock, so the Dirtbombs and their ilk are largely off the table. Is there anything that might speak to me but keep me from feeling completely bummed for the next couple of months?

We here at Central Target turn to you, Dear Reader, for your sage advice!

A Long-Term Effect

2009-10-18T03:37:00.000-07:00

I can't really even listen to Pornography anymore.

I was almost sure that when I grew up, I would outgrow my love of The Cure. I hoped I'd never lose that connection to a bundle of music that I really loved in my youth, but even then, it seemed like something I might grow out of. The older I get, though, the more I find to love about their discography. The strange thing is, though, it's not the same aspects that I'm attracted to, even if it is the same songs.

When I was a teen (let's say 15-18), I was a tried-and-true punk rocker. I loved the Clash and Black Flag, but the Cure were one of my first tentative steps into a different world, a less didactic world. It might have been Jon Savage that said something like, "Punk rock was all about saying 'fuck you', post-punk was about saying 'I'm fucked.'" Few bands did this with as much panache as the Cure, creating their own sonic world that was wonderful and terrifying and haunted and haunting and scary and angry and thrilling. I used to pore over their records, loving both the epic bummed-ness of their "big album statements" like Disintegration and their collections of pop tunes, each one a different flavor of delightful.

The Cure are, without a doubt, a band that is talented at writing songs. I connected to those songs because they gave a bored teenager a window into another world, where it was a little more fun. In hindsight, I had a wonderful setting for adolescence, but in the moment, there is nowhere on earth that is more boring than the suburbs of a mid-sized Midwestern city. The manicured lawns of the outskirts of Cincinnati aren't exactly a breeding ground for vibrancy and culture and the arts. But it was a wonderfully safe setting to start plumbing the depths of my own mind, all to a soundtrack of swirling effects and tumultuous emotional content.

What astounded me in the car on the way to my adult job this morning was that while I will always have a connection to some of the Cure albums I spent most of my youth loving, it's the ones that I didn't spend as much time with that are connecting to me more and more in my adult life. I used to be able to auto-point to 1982's terror-noir Pornography and 1987's pop kaleidoscope Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me as my favorite albums, while qualifying that Disintegration was probably their best work. These days, my music doesn't necessarily need to transport me to somehwere else, and the more I listen to them (especially the lovely remasters that came out a few years ago), the more I find that Seventeen Seconds and Faith are becoming my favorites. They're "normal" music that's going just slightly askew and sinister. I've always LIKED them, but listening to them in the city in the beginning of autumn is like putting on the high-tech Ray-Bans in They Live - it almost reveals a whole new layer of the world that's just slightly out of phase with real life. Sonically, they're far more indebted to Wire or maybe a snappier Joy Division or Comsat Angels than the huge, keyboard-laden songs with 2 minute intros that they'd later develop. Now that I have grown-up things to do, places to go, and a setting that's a little more stimulating than the 'burbs, I don't need to fall backwards into a fantastical sea like I did when I'd stay up all night before school, listening to Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and writing for hours (although that might not be a terrible idea). And regardless of changing favorites, Disintegration is still a masterpiece, still their greatest singular acheivement.

It's not that I have any less love for the gnarled nightmare of Pornography or tracks like "Shake Dog Shake". As evidence of a person dangerously close to the edge, they're remarkable. I love to play the '84 live album Concert to people who slag off the band as a bunch of made-up pop mopers (it's a dark, terrifying post-punk record by a remarkably tight band), and while The Top might be messy, it's far from the disaster people claim. But I investigated that aspect of my psyche when I was younger - I've tested my limits, and don't need to obsess over an abyss of unrelentingly bleak sonic psychology. There are moments on Pornography that rank among my very favorite recorded moments. But that record was so close to me for so long that it's nice to put it on a shelf and know where it is when I want to get to it. It's such a powerful record for me that it's hard to listen to it with any distance - and without distance, it's just a tar-black ooze that will roll over you. OK, over me. But it's a magnificent album that I almost never have the urge to listen to. Brent, if you're reading this, please add it to your list of albums that can be just downright scary.

But the older I get, the more I appreciate some of the nuances of the post-punk music I listened to years ago, and those early albums are really wonderful. They're the sound of a basic pop songwriter blossoming into something more. Live recordings of the '81-era band sound like punk tunes and speeds bursting at the seams to illustrate something... more. And it's that look at real normal life with something else underneath, something indefineable, that really comes across as thrilling. Short hair, no makeup, touring in a little van, but willing to dig deeper without it being forced - that's why I love the early Cure. Try 'em out... you might like them:

"A Forest", "Three Imaginary Boys", "Killing An Arab" 1979 Paris

"Grinding Halt", 1980 Boston

[Incidentally, when I met my fiancee and future wife, I was at the height of my Cure phase. She was just in her office writing a short biography of how we met for our wedding website. That night, I was wearing my lucky "Wild Mood Swings" t-shirt, and even played a ham-fisted, punky version of "Fascination Street" at the soundcheck. Funny how life works, isn't it?]

Punky Screams, Robot Rock, And Album-Cover Panties: Spinnerette Crosses The Radar

2009-10-10T01:30:00.000-07:00

I used to have a couple of Distillers records, but then my hard drive crashed.

My friend Kevin is a big fan, and what with my casual interest in the punk rock, he thought I'd like them. So a couple of years ago, I picked up Coral Fang and (I think) the self-titled one, and liked them, more than most things I hear on Hellcat/Epitaph/whatever punk label they're on. I could never believe that it was actually a woman singing those songs, cause those were some gnarly, raspy, whiskey-and-razorblade vocals. But, they sounded good and I liked them, although I got most of my "gutter punk" love out in one concentrated burst in high school, I do enjoy it, and they were a lot more tuneful than their often too-grimy-for-my-ears bred'ren.

Point being, that I heard them, I liked them, and then I rarely bothered to walk over to the corner I kept them in, you know? Which is why I'm as surprised as anyone that Brody Dalle's new project, Spinnerette, just put out a record that's now in the running for my Top Ten of '09, a good year for my listening if there ever was one.

See, I went to Kevin's wedding last weekend, and he set me up with the Distillers discography, to replace the ones I ripped and sold. They came in MUCHO handy on our drive from Warsaw, IN to the Indy airport, because on the way up, we had no CDs in the rental car - just rural Indiana radio. Which is grim. Christian Country and Regular Country grim. "All-Skynyrd Weekend" grim. But listening to those Distillers records again in an isolated environment reminded me of just how (*ahem*) tuneful they are. Kevin had played me a little bit from frontwoman Brody's new project Spinnerette, which is to Queens of the Stone Age as the Distillers were to Rancid. Apparently, Brody's a gal who tends to shapeshift depending on her current beau (not true, but it's an easy analogy to make, and I'm feeling tired and lazy*), and while it's not a WILD departure, it certainly sounds more like current dude Josh Homme's band than her mush-mouthed ex's mohawk brigade.

The opener, "Ghetto Love", sets the tone, with robotic (yeah, I used it again) drums/claps, a fuzzed out Devo bassline, but downtuned, like the Network gone a little sexier and a little more badass. Brody reveals her inner Rachel Nagy, applying her rasp not to a punky yowl, but a snarling croon. I never listened to the Distillers for their sex appeal, but Spinnerette sounds like a sexy, amp-fuzzed assembly line. Brody's probably at her best here, as far as vocals are concerned. As much as I love a crazy-ass Australian punk woman screaming bloody murder at me, this record connects a little more with my hips. The mixing on the record, as well, pushes the Queens comparisions, but they're really comparisons that could be made to any of the projects in that Homme/Goss/Johannes axis - parts appear out of nowhere, set strangely in the stereo field, surprising you with dry, up-front backing vocals, or reverbing a bassline into near-oblivion. Its effect might be a straightforeward hard rock record, but none of the parts tell you that's where it's going... it might as well be a primer for psychedelic production with piledriving guitar riffs as the base, "just because".

The playing and production on this are all top notch, with far more apparent care into the actual sonics of the record than the Distillers (hey, that's not a knock, I just know what it's like to record punk rock), but this is clearly Brody's show. Her vocals go from dangerous to delicate, evidenced on the lovely and hauting "Distorting A Code". She sounds effortless, but clearly a lot of thought went into her musical and vocal performances. Delicate and thoughtful are not two adjectives I would have expected to apply to Dalle's vocals 3 years ago, but it's a very pleasant surprise. It's just as carefully-crafted as anything you've ever heard - the sound of a talented but pigeonholed artist wanting to show what she can do. And she is an artist, despite what some might think of the Distillers punk bashing, and this is her "no, really, I can do all KINDS of stuff" album. It's to her credit that she had a clear vision and knew which sympathetic sidemen to pick to acheive it. Does it belong in the Desert Rock family? Absolutely. But it certainly sounds like an original take on it. My love of punk rock girls and talented artists and bludgeoning riff-rock and robotic pop hooks all tell me I love this record, and I do. So there we go. Spinnerette is now in the running for one of the highly coveted spots on my Top Ten of '09 List.

[*Yeah, it's glib, and I shouldn't feel the need to justify a pithy comment in an otherwise flattering review, but upon review, her intentions certainly seem genuine, and the artists she's quoted as influences seem feasable. Brody deserves better, as a woman in rock, than for some douche like me to make a sexist comment like "she sounds like whatever man-rocker she hangs around", although I might make the same comparision if she were a guy in the bands, not dating the respective frontmen. If the shoe fits, right? But this is more Queens than Rancid.]

Today's Editorial Mistake: Brought To You By The Internet

2009-10-09T03:35:00.000-07:00

If you've been here before, you most likely know my contempt for the hyping machinations of Pitchfork.com, which I won't even do the service of linking to. I've been thinking a lot about my own creative outlets recently, and while I was perusing the internet today, came across their review of former Queens Of The Stone Age bassist Nick Oliveri's solo album, Death Acoustic. I heartily enjoy the Queens (to the surprise of many of my friends), but am certainly no diehard or historian, but today's reviewer states the following:

...when he offers up lines like, "I use crystal methane by the boatload/ I live off straight booze, I just don't fucking care," in "Outlaw Scumfuc", you don't really question the validity of that statement for a second. In some sense, it's effective songwriting, as the listener gets some insight into Oliveri's persona...

Without bothering to reference the fact that the song "Outlaw Scumfuc" (charming title, isn't it?) was originally written and recorded by one G.G. Allin, one of the most disgusting, depraved people to walk the earth. I have no real problem with the song, the cover, or Oliveri's choice, but nobody bothered to check the liner notes? Fuck this noise... I'm out.

"Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before"

2009-09-26T01:45:00.000-07:00

Morrissey.

Hmmm.

I was a Smiths fan in high school, despite the horrible, dated production on most of their records. Johnny Marr (who most of you kids would know from Modest Mouse), was a genius guitarist in the age of synths, and their tunes were undeniable. But there's the Morrissey Problem.

I'm not British, so he's not representing any segment of my youth culture (unless you count too-smart-for-their-own-good, self-styled poet-types), and anyway, I came to the party about, oh, ten years too late to really identify with his political views.

Put simply, Moz (as his MOST pretentious fans refer to him) was about as irritatingly affected and pretentious as a singer could get, just shy of Bono on the self-importance scale. So why is it that I've kept listening to his records for so many years?

The Smiths aspect of the equation should be self-evident: Johnny Marr. I love the way he plays guitar, I like the way he integrates himself into the sound of a band, and I like the songwriting style. Plus, he gave Morrissey a foil, in two regards. Firstly, he pushed Le Pompadour into his best singing to match the sparkling, overchorused guitar work, secondly, the personality clash kept the frontman in line. Lennon needs a McCartney, Mick needs a Keef, and dear God, Morrissey needs a Marr.

Once he went solo, he still needed that strong collaborator. On his first two (admittedly wonderful) solo releases, it was producer Stephen Street, who, by virtue of his having worked with the Smiths in the past, understood the man's strengths. After a nasty falling out, his second official album, Kill Uncle (sans Street) was terrible. He teamed up with former Bowie sideman Mick Ronson for Your Arsenal, which was once again wonderful, primarily due to Ronson's ability to keep "The Hair" in check. However, since then, he's allowed his self-indulgence to overwhelm, and despite a few enjoyable moments per record (especially 2004's You Are The Quarry, he's slipped into middling irrelevance.

"But wait", you're thinking. "You're telling me all the reasons that Morrissey sucks, not why you've been listening to him all these years." Well, that's true. The last piece of the puzzle is the fact that he knows how to write a great hook and melody. "William, It Was Really Nothing", "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want", "Panic", "Girlfriend In A Coma", "Everyday Is Like Sunday", and "How Soon Is Now", among DOZENS of others have instantly memorable hooks and melodies. Since most of those titles are the hook, I can barely type them without singing them. Sure, they're beautiful melodies often delivered in the most affected, self-important way possible, but it's still a beautiful melody. Give it to someone else with a half a way with a tune, and let them sing it. It will STILL be a beautiful melody. The fact that a song like, for instance, "London", has such a good melody AND such interesting guitar playing is almost criminal. It would still be a great song with either or... it's almost unfair that it's got so much going for it!

Obviously, my critique is biased toward the "Smiths" years. His solo efforts do seem to wallow in melancholy and hyper-literate moping, but, for example, in "Everyday Is Like Sunday" the soaring glide of the vocals over the synthesized music really gives the images a beautiful power. The lyrics are alright, the music is alright, but that vocal pushes it into another territory altogether, making it even more frustrating that so much of his recent work has seemed so truly bland.

So I'm going to maybe stop bitching about what a douche Morrissey can be. That's not to say I'm any less irritated by his navel-gazing narcissism, it's just that this whole grudging respect thing is harder than it looks. And I don't want to have to stop listening to "How Soon Is Now" any time in the near future.

[Incidentally, a close personal friend of mine does an amazing dance whenever Morrissey comes on the radio - arms straight up over the head, wrists together fingers dangling, a saaaad look on the face and a little mopey hip wiggle. It's like the saddest, most effeminate palm tree you've ever seen. It's called the "Morrissey Dance"]

The Treatment Is In The Medium, The Message Is The Cure

2009-09-23T01:28:00.000-07:00

Just when things get boring and I can't seem to find a new band to thrill and swoon to, the universe will unveil for me a reason to keep on digging. I've been experimenting with guitar ambience and musical space for a while now, and just as it seems like my only options are shoegazer gravedigging or moving on to power pop, I get the opportunity to see one of the (unfortunately) secret prizes of the Midwest or any region - Early Day Miners.

Now, there is a bit of bias here. I used to work with their record label, as I lived in their hometown of Bloomington, IN. But that's where the bias ends. They might be a perfect fit for the wide-open spaces of southern Indiana, their haunted guitar lines echoing through a thousand cornfields, but Bloomington is too often a fickle mistress, and while it's nurtured them, it's never given them the due they deserve.

Their new album, The Treatment, is not so much a departure from their previous work as another angle. People (well, critics) too often mistake a consistent artistic vision for complacency, but I'm going to lay it down for you: while their records often don't sound dramatically different from one another, EDM explores variations of a theme, mining (ha!) the space between notes for as much drama and depth as the notes themselves. Sparse has practically been the raison d'être for this combo, but the new album adds an unexpected twist: pop songs.

As much as I love the band, I'd be hard pressed until yesterday to sing you one of their songs. There are tracks that I like, and the melody in those songs tends to bury itself in the whole movement and breathing of the song, almost as if each inhale and exhale were the melody. Beautiful and intricate, with songs gently shifting from one to the next, but "poppy" wouldn't be a word for it. Last night, the lineup was certainly stripped down from the 6 or 7 piece version that I've seen over the past few years, consisting of drummer Marty Sprowles, bassist Jonathan Richardson, guitarist John Dawson, and vocalist and guitarist Dan Burton, who doubles on keyboards. The first surprise was the rhythm section - what was previously a rumbling monster, all tom fills and powerful drama, is now focused, sharp and driven. Sprowles keeps things here tight, clipped, and snappy, propelling the band with a motorik sensibility, even if his playing is more complex. Richardson's bass, however, is the anchor of the band. Never dull, never calling immediate attention to itself, but holding the bulk of the clearest melodic aspects, these two click into a post-punk groove that wouldn't sound out of place on the first Comsat Angels record. A bass-and-drums combo this tight gives the guitarists room to move by remaining steady as a rock, but not steady at the expense of soul. Rarely do I find myself watching the bassist and drummer at a concert as much as I found myself last night, marvelling at the way things seemed to click perfectly into place.

But as a guitar player, it was the guitar that's always seduced me on their previous records. Although it's anyone's guess what transpired in the studio, in the live setting, it was Burton's textures that laid a bed for Dawson's stinging leads to rest on. While Burton had his work cut out for him (at one point he was playing his keyboard, his amp controls, and his effects board at the same time), while it only took some well-placed echo and reverb to make the ringing leads seem larger than life. I'm still amazed every time I see them that this few people are able to create the sounds coming out of the speakers. So we've got a tight, snapping, growling rhythm section, slicingly concise leads, and more spatial textures than you can shake a stick at. Now what was that about pop songs? Oh yeah, I found myself and others in the all-too-thin crowd singing along by the second or third go-round of most of the choruses. There was even a little dancing. In the same way that great bands like Codeine, Galaxie 500, and the aforementioned Comsat Angels were able to create amazing pop songs that almost shunned attention - the songs passing themselves off like obvious secrets, inherently understood - the Early Day Miners write anthems without being preening. Had U2 not desired to rule the world and remained an atmospheric pop band (and maybe traded in that blowhard singer), they would be lucky to be making albums that sounded like this.

So what does all this mean? It means that all the people who have accused Early Day Miners of having the sound but not the tunes need to ear their words. It might be a bit of a development, but listening back to the earlier albums, such as 2005's masterful All Harm Ends Here, all the ingredients are there - the band merely seems like they were merely choosing to ignore the poppier side for the atmospheric until now, acknowledging it's presence and keeping it on the shelf for later. Now that they've chosen to release it, it proves just how adept they are at crafting soundscapes: these ones actually sound pretty catchy.

Add It Up: More Remainders From The Decade's Math Equation

2009-09-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

[Here's another entry for the pool of those deserving of being considered for the top honors of the decade: my best-of-decade list. Maybe they'll make it, maybe they won't, but they deserve a shot... they could be contenders!]

The Raveonettes - "Chain Gang Of Love"
Snobs claim to like their first EP/LP better, their third album is nobody's favorite, and Lust, Lust, Lust is probably a better record, honestly. But this is about moments, not just records. When this came out at the tail end of the summer of '03, the heat was winding down, but the world was jsut warming up. 2002 started as a pretty bleak year, after all, and it stayed that way, right in the middle of the first Bush term. Things sucked. Suddenly there was a single on the radio that sounded like Phil Spector mixed with heavenly static, white noise... meaning it sounded just like the Jesus And Mary Chain. This optimistic song (seemingly) about love was slamming through of TARGET commercials, and noiseniks like me were sitting jaw-dropped as we heard what sounded for all the world like 1980s Creation Records noise-pop blasting out at us at Applebee's. Some could easily argue that A Place To Bury Strangers took the Psychocandy sound and updated it, rather than swimming in its simple pleasures, with APTBS ultimately bettering the earlier Raveonettes album. But I don't need to defend Chain Gang Of Love... I'll let the feedback do it for me.

True Love May Wait, But It's Fans Will Tell You Just How Much Better It Really Is

2009-09-01T13:07:00.001-07:00

It's not lost on me that I may have a reputation as a bit of a curmudgeon - a so-called stick in the mud when it comes to certain things that I'm supposed to be a fan of. I very much dislike being told what I like, and the rise of the indie rock blog critic has only exacerbated what I see as a nasty case of cultural elitism. You see, everyone wants to think that what they like is cool, and I have certainly been guilty of that in the past, and probably will be again. However there are two examples in the past decade that have driven me so up the wall that I felt I needed to step back and re-assess my opinion, just to make sure I wasn't holding an opinion purely for pride.

First, there's Wilco. I'm not going to talk much about Wilco, because after going back and listening to them again, I still don't like them. I understand why people like them, but I find them ponderous, faux-"regular guy" art rock and even the addition of the otherwise wonderful Nels Cline to their lineup can't save them for me. Sorry folks, but I'm just closing the book on that train with a handily mixed simile.

It's the hyperbole that swirls around the heads of Radiohead fans that irritates me in a peculiar fashion. It's not that I can't stand Radiohead, and it's not exactly a case of "good band, lousy fans". I'll admit that I still have a certain reactionary instinct regarding the band, but it primarily derives from what I feel is a lack of attention by their most ardent supporters to what the band is actually telling them, and a desperate movement to read what they want into what may or may not be there.

But let's rewind. I bought The Bends in '96 and remember loving it, but being actively teased in the eighth grade because it wasn't Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden. I'm dead serious. Whatever. OK Computer comes out in '97 and I love it, as it perfectly correlates with my then-recent discovery of J.G. Ballard's feverish urban nightmares, Burroughs' post-modern cutups, and the idea that the 1997 "Next Big Thing" wave of electronica could be mixed with rock in a bracingly modern way. It was fantastic, and I distinctly remember biking up to K-Mart to buy it the week it came out. This time, just about everyone was on board (well, all the pseudo-musos in high school with me), and we were all living in a Brave New Age. I remember that my friend bought the first US edition of Now! That's What I Call Music, and it had "Karma Police" on it. Seriously. Sandwiched between Aqua and Everclear. It was a fantastic moment for a wonderful big-statement, capitol-letter Album, and deserves to be hailed as one of the first and most interesting records of the Modern Age of Music (despite its now 12-year-old vintage).

Between buying that and the next album, I went to college, in the first explosion of file-sharing. My university, in fact, was one of the first to ban Napster, after the lawsuits started flying, but there was no way to stop online music. I'd become a music hound, absorbing everything I could, soaking it up, spending fistfuls of cash at my local record store for everything from the Jesus And Mary Chain and Faust to early Kraftwerk to Phillip Glass to Ornette Coleman. It was like 50 years of music history (which I also took in school, natch) crammed into a two year period.

So when Kid A came out, I enjoyed it, I bought it, and I listened to it repeatedly... but I didn't find it particularly innovative. Interesting and fascinating to be sure, but there was very little there I hadn't heard on records that were 20 years old by that point. Not to say it wasn't well done, but for every "Treefingers", there was a Brian Eno song, and if "Idiotqeue" wasn't on your copy, I was pretty sure that you could find it on Aphex Twin's Analogue Bubblebath 3. And that's fine... because the band themselves were tellling everyone that it's wasnt revolutionary, it was just a reflection of what they had been listening to. It's not that it was boring, it was a wonderful sort of pop-distillation of the avant-garde that they clearly loved, and it was a wonderful way to both fuck with people's expectations of a prog/art-rock band and bring this esoteric material to the masses. Suddenly, I see Kirsten Dunst on MTV wearing a Radiohead shirt and get treated to a brilliant performance of "Idioteque" on Saturday Night Live. I believe Kate Hudson was hosting, and it was just shocking how wild it seemed. That performance always seemed to get edited out of the reruns, much to my chagrin. While my taste at the time skewed decidedly pop and punk, it's not like I didn't appreciate what they were doing.

Gradually, however, the press (especially that on the 'net), who I recall giving the album a bit of a cold shoulder at first, started winding up. It wasn't the initial reaction, though, which was one of confusion and frustration - where were the songs, maaaaan? We need another twitchy depressed anthem, a la "Paranoid Android"! After a while to let it sink in, it was as if Radiohead had saved music. Fans became fervent, slavering disciples, swearing up and down that you didn't "get" the band unless you heard this live version of the non-album track that they'd found online. Sure, it was nice to see so many people getting so passionate about a seriously interesting band, but I believe that the rise in this serious music, coupled with the sudden widespread usage of the web, made everyone a critic as dour as Radiohead was purported to be. This serious music had to be taken seriously after all, right?

As time went on, Radiohead got bigger and more important, and the more important they got, the less I seemed to care about them. Again, I can't stress enough how good the band was about attempting to defuse this hype - "messiahs" was a term put on them by outside forces, Yorke told everyone to go out and buy Neu! records to see where they were coming from. But suddenly everyone with a (then-new) iPod was a critic, and the line of the day was that if you don't like Radiohead, you don't like "real" music, and if you don't like them, you don't understand them. I understand them fine, thank you very much, but Amneisiac didn't appeal to me (although I wouldn't be glib enough to use the "Kid B" epithet so often thrown at it), and I felt that Hail To The Thief was interesting, but treading water. A band can only redefine music twice, right?

So in my old age (*ahem* twenty-three...), I suddenly became very anti-Radiohead. I still listened to them, but I preferred the records with guitars. As I became a better guitarist, I was aghast that the three-pronged guitar Hydra that twisted and gnarled and spit out The Bends had hung up the guitars in exchange for broken synthesizers and ProTools. I didn't expect them to make that type of record again, and there were certainly enough b-sides and ephemera from that era to tide me over, I just wanted them to do something I hadn't already heard. I was sick of being told that they were the greatest band in the world, and sick that everyone who loved them had a certain superiority complex. "I love music... what do you listen to?" "Well, I listen to Radiohead...", "Oh, you must be so intellectual." It was a sickening cycle of self-satisfaction feeding egotism that I wanted nothing to do with. Leave that to people like my arch nemesis in college (who I'll refer to as M.T.), a self-styled avant musician, comparing Radiohead to the likes of Sid Barret [sic] and telling everyone who didn't get it that they shouldn't bother. Fuck off. A friend of mine who shall remain nameless recently posted on his Facebook page that he thought that while Radiohead might be overexposed, he thought that anyone who said they truly HATED Radiohead was just being a contrarian. While I don't love their recent work, I thought his was a rather close-minded, indie-centric view (and I realize that a status update on Facebook doesn't qualify for a well-planned treatise). People HE knew couldn't hate Radiohead, sure. But I know plenty of brilliant musicians who know their history and would totally understand Radiohead and would probably just loathe them. I hate Antony & the Johnsons, but I bet ol' Antony has fans that couldn't fathom ANYONE not adoring their hero.

But you know what? I've moved on. The fair-weather musicologists are idiots, and I wish they'd move on to something else, but the fact of the matter is that Radiohead is the most interesting band most of these people listen to, and what they listen to is all they have. It's an amazingly interesting record, made all the more astounding by the fact that it was a hit. All the while, Jonny Greenwood is singing the praises of Mo' Wax Records and Amon Duul II, but nobody hears that, they only praise their heroes. It was a bit like Tommy, where, despite his protestations, his acolytes are just hearing what they want to, not caring about what they're being taught.* Nonetheless, for those who cared to listen to the rare interviews the notoriously press-shy band gave, they did their best, and having subsequently worked at the very record store I bought it from, was amazed at the number of people who DID end up discovering some of the influences through Radiohead. Good for the band, good for those brave enough to step up to the counter with an unheard album like Faust IV or Before And After Science.

With a bit of distance from that self-satisfied indie rock scene I ran in, I would go so far as to place Kid A on my list of top albums of the decade, in that not only was it an interesting record, but in the way that Nevermind brought the punk/grunge underground to the surface, Kid A did sort of the same... only this underground was a much older, much more rooted one that may very well be TOO difficult for the average John or Jane Doe. Liking Kid A does not immediately make Can's Ege Bamyasi or Paul Lansky's Smalltalk accessable to peoples' ears. Radiohead moved the mountain, though. They didn't bring the underground to the mainstream, so much as move the mainstream a few inches toward the avant garde. Maybe only a few inches, sure, but it's still a fucking mountain.

For creating a really wonderful album on its own merits, and for changing what a hit album could encompass, I'm adding Kid A to my list of best of the '00s contenders.

*[Of course, since the last act of Tommy was essentially a criticism of organized religion with the hero as a stand in for Christ, I've finally espoused myself into a corner. I'm comparing Radiohead to Jesus. You win, Internet - it's apparently impossible to author a blog without making that comparison.]

D'You Know What I Mean?: A Long-Distance Look On The Messy Follow-Up

2009-08-30T03:02:00.000-07:00

I had the idea for a series of articles for this blog, entitled something like "Middling Bands Make Great Albums", highlighting the one great moment by an otherwise adequate but dismissable band. The idea of writing a whole column about the Goo Goo Dolls' Hold Me Up, however, seemed like a bad idea before I even started, and the whole "Great Band Makes A Mediocre Album" seemed a little obvious and boring, and I don't want to listen to "Hail To The Thief" or "A Ghost Is Born" again if there's not a gun to my head. I've just been looking to contrast the difference in quality between an album and the work that came around it.

So in that spirit, let's talk about Oasis' Be Here Now.

One of the most highly-anticipated rock and roll records of my formative years, Oasis had raised the bar pretty high. I wasn't a fan at the time - too busy listening to serious angst - after all, I was an American who was looking for the next auteur after grunge... I couldn't be bothered with their hippie-Beatles platitudes. But, I couldn't deny that after the larger-than-life rock and roll of Definitely Maybe and the larger-than-that epic balladeering of the (What's The Story) Morning Glory singles factory, the excitement surrounding the imminent release of Be Here Now was palpable. The leadoff single was "D'You Know What I Mean", and it seemed that the lads in the band were about to enter their psychedelic phase, but with that punky edge that Liam's obnoxious sneer lent their tunes.

And they dropped the ball, or so the story goes.

Coming off not only two of the biggest albums of the '90s, but (from a "classic pop songwriting" perspecitve), two of the best albums of the '90s, they were doomed to fail, to some degree. Bands simply cannot sustain top-of-the-charts success for three albums in a row anymore, even in the heady days of 1990s Cool Britannia. The public is too fickle... a cruelly unforgiving, trendspotting mistress

Many might point to the Gallagher brothers' own assessment of the album to back up the popular opinion - Liam thinks it's genius, but he's a self-deluded prick, and Noel thinks it's terrible, but he lets the public define what he thinks is his best work. If Definitely Maybe was from a young band who wanted to beat the world, and Morning Glory was the sound of the biggest band in the world basking in success, where else did they have to go? They'd been too clear-eyed about their vision, too focused in their aim to be the biggest and the best, and suddenly, they made a sprawling, confused album that sounds messy, almost scared of its own place in the world. What now? "We have everything, and we're not happy, because we don't know where to go next." It might not have the immediate surface impact of the first two, because it has no "Live Forever", or "Rock 'N' Roll Star", or "Wonderwall", or "Roll With It", or "Champagne Supernova" and on and on. There aren't many great singles-type moments on the album, but as a piece, from a songwriting perspective, it's one of the great "we're huge, what now?" albums in the rock canon. It's the paranoid, insular, almost-falling-apart vibe that made albums like Exile On Main Street so fascinating. When you're that famous, when you're working under that level of expectation, you have no precedent at the moment. Who do you look to for inspiration? Nevermind the fact that the band was fronted by the two most self-obsessed rock-star types of their day, dead set on making their epic statement.

It should have been the concise record that made Britpop the biggest musical movement since '77 punk, but it was, in fact, the nail in the coffin. It was purchased in droves, then sold back the next week. It's not that it was a bad record, it's just that it's not the 35-minute singles bonanza that everyone put their money on. Records this messy and sprawling do not stick to people's ribs, they want the next immediate rush. Shit, I bought the hype and it's taken me more than a decade to come around.

Was the album a failure? Yes. It didn't sell as well, it was held in lower regard, it didn't have as many singles, and people still use it as the punchline to jokes.

Why? Because the hooks weren't as strong, the production was too thick and layered (requiring too much work on the part of the listener), and for a band that wrote effortless, inviting pop hits, it seemed too insular. Oasis has (as evidenced by their B-sides comp The Masterplan), probably three full albums of B-sides that are at least as strong as every song on Be Here Now, almost entirely written by Noel. By the third official album, but about the SIXTH if you go by song count, he handed some of the writing reins over to the band. Poor choice, but it's hard to blame the guy. I could make you a mix disc of Oasis material you've never heard and would blow you away. Give the guy a break.

But before it seems like I'm just covering for his shortcomings, let me note that ""My Big Mouth" sounds as good as some Definitely Maybe material; "Magic Pie" (despite some questionable lyrics) is at least as anthemic as "Some Might Say"; "Stand By Me" is their "All You Need Is Love" knockoff (which is to say, a loveable singalong with good intentions but a bit slight - but hey, we all saw them doing a version of that song coming, right?); "Fade In-Out" is, admittedly, psychedelic nonsense; and "All Around The World" is one of those sing-alongs that's so good you might hear it in a commercial. "Don't Go Away" and "Be Here Now" are still, I declare, better than most of the lameass post-Radiohead Brit-mope bands like Travis and (ugh) Coldplay. All in all, yeah, it's overlong, it's overblown, and the songs, while good, aren't up to the level of the first two albums and a lot of the early B-sides. So? Keane has built a whole career on songs like "Don't Go Away", and I LIKE Keane.

Don't believe it. This is a really good record. Not as good as the first two, but name me two albums by the same classic pop band that stand up as a pair like those do, and I dare you to see (if you can even name an example) the follow-up that stands up like this one.

Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?

2009-08-28T00:54:00.000-07:00

I was talking to someone in bed last night, and she and I were discussing the fact that the Information Age is helping us inch, musically, toward the melting pot of cultures that we've been promised since grade school. The examples on my mind for the purpose of this brief diatribe are Gorillaz and M.I.A..

I've spoken to a few people who took my M.I.A. piece a few weeks ago as a slight against her... far from it. It was more to illustrate (poorly), the effect the internet and global connectivity are having. The two acts listed above are prime examples of this effect. How would you categorize them? Not everything needs to be classified and pigeonholed, but for the sake of posterity, for the sake of our future music historians (who I can only assume will have the same filing system we do), how would you tag the genre for these acts on your iPod?

Me? I choose hip hop. Not because it's accurate. In fact, it stings a little bit because I know it's NOT accurate. But it's about the only style I can wrap my brain around this music being more than anything else. It has beats and a little rapping. Maybe not a higher percentage of that than pop or rock or indie rock or punk or soul or some world music I don't have a knowledge of, but it's got SOME.

Forget all the hype about M.I.A. - I was sick of her before I'd even heard her. Another Lady Sovereign, this one political and indie and Sri Lankan. Big deal. Bloggers were falling all over themselves to kiss her ass, hipsters were telling me how great it was, and I wasn't buying the hype. I still don't. Especially since the same fickle trendspotters have moved on to something else. Some I've talked to told me the appeal lied in hearing a form of music they'd never heard - South Asian hip-hop. Cool. Whatever. But that's not what caught me. It's the fact that, as mentioned in that previous article, the Information Age allows her to pick from the cultural rubble, using whatever she wants to paint her pictures.

Now, I'm not stupid. I know not to believe the tale of Maya Arulpragasam, wide-eyed and angry refugee from a war-torn country. I'd like to give her credit for being smarter than that. After all, she went to art school and designed the packaging for Elastica's second album as I recall. Craftily smart, she's able to pick and choose... with the technology available, any idea or sound is only a click away. It's complete recontextualization, something I've been railing for since I was a pop-art obsessed teen, but too shortsighted to understand when it popped up in front of me in a form I didn't expect. While I hate the fact that the term "postmodern" is misused and thrown around these days to indicate something modern, this is more in line with Jacques Derrida's work (or part of it, as I understand it) - complicated things come from a complicated origin, not something pure and simple. M.I.A. assembles collages like Richard Hamilton - the pieces used come pre-loaded with meaning and purpose of their own, she's either hijacking them or subverting them altogether.

And while Maya A. basks in the glow of a thousand blogs (a trend which I wonder if I'm critiquing or contributing to), the Gorillaz one-up her in a form - they're so post-modern they don't even really exist. Each member of this cartoon troupe is an archetype for either a musician or a gang member, I'm not really sure. They live in a floating castle of sorts and have adventures. It's escapist fantasy. Nevermind the fact that their real-life counterparts are combining rock, pop, hip-hop, soul, funk, electronica, spaghetti western soundtrack, punk, and whatever else. Sure, some of the parts in this case might be more recognizable, but that makes the effect of playing with purpose even more daring. Their self-titled album was great, but the second, Demon Days, took it even further, jettisoning original producer Dan "The Automator" Nakamura and bringing in enfant terrible Danger Mouse, fresh off his postmodern (again with this!) masterpiece, the hallucinatory Beatles/Jay-Z blender child The Grey Album. Genre for them in this case is merely a case of "what should we do now?" They don't add guitar parts, they add whole styles, taking whatever they want, because, hey - it's all just music, right? They are actually breaking down cultural boundaries, building a new concept out of old ideas, taking whatever they want, leaving it to sound like what it is, but somehow, with the magic of this "context blender effect", giving it a new meaning based on what it sits between, without stealing its identity, both culturally or sonically. In the past, an artist might sample something and conceal the sample sonically - fuzz it out, reverb it, EQ tweaking - to make it almost unrecognizable. The new wave of artists leave things as they are. They let your mind change what you hear.

Now that's revolution, baby.

[With these realizations, I'd like to formally submit Danger Mouse's The Grey Album and M.I.A.'s Kala to my best of the '00s list. Why Kala over the earlier and therefore more bracingly "new" Arular? Cause I like the sound better, and they're both really good.]

Dirty Mike in: The Dead Pool (Best Of '09 Finalists)

2009-08-22T02:20:00.001-07:00

Lots of posts, lots of confusion. Let's sum up our current contenders (alphabetically) for the best albums of 2009 (so far):

Asobi Seksu - Hush
The Breeders - Fate To Fatal EP
The Big Pink - A Brief History Of Love
The Dead Weather - Horehound
Death - ...For The Whole World To See
Dinosaur Jr. - Farm
Early Day Miners - The Treatment
Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown
Madlib - Beat Konducta, Vol. 5-6
Meat Puppets - Sewn Together
Metric - Fantasies
Mos Def - The Ecstatic
ofthemetro - Under The Sound
A Place To Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
Sonic Youth - The Eternal
Spinnerette - Spinnerette
Sune Rose Wagner - Sune Rose Wagner
The Vandelles - Del Black Aloha
Varsity Drag - Rock 'N' Roll Is Such A Hassle

Back To The Garage: More Top Albums Of '09

2009-08-22T01:52:00.001-07:00

Dead Weather - Horehound
Jack White does not get an automatic pass into my top 10. People assume that I just rate anything he does, even if it's not his best work. However, those ain't the rules of the Year End Top Ten. It just has to be a better album than other things released that year, a target which he hits with alarming regularity. Is this album better than the best White Stripes album? Nope. Is it better than Chinese Democracy and whatever indie-folk messiahs came out this year? Without a doubt. Alison Lockhart acquits herself wonderfully on most of the lead vocals, but make no mistake, this is Jack's show. The Stripes are minimalist blues-punk, the Raconteurs are garagey power-pop, and this is voodoo grind. New Orleans evil blues, positively oozing with sinister vibes. And therefore worth contention for my top ten of the year.

Death - ...For The Whole World To See
No reissues and no re-releases, unless it's more than 60% new material: this is the first rule of the year-end top ten. Two of these songs were previously released on a regional single of 500 copies in the mid-70s, so I'm going to allow it, in lieu of the (sadly) inadmissable Volcano Suns reissues (which were merely "not ever on CD"). Punk before punk's revolution, black punk before the Bad Brains, soul/punk before the Dirtbombs, it's releases like this that give rock and roll archivists like me conniptions. On paper, this shouldn't exists, stylistically. But sure enough, here it is. Gritty, howling, provocative, and recorded on behalf of a major label. This is crazy. This is the kind of dangerously unhinged but pointed music that makes people pick up an instrument in the first place.

Varsity Drag - Rock 'N' Roll Is Such A Hassle: Live In Europe
Practially a Ben Deily greatest hits collection, this is a rip-snortin' power pop extravaganza. The tunes are melodic as all get-out, but they're speedy, short, and buzzy. For those who thought he fell off the face of the Earth a few years ago, the fact that he hasn't missed a beat since Creator (some of which features here), and it doesn't sound like a collection of tunes written over the past 20 years is amazing. The material from Varsity Drag's 2006 debut, For Crying Out Loud is bigger, tougher, and lived-in, the Lemonheads material sounds as good as it always has (which is to say, pretty damn good), and it's nice to hear any Pods tuneage get a wider release. Maybe the best pop band in Boston right now, any fan of punky pop 'n' roll should seek this out immediately. Download it from his site (www.bendeily.com) right away!

More Of The Decade's Greatest Hits

2009-08-21T01:17:00.000-07:00

I'm suddenly wondering if Ash will make my larger pool of candidates, but while I sit and think about that, why don't you turn off your brain and just shake your backside?

Daft Punk - Discovery
I was a Daft Punk fan as of just post-Christmas 1999. My brand new girlfriend made her dad drive her out in lousy weather so she could get me a copy of Daft Punk's debut, Homework. When I reach for any of their records, it's usually that one, with it's rough-edged 808 beats. But it's Discovery that not only made them stars, but presciently predicted much of the danceable music of the decade. It was like a rainbow from the mid-80s were dipped in chrome and sent to the future and back - it was funny, hooky, positive, dancey, funky. Most wannabes on the radio still sound like they're trying to catch up.

Basement Jaxx - Rooty
As much as they might want to, NOBODY sounds like Rooty. Too weird, too insular, too warped, but more than booty-rumbling enough. Remedy was sweaty music for sexy Brit clubbers. Tracks like "Where's Your Head At" and "Get Me Off" were for the freaks. But hey, people, it's all a party, even the sexy people are invited, too.

Joe Strummer - Global A Go-Go
Streetcore is the more "classic Strummer", but the cultural mix up that this album plays while being a punk rock version of world music is infectously danceable. And leading the charge is the late, great Joe himself.

A Decade Of Decadence: Mike's Fave Albums of The Noughties

2009-08-15T02:08:00.000-07:00

Alright, so B. Dawg over at Dogdoguwar proposed that we team up and take on the greatest albums of the past decade. The problem is that I think he and I have listened to far too many records between us this decade. His recent post on the matter is put far more eloquently than mine, regarding the lack of zeitgeist-defining records... it's been a pretty scattered decade. I mean, 9/11 people. Never forget. To floss.

So, to get started at least, I've just started compiling a big list of records that were favorites of mine over the past 10 years, that I could honestly see on my end-of-the-decade list. Some of which are completely unoriginal, but just super-solid records, some are surprises even to me, because even though I've grown to love them,
I actively disliked them for maybe even the majority of the decade (Queens Of The Stone Age, I'm looking at you!). I have, however, tried to be a LITTLE careful in my choices, picking things that are notable on a medium-larger scale... I loved that first Varsity Drag record and a later Cheater Slicks album, two of my absolute favorites for the past few years, and even though I've listened to them more than other things on this list, they just don't feel right to put down, you know?

So without further ado, here's a list of a bunch of records I ended up thinking might make the list at the end of the year (and decade), in, I can't stress this enough, no particular order.

The White Stripes - White Blood Cells
Not even my favorite of their first three, but so tight, varied, and end-to-end listenable that it edges out even Elephant as their best so far for me.

The Dirtbombs - Dangerous Magical Noise
This album revels in the fact that it could have been made before OR after the so-called "garage rock revolution". Mick Collins is a god.

Queens Of The Stone Age - Songs For The Deaf
Written off by myself as nu-metal when it came out, I was turned by the tightness of the rock and the looseness of the groove. It absolutely slays.

Gorillaz - Demon Days
Paranoid, multi-genre hip-pop by a bunch of depressed cartoons. Perfectly post-millenial pop music.

Danger Mouse - The Grey Album
Not only culturally critical, but totally a great listen. If you could find it.

Madlib - Shades Of Blue
"Smart" hip hop has often leaned on jazz tropes... this actually samples from the Blue Note Vaults, and combines the mind expansion of classic jazz with the soul expansion of hip-hop.

Asobi Seksu - Citrus
Do you like guitars with effects? They do. They also love soundscapes behind lovely pop songs, like skipping through a good dream about good dreams, and when you wake up, you're still humming the tune.

The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
The sweet, hopeful flipside to the Gorillaz, no matter the weight of the message, they make you feel like they're right there with you. Neo-prog psychedelia meets bubblegum pop. Wonderful and life-affirming.

Primal Scream - XTRMNTR
More than any of the late-90s acts that tried to marry aggressive rock and electronica, this album melds the two like they were the same thing. Not even my favorite Primal Scream album by a long shot, but certainly one of the best.

Fountains Of Wayne - Welcome Interstate Managers
Not revelatory in the least, but a wonderful pop record about life in the midfield. Office workers, hormonal teenagers, broken-hearted sad-sacks and wistful New Jersey denizens collected in a Kinks-like catalog of fully fleshed characters, each more relatable than the last.

Guided By Voices - Isolation Drills
I was very, very surprised to see this on Brent's list as well, since I always had him pegged as more of an Earthquake Weather kind of guy. This will most likely not make my Big Ol' Final List, but it's a damn fine rock record. Just looking at the songs ("Chasing Heather Crazy", "Glad Girls", most of the other songs), makes me wish I was listening to it, and if "Teenage FBI" were on this, I'd have no bones about putting it on the list. Probably the finest "pop" record Pollard & Co. made after 1999.

Johnny Cash - American IV: The Man Comes Around
Probably not the best of the American Recordings series that so defined Johnny Cash in many people's minds, it had a sense of finality to it, as though Cash knew it would be his last, turning out harrowing performances of his own and others' songs as though it were the last time any of them would ever be sung. And it is the last time any of these will be sung like this again.

Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
To my ear, modern soul and R&B albums sound indebted to the past, no matter how good they are. Maxwell and D'Angelo are wonderful performers, but they're part of a tradition that leads back to Sam Cooke and further. On this album, Cee-Lo's fractured testifying meets Danger Mouse's bouncing production resulting in something approaching soul music in a completely new way. And the second side is the weirdest, most psychedelic album moment of the decade to hit the top forty.

Postal Service - Give Up
My memory of this album is walking the 3 miles from the record store to my recently rented, unfurished apartment to eat leftover chinese food alone while sitting on the floor in the middle of summer. But somehow, this record, summed up by my friend Kevin as "emotronica" at the time, made that situation OK. Hopeful, wistful, sad, optimistic, it was fresh in a way that pop electronic music hadn't been in years.

Luna - Romantica
I'd say it seems a little generic to make a list like this, but nobody else is making records like this. Mature pop, interesting without being inapproachable, subtle without being boring, it's the kind of music I imagined I'd listen to if I grew up to become a classy grown-up. Jury's still out on that one, but the record is wonderful.

Malory - Not Here, Not Now
Not entirely innovative, but probably the prettiest album I've heard in the past ten years. Just beautiful sounds.

Choosing To Remain Uncool

2009-08-15T01:38:00.001-07:00

I've decided to come to terms with the fact that what I do will almost never be considered cool, and what is considered cool is far too methodically contrived for me to ever aspire to.

I'm reading a record review, published yesterday, that makes me sick to my stomach over both the album reviewed and the reviewer's so-called "style". I'm sure the album would be acceptable on its own merits, "acceptable" being key here, but I'll be damned if I just get angry when I re-read the article.

The record in question is one that I will not name, but I will say that it's by an artist that in certain limited circles, is critically lauded, and put out one so-called landmark album at the turn of the decade. The new record apparently shows his newfound love of black metal (no it's not Sonic Youth, they've been teasing us with that one for decades), and as this artist is neither a black metal artist, or, for that matter, very prolific, it's being taken as a big deal.

Big fucking deal, guys. For all the claims that this new album shows the influence of Xasthur and Leviathan, it doesn't really sound like it, and while every review I've read in advance of this album mentions that fact, it's completely out of the way by the third or fourth paragraph. Maybe due to the fact that despite the artist saying that, there is NO INDICATION WHATSOEVER on the record of any black metal influence. If a few moments of moody, runbling, dark sound is black metal, I've heard somebody fart a Burzum album on the subway.

The rest of the review spends time talking saying things like the following:

The story, then, emerges from the way these songs alternatingly devour or are born from the smoldering ashes of one another, clear skies giving way to ferocious muddle, which in turn begets light and insight anew. The lyrics, appropriately, deal in fundamental dualities. "My Heart Is Not at Peace" and "Summons" each posit wind as both "destroyer" and "revealer," "Ancient Questions" pits doubt against a sense of purpose, and closer "Stone's Ode" is divided into two distinct movements, one assured and awash in the clarity of day, one less so and detailing the onset (literal and metaphorical, one assumes) of night.

Which states, in a very elaborate fashion, nothing at all. Or at least that the author finally got his degree in comparative literature. What I glean from that Faulkner-esque bluster is that there are two different kinds of songs and sounds on the record, which are different. Maybe all the flailing adjectives were being used to cover up the fact that there's not much to the record?

I've heard the record. It's alright. It's not offensively irritating, like some other rather well-hyped records this year. But it's BORING. Painfully so, in my opinion. Hey, this artist is selling more records than I ever will, and his fanbase adores him, I've talked to him on the phone and he's totally a nice guy, and if this is what he loves doing, more power to him and him alone. But if this is part of what defines "cool", count me the fuck out. Not all music has to be rock and roll, but does everything "cool" these days have to be creaking wooden guitars and theremins? Can we please have some rock back now? That Dead Weather album was pretty good, but a man cannot live on it alone.

So that's my new location. Me, standing over here, not sulking in the center, angry at why people think certain things are "cool", but giving the finger to them while I crank up my Wire records* in my headphones. It's all a self-feeding cycle of bullshit music and hipper-than-thou hyping, so can't we please put them all on an island, let them have the big indie rock orgy, and then cut the radio lines to the island, letting it go on and on forever?

*[Although I haven't always liked Wire, their critical cache has remained constant over the years, so naturally, I only listen to them because it's hip. No wait, that's all those other fuckers that do that. I like Wire 'cause they're good.]

Noise Annoys: The Best Of 2009, Continued

2009-08-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

3. The Big Pink - "A Brief History Of Love"
"Velvet" was my favorite new song of the year. I heard it, I loved it, I raved about it to anyone that would listen. Huge and intimate at the same time, bombastic and dreamy, it was like if My Bloody Valentine wrote anthems, or Coldplay with a lesson in Jesus and Mary Chain, but not garbage. The follow-up, "Dominos", was far more arena-chant (one friend called it Happy Mondays-esque) than I expected, but even after one listen I couldn't get it out of my head. The full-length doesn't have the concentrated perfection of "Velvet", but it's an astoundingly large-sounding record that never loses faith in it's big-beat shoegaze testifying.

2. Metric - "Fantasies"
An unexpected entry, as Metric has never really thrilled me in the past, although I've certainly not had anything bad to say about them. This one is a modern pop platter - emphasis on the modern - that sounds to me like if all the teen-poppers actually rocked. Catchy like the plague, intricate production, melodies that sigh and wail, with a sheen of glistening, icy, mirror-ball synths. It's the soundtrack to the party that everyone was invited to but nobody showed up at, so you just dance anyway. And extra credit to them for finally asking, on the album's highlight, "Who would you rather be? The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?"

1. A Place To Bury Strangers - "Exploding Head"
Noise Noise Noise. Sure they may be knocking off their noise-gaze forebears, but they're doing it better and with more style and consistency than anyone else. Their live show is stroke-inducingly strobe-a-rific, and the buzzing sighed vocals, white noise avalanche of guitars, and thundering robotic rhythm section are maybe one of the best things going these days. While the re-recording of "Everything Always Goes Wrong" is, in this writer's opinion, inferior to its earlier EP incarnation, the album version still annihilates any competition.

Guerrilla Warfare: Appropriation In A Post-Contextual World

2009-08-13T00:15:00.000-07:00

The first time I heard M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes", I was really put off by the fact that the basis for the song was "Straight To Hell" by the Clash. Not that it was sampled, not that there was a reference, but if you removed the Clash from that song, there'd be very little left other than the vocal melody and some sound effects. The person who played it for me had never heard the original, and was a little defensive about it, ultimately claiming that it didn't matter, and the M.I.A. track was so brilliant.

It ain't bad, it was one of my favorite songs of last summer's hit parade, but it's existience brings up a lot of questions that I'm not sure of my feelings on. It would be easy to take the "old man" standpoint and grouse about the kids and their thievery, but I'm not so certain.

My first concern was that it would kill the power of the original. Now, I don't know if anything can do that, in this particular case. If it were something like "Footloose", maybe it would be a different story, but the original "Straight To Hell" was a wildly impressionistic view of the effects of the Vietnam war and culturual imperialism that was spreading faster and faster in a pre-Internet age. As a product of the British punk and post-punk culture, M.I.A. certainly understood this when she used the song, in my opinion, turning the sample into a soundtrack for the lyrics to be set to... her tales of young thugs, when set to the backing that has a pre-existing context of the poor and destroyed villages of Vietnam, conjures up images of herself as a third-world outlaw, swaggering Robin Hood-like through the slums, a self made queenpin of the ghetto, like Ivan in The Harder They Come. It's a starkly vivid image - for someone who knows the context of the original. Since I've known that Clash song for ages, I find myself wondering if people who DON'T know "Straight To Hell" would have the same response to it. In essence, does this song suffer for the fact that a large portion of it's intended audience doesn't get the message?

The flipside to this is the question of whether or not there is any potential loss of impact and meaning in the original song. The Clash will always be important to me, but by their very nature I don't hold their music sacred. Their records, I feel, will stand up to anything, so I don't need to champion them. However, is there a chance that if "Straight To Hell" is heard in a movie or on TV (because let's forget the radio), will it then be seen by post-M.I.A. listeners as "that song she sampled"? Sure, the song is powerful, but it has to be LISTENED to to retain that power. If it's summarily dismissed before it's even listened to, how can it retain the same impact?

Of course, this is all just a microcosm of the post-modern sample effect. Not that I hold too many sacred cows, but isn't there a danger that if everything is just a sound to be sampled, will there be any meaning left to anything when the dust settles? I've often claimed that by trendspotting and jumping from whatever is trendy to the next big thing, hipsters tend to hold everything at arm's length and never connect to anything. I firmly believe that the marketplace for creativity will ultimately prevail, but if there's no context for anything, how can anything have any emotional impact? If Puff Daddy sampling the Police didn't call to mind the melancholy of the original song, wouldn't his tribute to Biggie have just been augmented by a weird guitar line?

In my view, the point of sampling is to recontextualize a moment, which means placing the original moment, meaning and all, into another context, thereby transforming the new work's sentiment based around the original's subtext. Without that grounding, or something like it, everything becomes meaningless, just so much sound to be manipulated coldly, never intending to allow the context of the original moment through, merely creating an infinte digital cache of notes to be rearranged ad nauseum.

Is everything just sound? Does the concept of "purpose" have any place in the Digital Age? I don't know. I'm too old. But I think there is a major shift happening, when teen-idol pop stars can create "new" songs simply by putting a new melody and lyrics over a Beatles backing track. M.I.A. was most certainly aware of what she was doing, and while I guess she hit a nerve with my love of the Clash, she did a good job by using the original song's original meaning to enhance her new concept. It's just a shame that some of her audience isn't as well-informed as she is - they're only getting half the picture.

Pass The Coke, I Think I'm New Wave...

2009-08-09T03:05:00.000-07:00

Shake is back. Kinda. We've re-arranged the lineup, so Shannon is no longer drummin', but playing her gorgeous baritone guitar in a bass-like fashion. Since her crazy Captain Beefheart sense of rhythm is no longer the driving force in the band (any band with that kind of drummer just has to accept that their drummer is, in fact, leading the band), the songs that we're coming up with are far more conventionally structured.

Maybe it's due to the fact that we're not playing with a drummer yet (know anyone?), maybe it's due to Shannon's relative inexperience on the bass, or maybe it's the fact that in the past 13 years of playing in bands, I've sorta gotten the "loudfastrules thrashthrashthrash" drive (largely) out of my system, but the music we're playing, while certainly punk rock, is nowhere near radical hardcore or anything. I have a feeling that with a drummer, we could gain some kick, but right now, our aggresssion level is set around, say Generation X. Certainly not easy listening, but SS Decontrol it ain't.

What I'm finding myself surprised by, although I shouldn't, is that we're starting to sound like that strange subset of bands labelled *gasp*... "new wave".

The problem is that I hate New Wave. The capitalization is important. I generally hold at arms' length the quirky, off-kilter, synth-driven form of pop music that immediately followed the initial punk explosion. It's usually all surface and sunglasses, and even though there are some great singles from that style in that era, if you throw enough shit at a wall, something is bound to sound like a good B-52's song, right?.

That's not the style I'm talking about really. I tend to follow the Keith Morris view that there is no such style as new wave in regard to punk, only a term used to describe the same music that is somehow less offensive in polite company. "Oh no, I don't like that disgusting punk rock, I like new wave music...". Didn't Seymour Stein invent the term so that people would still distribute Sire Records without the "punk rock" stigma attached to the Ramones and the Dead Boys? While this view is true, and as a punk rock sort of person, I agree... historically, there was a period immediately following the punk ground zero of about 1976 that lent itself to a stripped-down, pissed-off sound that was a little more literate, and maybe just a little more mannered than, say, The Germs. I'm thinking more of things like The Jam, Elvis Costello's "This Year's Model", the harder moments of the first Pretenders album, Blondie's "X Offender", etc. Things that aren't "punk" in the retroactively accurate sense of the term, but certainly aren't the quirky pop of XTC and Squeeze or the synth-driven sounds of the early MTV era.

Not that one man and a blog can make any difference in this matter, but can someone please help me defind this music? "Hard New Wave" sounds like a mid-80s gay porno, and to call it post-punk, while absolutely true, gives it a certain grey pallor that my mind usually reserves for bands from Manchester. Unfair, but that's the way my mind works. Talking Heads, while wonderful, were always too quirky, and rarely approached the straightforward "rock" sound that we're talking about here. R.E.M. was too folky and distantly collegiate, and Devo too contrived. Perfect example? "No Action" by Elvis Costello. Fast (but not too fast), simple, pissed off, well-put (so many turns of phrase!), and, if memory serves, all over in under 2 mintues. Now THAT'S what I'm talking about. Under two minutes?!?! I do, however, intend to stay away from any Cars comparisons, mainly becuase they're sacred in my adopted hometown of Boston. But if you dropped the synths from "Just What I Needed" and "You Might Think" and sped them up to about 130 BPM, you're in the ballpark. Fenway, to be exact.

What amuses me the most is that while I feel we're playing in this so-called new wave style, due to modern technology (and, oh, 20 extra years of music), we also sound like a half-decent mid-90s post-grunge act. Same situation. Take the raw nerve revolution (I'm trademarking that phrase, by the way), and see what sort of pop crops up after the initial blast. Superdrag? Veruca Salt? Green Day? Big, loud, pissed-off rock music that stayed stripped down but doesn't have the bile of the "musical reset" (trademark also pending) of the revolution that came before it.

Forget it. We play punk rock. Let's just leave it at that.

"Must-See TV": Punk Rock Edition

2009-08-02T07:09:00.000-07:00

Punk rock changed my life. It may not be as obvious a change as the kind of change that happened to Mike Watt or Ian MacKaye, but punk rock changed my life. When I discovered it, it was not just the music or the culture, but the ethic. The ethic of "do it yourself" and "don't be a jerk" was instilled in me by these people, and in a lot of ways, the music and culture was just periphery, although the best way to immerse myself in the ethic was to listen to these records which I loved both musically and philosophically.

Aside from a sort of knee jerk reaction at first which lent itself to dogmatic stringency, punk rock always freed me to be a more decent person. Help your fellow man, let's do this together. The system is fucked, let's have our own system. I used to think it was the so-called "sellouts" that made that "work within the system" argument, but I will, until my dying day, contend that the moral compass that punk rock either instilled in me or brought to the forefront (my pre-punk life wasn't exactly a morass of bad vibes and stepping on the little guy) lent itself to my being a smarter, more understanding man than I otherwise would have been.

Unfortunately, the majority of the world still sees punk rock as an adolescent loogie hocked upon the shoes of decent, upstanding society. US hardcore punk was one of the hardest-working, ethically stringent cultural movements in the past fifty years, but its' music is not approachable to mass culture - too aggressive, too intense. More "listenable" bands like the Sex Pistols got there first, and squandered the D.I.Y. with images of a bloody Sid Vicious spitting at teenagers. First impressions are, as I believe Shakespeare put it, a bitch.

But I had my own little victory for the punk culture last week, and I didn't even realize it.

I work in the news. My desk is in the newsroom, and more often than not, when I'm at work, my desk is on camera, and I'm being broadcast. It seemed weird at first, and eventually you don't even notice it. Last week, I found myself wearing my usual weekend uniform of Converse, shorts, and a button-down shirt, often open to reveal whatever clean t-shirt I could find that morning, which, that day, was the Misfits shirt I've got. At one point, I was standing next to a producer's desk, chatting, and realized that not only was I on camera, but that my shirt was pretty clearly visible. Which made me happy. The Misfits these days are, at best, a fun, trashy nostalgia act for those in the know, and with the proliferation of Hot Topic and the like, some of the trappings and symbols of punk rock have become a commodity, thereby losing some of its meaning. But I really felt proud for a minute or two once I realized it - here I was, the same guy I've always been, maybe a little more grown up, but I was putting a little punk rock moment on TV. Unintentionally, sure, but I wasn't paid to wear the shirt, I wasn't being asked to do it, but I was still able to get a little symbol of this culture that I love, that's still an outsider culture, broadcast to, what, a hundred thousand people? What percentage of them noticed? Probably less that 1%. But that's still a few hundred people who may have seen it and said what I would have sad: "Look! That guy in the background is wearing a Misfits shirt!" I was able to get a little bit of punk rock on large-market TV.

Once I realized that, it made me realize that while my viewpoints on many things have changed since I was 13, mainly due to experiences, changing times, etc., everything I did then and everything I do now is sort of filtered through this moral/ethical lens that was given to me by punk rock. I think it was Steve Albini (that paragon of righteousness), who once said about his band Big Black:

"You can be an asshole, or you can not be an asshole... and we didn't see any reason to screw people over."

It makes sense. I've found in this life if you treat people like you would HOPE people would treat you, often times they're so thrown off balance at you NOT trying to screw them over, they'll surprise you. Nearly any religion's basic tenet is "be a good person." The details differ, but being a decent human is what it often all boils down to.

I'm proud to come from punk rock. The music I play is only vaguely punky anymore, and some of my listening and fashion tendencies aren't exactly ripped from the Dischord handbook, but come hell or high water, I'm a punk. A proud one. And as long as I can bring that ethic, that sensibility to the world around me, I think I'll do alright.

Overlooked Classics: "Good God's Urge"

2009-07-18T03:27:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, when exposed to something at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right set of circumstances, one becomes connected to that thing, no matter how your rational mind may tell you otherwise, and no matter how incorrect it may seem with the rest of your life, there are things that we love, for which we can offer little to no excuse. We like them. And there's nothing wrong with that.

One of the benefits to this blind appreciation (I won't call it devotion, as there ARE limits to an otherwise sane person), is that one can then find elements of excellence that others would have overlooked, not being willing to devote the time or energy that someone who was more inclined to enjoy it would. And that's where I stand on Porno For Pyros.

Jane's Addiction was one of those things for me. So, just as I'll buy anything that has "The Stooges" printed on it, I'm inclined to check out anything "Jane's Related", from bootlegs to side projects. Some of these are excellent (the post-JA Deconstruction album), and some are unspeakably awful (*cough* the Chili Peppers' One Hot Minute *cough*). But some of them are not only worthy of your time, they're better than they deserve to be. Jane's worked because of the balance between members. Without guitarist Dave Navarro, leader/vocalist Perry Farrell got too artsy and freaky and self-indulgent, and without Farrell, Navarro would mire down in a sea of hackneyed metal cliche, for instance.

So upon the breakup of Jane's Addiciton, Perry Farrell started Porno For Pyros, and no Navarro or bassist Eric Avery meant it was going to be far more wigged out and pretentious than he has any right to make (*ahem* Satellite Party...), right?

Nope. Porno For Pyros' self-titled first album has its moments, but it's by and large a tight, rocking band that strays into the oddball at times, but is ultimately pretty satisfying. Guitarist Peter DiStefano was a lot more textural than Navarro, the band was by-and-large less aggressive, it was a nice soundtrack for the early 90s: intellectual, artistic, hooky, bohemian. This was a time when Dee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart" was ruling the charts. People were ready for freaky boho rock. Grunge had cracked the listening public right open and the world was ready to hear anything.

By 1996, however, their second album sank like a lead-lined rock.

1996, buddy! Korn was happening! 311! Tool! Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was like quadruple-platinum! Alanis went huge and Metallica went alternative. The Fugees, No Doubt, and Rage Against The Machine all had number one records in 1996. You expect me to listen to your understated album full of acoustic guitars and tropical percussion? Freaky hippie stuff with soundscaping?

Well, yeah.

"Tahitian Moon" starts out with a crazy noise guitar and cuts loose into the sound of laying on a beach under the stars. Otherwise icky hippie hand drums and trippy songwriting is obscured with enough haze to make it absolutely delightful. I once spent a week canoeing to this album, and it somehow fits the outdoors, near the water. "Kimberley Austin", in particular, reminds me of a song that's been barely written, but caught on record in that magical period between songwriting and arranging, when something can sound fresh and spare at the same time. Could it, as a song, have benefited from a little more fine-tuning? Yep. No doubt about it. But the freshness of it completely overrides it - any more and it would be overcooked. I think that sums up this whole album, in fact. Despite the layers of overdubs on everyone's part, this album is absolutely a perfect example of being laid back.

The players, as well, deserve some credit here. Guitarist DiStefano is quite possibly more inventive than Navarro (who guests here) in a sonic way, and Mike Watt, possibly the greatest bassist in the past three decades, lays WAY back on the tracks he features on, avoiding his Minutemen-style bean jumping, preferring to slide into notes and let the lines breathe. Stephen Perkins brings the most intricate and well-placed percussion of his career to the table, and to Perry Farrell's credit, he keeps his ego in check, almost always coming across as just one of the group, never dominating the proceedings.

Good God's Urge had the misfortune of being released in one of the worst possible musical climates for what it is, and due to that, was largely overlooked, even by former Jane's Addiction fans. In this post-millenial musical world, the disc has enough variety for the iPod Shuffle generation, but stands as a remarkably solid piece of work as a whole.

In short, it's absolutely worth the $.99 it would cost you to pick it up out of any used CD bin in America. I love this country.

Voodoo Ritual: In A Silent Way

2009-07-18T01:58:00.000-07:00

While I was a young man in college, I had a chip on my shoulder about jazz. You see, I was an outspoken proponent of the artistic merit of rock music. I worked in the rock and roll department of the Indiana University School Of Music, a prestigious music school to be sure. But we rockers in the staff were sneered at, belittled by the cultured classical divisions, as well as the jazz department, who felt that out music was often a blight on the school, a vulgar blight that was better left unmentioned among the cultured ponderings of so many jazz historians.

Seems silly, coming from guys whose music developed in brothels and bars, don't you think?

Were I feeling more academic, I'd consider spouting off about the heirarchy of popular music, how jazz was derided by the upper class in the early part of the century, only to be replaced at the bottom of the ladder by rock and roll in the latter half of the 1900s. However, I'm not in that sort of mood...

You see, partially because of my youthful ignorance, and then magnified by my resentment of the superior attitudes of academic jazz fans, I've never been a big fan of jazz in practice. In principle, I have no problem with the genre, but in practice, I've never been a big fan of it. I've studied it under some wonderful luminaries, but never fully appreciated it, at least, not to the extent that most jazz fans seem to. I have my problems with the attitudes of many hardcore jazz fans, but this is not about the fans, this is about the music.

Much of the more "classical" jazz music follows a particular format: start out with a "head", which is the main theme of the piece, let each member solo, returning to the head at either the end, or between each solo. My problem is that the "widdly diddly" soloing, while technically proficient, and in the best cases, really beautiful and melodic, has always been a drag to me. I don't really even care for guitar soloing - I'd much rather hear lead lines played in service of the song, not as an excuse for showing off or for "getting down" in the heat of the moment.

I realize this is a serious oversimplification of a varied genre, and please forgive what may come across as ignorance - it's merely conjecture. There are, however, two large exceptions to my listening taste when it comes to jazz. The first is free jazz. Wild excursions into dissonance, arhythimc sounds skittering across the air, bleating raw and wild... it's essentially the spirit of punk music with the opposite approach: you have to be REAL good to make this primal noise, rather than the anyone can do it approach of punk rock. Nobody ever accused Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane of not being able to play.

The other exception, and the reason for all that wind-up, is when jazz players take themselves and their abilties out of the equation, and play for the moment that's in the air, not the next one. When the music sits and thinks and pulses and flows like a living organism. Miles Davis' The Complete In A Silent Way sessions is a perfect example of this.

Not strictly downtempo, the closest comparison I can make in the rock world is Can's Future Days, it's jazz without being strictly jazz, ambient without seeming motionless, and experimental without losing grounding. Mysterious and murky in ways that the more "rock world" lauded Bitches Brew isn't. Bitches Brew has cultural importance on its side, but the funky rhythms of that album have tainted most other "fusion" music for my ears. On the In A Silent Way sessions (which, I should point out for the cash-strapped, the official album is more than representative of this box set, on which both album tracks appear), it never loses its status as jazz music, but it is perhaps the most subtle and atmospheric jazz music I've ever heard. Electric pianos abound, but not quite in that "instantly dated" tone that a lot of Bitches Brew has, and every element is clearly within the jazz realm, but somehow, the whole is more avant-garde than the sum of its parts.

Of course, my other favorite Miles Davis album/sessions is The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, another dark, mysterious album that owes more to funk than jazz, but that's another story, and betrays what perspective I come at this music from. But the regard in which jazz fans hold In A Silent Way surprises me. While it has vague precedents in Miles' music, it stands as a major break to what he'd done before, while not quite ever sounding like anything he put out later. Sure, Filles de Kilimanjaro indicated, in hindsight, where things might be going, but Bitches Brew (released immediately after In A Silent Way) was a whole different creature, one that seemed to prove more influential on not only jazz fusion, but Davis' own future works. More percussion, more polyrhythm, and more creeping funk influence led to what is probably the pinnacle of that direction, 1972's willfully singular On The Corner, which seems like it's a descendent of a completely different lineage.

So what's so appealing about In A Silent Way? I dunno. And that's it. It's mysterious. I can only compare it to the moments BETWEEN lines in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, the moments of deep mystery, tension, danger, stillness... by removing the head/solo/head/solo format, as well as the aesthetic, Davis and the rest of the band have managed to create jazz without jazz, jazz as ambient soundscape. It's a voodoo ritual, writhing and pulsing, crouching in the darkest corner, waiting for you to poke your head in, never making the concession to come out into the light. Ultimately standing on its own, it's a recording that neither gives ground nor takes it, daring you to come closer, luring you in, never letting you know what's on the other side.

Prove It. Just The Facts.

2009-07-11T05:18:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if Television's Marquee Moon is ever going to stop giving.

I purchased my first of several copies of it at J&R Music World when I went to NYC the summer after I turned 16. My incredibly cool aunt and uncle had to work, so they basically turned me loose on Manhattan, which would have made my mother worry her way into a coma. I hit every music and book store I could find. But Marquee Moon was the first disc I bought while I was there and spent most of the rest of the trip just wandering to the tunes of that and the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat. At the time, I figured "when in Rome, make sure you have an appropriate soundtrack". I'll admit to being both disappointed and confused with Television at the time, along with the fascination that kept me going back.

"It's a punk record!"

"Err... no it's not."

I was in about my second or third year of punk-ism. I'd read stacks of articles and books about the CBGB scene, and knew that Television wasn't standard issue punk, but was willing to give it a go. Even at the time I could tell it was important, but was a little disappointed in how measured, how polite, and how jammy it seemed. In hindsight, my blueprint of protopunk only included things like the Stooges, not Albert Ayler or King Tubby, so I didn't quite understand how (sonically) this was punk, how this was rebel music. I understood that it was MADE by punks, having practically memorized Please Kill Me even by then, but not punk in it's sound. Obviously, I came around as I got older. Having said that though, it's surprising that it didn't just go on the shelf for a few years to be admired and respected but never listened to. It was, however, an active part of my listening diet all through the rest of high school and into college. Once I'd hit that centre of education, one of my professors got me back into it in a big way, albeit from a different perspective: reminding me that this wasn't the "Marshall backline, Les Paul, epic stage show" sound that was so prevalent at the time it was made. With that in mind, I could hear how, to a teen in 1977, this must have been a revelation. It SOUNDS like it was made with a reasonable drum kit, a few gutars, and a few little Fender combo amps. Realizing that gave the album a fresh meaning to me, and it was like a new record again.

After college, I was a little lost as to what to do with my life, and I found the extended soloing to be both comforting and inspiring to just THINK to, as people in their early-to-mid 20s are wont to do. Recently, after moving across the country, gaining some maturity and realizing the power in subtlety (i.e., not all music needs to be drenched in fuzz and sweat), I keep different meanings in the same notes that I almost know by heart these days.

Will this album ever get old?

I just realized that I've written about Television before, in a blog post for an old, now defunct, blog back in 2006, and while the tone is a bit less refined, it's not awful. It does, however, have a completely different perspective, even three years ago. I was thrilled at finding a bootleg called Portable Electricity, happy that it finally gave Television the low end I felt they were lacking, and because the recording quality is muddy, the whole thing seems heartier and deeper, making them sound more like the punk godfathers they've always been touted as. While I understand that point of view, I don't know if I still feel the same. They were a guitar band, supposed to sound like subway brakes and clattering cityscapes. They didn't need to sound like what I was predisposed to want. Granted, the boot (which came from has been released as Live At The Old Waldorf) does make a case for them being a rockin' band, but after finally meeting Marquee Moon on it's own terms, it's even more enjoyable that whatever predisposition you'd want to lay over it.

And that, I believe, is the brilliance of this record to me. No matter what mindset I bring to the table, the album stands up to it. Punk rock? Listen to that rhythm guitar that opens "See No Evil": it's that "Subway Sound" that everybody talks about the Velvets having. Rock and roll classicism? "Guiding Light" has your 6/8 ballad down pat. The guitar interplay between Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd predicts Luna by about 15 years, and most of the songs have a push/pull that pretty accurately lays some groundwork for post-punk. However you want to listen to this, it will deliver.

Their discography, ultimately, allows for a this same range, but it's not quite as tied together. Bootlegs of their pre-MM material show a rougher band working closer to the garage bands of the mid-60s; their second album, Adventure is the softer, nuanced side of the band; the live collection The Blow-Up shows them stretching songs to their tensile breaking point, adding improv to garage tunes, creating an almost free-jazz-and-garage-rock hybrid, and their reunion album is spare to the point of ghostliness, sounding like nothing so much as post-millennial indie rock. But the brilliance of Marquee Moon is that it's all there from the outset. Not to take away from the later records, which often fit a specific tone, you can listen to Marquee Moon to enjoy any of those. My iPod usually has two Television records on it: Marquee Moon and whichever other one I'm feeling in the mood for. In a punky mood? MM plus a bootleg of the Brian Eno demos. Feeling heady and volatile? MM and The Blow Up. Introspective and reserved? Marquee Moon and the self-titled reunion album. You get the idea.

It's a rare feat to find an album that applies to everything while always sounding just like, and ONLY like, itself. This is one of those. The reissue makes it even more beautiful, by including their first single, the magnificent "Little Johnny Jewel". Highly recommended.

What I Learned In Music School

2009-07-11T02:05:00.001-07:00

"...the fact remains that if you take one note, any note, and let two different people play it, what comes out of one's axe just might be nothing more than the note, whereas through some magic the other's note might be just a little more expressive, probably because there was something, a kind of inner urgency and yearning, behind it. And all the conservatories and theory books and virtuoso chop-flashings in the world aren't gonna make one iota of difference in regard to that one humble note."
-Lester Bangs, "Free Jazz Punk Rock", 1979

Kittens And Sunshine

2009-07-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

"Hi. My name is Mike, and I'm a 27-year-old man."

The group responds collectively, "Hi, Mike."

"... I'm a 27-year-old man, and I like Nine Inch Nails."

(smattering of applause)

--------------

See, I liked Nine Inch Nails in high school. Of course I did. It was the mid-to-late 90's, I was confused, and when I wasn't thrashing away at some punk tune, I was wallowing in that whole angst thing. We all did it in one form or another.

Once I got to college, NIN seemed like a rather distant memory. What was once cathartic seemed silly and overwrought. To put the dating in perspective, when I was in middle school, I bought The Downward Spiral, when I was in high school, I picked up The Fragile, and the next one came out after I graduated college. I didn't buy it. I was an adult, ready for adult things. Goth-y industrual pop for eyelinered post-adolescents was a thing of the past.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. - The Bible

But then things started to turn. I read about the alternate reality game that Trent Reznor used to market Year Zero, and it seemed really neat and creative. I followed the blogosphere's coverage of Reznor's one man war against the Big Label Machine. It all seemed cool, post-millennial, and ethically/morally right, as someone to the left of the Big Label Debate. But what about the music? I'd heard tracks from the first '00s NIN album (With Teeth), and they were OK, but squarely in the "heavy modern rock" category. Meh. I worked in a record store and at a place that manufactured CDs, and the heat-sensitive discface to Year Zero was awesome, but I didn't really listen to it. I picked up a promo copy of Ghosts I-IV becuase it was free and I like ambient records; it was good for a few background listens, then it went on the shelf.

So what changed? I gave up. I needed something new and aggressive and electronic-tinged and modern. Reznor's seemed to be loosening up in the past few years, with his April Fool's Day 2009 joke coming across with some serious hilarity (the Kanye-baiting cover, the tracklisting, the producer... comedy gold). I downloaded the free-to-the-world album, The Slip, and it was great. Cool, heavy, angry, intricate... a wonderful album, made all the better by the distribution method and the intent with which it was made. Distanced from the brilliant marketing, Year Zero is probably even better, I'm just totally over the whole concept album thing, so The Slip's concise songs-as-songs mentality appeals to me just a bit more.

The irony of something so resolutely in my angsty youth blossoming into one of the more interesting, most mature sources of music in modern popular rock is not lost on me. While Reznor hasn't been one of my favorite lyricists (he still treads in cliched darkness more than I'd like), the fact that it's forward-thinking rock made for an intelligent audience is fascinating to me. Especially since (with a few exceptions) most of the Nine Inch Nails fans I know in 2009 are people I'd rather not know. Unfortunately, I think that a lot of his potential audience feels like I did, with their (completely valid) preconceptions of NIN keeping them away from music they'd most likely enjoy.

So let's hear it for Trent Reznor. Congrats on getting sober a few years back, congrats on using that experience to allow yourself to move beyond moody platitudes, congrats on fighting the good fight against the corporate monster, and congrats on managing to be commerically viable while fiercely maintaining your own independence.

Please don't screw it all up now.

Make Sure The Mic Is Grounded. Otherwise You're In For An Angry Show.

2009-07-02T01:15:00.000-07:00

I guess it was the name and the fanbase that kept me from getting into Built To Spill until well after I was out of college. Which is unfortunate, cause I would have LOVED them in college. So when Dave tells me he can't believe that I don't know them, and says he's gonna give me a couple tracks from their live album, I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa..."

I don't generally like live albums, you see.

But he sends me these tracks, which obviously I love, and then the whole record. And I totally flipped for it. Which is weird.

Not cause it's a solo-heavy "guitarist's record". Not cause it's anything but an awesome album.

It's because it's a live album.

I have a few live albums I like, and some of the better ones are the ones that were heavily studio "adjusted". Cheap Trick's At Budokan is about as good as a live album gets. Hell, it's about as good as ANY album gets. But overall, I'd rather hear the studio versions. If I really want to hear a stripped down, "just the band playing" version of a song, I'd rather hear a demo than a live version of a song I already know. Hearing a live album as the first time I'm exposed to a band is the kiss of death as far as my record collection is concerned. It's not because I'm against the idea of live records, it's just that they're often so much more flaccid, as most bands don't start playing a song live until they've recorded it anymore, and so then they're trying to recapture the magic of a moment created in the studio, and it's sad.

Built To Spill aren't any more of a "killer live band" than they are a "fine-tuned studio band". It's not like they're the Grateful Dead, who (allegedly) have to be seen live to be fully appreciated. So what made this so special? The production's thick enough that it may as well be a studio album. It's not that I'm enamoured of the jamming - as a rule, I avoid records that are full of extended jams; I think it's because there's a certain energy that pervades the proceedings that just relaxes and lets the songs happen. And not worrying about overdubs and space and the cost of tape, it's got a natural fluidity that is a very rare magic indeed. It's hard to find records where you can hear a song blossom, improvised, to realize it's full potential, while still remaining in the service of the song. A live record that shows what the band is capable of, but still manages to sound like a studio record that was recorded live, you dig? Think about it too hard and your brain will hurt. Luckily there's tons of AMP NOISE on the album. That'll make your brain stop hurting as much. And seriously, who leaves amp crackle and hum on their album?

So, the point is, most live albums suck. They're the defintion of cash-in, designed to bilk consumers out of cash for a version of a song they already have, and by recording at a concert, the cost to create the record is drastically lower than it is to create revised studio versions. But there ARE exceptions. Built To Spill's Live is one of them, At Budokan is another. While The Smiths' late-period live album is my favorite of their records, it wouldn't hold up in the pantheon of the greats. And I realize that the Sound Opinions podcast covered this EXACT SAME GROUND a few weeks ago, but the question is, what are the most underrated live albums of all time? You can keep your Live At Leeds and Get Your Ya-Yas Out!, I want to know about those secret gems that nobody ever adds to those lists, but realizes they should have two days later. Things like Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, Suicide, Big Black, Black Flag, and even the Butthole Surfers. Im going to ponder this and come back later with which ones and why, but in the meantime, drop any suggestions in the box...

Race For The Prize: Who Gets Where?

2009-06-29T05:15:00.000-07:00

This week, we here at the Central Target Research Lab are conducting an experiment. Given the same new album at the same time, will two people with (frighteningly) similar taste reach the same conclusion? Brent Shelley, our associate over at the wonderful Dogdoguwar has agreed to take part in this experiment, paving the way for next week's marathon joint live-review session! So, below is the Central Target review of the Lemonheads' new covers album, Varshons.

Let's get this out of the way: the Lemonheads' new, all-covers album sounds exactly like the Lemonheads.

They've had 3 distinct choices in cover material their whole career - the punky/poppy classics, the weepy country-pop type, and the "really?" fringe artist. "Mrs. Robinson" fits the first, the Empire Records-featured version of Big Star's "The Ballad Of El Goodo" is the second, and there was that unfortunate Charlie Manson cover on 1988's Creator. The Wire and Linda Perry covers here fit the first group, longtime Dando idol Gram Parsons gets the nod to fill the country quota, and Manson here is replaced by the cuddly-as-a-kitten G.G. Allin. However, there are a few little surprises.

It's far more acoustic than expected, for one thing. I was expecting Evan Dando to "Lemonize" these into fingerpoppin' brisk power-pop, which is the rarity here - seems ol' Evan would rather reach for the acoustic these days. You'd also NEVER know that this album was produced by the Butthole Surfers' ringmaster himself, Gibby Haynes. Dando's longtime buddy kept his weirdness off of this album, and honestly, it's the better for it.

However, nothing here is particularly revelatory. It all sounds good, and it's all well-perfomed, chosen, and produced. It feels like a collection that a friend of yours with a serious Lemonheads infatuation would hand you, saying, "Hey, here's a disc of all the covers they've done in the past 5 years." It all does sound "of a piece" (as opposed to the erratic production qualities a comp might have), but it never escapes the fact that it's a covers album. While it would be easy for a Cramps fan to pick "Green Fuz" as the highlight, it's the G.G. Allin cover here that's most interesting, as Dando's deep vocals push it to "Nick Cave Goes Pop-Country" territory. Frightening.

Three years since the last Lemonheads album leaves one wanting to hear more Dando & Co., and while it takes a lot of effort to make power pop that sounds effortless, and it's unfair to judge this by what it isn't, it's hard to shake the feeling of wanting to hear these guys really come into their own, rather than someone else's.

B+