marble stature

We Hate 2008 (so far)

2008-04-16T18:45:00.000-04:00

We're about 3 and a half months into 08 and the vast majority of releases I was looking forward to have graced and shamed my ears. As usual, this thing we call 'indierock' has its fair share of pleasant surprises (ex:Bon Iver), safe mediocrity (ex:Vampire Weekend), utter disappointments (ex:Constantines) , instant classics (ex: Times New Viking), and everything in between (ex:Hot Chip). Overall, I'd have to say I'm very satisfied with the year thus far. Join me and delight in the reality that honest and creative music is thriving outside (and sometimes at the fringe of) the mainstream. The following is a collection of standout tracks that appear on this years greatest hits and misses (mostly hits).

OBVIOUSLY (let's be reasonable here)

verticalphil's 2007....

2007-12-19T23:54:00.000-05:00

One man’s garbage is another man’s (top 10 list)

1) Battles- Mirrored

This indie super-group makes good on all of the promises of their impressive but sometimes limited EP’s. In the midst of so much great stuff in the way of noise, pop, and every other fucking genre, Battles really stood out with an album that could have easily passed as the soundtrack for TRANSFORMERS.

2) Slaraffenland- Private Cinema

Lee Ronaldo guitarscapes and awkward allusions to metaphysics are only two of the great things about this gem. The land of milk and honey (which is what their name means) is certainly a reach, but you’d be hard pressed to find a better delivered (and packaged) Danish export.

3) Videohippos- Unbeast theLeash

Synthcore that compels me to pretend I’m in high school and feign anguish because I feel ostracized. There’s something to this kind of stuff, I swear.

4) The Twilight Sad- Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters

Glasgow fat-cats debut with an album of stunning authenticity. Their sprawling guitar driven songs of yearning and anguish found exceed even the most high and naive expectations.

5) Spoon- Ga Ga Ga Ga

Just when I thought I’d had enough (not to mention the ridiculous album title), Britt Daniel and Co. make it dramatically clear why they are still America’s most deserving indie faves and likely to outlast any trend or schtick hipster america may throw our way. As usual, Spoon deliver clever production as a scaffold to some very well crafted tunes.

6) The National- Boxer

I don’t know what to say about The National that doesn’t sound melodramatic or grandiose. Critics have done them enough justice this year. It’s just that good.

7) Les Savvy Fav- Let’s Stay Friends

Let’s face it- Les Savy Fav are the veritable monsters of post hardcore that just won’t die. Not that anyone wants them to, but most of us thought it was all over for them after the release of INCHES. These guys had nothing to prove…. So they went ahead and made an album of raw intensity and righteous guitar driven rockers anyway. Let’s stay friends indeed.

8) Jose Gonzalez- In Our Nature

Every year it seems we (I) fall in love with some new folk dude. Well, this year it was Jose Gonzalez. He’s like James Taylor and Nick Drake combined except he’s Swedish-Hispanic.

9) Daft Punk- Alive 2007

That last record had us thinking that they were in fact, human after all… Now I’m not so sure. You know, on an unnamed message board someone mentioned that they would rather have had new material. I’m wondering if this person actually listened to this. As my friend Steve put it, “The best thing is it manages to make songs from Human After All sound good. In fact, the album recontextualizes their entire catalog. Any song can become any other song.” He’s exactly right, which is why I’ve placed it in my best of list.

10) Grinderman- Grinderman

Dirty old men led by his majesty Nick Cave make songs that sound like dirty old men led by his majesty Nick Cave. I mean, it makes Mclusky sound like Barney and friends.

Honorable Discharge( I meant mention, but I love that word)

Radiohead- In Rainbows

Oh how the mighty have…uh…. proven themselves mighty. Fuck anyone who can’t understand why they did this.

Caribou- Andorra

Dan Snaith is “the new Zombies this time around”…. Huh? I swear I read that somewhere. Whatever… this guy’s versatility is very impressive…but it’s not what’s great about Andorra. Andorra delivers on a level of lighthearted craftsmanship that we so rarely see in artists these days.

Animal Collective- Strawberry Jam/ Panda Bear- Person Pitch

While neither were my favorite records of the year, there is no doubt in my mind that they are the “PEOPLE TO BE” in music right now.

JUSTICE- I

Yes. Dancing is still fun.

Foreign Born- On the wing now

Dim Mak strokes/walkmen/everyone else soundalikes somehow strike a chord with their moody and not overly ambitious debut.

At Swim Two Birds- Returning to the Scene of the Crime

Quigley covers himself (with the exception of a couple amazing originals). Personally, I think this guy’s bedroom melancholy is near brilliance… but I don’t think it strikes a chord with anyone, no matter how many people I play it for (except for maybe Seanzilla).

The Aliens- Astronomy for Dogs

I hate to break it to everyone, but it’s the Beta Band.

A note: There were so many records this year that were worthy of mention… Iron and Wine is good, A Place to Bury Strangers is cool, Sharon Jones gets me movin’, That Burial record is really something else, Handsome Furs, Kevin Drew, Sword Heaven, Thee More Shallows, Phospohoresent, Black Lips, The Field, you get the idea … but the folks who made it were the honest repeated (like a monkey with a miniature symbol) listens of the year.

Enemies (friends)/////////of the state

Times New Viking- Present the Paisley Reich

Coffinberry- God Damn Dogs

Dreadful Yawns- rest

Psychedelic Horseshit

EMERALDS- every single thing I got my hands on

THE DOLBY FUCKERS- s/t

SINGLE(s) and Loving It

Battles- Tonto (FOUR TET REMIX)

The National- Mistaken for Strangers

Spoon- The Underdog

Euros Childs- Horseriding

Pinback- From Nothing to Nowhere

Grinderman- No Pussy Blues

Justice- D.A.N.C.E.

Look, (awesome) Shit Happens

Sharon Jones finally gets her props. Thanks for coming to the party Denzel.

Ohio’s THE UNHOLY 2 marginalize themselves by virtue of racial slurs and bad emoticons. Who the fuck do these guys think they are, Robert Duffy?

My brother decided to ditch the pop thing do the best thing going for Ohio right now, which is making NoIsE.

Sam Craighead is starting a Cult. Email him here for details

Superbad.

Transformers.

Control.

No one cares about the Libertines…on a related note:

The Kooks and The Cribs and The Horrors and whole host of other brit-press darling rock knockoff whoredom did not go over like the rec execs wanted it to.

Radiohead.

Lindsey Lohan is probably broke

Disappointments

Modest Mouse. Oh where do I start? The addition of a certain Smiths guitarist did nothing. Unless you consider making him look like an ass as something. Aside from that, it’s a forced and stagnant album by any measure. With the exception of a couple tunes, the tracks aren’t memorable or engaging. Ok… I could go on forever, I’ll stop. I’ll save thinking about how disappointed I am in Modest Mouse for a long drive.

The Shins turned into late 90’s “edge” less REM (in spirit and persona, not style) way before their time by virtue of a mediocre album, Starbucks, and the never ending residual effect of that dude from Scrubs.

My friends have always railed on me for maintaining my love of The Sea and Cake; Calling them “Indie Adult Contemporary”, among other things…Anyhow, their latest album, Everybody, proved my friends right. I still listen to it and their live show was amazing…but…..my defenses of this album would be useless and insincere.

Queens of the Stone Age’s Era Vulgaris. Josh, it’s time to get some quality control buddy. Lullabies was good by a thread due to some decent songwriting….but this time there’s just really no excuse for what you’re passing off as an album.

Oh yeah, that band Interpol. WTF? That album fucking sucks.

It’s alright…it’s ok…there’s something to live for, jesus told me so…

Amy Winehouse will probably die and we won’t have to deal with her or her overrated piece of dog crap music anymore.

MORRISSEY

HOT CHIP

MALKMUS

ARCHIE BRONSON OUTFIT

CONSTANTINES

The NOTWIST?

MEW

(Smog)

Anonomoanon

The Black Angels

Anyone head of this Columbus band called Times New Viking?

Possible Reopening (or something) of THE EUCLID TAVERN (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

2007-07-06T23:25:00.001-04:00

Unofficial 2.27 post... fuck the Blogger... this site used to run smooth but now huffs and puffs, freezes and thaws... until the bugs get fixed, look to The Z Gun for your reviews. This is by no means the end of this blog, but just a heads up so that you're not waiting at the window for the goods.

2.26|

2007-06-21T22:04:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday the second-best record store in New England, Armageddon Shop, had their 6/6:6 anniversary show at AS220. I met up with some of my schoolmates after an ill-fated "couples picnic" with my lady and our friends from Marblehead, Mass, only to be bombarded by the past- a handful of old and close friends that I hadn't seen in years that for some reason had all come out to see Pissed Jeans, The Body, Snake Apartment, and Rusted Shut, now that's the noise I wanna hear when I'm trying to play catch up! After several $2 'gansetts and an eyeful to look at in between bands thanks to the Gay-Pride night parade cruising by the next block... things started to get a little rowdy, i'd say right around Snake Apartment's set. It was the first time that I'd ever seen these guys before because half of them live out west, but the proud sludge that I've been hearing since I picked up their Parts Unknown record a few months ago was even more powerful live. I don't know if theys considered a local band, but if they are, they're by far the best. Perhaps the band I was looking most forward to seeing was Rusted Shut, as their Rehab disc was a top-choice in my fall semester studio "midnight slot," but I wasn't feeling their set that much. It's awfully hard for a guitarist/singer to incite the same riot as an uninhibited frontman, especially sandwched inbetween two savage frontmen but if that's your game than let it roll! I have to admit that I've never seen anybody use a microphone to "strum" a guitar but it sounded like complete shit in the greatest way! Now to Pissed Jeans- I've never been much of a fan, but Pop:Doug's always tried to get me on to Shallow, claiming that it's "as good" as that Clockclean er album (Top 25 of 2006 Material, there), and after seeing them live i'm definately feeling like there's some truth behind the words. Their frontman played a sour-faced Iggy Stooge, and the band was energetic (but not in an annoying way)... heavy on the bass groove, and with guitars that edge on metal and punk not unlike my boy Bob Petric of TJSA. Nice, but I'm still not crazy for this year's Hope For Men, revisiting Shallow is enough for me for the time being.

Church Police Gilligan's Wings (Skulltones, 2007)

I picked up an sneak-peak copy of this, the latest release from one of my favorite new labels Skulltones. Now, I got this after Rusted Shut played, so I am pretty amazed that this was still playable after the Pissed Jeans' incited beer-showers, dudes with rat tails and moustaches moshing outside of the ring and the occasional drunk "I can't believe that your here too!" hug, BUT IT DID! I had no idea what it would sound like so I put it on Sunday morning while Meghan was in the shower (I was in the doghouse that morning after stumbling up the stair piss drunk at 3am, clutching on to a beer-soaked 7" like my life depended on it, so the last thing I wanted to do is be caught listening to what could've potentially been a black turd pressed to vinyl). I was really pleased with what I heard, soaring one-note lead guitar leading the slowly descending punk jam- sounding like something off of Slanted and Enchanted, but undoubtedly one of the many sounds that inspired the landmark album. The most obvious comparison would probably be Flipper, but I think that they're more in the company of The Puddle. After a bit of searching I found out that these guys have another EP that was put out on RRRecords but I have yet to track it down, but give me some time and you can bet your two cents that it'l end up in my bins eventually. This is a usual Skulltones editon of 300, I'd say to move quick, but it'll sell out even if this ain't your bag, what's a recommendation anyways? I'll be back tomorrow.

2.25|

2007-05-17T22:15:00.000-04:00

What the... ? It's OK, i'm back for the long haul. Year two is now behind me, and I'm feeling a bit refreshed. I landed a choice internship for the summer, which means that I will actually be able to afford to get some new records (but has that ever really stopped me?). Looks like The Z Gun is nigh off to the presses, so be sure to check that out once you get the word... i'm guessing that there will also be an online update over there for Jue as well. This year's already panning out to be a great one, with Siltbreeze, Not Not Fun, SS, Woodsist, and Columbus Discount slamming home winner after winner... but the real shocker has got to go to...

The Takeovers Bad Football (Off, 2007)

Sure, Big Bobby Beerbelly made an appearance on my Top 25 of '06 with his double LP From a Compound Eye, but a when it came down to list-time it seemed as if Normal Happiness' medocrity consumed all of Pollard's second wind (fart). I got word today that former GBV-bassist and Off Records' own Chris Slusarenko has just released the new Takeovers album. The first Takeovers album was released last summer and was one of the most disappointing purchases that I made since buying a copy of that second Kula Shaker album from the $3 bin at the old Used Kids. I went to the Off Records site in order to listen to the available tracks and I have to admit that they are fantastic. First of all, it is so nice to not hear the heavy hand of Todd Tobias. Instead the sound of Waved Out, Not In My Airforce prevail... whatever happened to John Shough's Cro-Magnon Studio? Now that was some beef, baby! Stephen Malkmus, John Moen (former Jicks drummer), Tad Doyle (Tad, baby!) and John Peters (Mudhoney) lend their hands, but for the first time in a long, long time Pollard sounds like he's actually got some wind in his lungs, which can't be said for his new Silverfish Trivia EP, blech. Now, Off's only got 3 songs posted, so I can't vouch for the other 9... but I couldn't be more excited about this. Head over there and have yourself a listen, if you don't believe me.

Editor's note: the official word on this is "half great."

2.24|

2007-03-30T15:42:00.000-04:00

I’ve always wanted to dive deep into these Sublime Frequencies compilations, but never had the time or money to go balls deep. Come Spring Break ‘07… with a whole lotta extra time on my hands (and it feels great!), I’ve finally had enough time to immerse myself with the work of this great label.

Radio Palestine: Sounds of the Eastern Mediterranean (Sublime Frequencies, 2004)

Of all of the stuff that I’ve heard this past week, there have been two releases which have really grabbed a hold of my attention: the latest album from the label, Group Doueh’s Guitar Music from the Western Sahara (read Scott Soriano’s review of it here), and this compilation Radio Palestine. For the most part the Sublime Frequencies stuff can be split between compilations with whole songs and “radio” albums, which simulate the experience of channel surfing in some exotic and often dangerous locale. If you couldn’t already tell by the name, Radio Palestine is one of those “radio” albums, but is arguably the best of the bunch. While songs are not presented in their entirety, it’s an undeniably powerful moment when flashes of radio color give way to a challenging groove or soaring psychedelic timelessness. There is a sense of adventure here that is damn-near-impossible to duplicate, because it is real, it is happening- interspersed with fragments of news radio, which acts as a reminder of the turmoil which lies beneath the music. I can’t help but to think that this label is incredibly successful in the way that they establish a way to ground the listener into a real sense of “place” from which they can begin to take on such foreign sounds. If you haven’t already invest some time into this label, I’ve given you two of the best places to start your journey.

2.23|

2007-03-05T02:26:00.000-05:00

I can hardly remember February!

I can’t believe that it has been over a month since I posted anything here. You might be thinkin’ that I’m lazy or forgetful… but that couldn’t be farther from the truth: there were only three-four days between the end of my finals for my winter semester and starting this new spring semester, and during that time I’ve been hard at work writing reviews (as well as getting the ball rolling on a couple of exciting interviews) for my home away from here, The Z Gun, and working on some new paintings and drawings for a possible show later this spring. A nice big tax return showed up two weeks ago and I’ve been spending every waking hour ripping my records and tapes so that I can listen to them at school and en route. I’ll throw a couple reviews up on here later this week, because I’m tired of people asking when I’m going to update this damn blog… but really that just shows that there’s people out there who are actually reading and checking the blog on a daily basis, which is very flattering… so thanks for your support… and bear with me, this blog ain’t going anywhere, you will see that it just gets updated more frequently/regularly when my schoolwork doesn’t keep me in the studio 24-7…. time for bed! (pictured is a cardboard panel and duct tape wall system that I worked on over a weekend back in mid-January)

2.22|

2007-02-02T23:05:00.000-05:00

In case you are still in the dark, my pal Doug Elliott has recently started up a blog, which is aimed at documenting the great stuff coming out of Ohio, and some of the sounds of Ohio's past (and, I'm guessing, a whole lot more). He has done some great writing for the Vertical Slum in the past, but with Population: Doug he finally has finally secured a forum for his insight, which is as gloriously one-sided as ever. To save you from scrolling down to the bottom of the page, here's the link. Visit, visit.

The Geeks Too Fat Pig/Visiting Day at San Quentin 7" (S-S, 2006)

A few months ago, Scott Soriano sent me this along with the new single by the Nothing People, and asked if I would mind writing honest and accurate reviews of them. Luckily both were nothing short of fantastic, but I still felt a bit weird revieweing these for The Z Gun, because I think that Soriano has to be applauded for his ability to dig through the dirt and time-after-time come up with pure fuckin' gold (and it'd be a hard pill to swallow such lauding in his own zine)... but this Geeks single has been on my mind since I first heard it a couple months ago. While there are a lot of bands out there that claim to be channeling the soul, spirit, spit, and ideology of Coltrane's Impulse universe, there is almost always a off-putting discord between the sound and the vision. Off hand, there’s only one band that could ever pull it off with exhilarating results and that would be the almighty Numbers: 15-30-75 (read about them here) but I’m pleased to hear what I like to think of as the Numbers Band of the West Coast: The Geeks. I guess that The Geeks were around as far back as ’65 and made music until the 80’s. Based in and around San Francisco, they survived long enough to see two full-length albums released. While them collector scum hold onto those LP's until their dying days, The Geeks, who had kept an expansive archive, thankfully opened it up to Soriano... and while I missed out on S-S’s first archival reissue of The Geeks three years ago (Dreamland in Machineland/Hey Wreck), I did finally hear it this past summer and it sure sounded like a more askew Numbers Band. With this release, however, the group really takes it down a few notches, emanating from the vinyl with a cool, late-nite sexiness.

The a-side reminds me a bit of Bongwater (you know, those great sultry Ann Magnuson vignettes), but a little creepier considering that our soft-voiced chanteuse is fifteen-year-old Lydia Kindheart (exquisitely backed by a meandering swells of guitar leads, stumbling drums, saxophone, and some stand-up bass). The b-side is an Iggy-voiced account of visiting day at San Quentin (The Geeks used to live in a house across the street); lead by a simple driving bass-line and intense but desperate vocal chanting, and accented by bellowing horns, the track is the true showstopper of the pair.

I was pleased to read that The Geeks were great to work with and these two archival reissues have been seen the light of day without a hitch, because I would give my right arm to hear more where this came from. Definitely secure yourself one of the 500 pressed before the window closes, because this S-S stuff don’t stick around for long.

2.21|

2007-01-27T00:43:00.000-05:00

I spent the day not in class (surprisingly), but rather working a few hours in the afternoon and then spending several hours with a bunch of old cassettes (crudely recorded probably about six or seven years ago) that I stumbled upon towards the bottom of a large cardboard box with busted-out-sides, due to the amount of junk artwork, photos, various post-its and receipts that Meghan is making me sort through. For your sake, I hope that these shit cassettes never find their way to another set of ears, but it was kind of nice to writhe in the pain that each terrible song after another, and tape after tape, would bring, because while it ain’t good, it's at least honestly terrible.

Axemen Three Virgins, Three Versions, Three Visions (Flying Nun, 1986)

If you hadn’t noticed already, the Lax-machine, Siltblog, has been dropping the word of this group of neglected Kiwis and their ultra-obscure label Sleek Bott for the past month and a half. I’ve had a few people a day ask me if I have any of this Axemen/Sleek Bott shit, which I didn’t. I bought the Axemen retrospective thing, Peter Wang Pud (still in-print after all of these years, try here), a couple of years ago from the $3 bin at Used Kids, and while it mysteriously went missing soon after, I was probably too busy listening to Juvenilia, or Goblin Mix to give two shits. Caught up in all of the Axemen-hype of the past few weeks, I re-bought Peter Wang Pud for $5 on eBay two weeks ago and then found this double-LP for $18 last week (thinking that if it sucked I could at least find an eager buyer amidst the hysteria). So where do we stand? While I still hold Marie and the Atom and The D4 to be the two weirdest bands on Flying Nun (hey! for two completely different reasons: one’s great and one spelled the end, mate), the Axemen make me scratch my head like untrimmed nails and a bad case of psoriasis (for the record: I am not saying that psoriasis is funny in any way, shape or form).

Three Virgins... is the Axemen’s sprawling double album Flying Nun debut, but the odd thing about this thing is that, while almost all of the double albums I’ve heard set themselves up from the get-go to be epic, grandiose artistic statements (the musical equivalent to a Western in Cinemascope), the Axemen went about it in the laziest way possible; creating a sprawling, scatterbrained mess of pop music that set the precedent for that roll-call of classic early-90’s indie-rock breakthroughs (Slanted… Bee… Crooked… Alien Lanes… Stangers from the Universe… you're still reading this?!!), and yeah, I can hear some of that Messthetics DIY horseplay in the dank ol' air as well. Sometimes the voices are as chirpy as a bird in the closet, sometimes I hear some Mark E. Smith-cadenced sing sing in the radar, sometimes some Nikki Sudden, but if you are one you registers rather irritating voices as ruggedly charming and charismatic… go on, you devil, and just surrender yourself to the “Rain O’Seeds.” How does the end of this old joke go: if you listen to Three Virgins for long enough…? Oh yeah, I remember: “I bet you won’t be able to stop!” Pretty damn ripe for a reissue... any takers?

2.20|

2007-01-21T21:59:00.000-05:00

News, News... The Z Gun has been updated, so be sure to get yourself over there and read, read, read! The first printed issue should not be that far off, so I will post some information on that as soon as I get the word. In other news, the new Teenage Panzerkorps album, Harmful Emotions, showed up on my doorsteps yesterday morning. While it's about as fantastic as you'd think it to be, I wanted to write about a band from yesteryear that doesn't seem to get much praise these days. I think that this might be the first in a series of writings about the the many odd wonders hiding within Matador's well-known catalog.

Run On Start Packing (Matador, 1996)
Run On No Way (Matador, 1997)

This past Christmas got me thinking about this song "Xmas Trip" by Run On. I had never heard an album by them, but had watched the video on the Everything is Nice DVD once a few years ago, and although I wasn’t too into the song at the time, I was anxious to get back to Fox Point so that I could look at it with a more refined palette. I did, and had the song stuck in my head for days, which compelled me to go out and grab their pair of out-of-print albums on CD for less than $1 apiece on Amazon (and i'm sure that their vinyl ain't gonna break you bank either).

Now that I’ve been listening to them for a while, I’m really surprised that Run On never amassed much of a following (well they might have, but I had yet to meet a fan of them, much less somebody who has heard one either of these albums). While songs such as “As Good as New,” “Anything You Say,” “Doesn’t Anybody Love the Dark,” and the aforementioned “Xmas Trip,” are concrete proof they flaunted an impeccable talent for penning a pop song, but did so in a way that sounds so incredible unique and fresh, instead of relying on the fine-tuning the sounds and sonics of past pop giants (The Beatles, Beach Boys, Byrds, blah, blah... The Who). Man, I think it's time you all realize that there's nothing new about The New Pornographers. Run On's progressiveness seemed to make sense once I read up a bit more about the band: the sultry, proto-Neko Case-voiced, Sue Garner, who has some great solo albums on Thrill Jockey and was in the Homestead band, Fish & Roses, with her (eventual) husband Rick Brown, who also sings and plays drums in Run On. Perhaps one of the most innovative and resourceful drummers I’ve ever heard, Brown proudly turned his back on the use of hi-hats and developed a simple yet very complex style. Acclaimed avant-garde noisemaker/writer and former member of Love Child (another seldom-heard Homestead act), Alan Licht, who has seen his solo work released on Drag City, Corpus Hermeticum and Siltbreeze, among others. Yeah, pretty impressive as a three-piece core, but Run On always had a fourth element to add to their sound; on No Way, violinist Katie Gentile, and on Start Packing, trumpeter David Newgarden… (according to allmusic guide) a CMJ writer, former WFMU disc-jockey, member of The Mad Scene (with The Clean’s Hamish Kilgour!) and was an employee of John Zorn’s Tzadik label! Jeeeesus, I wonder what Newgarden’s up to these days?

I challenge anybody who digs their former label-mates and friends Yo La Tengo to try these two albums on for size, especially when last year's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass had critics excited, one listen to either of these albums, will show that Yo La Tengo are just slowly retracing the steps that Run On walked over ten years ago. Now go out and raid those dollar bins!

2.19|

2007-01-17T13:55:00.000-05:00

After a few very relaxing weeks off of school, traveling back to Ohio, visiting friends and family, and catching up on episodes of House and The Office (thank you, Meghan!), I’m finally ready to get back to work. I’ve been writing reviews for the upcoming monthly update for The Z Gun, so things over here have been on the backburner, but I figured that I should give you something to bite on for the next week. Think of this post as an addendum to the "Top 25."

On On (Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, 2006)

Where did this come from?!!! I’m guessing that On is a new group from New Zealand, but to be honest, I don’t know much about them. Their self-titled CD was released last year on Campbell Kneale's (aka Birchville Cat Motel) impressive and uniformed CD/CDR label- thankfully distributed by both Midheaven, and Aquarius Records. If you think that this is akin to Birchville Cat Motel’s droning electric atmospheres, you couldn’t be more wrong. Blasted guitars, treble-kickin’, and a pair of screamers mired in overdrive, On is, at heart, a powerful punk band capable of moments which will humble even the most Flipper-crazed cheerleaders of them Pissed Jeans and Clockcleaner. However, the tapes are thick with submerged melodies (which were not immediately present to these ears), and a dialog between high-end amp noise and low-end drones that I can imagine that Boodle Boodle Boodle sounds like in a Morse code conversation in Okinawa. If I would’ve listened to this a few weeks earlier it would’ve easily landed a spot on the Top 25 list, but every winter you’ll get that. Tough shit.

The great thing about this is that you can totally hear 25+ years of kiwi rock in these lo-fi rumblings, but they’ve even moved beyond the left-field noise and experimentation which The Dead C, Pumice, Peter Jeffries, S.P.U.D., Birchville Cat Motel, and Gate into an exciting new terrain... and this is only their first album?! While underground American music (such as Scratch Acid, My Dad is Dead, Happy Flowers, Butthole Surfers, and Crystallized Movements) was, at the time, being overshadowed by the likes of The Chills, the Verlaines, and NME, it’s incredible to hear all of the aforementioned completely absorbed into a new breed of kiwi animal that's ready to destroy all that's left of the once-great Flying Nun. Highly recommended.

2.18|

2007-01-07T12:57:00.000-05:00

THE BEST OF 2006 (Part Five... FINALLY!)
So this is how the end of the year is going to go down at the Marble Stature blog: I’ve painstakingly spent the last week digging through my records and CD’s, downloads and tapes in order to cull what I believe to be “The Top 25” of 2006. There’s gonna be some bitchin’ because I’m close friends with a lot of bands, and I feel a little weird listing something that I’ve had my hands in, but I think that the end result is as fair as it gets. Next year it’ll be a little easier as I am stranded out East for keepers (not really, but for the time being). These aren’t in any order because it’s hard to say that one thing that you like a lot is necessarily better than something else that you like a lot, but they will be presented to you as five groups of five albums. Here’s the fifth and final group:

Sun City Girls Djinn Funnel (Nashazphone, 2006)

This collection of five choice Sun City Girls live recordings was released this past year was the first release for Nashazphone, a new Egyptian/Algerian label. I had always been a little too intimidated by the amount of stuff that these guys had out there to pay attention to pricey limited-run Sun City Girls stuff like this, but like that Blues Control cassette that also made the “Top 25,” Doug Elliott also recommended Djinn Funnel while I was back in Columbus for Xmas break. Opening with the galloping “Nites of Malta,” vocalist Alan Bishop drawls and drones sounding like something off of The Clean’s Oddities. The three tracks in the middle are instrumental, and while Bishop’s strong vocal presence is missing, the album begins to open itself up to the weirdo, spastic desert groove that the Sun City Girls have jammed on for the past two decades, and that final track, “Grand Trunk (Drifters of the Grand Trunk),” could be thought of as the transmogrification of the old slow blues closing number for the new class of nightfolk to beat to.

Self Destruct Button Natural Selection of Accidents (Tower Control, 2006)

I reviewed this for the November ’06 update of The Z Gun, which you can read in full here. Unfortunately I missed these Clevelanders’ show in Boston around Thanksgiving because I was swamped with schoolwork, but I as glad to see that they made a “show of the week” for our area’s scene paper, ‘The Dig’… so hopefully they had a worthy reception. I can’t recommend Natural Selection of Accidents enough; it’s entirely insane, and I still think that at any moment they can sound like “Brainiac, Big Black, or The Beatles,” but I think that is the strength of their sound… if I were to hear this back when I was in high school going through my obligatory teenage Beatles phase, it would inspire me to get into some really, really weird stuff. Don’t mistake Self Destruct Button as a pop group, they are far from it, but the way that they play their music is so tight and infectious that Natural Selection of Accidents should continue to influence and inspire all who hear it to branch out their tastes into unknown territory.

Teenage Panzerkorps Gleich Heilt Gleich 7" (Skulltones, 2006)

I’m really liking this new label Skulltones (they also put out the first seven-inch by Lambsbread and a new Sic Alps single) that gave this impossible-to-find 3” cdr an official release on that nice vinyl format we all love. Teenage Panzerkorps are a group of old Californian punks with cool stage-names and are fronted by a German transplant that touts the coolest stage-name of ‘em all, Bunker Wolf. Gleich Heilt Gleich is a strange little 9-minute pop record; Wolf has a scratchy loathsome growl, that works well with the punkest of the tracks, “Games for Slave,” but is most impressive when paired within more upbeat atmospherics, such as on “Burma Crawl,” and the most memorable “Christian Gender.” Yes, they also have a new full-length (Harmful Emotions) coming out on Siltbreeze at the end of this month, which will be (in the words of Lax) “a one-time vinyl-only release, with paste-on covers, in an edition of 500 copies. Just like your Grandpa's Siltbreeze!” If it’s good as Gleich Heilt Gleich and their full-length cdr from a few years back, Nations are Insane, you’ll have to move fast to get yourself a copy.

Frustration self-titled 7” (S-S, 2006)

Although they are curiously missing from the Tête de Bébé compilation that got a whole lot of love around here this year, Frustration are one of the best bands in France right now (with Cheveu and Volt). I’m not quite sure why this single hit me so hard this year, but it did. It’s post-punk at its simplest; Jay Hinman put it best when he reviewed this in Agony Shorthand earlier this year: “(Frustration) compare themselves to Killing Joke and Joy Division, and yeah, the excellent “Premises” is a total Warsaw/Ideal For Living rip-off, but it’s also that good. And as you know, that’s real good. Real real good!” Really.

Jakob Olausson Moonlight Farm (DeStijl, 2006)

This is a very impressive LP of antisocial whisperings which weaves inside and outside your existing preconceptions of new-age Scandinavian campfire folk. Sometimes closely adhering to the structure of the simple song, and at other times, drifting into some mystical timelessness. Probably one of my all-time favorite folk albums, it’d actually be nice to see this one given the CD treatment as well so that it might find it’s way onto more ears, because you don’t have to be enlightened collector scum to channel Moonlight Farm’s odd power. Of the 25 releases listed if I were to pick an "album of the year," this would be it.

2.17|

2007-01-05T12:03:00.000-05:00

THE BEST OF 2006 (Part Four)
So this is how the end of the year is going to go down at the Marble Stature blog: I’ve painstakingly spent the last week digging through my records and CD’s, downloads and tapes in order to cull what I believe to be “The Top 25” of 2006. There’s gonna be some bitchin’ because I’m close friends with a lot of bands, and I feel a little weird listing something that I’ve had my hands in, but I think that the end result is as fair as it gets. Next year it’ll be a little easier as I am stranded out East for keepers (not really, but for the time being). These aren’t in any order because it’s hard to say that one thing that you like a lot is necessarily better than something else that you like a lot, but they will be presented to you as five groups of five albums. Here’s the fourth group:

Clockcleaner Nevermind (Reptillian, 2006)

Did this come out at the end of 2005 or the beginning of 2006? Oh, who cares anyway- this is an amazing album. One of those truly impressive new indie bands that seems to be cutting their own cloth while still keeping their influences close (Big Black, Jesus Lizard, Flipper). Heavy, periodically tuneful, and just weird enough to keep things interesting; Nevermind has all the trappings of a fist-pumping sweaty t-shirt breakthrough record. What year is it? This group's got some balls to call this Nevermind, but hey I give as much of a shit about Nirvana as the Replacements did about the Beatles. Yeah, I was sad to hear Mclusky call it quits a couple years back, but i'll tell ya Clockcleaner do good filling the void. I hear that they’ve got a deal with Matador in the works which should be a good deal for all. Maybe we'll even get to see this one on vinyl?

Pink Reason self-titled 7” (Savage Quality, 2006)

This debut 7” from what I presume to be Green Bay’s greatest one-man band was nothing short of monumental when it hit this past spring, as the whole of the pressing, a mere 300 copies, were devoured as sucked up as a quick as a snooter. It’s a taste of hippie psych rock performed as a clear-the-datebook bedroom acid-trip confessional; there's not much else I can say that hasn’t been said already… the debut full-length comes out at the beginning of next month on Siltbreeze, and the songs that I’ve heard off it are pretty good, so… yeah. Oh and what I wouldn't give to see a show off of their upcoming midwest tour- don't forget about the Ocean State.

Pere Ubu Why I Hate Women (Smog Veil, 2006)

This was the first album that I bought when I moved up to Rhode Island this past September, and immediately whipped up a glowing review of it- posted here as 1.15|. After giving this some serious listening for a few weeks after writing the review, I completely forgot about it until about a month ago when I started thinking about this “Top 25” list. While definitely not at the top of the pile any more, the reanimated Ubu of today is still good enough to hang in there among this year's clouds of dust and dogs. Here's an excerpt from 1.15|: "(David) Thomas’ voice takes on a unique tone for each song and his performances on Why I Hate Women are as electric as anything he did in the 70’s, but without the escapist excitement fueling the Cuyahoga. Here he is tired, frustrated and direct. It’s hard to find anything to criticize about this album, because it has a quality about it that is so deliberate and constructed, without ever sounding difficult or laborious. Every time I listen to Why I Hate Women, its dense layers reveal a new level of complexity and sophistication which is rarely seen in music these days, and when you do see it, is usually a product of ignorance rather than intelligence."

Blues Control Riverboat Styx (Fuck It Tapes, 2006)

I listened to this a bunch over Christmas break thanks to a recommendation by former Vertical Slum writer Doug Elliott; with traces of old-timey piano, harmonica, and other non-grating instruments of noise, this cassette is dreamy, hypnotic, and softly melodic. Can’t say that I know much of the back story, but rumor has it that Holy Mountain (Six Organs of Admittance, Lichens, Residual Echoes, Om, et al) is going to be dishing out Blues Control for us uninformed sometime in the near-future, but until then find time to track down one of the best releases that I have yet to hear from Fuck It Tapes while there’s still a few copies hanging around their distributor's warehouses.

Burnt Hills To Your Head (Flipped Out, 2006)

Holy moly! I went to Albany, New York once, about five years ago, packed in a Dodge Neon with a couple of fellow summer-camp counselors looking to get away from the Berkshires of western Mass in an attempt to find some semblance of the trashy college life that we had been missing. Albany is a fucked-up town, and you know it from the first glance… at night, the city looks like an old set from ‘Blade Runner’ and the nine-piece (five guitarists, three drummers, and a lone bassist holding down the fort) Burnt Hills calls the wasteland “home.” Sheer volume and geography puts gets them comparisons to the almighty Vermonster, but these guys have gone even further in the direction of that sweet new free shit (Lambsbread fans/collectors take note), and just wait until you get to the final five minutes of the record: an outer-body experience… “if only this record was long enough!?”

2.16|

2006-12-21T16:09:00.000-05:00

THE BEST OF 2006 (Part Three)
So this is how the end of the year is going to go down at the Marble Stature blog: I’ve painstakingly spent the last week digging through my records and CD’s, downloads and tapes in order to cull what I believe to be “The Top 25” of 2006. There’s gonna be some bitchin’ because I’m close friends with a lot of bands, and I feel a little weird listing something that I’ve had my hands in, but I think that the end result is as fair as it gets. Next year it’ll be a little easier as I am stranded out East for keepers (not really, but for the time being). These aren’t in any order because it’s hard to say that one thing that you like a lot is necessarily better than something else that you like a lot, but they will be presented to you as five groups of five albums. Here’s the third group:

Sapat Tongue-Tied & Staid 7" (Black Velvet Fuckere, 2006)

This loose-conglomeration of grisly Bluegrass metallurgists named for something precious and rare out on the other side of the world pressed one of the most chattered about seven-inches of the year via their own hillbilly commune and label, Black Velvet Fuckere. These three tracks are amorphous; dense with almost Amon Düül II complexities, and voiced by a croaker channeling Van Vliet by-way-of that Mirror Man record. Some might say, “The best $5 spent on a record this year,” and who could blame them? It plays nice and long and after you get about a minute into it, you’ll be entranced for good. I am dying to hear what they do on their debut full-length, Mortise and Tenon, which is set for release at the end of January… on Siltbreeze, of course.

Robert Pollard From a Compound Eye (Merge, 2006)

I can’t help but to still be impressed by From a Compound Eye, which came out when it was still snowing this year. I figured that’d be terrible because Matador passed on it and then about a year after it had been shopped around, Pollard’s old pal Mac McCaughan seem to get coerced into putting the darn double album out on Merge. Oddly enough, it was the biggest (and possibly the best) album that Pollard had put out since Isolation Drills. Why do the scores of Pollard fans dig it so much? Because it has some absolutely fantastic songs on it such as “Dancing Girls and Dancing Men,” “Love is Stronger Than Witchcraft,” “Blessed in an Open Head,” “Kensington Cradle,” “The Right Thing,” “50 Year-old Baby,” “The Kingdom Without,” and so on and so on. I come and go with Tobias’ production as a whole, but here it seems to sound less “cheap,” than it does on Normal Happiness or any of the last three GBV albums. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of From a Compound Eye was that Pollard didn’t sound as if he were just throwing away songs and ideas; here, each song- check that, most songs- sound as if it were carefully focused on, from the riff all the way down to the lyrics… and that is a major accomplishment for the big boy at this point in his career.

Major Stars Syntoptikon (Twisted Village, 2006)

Team Twisted Village, husband and wife lead guitarists Kate Biggar and Wayne Rodgers, juiced up the Major Stars formula by moving the Stars bassist Tom Leonard to 3rd lead guitar, and then added a new bassist, Dave Dougan, a new drummer, Casey Keenan, and a full-time singer, Sandra Barrett. There- I just introduced you to the most fucking bad ass band on the Eastern seaboard. There’s no frills; just the pummeling drone of a triad of deft guitarists pushing each other into transcendence while a husky-voiced pretty girl sings nice every once in a while, just when things have cooled off enough to be mistaken for a band of “just another rowdy bar band of frustrated 9-to-5-ers.” Whoa Nellie! Very impressive, and probably my favorite album that has come out of Twisted Village to date, who thought that these guys would just now be hitting their peak?

Hue Blanc's Joyless Ones Fait Accompli (P. Trash, 2006)

This group from Algoma, Wisconsin released a pair of seven-inches before dropping Fait Accompli, their debut full-length, by way of overseas garage-rock magnate P. Trash. With a two-guitarist and drummer line-up that brings to mind fellow “joyless ones,” the Cheater Slicks, but Hue Blanc’s take two decades of Lou Reed (the good decades, don't worry), and manage to come out with a whole new street hassle. Yeah, Fait Accompli does at times threaten to go the direction of stale garage stank, but when it happens, it doesn’t sound forced; mapping their own path about 95% of the time. Ryan Wells from The Z Gun dropped Death of Samantha and Sister Ray in his review of this back in October, and I couldn’t agree with him more, but the Joyless Ones seem to have a bigger flame under their asses.

Ex-Cocaine Keep America Mellow (Killertree, 2006)

You know what they say, “If the cover looks like Twin Infinitives...” hey I’m just joking around, but rather Keep America Mellow is the work of another duo, this time a guitarist (Ramirez) and a drummer (Mike C.) hailing from Missoula. Sounds innocent enough, but the music here is as boundless and airy as their State’s speed limit; a bit like a jam session between Michael Morley's pre-Dead C duo, Wrecking Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos, and early Tyrannosaurus Rex under the summer stars of Montana's big sky. If you can picture that I think you can just taste the mellow rural vibe that Ex-Cocaine conjure. To put it quite simply- a hauntingly beautiful and meandering record.

2.15|

2006-12-21T15:18:00.000-05:00

THE BEST OF 2006 (Part Two)
So this is how the end of the year is going to go down at the Marble Stature blog: I’ve painstakingly spent the last week digging through my records and CD’s, downloads and tapes in order to cull what I believe to be “The Top 25” of 2006. There’s gonna be some bitchin’ because I’m close friends with a lot of bands, and I feel a little weird listing something that I’ve had my hands in, but I think that the end result is as fair as it gets. Next year it’ll be a little easier as I am stranded out East for keepers (not really, but for the time being). These aren’t in any order because it’s hard to say that one thing that you like a lot is necessarily better than something else that you like a lot, but they will be presented to you as five groups of five albums. Here’s the second group:

Jay Reatard Blood Visions (In the Red, 2006)

With 15 songs in less than a half-hour, two-minute power-pop reigns yet again! Blood Visions is the first solo album from Reatard, the prolific 26 y.o. who spent his teens in the 90’s fronting the much-loved… uh… Reatards. This guy is an interesting songwriter, who is able to effectively translate his love for all things Killed By Death, Hyped2Death, Yellow Pills, Bloodstains and Teenline, and make something sharp and exciting; this is what I wanted The Ponys’ second album to sound like. Every song is intricately crafted and fully realized, the recording is crisp, and it’s all quick enough to never overstay its welcome. I don’t know any other way that I can sell it you; this is a fantastic album.

Raccoo-oo-oon Is Night People (Release the Bats, 2006)

These four guys from Iowa that go by the name Raccoo-oo-oon (silly, ain’t it?) released their first recording, Is Night People, last year but its scarce run was gobbled up quick. Luck for us, Swedish label Release the Bats gave the cassette a proper CD release earlier this year. Is Night People is an organic and inventively recorded album that seems to have conflicted intentions; an album organized by songs, or a freer assemblage of pedal-manipulated experimentation that is organized by passages. I think it is more of the former, but in the best possible way; by keeping a trace of structure to the chirps, wails and moans, parts of the album become identifiable and memorable, effortlessly seducing you into the more interesting experimental nuances which are at work within the album. Great stuff from this prolific band, I have a few other things that they’ve put out this year, but haven’t been able to pull myself away from Is Night People for long enough to give any of their other stuff a fair listen.

Tête de Bébé (S-S, 2006)

For me, this was the clear winner for compilation of the year (but it should be noted that Hyped2Death’s Messthetics Greatest Hits was thrown out of the running because it is comprised of archival recordings). With Tête de Bébé, music critic and S-S label head, Scott Soriano, created the definitive document of the now French Underground, introducing the likes of Cheveu, Dragibus, Le Club de Chats, The Normals, Crack und Ultra Eczema, and Lawrence Wasser, to a hungry domestic audience. Surprisingly, due to the nature of the release, each song used for this compilation is impeccable; exhibiting each group’s most interesting nuances. But perhaps my favorite thing about Tête de Bébé is that it is a fun album; uncompromising, colorful, bouncy, angry, exciting, and yes... intoxicatingly melodic.

Pumice Yeahnahvienna (Soft Abuse, 2006)

I wrote a nice long review of Yeahnahvienna back in October, and so you can read the full review by following the link here, but here’s a little, slightly re-worded, excerpt: "Stefan Neville (Pumice) is perhaps the most exciting thing happening in New Zealand right now (at least of the stuff that has made it over to the States), but as it turns out Pumice is nothing new over there. He’s been performing and making DIY albums (primarily released on cassette) and singles for the past 15 years! Yeahnahvienna, his most recent full-length, is very complex in the way that Neville juxtaposes noise and song into a single performance of choreographed limbs and voice. ‘Noise’ as music is often criticized as not directly relating to the body, and in the past couple of years there has seemed to been a whole movement of bands which try to soften noise so that it more-often-than not exists as an additive creation; a backdrop to freak folk or whatever’s the hot deal. Here, Neville succeeds in marrying noise music to the intimate and personal scale of the body. Limited by contradictory rhythms and gravity, you can directly hear the tension of the body being affected by the physical constants of the universe in every nuance."

Sic Alps Pleasures and Treasures (Animal Disguise, 2006)

Composed of members from Erase Errata, the Hospitals, Big Techno Werewolves, and the Coachwhips, San Francisco’s Sic Alps earn the pedigree of a super-group in my blog. Their sullen “early” recordings (“early,” as in last year) have been collected and released as Pleasures and Treasures, an album that is almost as menacing as it is pretty… kind of like a fusion of Skip Spence, Bobby Beausoleil, and Fushitsusha, if that means anything to you. A tough album to get at, i've been listening to it for a while, and feel as if I have still only scratched the surface.

2.14|

2006-12-21T00:34:00.000-05:00

THE BEST OF 2006 (Part One)
So this is how the end of the year is going to go down at the Marble Stature blog: I’ve painstakingly spent the last week digging through my records and CD’s, downloads and tapes in order to cull what I believe to be “The Top 25” of 2006. There’s gonna be some bitchin’ because I’m close friends with a lot of bands, and I feel a little weird listing something that I’ve had my hands in, but I think that the end result is as fair as it gets. Next year it’ll be a little easier as I am stranded out East for keepers (not really, but for the time being). These aren’t in any order because it’s hard to say that one thing that you like a lot is necessarily better than something else that you like a lot, but they will be presented to you as five groups of five albums. Here’s the first group:

Home Sexteen (Brah/Jagjaguwar, 2006)

This is a hard one to write anything about; I tried to come up with a review for The Z Gun a few months ago and it got tossed because it was couple paragraphs that didn’t really go anywhere, or do anything, but this is about as clever as indie-pop music got in 2006, with a rotating cast of singers, songwriters, lovers, and fuckers, coming off like swarm of arrogant Brooklyners looking to do nasty things to their long-time girlfriends. The result is a wild-card; as style, point-of-view, affection, and intention never remain constant. Home have been around for a long time now, and it has taken them 16 albums to finally make one that feels like a focused album, with real album character, although each of the songs have very distinct and diverse identities.

Sparks Hello Young Lovers (In the Red, 2006)

Whoa. Let me collect my thoughts about this; this is one of the few albums that my girlfriend banned me from ever playing while she was around… so in that way, I guess that it makes sense after all, being released by the notoriously crude and rude L.A. punk and garage rock label In the Red. I had never listened to Sparks before this, and Hello Young Lovers has since turned me into a big fan. While it turned out to not be half as good as their string of classic albums in the 70’s (Kimono My House, Propaganda, and Indiscreet) it is better than the rest, and that counts as a comeback in my book. What we have here is an inventively arranged album of snappy melody, operatic intensity, and puns… oh, the puns. I can’t wait to hear a follow-up from the Mael’s, because they’re riding on a wave that hasn’t been this high in 30 years.

Wooden Shjips Shrinking Moon for You 10” (Self Released, 2006)

In a brilliant move earlier this year, this group from San Francisco pressed a 10” record, housed it in a plain white sleeve, stamped it with a mysterious sun image, and sent it out free to whoever wanted one. Well, the record fell into some grateful hands, getting praise from taste-makers such as Agony Shorthand, Terminal Boredom, and Siltblog, and the rest is history. Yeah, but the beauty of this 10” is not just the story behind it, the music is fantastic; the A-side, “Shrinking Moon For You,” takes a simple bass riff (or is that a keyboard?) and lets it churn out a poppy groove as guitars, drums, sleighbells, backwards vocals, solos, and chintzy electronics simply, but provocatively get added and subtracted from the mix. On the other side, the mud just ain’t as deep, but is a nice contrast to the more conventional side of psychedelia, with enough air in the room to get a good feel for the keyboard, guitar and voices. Simple, exciting, mysterious; and they’ve put a 7” out this past fall that’s almost just as good.

Psychedelic Horseshit Who Let the Dog’s Out? 7” (Columbus Discount, 2006)

The ‘Shit had spent the first 8 months (or so) making precious little EP’s, playing what seemed like just about every show that was thrown their way, and basically carving out a name for themselves one chip of the chisel at a time, that is until this solid three-song EP came out, instantly hurdling these guys onto the top of the heap. It’s infectiously amateurish, sloppy, even lazy, but it’s mostly drug-induced… they ain’t dumb; they have wild ideas, write great songs, and consistently execute with everything that they’ve released to date. They’ve got a split with Times New Viking out now on 300% (which I haven’t heard yet), and a full-length with Siltbreeze in the works (which I also have yet to hear stuff from), but they’ve yet to let me down, so I expect some kills.

Red Red Red Mind Destroyer (Big Neck, 2006)

Ryan Sabatis, former drummer of the much-missed punk outfit The Piranhas, grabbed himself a guitar and fucking cranked up the amps with his new group, the Detroit-based, Red Red Red. Easily the loudest CD I got (except maybe for an unlistenably loud vinyl-rip of a GBV boot that I tried to make my Junior year at Ohio State), and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Loud and fast, a lot like pre-Rollins Black Flag, but some songs remind me of the middle, more hardcore areas of Zen Arcade- I think you can get the picture. While the territory has been beaten to shit by a million bands… Mind Destroyer is one of the few that actually stand out, crammed with unexpected hooks and packed with about as much bite as a White Castle 'Slider.' If you’re gonna make an album like this it’s gotta be as nasty as you can make it, and Red Red Red really got it right from the start, and didn’t try to fiddle it to death. If this would've been released last year, we'd have a street-fight with The Feelers' Learn to Hate..., that would rival this year's OSU/Michigan game, but it wasn't, and therefore Mind Destroyer gets the punk revival title by a longshot.

2.13|

2006-12-20T14:04:00.000-05:00

Life ain't easy.

Jim Shepard w/ V-3, Lacquer, etc... Evil Love Deeper (Thrill Jockey, 1995)

I was sitting around a few nights ago, and I realized that, although I’ve owned Evil Love Deeper for a few years now, I have never actually listened to it. Weird, right? This album is special for a couple of reasons: unlike Shepard’s other LP’s, it is still available (from Thrill Jockey’s website for a mere $10), and it is one of the two times that his short-lived group with Bob Dickie from the Strapping Fieldhands, Lacquer, makes a significant contribution to the album (the only other time that I recall a Lacquer track is on Picking Through the Wreckage with a Stick). Evil Love Deeper exists in a weird place in the Iron Press; not quite as song-based as much of the V-3 material (although there is a great live V-3 track here, “Tetramagorica”), and it’s not as Jandek-influenced as Shepard’s aforementioned solo Siltbreeze LP. There are some great moments on Evil Love Deeper, such as Skullbank’s bouncy, Minutemen-like “Revelling Finalities,” Dickie’s cello-hook on “Your Leader,” the somewhat pretty “That One Thing,” and “Harry’s Getting Ready to Shave,” which sounds like a medley of two of V-3’s most well-known tracks, “Negotiate Nothing” and “Harry,” as played by a sleepy Pere Ubu.

How do all of these memorable moments add up? Pretty well, I’d have to say that Shepard really knew how to orchestrate his material over the course of a full-length better than most people know how to pick their nose, and I’d take a full-length of his over one the many seven-inches he put any day; because while this may not be as oddly heroic as Negotiate Nothing, as eerie and unsettling as Picking Through the Wreckage with a Stick, as impressive as Photograph Burns, it feels like a lot more than the collection of odds and ends recorded over the course of the first half of the 90’s. Evil Love Deeper is a focused effort, full of peaks, valleys, twists and turns; one of Shepard's few remaining artifacts… urging us to scratch deeper beneath the surface of the two themes of love and evil, and dwell with Shepard in the underworld where the two could coexist with almost interchangeable identities.

2.12|

2006-12-18T19:32:00.000-05:00

Eh, after doing some much-needed apartment cleaning, I don’t feel like much of an introduction today.

A-Band Artex/Alot (Siltbreeze, 1993)

This classic Siltbreeze title is comprised of two live songs/sets. The first starts out like some later-day Roland Kirk accompanied by a few Dust-Deviled harmonicas and saxes, before a bass guitar lays down a droning groove, and the drums slowly trip into the bass’ beat while white alarm noise sears in the distance. Gasp! ...long sentence. Are those vocals or is that a crusty record of ancient war chants? The voices and saxes exchange back-handed blows of singularity and multiplicity, near and far, sneaky and blunt, within the confines of the cave-like walls of The Wharf. I don’t know much beyond the names of A-Band’s Neil Campbell and Richard Youngs, but you gotta start somewhere, and this is sounding right quite nice following an afternoon of thorough house-cleaning and record-dusting.

The B-side, “Alot,” is more cacophonous; the rapture from the other side of the table. A guitar gets played like a tornado on the prairie sending Danny Taylor’s infamous drumset up and down the cellar stairs while the keys only seem to get tickled and wiggled by the gale. Like “Artex” eventually the mess stumbles around into some logic behind alternating movements of primitive and technical drumming, and the alarm motif from the A-side is once again revisited, but vocalized this time, bringing this chaotic LP to an wailing conclusion.

Contrary to my initial feeling about this release, it's been much more of a mindfuck 'n headache to track-down a copy than it has been to listen to.

2.11|

2006-12-17T23:49:00.000-05:00

Back when I was a kid, it’d be snowing by now. Head on over to The Z Gun, as it has been updated. I didn’t have any time this month (finals) to throw any reviews their way, but rest assured I will be contributing for January’s update, as I am now on fuggin’ break and ready to head back to Ohio next weekend.

Raven Back to Ohio Blues (Owl, 1975)

It makes sense that information about this LP is about as mysterious as the moniker. I guess that this pup is one of the most valuable records that’s ever been released by a guy from Columbus, fetching close to a grand for copy on eBay, not too long ago. Originally pressed in an edition of 500 on Owl records (also a creature of the night), but reissued twelve years ago in another edition of 500 LP’s on Rockadelic with a new more colorful and overall pussier cover (by-the-way, the Rockadelic pressing is also long gone).

Jared Phillips from Times New Viking played a cdr copy of this last summer and he sat around drinking beers to it. I had never heard of it; I guess Mike Rep burned him the copy and said that Raven was some biker local that wrote and played all of the instruments on this, his sole release, and then died of an O.D. months after… or at least that is the version I remember. Anyway, I was pretty excited to see that somebody had a copy of this to download, so now I am able to give it some of my hard-earned free time and shit out a little nugg about Back to Ohio Blues.

This must’ve had a big impact on Rep, as it sounds a lot like some of that good old early Quotas/True Believers stuff that we all rub our dicks over. Maybe if the guy stuck around here a little longer Raven could’ve shared a little of The Godz’ headlight, because frankly this is a lot better; darker, and less tongue-in-cheek. Back to Ohio Blues is split between snappy rockers reminiscent of Aerosmith’s better days (but imagine Alice Cooper in place of Steven Tyler) and longer acid-blues workouts, the most notable being the titular track, which is so seedy that you can just picture the guy shooting up in between the overdubs.

I don’t know how this slipped by Chuck Eddy while writing the quintessential Heavy Metal guidebook 'Stairway to Hell,' but this is definitely worthy of a spot in the better half of the 500… maybe taking the place of one of those shit Kix albums.

2.10|

2006-12-15T12:34:00.000-05:00

It's my girlfriend's birthday tomorrow so I am going to make her a cake after I write this.

Luxurious Bags Frayed Knots (Twisted Village, 1995)

I’m starting to think that this might be the most straightforward thing that I’ve ever heard come out of Cambridge’s Twisted Village, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I hear that Luxurious Bags is a bedroom project; if that’s the case, that schizo’s gotta full band in him, because Frayed Knots is a pummeling fusion of Robot World-era Bailter Space, Crystallized Movements, David Baker's Mercury Rev and the first Dinosaur album. Appropriately planned as the final album from Luxurious Bags, who had released two rare LP’s on Twisted Village prior (compiled on the Quarantine Heaven CD), because I doubt that this guy’s vision could be any more succinct and affecting; each of the seven (somewhat long) songs is entirely memorable after first listen- plodding stoner-jangle (“Monster Mind”), junkie noodling (“This Won’t Help a Bit”), in-the-red bluesy drone (“12 Miles Back”), and a long psych-out at the end… you gotta have a long psych-out at the end! I’d say that Frayed Knots is a forgotten classic of this past decade, but I doubt anybody ever really paid much attention in the first place, nevertheless, it’s thankfully still in-print and ready to bite.

2.09|

2006-12-14T23:20:00.000-05:00

I think it was Steven Tyler who shreiked it: back in the saddle again. Although I have a busy weekend of tying up loose ends, cleaning out my studio and documenting my work, after what turned out to be a little over 100 hours of work in the past five days, my semester has come to an end.

Markku Peltola Buster Keatonin Ratsutilalla (Ektro, 2003)

I went into this one completely blind; I had no idea what this would sound like, but the Buster Keaton reference (i think it translates to: "in the ranch of...") made me think of watching 'College' and 'The General' as a kid with my dad AND this is the time of the year to get sentimental over a good nog, so I guess that's a-ok. Buster Keatonin Ratsutilalla opens, oddly enough with some cheesy cheddar guitar shredding, but then bounces out of metal box and with the help of some om'em bongos, spritely acoustic guitar and a violin melody that screams ciné-mentality but thankfully the "it" indies have yet to tap Finnish sap for obscure additions to their shitty soundtracks (...Zack Braff ...Wes 'Small Change' Anderson ...Sofia Coppola ...sexy, yes, but terrible nonetheless). Oddly enough, bandleader Markku Peltola has made a name for himself in Lappywood or whatever, starring in the only movie from Finland that I have ever heard of, a movie by Aki Kaurismaki that if I remember correctly came out while I was still a dorm-boy (so about five or six years ago) called 'The Man Without a Past.' I don't know a whole lot about the background of this release (or Peltola for that matter), but a few songs into this album I couldn't help but to think of the phrase Swedish Reggae, which was the proposed title for that self-titled Steve Malkmus album. It's a good concept though, and while I don't think it would be appropriate for Malkmus, it really does nail what Peltola and his players conjure up from some wintry jamming. There is a looseness to Buster Keatonin Ratsutilalla that is almost spongelike; ontologically simple, but rich in texture and rather sophisticated upon examination, especially the interplay between that violin and the guitarist, one of whom I would assume to be Peltola. While this ere oddity may not be earth-shattering, it is admirably unassuming, strangely familiar- maybe even sentimental music that I like to think of less like "another jewel on the shelf" but rather like a stack of old pictures from a fun party that you that you threw.

2.08|

2006-12-09T21:05:00.000-05:00

Long time no see... as you may have guessed, I have been incredibly busy with school, but thankfully (as of the end of next week) I will be officially half way done with my Master's degree program. I have no time to write any reviews right now, but I just wanted to post something new up here, and also direct you over to the z gun, where you'll be able to read reviews for the new This Moment in Black History, Self Destruct Button and Crack Und Ultra Eczema, before the new issue goes up at the end of next week.

Here's some stuff that I have been listening to this past week of finals hell:

Maher Shalal Hash Baz Kunitachi Kibun ('84 & '85) (PSF, 2006)
Markku Peltola Buster Keatonin Ratsutilalla (Ektro, 2003)
Bill Fox Transit Byzantium (SpinArt, 1998)
Fushitsusha Double Live (PSF, 1989)
Cornershop When I was Born for the 7th Time (Luaka Bop/Warner Bros, 1997)
Hole Class A Glimpse of Hole Class (Self Released, 2006)
Luxurious Bags Frayed Knots (Twisted Village, 1995)
Sun Kil Moon Ghosts of the Great Highway (Jetset, 2003)
Verlaines Hallelujah All the Way Home (Flying Nun, 1985)
The Feelers Just Can't Get Enough 7" (Contaminated, 2006)
Thin Lizzy Vagabonds of the Western World (Deram, 1973)
Drunks with Guns Drunks with Guns (Behemoth, 1995)

Check back in a week and a half, and i'll probably have some reviews posted for some of the albums listed above.

2.07|

2006-11-01T16:35:00.000-05:00

We sat outside a Shell station; to our front was a clump of trees. It was a real idyllic fall scene along the Merritt Parkway, outside of New Haven, breaths of the crisp air meshed with every hit of the joint. Eventually Eric, my colleague from my program and ride to New York this past weekend, and I would hop back into the car and snack on some bite-sized Baby Ruth’s and Crunch bars that his mom sent him in the mail for Halloween, and head back to school… but it was real nice to have a moment to take in the whole season.

The Cakekitchen Stompin’ Thru the Boneyard (Merge, 1995)

Graeme Jefferies, no stranger to the strange goings-on in New Zealand’s netherworld, formed the oddly named Cakekitchen after his first and only solo album Messages from the Cakekitchen was released in 1987. The Cakekitchen is quite different from his earlier cultic groups This Kind of Punishment and Nocturnal Projections in that they are slightly more conventional, which probably has to do more with the absence of his brother Peter, who had been the primary singer of (and arguably the most influential creative force behind) the aforementioned groups. Stompin’ Thru the Boneyard is not The Cakekitchen’s first album (they had already released a few albums on Homestead in the early 1990’s before the label went kaput), however it is the first album that is performed as a duo (along with drummer Jean-Yves Douet), the first of two albums for Merge (who at the time, along with Ajax and Siltbreeze, were the only labels domestically releasing stuff from the more unmarketable side of kiwi-pop), but more importantly the first album that I had heard from The Cakekitchen. I found this for $3 at Used Kids, and listened to it on my way back home after an early morning class late into Fall Quarter. It was light outside but overcast, windy; the sound of Jefferies’ opening arpeggios mixed in with the whoosh of cars coasting along the slush still lingering from a snowfall a few days earlier, and sounded like something off of Zen Arcade.

Jefferies’ nasal sing-speak is far from exciting, but is not repulsive; simply comfortable and casual. The two-piece formula works well for Jefferies and Douet, as they for the most-part keep their integrity by not beefing up the tapes with extraneous instrumentation to compensate for their newly found thinner profile; instead Stompin’ Thru the Boneyard is kept low-key, occasionally indebted to shoegazer wall-of-sound clichés as on “Even as We Sleep,” but for the most-part the album is almost too painfully careful in construction. The songs sometimes stick around a little too long, but there are some great moments throughout the record that ultimately save it from being boring: the powerful opener “Tell Me Why You Lie,” Jefferies’ astonishing duet with Alastair Galbraith’s piercing violin on “The Mad Clarinet,” and the cascading finale “Another Sad Story,” which is more or less resumed as their epic 10+ minute opener, “The Old Gray Coast,” on their next and last Merge album, The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea.

You can find both of these Merge albums for next-to-nothing online and probably for a couple of bucks at your local used record store, so keep an eye out for them, they are really solid albums that I always go back to every couple of months, and while The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea may be slightly more consistent, I always end up listening to Stompin’ Thru the Boneyard more, as sometimes a great band’s greatest songs sound best when they are in close company to their noble failures.

2.06|

2006-10-28T21:03:00.000-04:00

This is a very special Marble Stature post, as I am not writing from Fox Point, but rather from the Park Slope area of Brooklyn. I rolled in a little too late to do anything last night, but woke up on the good side of the couch watched an old episode of “A Pup Named Scooby Doo,” and I’ll be off to class in a little bit. I’m going to go ahead and wish you Happy Halloween a few days early, because I think that the annual Huron Keg Race (drink ‘til your done!) is happening this weekend in Washington Beach, Ohio, and for me, that is the true indicator of Halloween weekend.

Psychedelic Horseshit The Anticoncept (Self Released, 2006)

Columbus, Ohio’s Psychedelic Horseshit are an interesting band; they played a show (I think it was one of their first, if not the first show) at Cafe Bourbon Street last New Year’s Eve with Night of Pleasure, and Times New Viking and then within a couple of months they already had a couple of cdr EP’s for sale at their shows and on the Columbus Discount website. Over the course of this past year they have put out a total of five of these “paper singles,” a fantastic seven-inch called Who Let the Dogs Out? on Columbus Discount, and are now working on their debut full-length to be released on Siltbreeze next year. I’d say- that’s quite a year! It’s a shame that these “paper singles” are now all out of print, because they are all great in their own way… and eventually I’ll have some reviews up for all of them. They all have really nice collaged artwork that’ve been color copied, folded and stapled on the sides, as to make a folder for the cdr. Simple enough, yes, but there’s something really nice about these little artifacts.

The first one that I got was their (somewhat) breakthrough release Blown Speaker Standards, and I was pretty impressed by it (especially the anthemic opener, “Not Since Now”) and picked up a copy of the two which preceded it: King Tubby’s Baddness Dub, and The Anticoncept. Out of the three, I thought that The Anticoncept was the pick of the punk litter… opening with “Punk Tree,” a (somewhat) typical mode of Horseshit as singer Matt Whitehurst’s cocaine-addled Dylan-meets-E. Smith stream-of-conscious riddim raps atop simple street-side musicianship. But it’s The Anticoncept’s two other songs that really stand out across their EP’s. Soft and almost lilting; “Nothing to Do” sounds like one of those great down-tempo heart-tuggers off of Slanted and Enchanted, driven by Rich Johnston’s sloppy drumbeat, and washes of guitar, casio and bass slugging along until their brilliantly un-climactic union at the end. On the final song of the three, “Dead Horse,” they slow things down even more; even resembling a ballad, with pretty keyboards, soft drumming, Jason Roxas’ melodic bass-playing, and a ton of atonal saxophone skronk upsetting the mix just enough to charge the piece with unforgettable moments of beauty and catastrophe. Good luck trying to find a copy of The Anticoncept (or any of their other stuff, for that matter), but here’s to hoping that down the road somebody puts together all of this great material for the people who weren’t lucky enough to grab a hold of them the brief time that they were around.

2.05|

2006-10-23T23:29:00.000-04:00

I got a pair of records in the mail today from My Mind’s Eye in Cleveland, The Easter Monkeys' Splendor of Sorrow and Numbskull’s Final Days of Torture) and it got me thinking about all of the eccentrics in my life that are from Cleveland.

The New Year Newness Ends (Touch and Go, 2001)

Matt and brutha Bubba Kadane made a career throughout the 90’s writing sad and sleepy songs as Bedhead, a group that embodied the “slow-core” genre with a yawn and a stretch. I never really heard anything from them that ever got me interested enough to care (…I’m getting sleepy just writing this). That all changed around 2003, while cruisin' Pearl Alley, either coming from or headed to Bernie’s Happy Hour, (back when Tree of Snakes' singer Jeff Fernengel deemed it was “the thing to do” on a Friday night) with "the most eccentric" Vertical Phil (fact: "the most eccentric" is an actual award to be won at the annual CDR-BBQ). In his typical ecstatic Friday night state, Phil was worked up about this album from the Kadane’s new band, The New Year. This ain’t no Bedhead! It was upbeat and exciting (especially on the first three songs), and I think we officially had own minds blown by “Gasoline,” which is still up for download on the Touch and Go website… hurry! Packed tight with drummer Chris Brokaw, who has played drums for Codeine, the excellent Mission of Burma side-project Consonant, and Evan Dando (with that pedigree- it’s no wonder Phil liked The New Year so much), to name a few, The New Year is a fiery indie-outfit sized up like a Silkworm sans Shellac. When the tempo drops down a notch, we don’t get so much Bedhead, as we do get reminded of Canadaddies Broken Social Scene and Pitchforked and “rah-rahed” Ohioans turned Brooklyn babies, The National (can’t say that I agree much with Pitchfork these days, but I did like You Forgot it in People and Alligators).

Yeah- I think that Newness Ends should have been as recognized as those albums, and probably would have if it didn’t look so deceptively resemble "another Bedhead album." The New Year put out a follow-up to this called The End is Near, but I don’t remember much about it except that Phil dug it at the time. Maybe it’s time to give that one a listen, because my random impulse to reach for Newness Ends last night really hit the spot.

2.04|

2006-10-22T22:32:00.000-04:00

My girlfriend went back to Ohio for her sister’s wedding, and I was given the task of watching her dog, Lemmie, who has been suffering from severe separation anxiety and has basically been acting like a jerk whenever I went in to the studio and left him alone in the apartment; basically pissing and shitting all over the apartment. So I finally decided to just take him into the studio with me, knowing that he would probably be good when people are gawking over him. I was right! The Korean girls were all over him and took turns walking him by the river, and I think that he was a little happier after that.

J. Mascis and The Fog More Light (Ultimatum/Artemis, 2000)

So yeah, there may not be a whole lot of stylistic differences between this and the last couple of Dinosaur Jr. albums, Hand it Over and Without a Sound, but More Light is easily stronger and tighter than the pair; benefiting from the new escapist and atmospheric moniker of "The Fog."

Guided By Voices’ Bob Pollard has made it a fact of his love for Dinosaur’s great early albums, and here joins his indie-peer on a trio of songs with long solos (let ‘em burn slow forever, man). The opening power-anthem, “Sameday,” is cut from the cloth of the Where You Been classic “Out There,” but is a little sadder, yet more melodic, and far less reliant on layers of guitar sludge (although there is still plenty of it here); kicking off a string of hook-heavy songs the only way that Mascis can do them. The recording excellent articulates the power (“More Light,” “Back Before You Go,” and “Where’d You Go”) and the delicacy (“Does the Kiss Fit,” “Ammaring,” “Wasitin,” and “All the Girls”) of Mascis’ guitar prowess; creating an album that is less schizophrenic than Hand It Over, and far more exciting than Without a Sound.

The absolute killer on More Light is Mascis’ collaboration with My Bloody Valentine’s reclusive aural-hobbit Kevin Shields on the titular closing track. The drums drive along a coastal highway penetrating the white-noise and winds, while Mascis’ distorted worried warble makes way for the most infectiously simple and beautiful falsetto refrain: “I’ll… Be… There!” The tough promise during the most trying times, the wind against your back, onward and upward, and bring on his next album Free So Free; it seems as if Mascis had finally decided to lighten up his “do-it-myself” ego, which had marred the great negative spirit of Dinosaur’s classic line-up, and enjoy making some crushing and melodic guitar albums. I can’t wait for the new Dinosaur Jr. album that’s currently in the works; Mascis might be losing his mind, but it’s also evident that he has always been capable of delivering some of the most punishing hardcore/psychedelic/pop/metal music ever written. After hearing the final minute of “More Light,” you can start to understand why he toured with the Stooges immediately after his tour to support this fucking fantastic album.

2.03|

2006-10-21T14:34:00.000-04:00

The Bucks are still kicking it at #1, and it doesn't look like they are going to budge, baby! Come November, as this is going to be the best Michigan game in the history of the series.

The Red Crayola w/ Art and Language Kangaroo? (Rough Trade, 1981)
The Red Crayola w/ Art and Language Black Snakes (Recommended, 1983)

I really like this era of the Red Crayola, summed up by a pair of albums in which Mayo Thompson was backed by this odd punk super-group (composed of members of Swell Maps, X-Ray Spex, Essential Logic and The Raincoats) called Art and Language. These albums really stand out in Red Crayola’s storied, vast and ever-expanding discography, as they are two of the most conventional releases but strangely enough two of the least heard. Between 1995 and 2000, Drag City reissued the pair (in addition to, ahem, Coconut Hotel, Live 1967, Corrected Slogans, Three Songs on a Trip to the United States, and Malefactor Ade) digitally for the first time ever, but they both eventually fell out of print. Fortunately, Kangaroo? has been repressed, but Black Snakes remains strangely out-of-print. It’s a real shame, because the two albums should be heard together, showing two sides of Thompson's post-punk experiment, as Kangaroo? is ecstatic, sprightly and bouncy, Black Snakes is a bit darker, funkier, and far less lyrically absurd. It’s also interesting to hear Thompson translate British and ‘Rust-Belt’ post-punk into a “new” brand of Red Crayola, turning away from his psychedelic roots.

While I’m by no means an authority on Red Crayola, as I think that, while they are extremely imprtant as a band, a lot of their stuff is so wildly expressionistic that it starts to become redundant and banal. On these two albums, however, the sound veres a little more towards sanity without ever sounding like a tamer strain of Mayo Thompson's lifelong art.

I think that I prefer Kangaroo? when it's all said and done (so pick it up while it's still available) because it sounds a little more democratic and band-like, but keep an eye out for Black Snakes as it is nearly as good, but prone to the occasional, aimless jam. It's kind of hard to believe that he made these great albums during his stint as the guitarist for Pere Ubu, but at the same you can, because these albums are a hell of a lot better than the crap he did for Ubu (The Art of Walking and the also mediocre Song of The Bailing Man).

2.02|

2006-10-21T01:33:00.000-04:00

I got an exciting email today: Scott Soriano and Ryan Wells announced that they are going to start a new print zine called The Zap Gun. While the first issue sounds like it is in the works, they have created a website for the zine, from which the reviews will be posted, although it looks like the articles, interviews, and assorted zine-stuff are going to be in the print version only. The first batch of reviews is already on the site, so be sure to make your way over there (http://zap-gun.com).

Debris Static Disposal (Anopheles, 1999)

This first couple of times that I listened to this, I really didn’t think that it lived up to the hype that’s been bubbling up as of late; not bad by any means, but just lacking some sort of cohesive identity. I didn’t know how to describe what I was hearing, and so I just stopped listening to it for a couple of months, but I gave it a listen on my way to class last week and haven’t stopped listening to it since. I’m starting to think that Debris is like a twisted and tangled collision of Guess Who-la-la beef-rock and the meditative compositional experimentation of Faust. The Anopheles reissue of this art-punk oddity (originally released by the band 30 years ago) has a pretty informative booklet on Debris; you get a feeling from the number of interviews and writings from the band, that there was an incredible amount of foresight running across the entirety of their work, although I think that a lot of their intentions we’re never really pulled off as eloquently as they describe. Enter the Guess Who side of Debris; after all, we are talking about Chickasha, Oklahoma in the mid 70’s. I think that I started liking Static Disposal a lot more once I started hearing more of that side of the band; maybe because there is an identifiable point of origin from which Debris can skew time and texture into a mess of prophetic doom. Of course, you might say that that is descriptive of Pere Ubu as well… but I think that Ubu is quite a bit more composed, while Debris are more surrealist in their approach. Taking obvious cues from Captain Beefheart, the songs have a grandiose choreography of interconnected elements, so as to obscure the individual within the larger context of the song (or the album, in that matter). Where Beeffheart was clearly the iconic constant organizing The Magic Band’s wilderness, it’s the dumb 70’s rock running through Debris’ music that is nucleus of the meltdown, which is a pretty interesting and original idea; straying from the typical assumption that the frontman is the thread from song to song.

You might ask, “How do the songs read, after giving Static Disposal a little love and attention?” I say, pretty well! While there are definite peaks and valleys here, Static Disposal clusters the peaks into the middle of the album, leaving the meandering focus of the beginning and end to act as the preamble and postscript to Debris’ singular statement.

2.01|

2006-10-15T21:26:00.000-04:00

I hadn’t listened to this in a year or two, but it really hit the spot the other night, so I think it’s time to write about an old favorite.

The Dream Syndicate The Day Before Wine and Roses: Live at KPFK, September 5, 1982 (Atavistic, 1995)

I’ve never been to L.A., I have never seen a Dream Syndicate show, and actually my first experience with the band was buying their Ghost Stories album on a whim. I know, I know, you probably think that their debut The Days of Wine and Roses is their best album, and you have a point, since it captures the band at their most distinct, before they started down the road of bar-band booze rock (which they were actually pretty good at, just check out the fairly recently expanded Live at Raji’s, or their Weathered and Torn DVD for some persuasion). Rhino finally reissued an expanded version of The Days of Wine and Roses back in 2000, and I finally got to hear what all of the fuss was about, but to be honest, I think that the band’s power has dulled a bit over the years, because when I was expecting Velvets-via-The Germs, I just heard slow and dated chocka-chocka College guitar rock. I was kind of pissed. But of course, the more that I read about the band, and the more I listened to it, the more life seemed to go back into the album. It wasn’t until I heard The Day Before Wine and Roses that I really got a feel for The Dream Syndicate.

Recorded during a late-night radio broadcast about a week before the group went into the studio to start recording their debut, it captures a station packed with the rowdy scene that brought us the crash and burn greatness of early 1980’s So.Cal-punk. The Dream Syndicate’s own Lou Reed, Steve Wynn, dishes back at the audience’s agitated state, with wit and sarcasm in between their especially punishing set. I can’t imagine how great this must’ve sounded on-air, but you can’t help but to think hat when Wynn says that they have yet to find a label to put out their soon-to-be-recorded debut, the lines were ringing off the hook. There’s a lot of speak about the lead guitarist, Karl Precoda, who reportedly was such a monster at the guitar that he left a pile of busted hollow-body thrift-store Kay’s in the dust, but on The Days of Wine and Roses he seemed a little tamer than the legend. Here, you can actually hear and feel the legend at his peak, especially on the fucking insane version of Bob Dylan’s “Outlaw Blues,” and on “Sure Thing,” which was from their excellent self-titled EP (included on Rhino’s The Days of Wine and Roses reissue), which had just been released. Although there is a definite fire in the air, there’s also a late-night drinking blues vibe going on as well, which seems fitting considering that it was recorded at 2:00 am. This contrast between a rowdy and excited crowd and a trio of long drawn out, but tight as tight jams, creates an array of unpredictable and powerful moments escaping from a band that is just playing with their audience of friends and drunkard, with a restrained and cocky composure. It’s no wonder that the legend about them that just grew (somewhat) out of control.

You might say that this isn’t their definitive document, but I beg to differ, this is The Dream Syndicate before people put ideas into their heads, and producers tried to turn the scene’s most accessible-sounding punk band into something that more closely sounded like their heroes and influences. Just try to give the horrible Out of the Gray a listen and I think that you’ll get my point. The Day Before Wine and Roses is heavy on The Velvet Underground of course (they can’t hide that one much), but you do finally get a sense of all of those obscure forces at work, that pushed the record obsessive Wynn out of the crowd and onto the stage in the first place.

1.25|

2006-10-13T09:07:00.000-04:00

So that new Robin Williams movie looks promising, I the way that it doesn’t fall into the “Patch Adams,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Bicentennial Man,” “Jack,” typology. Is he on drugs again? I hear he is on drugs again.

The Lindsay Dragged Out (Manup Music, 2006)

I’ve been eagerly waiting for this album to come out for a while (although I should give props to Manup Music, which really pushed this thing along quicker than one might expect from a new label), The Lindsay have been a band that during my past year in Columbus, Ohio really made a name for themselves by their excellent live chemistry, always managing to pull out a great show- show after show. I loved seeing them live, but to be honest, when I would sober up in the morning (after the first couple of times that I saw them) I couldn’t remember anything specific about their songs… it was almost as if there was a void in their music. Of course, some people might think that to be a bad thing, but it actually popped my interest even more, so much so, that I ordered this baby the day that Manup put it up for pre-sale on their website (I found out that I was their first customer!) because I knew that once I heard it, the pieces would all fall into place. I couldn’t have been more right.

Recorded over at Columbus Discount this past summer, it sounds crisp and meaty, and in a weird way reminds me a little of the late great Blue Revision (who called it quits this past year) at times. Hey- in fact there’s a lot of bands that The Lindsay remind me of sometimes: X, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, The Beatles, Opal, The Breeders, Blur, The Wipers, Superdrag, Sonic Youth, The Wedding Present, Throwing Muses…etc. but the great thing about The Lindsay is that they (like The Blue Revision) don’t really sound like anything else, and I think that is partially because the songwriting on Dragged Out is so diverse. It’s hard to think that I used to think of their songs as one big indefinable blob, because they’ve got some excellent songwriters in their ranks, capable of creating a dark and romantic mood across the album that never recycles any ideas or structures. I also like the dynamic between guitarist Jon Olexovitch and bassist Gretchen Tepper, as their voices just simply melt into each other, but the effect is never falls static. The drummer James Lavery is minimal but brutally effective evoking, at times, Mo Tucker’s big drum, while Tom Schmidt and Olexovitch subversively turn this fucker into a great big fucking guitar album. I was going to say that it’s hard to pick out a favorite, but the swirling jangle of “Your Contemporaries” is an absolutely mesmerizing exercise in melody and dynamics… and while Dragged Out is compelling enough to make me listen to it over and over again, every time I hear “Your Contemporaries” chime in mid-way through, the hair on my neck stands on end. Great album.

1.24|

2006-10-12T00:15:00.000-04:00

I was working in the studio a couple weeks ago listening to an Art for Spastics (see entry 1.20) show that I had downloaded over dinner. It was a great show, and then I heard this fucking amazing song that had just embedded itself into my head. I just couldn’t escape from its hypnotic grip. I did some digging, kidd.

Pumice Yeahnahvienna (Soft Abuse, 2006)

“Brawl” was featured on Art for Spastics as a live (in-studio) recording that will hopefully be coming out soon via the KDVS label, but you know how these things go… but case in point, both versions sound like reverb drenched in magic. Seriously, MAAAN… magic. Yeahnahvienna is, remarkably, a live album, recorded two years ago during an artist residency in Vienna, Austria. I say remarkably because unlike all of those other four-track bedroom whack-offs, this guy, Stefan Neville, is an actual one-man noise band/singer. Hailing from- you guessed it- New Zealand, Neville is perhaps the most exciting thing happening there right now (at least of the stuff that has made it over to the States), but as it turns out Pumice is nothing new over there. He’s been performing and making DIY albums (primarily released on cassette) and singles for the past 15 years! I found an old website (here) which has a discography dating up to 2003 which is definitely worth having a look at, since it gives you a good idea of the level of prolificacy we’re talking about here. Anyways, back to Yeahnahvienna… this album is very complex in the way that Neville juxtaposes noise and song into a single performance of choreographed limbs and voice. ‘Noise’ as music is often criticized as not directly relating to the body, and in the past couple of years there has seemed to been a whole movement of bands which try to soften noise so that it more-often-than not exists as an additive creation; a backdrop to freak folk or whatever’s the hot deal. Here, Neville succeeds in marrying noise music to the intimate and personal scale of the body. Limited by contradictory rhythms and gravity, you can directly hear the tension of the body being affected by the physical constants of the universe in every nuance (MAAAN… I’m telling you, it’s magic).

The album as a whole can be split, albeit somewhat superficially, down the middle, dividing the more noise-oriented and the more song-oriented, but really the only significant difference is whether or not the piece is an instrumental or contains singing, as the two sides of Pumice seem to be completely codependent and can not be isolated from each other without collapsing into mediocrity. Thankfully, this tension between the song and the noise is surprisingly relentless.

Yeahnahvienna could be kissing cousins to At Swim Two Birds' neo-classic rumination on the darkness (and a Vertical Phil favorite), Quigley's Point, but most people seem to compare Neville with fellow New Zealand native Alastair Galbraith (who made a name for himself throughout the 80’s and 90’s with an excellent solo career and fronting a pair of short-lived oddball groups such as Plagal Grind and my favorite, The Rip). That comparison is also fitting, especially when you hear him on the opening track, “Abominable,” which is almost unsettlingly gentle (in all but subject matter) compared to the whole of Yeahnahvienna. That’s not to say that this is a difficult album to get into, if anything, it is inviting and intriguing rather than disorienting, and its complexity is masked by passages of intoxicating beauty which just seem to reverberate within the noise long after the passage has slipped in the next subsequent movement. The depth of Yeahnahvienna, opens itself to be dissected analytically, and ultimately is an interesting and boundlessly rewarding album- easily one of the year’s best. I can’t believe that I missed him on his US tour this summer, but I was a few months late in moving to Rhode Island. Shit luck, shit luck, in the meantime, there’s plenty here for me to enjoy. Get over to the Soft Abuse website and grab yourself a copy before you start drafting up your best-of ’06 lists.

1.23|

2006-10-11T18:06:00.000-04:00

I was startled by a mouse run across the floor while I was writing this review, and when I heard some weird crunching noises from beyond my headphones, I thought that maybe the mice had gotten into the dog’s food, and so I got up slowly… leaned over to check out the closet, aka “the scene of the crime.” The next thing I know is that my laptop (the next few moments were like a whirlwind of trauma) which was sitting on a tray table was teetering on the edge of the table and then I feel this pull on my foot and then CRASH my computer hits the ground (seemingly unharmed) and I quickly tumble down with it. Yep, this is quite embarrassing, but the companion tray table was somewhere caught in between the wall, couch, the computer, and myself, and I took the motherfucker out. It’s in like four pieces, which would in the past not be a problem, but I’m just hoping that the girlfriend has a sense of humor about the thing. I'm pretty sure that she will... anyhoo

The Black Swans Sex Brain (Bwatue, 2006)

I don’t know how Vertical Phil was able to convince Jerry DeCicca to give him a cd-r of Where is David Blue Tonight? I have a hunch that Phil swayed DeCicca with his unmistakable drunken charm and most likely an oath not to play it for anybody, but I think that Phil went straight over to my house with it and immediately put it on. I had seen DeCicca play solo a few months before and was pretty damn impressed, but I had yet to see his band before I heard the recording; I think Phil and I went to every single Black Swans show for about a year and a half because the album struck such a chord with us. This was in the formative stages of The Vertical Slum, and I remember coming up with tons of questions for an interview that Phil would go on to do with DeCicca for one issue. Usually, it’s a bit difficult to come up with interesting questions for interviews, but we had pages (literally) of questions that we were dying to ask him, and frankly we were really impressed with all of his answers. DeCicca’s style of singing (which is typically the make-it-or-break-it) at the time was so fragile, delicate and intentional that it was almost overpowering on The Black Swans’ debut album, which would eventually be renamed Who Will Walk In The Darkness With You? before finding release on the small label Delmore Recording Society almost three years ago.

Who Will Walk In The Darkness With You? was my pick for best debut of the year (by a longshot, actually), and this new self-released EP is probably gonna end up on this year’s best EP list, as it is absolutely fantastic. Sex Brain is evident of DeCicca’s incredible ability to fine-tune The Black Swans approach. In a way, they are almost the complete opposite of the band that they used to be. Of course, with the exception of the core group of DeCicca and violinist Noel Sayre we are talking about a different band. The Black Swans of Darkness were soft, subtle, and haunting, but on Sex Brain, and especially on the shocker opening track “I.D.W.2 F.” The Black Swans are a loose, and uninhabited, and dare I say… joyous folk unit. Very odd to think of these guys as joyous, but there is a definite excitement in the room when you are running on all cylinders and you bet your buck that it’s evident on this ep. Even the subject matter is a bit lighter, or I should say, a bit more humorous… let me quote a few lines from each of the songs to illustrate my point (*in hindsight I think that Pitchfork may have also quoted some lines when they reviewed this, but I can't really remember... anyway, to quote lines from this EP is almost irresistable, because they are so elegantly romantic, humorous, and crude):

“I don't want to fuck/ I just want to spoon/ I'm too sensitive of a man/ To be any closer to you.”
(the great opening line from “I.D.W.2 F.)

“Tequila, my friend/ She pulled my pants down/ and said she knows/ My girlfriend.”
(from “Friends”)

“It was sweat and shampoo/ Now it's cocoa butter lotion/ and I dream of your hair/ In my afternoon motion/ And your hands/ Are better than mine/ and your hands/ Aren't here at my side.”
(from “Your Hands”)

“Can you feel them swell beside you?/ Shoo the fruit flies out of your way/ It's been like this for two months/ Are we too good of friends to play?”
(from “Dark Plums”)

and we’ll end it like this:
“My chest on your back/ My lips tickling your arm/ I'm counting brown freckles/ You're making silky white tar/ Will we wear out our welcome/ As closeness grows dull?/ Our bodies too familiar/ My hard-on sinks into a lull.”
(from “My Lips”)

Yes, yes, yes, Sex Brain gets my full A+ endorsement; if you were not a fan of their heavy debut, give this one a shot, because frankly it is better… which should speak volumes as to the greatness of this little five-songer.

1.22|

2006-10-06T16:23:00.000-04:00

Cheer on the Buckeyes tomorrow as they take on... Bowling Green?! Yes, it should be a blow out, so I will probably be spending my Saturday (for the first time in a month in a half) not watching College Football, but instead pounding some beers with the girlfriend down in Newport for Oktoberfest. Sounds good to me.

Kousokuya First Live 1979 (PSF, 2006)

After reading, um, Roland Woodbe’s “voicemail from a concerned mother” review of this disc last week over on the Siltblog, and I had a hunch that this was going to be good (or at least interesting) so I visited my old pal Forced Exposure and ordered myself a copy. Now, I admit that I know next to nothing about the Japanese underground, psychedelic speed freak scene, but I don’t think you really need to be up to snuff to dig this one. First Live 1979 is immediate yet expansive, and is definitely going to make you want to do some research. As you may have guessed from the title, this album captures Kousokuya at their most embryonic, a stage of the band that has only this new release to serve as a document. The three-song set warms up with girl-voice bark 'n wail, over rolling random guitar and drums, and equaled by the industrial synthesizer. I don’t know if it is just because I have been listening to Trout Mask Replica a few times in the last couple days, but Kousokuya’s vocalist, Mick, reminds me of a female Beefheart in the way that she can couple tuneful melody with creative expressiveness. Ok, I admit that that might have been a little far-fetched, but I think that you get the point: that this stuff is more from a Beefheart/Psych Rock tradition, than anything punk or "post"-punk. Eventually the noise morphs into a steady beat and melody, but the guitar, girl-voice and synthesizer play hopscotch to the bass-drum, creating an intoxicatingly modern dance… and Chuck Berry is nowhere to be found. To top it all off, Fumio Kosakai (of The Incapacitants, Hijokaidan and C.C.C.C. infamy) articulately recounts the artistic de-evolution of Kousokuya, which was thankfully in both Japanese and English. Very interesting stuff, indeed; chaotic and deconstructive, but (I swear) you’ll actually enjoy listening to it, much less obsessively guarding your copy from wear and thievery (I'm still bitter about some jerk that stole a bunch of my shit, while I was in the Berkshire Mountains for a few months of the summer of 2002).

Where was I? Oh yeah, Kousokuya is so good, that I wonder why I've never heard their name uttered in hipspeak? Maybe I have, but after hearing this you'll find that they are the type of band that you'll never forget. Kosakai nicely wraps up his piece with emphasis on the obscurity of this incendiary recording: “The fact that that Instant of Illumination should have been captured on tape and now released on CD is nothing short of miraculous. But it’s a miracle that many music fans deserve to hear.” I can't help but to agree, First Live 1979 is miraculously timeless, in every sense of the word.

1.21|

2006-10-06T00:16:00.000-04:00

I haven’t slept since Tuesday night, and last night I was caught in a trance.

Roy Montgomery 324 E. 13th Street #7 (Drunken Fish, 1999)

As a founding member of the Pin Group, Roy Montgomery would usher in a good decade for NZ’s Flying Nun. I bet you thought that The Clean’s “Tally Ho” was legendary label’s first single, but no, it was “Ambivalence,” a haunted dirge obviously taking cues from the Joy Division, but worryingly in its near effortless depression. Good stuff, yes. A few years ago, Siltbreeze collected the Pin Group’s history with a self-titled trip to the dark side of the Kiwi-craze shadow that is definitely worth spending a little time with.

Much like his contemporary and occasional collaborator Bill Direen (Bilders, Bilderene, Die Bilder Schwimmen in Der See, et al) Montgomery never really fell in good with anything in New Zealand, and has remained the outcast in the pop circle, and the silent speaker amidst Xpressway’s noise. In the 1990’s he formed the also (all so) impressive Dadamah, and finally found a proper home with a pair of acute labels as Kranky and Drunken Fish, who kept his basement tapes within arms reach for the curious. In 1999, after a slew of critically acclaimed solo releases which followed the demise of Dadamah, Drunken Fish released this compilation of ultra-mega-rare singles (including one from his legendary post-Pin Group… group, The Shallows) rounded out with a few unreleased tracks.

The tone is stoic, and incapable of connection; the tough guy act that Calvin Johnson was too child-like to wholly pull off. The music is also evocative of the Beat Happening, but lacking the beat to ground the reverberation. The percussion-less arrangement of these tracks transform these simple chord progressions into obscured mantras from which Montgomery narrates. Conjured of the shadows, the apparition is always at your feet, and song-after-song, single-after-single, you’ll succumb the uneasy stillness with each sporadic shift of intonation; the momentary spasm of consciousness when you are next to asleep.

1.20|

2006-10-04T15:51:00.000-04:00

Ok, so activity on this ‘ere blog has slowed down a bit since I went back to school, but I assure you that it is only temporary. Unfortunately I have had and will continue to have (for about a week or so) a series of long nights in the studio. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to sit down and write up something, but I’ve been listening to a lot of great stuff lately… and will be doing some writing as soon as a get a little free time. You can expect a review or two to be posted this weekend, but in the meantime, you should really check out this incredible radio show out of Davis (California) on KDVS, Art for Spastics.

The 2-3 hour program is as entertaining as it is insightful. Although the wide range of material may not appeal to all tastes, the program’s coagulant is a punk DIY ideology… and it is nice to hear a knowledgeable host try to make sense of it all. DJ Rick has a simple mission: “While there's many great music bloggers mining overlooked should-be classics of a bygone era, and others scoping out new and exciting music, I hope this one can strike a balance and teach you something about how all the music under the sun is related,” and he really nails it. Instead of the narrow and exclusive point of view you might expect from such the quintessential record nerd/collector scum, the program comes across as adventurous and all-inclusive as you would hope after reading DJ Rick’s mission statement. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and download or stream a show and spend a little time exploring some adventurous and wild music that you will have a hard time hearing anywhere else.

1.19|

2006-09-27T20:58:00.000-04:00

Ya hear that the great Jay Hinman has called it a day over at Agony Shorthand? Yeah, it kind of took me by surprise as well. Agony Shorthand was one of the best; a great source for digging up great bands and albums from the past and present, and the writing was fantastic. Hinman’s serious devotion to quality writing day after day on Agony Shorthand has pushed blogging to a new level of credibility; leaving traditional music websites crying in the dust. If you were not a reader of the site, please follow the link here and peruse through his archives, you’ll find three and a half years of album and single reviews, fanzine reviews, “overrated” call-outs, interviews and more. I’m just glad that he’s going to keep the site up so that we can all enjoy Agony Shorthand’s great legacy. Ok, on a bit of a brighter note, IT'S MY BIRTHDAY… and it looks like Sub Pop doesn’t suck no more.

Dead Moon Echoes of the Past (Sub Pop, 2006)

I don’t know where this one came from; releasing a two-disc “Best-Of” compilation of the Oregon-based Dead Moon. I was completely in the dark about these guys until a friend from Boston told me about them two years ago. He hadn’t heard them either, but said that he heard they were great, so he wondered if I had any of their shit. I didn’t, and I completely forgot about Dead Moon until I saw Mike Rep and Mac Sutherland from Siltbreeze sporting matching black Dead Moon tees at the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments reunion show in Columbus this past summer. When I saw this compilation hit the shelves this week, I couldn’t hold out any longer. Hey, this thing is great! I went home and did some digging on Dead Moon, and found out that the singer Fred Cole had been in a garage band that had a track on Rhino’s Nuggets (the first one… cheese!). He then formed Dead Moon with his wife Toody, who plays the bass, and Andre Loomis on drums, in the late 1980’s, some twenty years after the Lollipop Shoppe’s “You Must Be a Witch.” It’s an interesting back story, so read up on it over on AllMusic or something, because my time is too valuable to waste on retyping.

Back to the good shit, and there’s plenty of it… Echoes of the Past was compiled by Fred Cole himself, and despite being deficient in the liner notes, they were nice enough to include a discography, ie guidebook for the soon to be obsessive. I count six LP’s and a ton of singles and compilation tracks, almost all from the Dead Moon’s own Tombstone (with the rare exception of a Sub Pop and a SFTRI), but my eyes are what they used to be, so don’t count me on it. I’m going to end up owning all of this shit sooner or later, because this compilation is fantastic; full of rock ‘n roll rituals and pitfalls. You can hear a little MC5 here, a little Love there, and a little Roky, but Dead Moon ain’t imitators. There is something so primal about everything on here despite covering a great span of years (1988-2004), the production, or lack thereof, just hits the nail on the head. Gritty and warm, yet so delicately mixed so that nothing gets lost or shortchanged, and they are such a great rock band that this formula is just as successful on the slower numbers as on the rockers. The thing I like the most about these guys, er… I should say the thing that surprises me the most about these guys are that they are actually quite a versatile band; their material isn’t really based in the Blues, or in Punk, or in Surf, Noise, or Hardcore, they are a band that play songs from the soul, and you can’t ever fake that. It’s completely unmistakable from the start of Echoes of the Past. I really can’t believe that Sub Pop went all-out on this, and even expanded it across two-discs (49 songs!), but I’m really glad that they did because this is sure to turn on a hell of a lot of people to the great Dead Moon, who are somewhat of an untainted, uninhibited living treasure. Oh yeah, and they probably should've called the thing Echoes of the Future.

1.18|

2006-09-22T17:01:00.000-04:00

This week was pretty hectic; hitting the books in the afternoon and working late in the studio, it's been a while since I've felt so industrious.

Amon Düül II Yeti (Revisited, 2006)

It took me a long time to want to hear this because after I bought their first album, Phallus Dei, I wasn't as blown away as I was hoping that I would be. When I saw that Revisited Records out of Germany (who have also released albums from some of the other lesser-known Krauts of the 70's: Kraan, Grobschnitt, Guru Guru, and Klaus Schulze) was going to reissue Yeti this summer I was a bit relieved that I wouldn't have to hunt it down like I did with Phallus Dei (which was also reissued). I finally picked it up today on a whim and it is incredible. Do what you must in order to hear this (if you haven't already). I'm looking forward to going back and giving Phallus Dei anoher chance, as soon as I give this one a rest... I'm guessing that it's gonna be a while.

In conclusion- hey, why doesn't this get mentioned when people talk about the greatest double-albums of all time?

1.17|

2006-09-16T16:45:00.000-04:00

I started writing a review yesterday for what might be Guided By Voices’ best ten minutes of bar breath, Fast Japanese Spin Cycle, but as I was writing it started raining more and more, and the apartment was getting dark so The Rock*A*Teens seemed like a better choice. Today is a new day; my Buckeyes won (still #1) and it feels great outside, real fall-like. I’m in a good mood and I was glad that I liked this:

Robert Pollard Normal Happiness (Merge, 2006)

I’m not going to lie, I love Guided By Voices. Thankfully my obsession has died down quite a bit over the past couple of years, but I’d be lying if I said that they were not influential in my music taste; they really opened the sonic gate for me and essentially inspired me to seek out great music, so for that I am eternally thankful. I was kind of afraid to hear From a Compound Eye (which was released only seven months ago!), because I thought that it might be more along the lines of a Fading Captain “curiosity” and less along the lines of Not in My Airforce or Waved Out. But I was really surprised and impressed by From a Compound Eye and I think that it was good for Pollard to release it via Merge Records, because it helped in avoiding comparison to his excellent Matador solo albums and established a new era of Pollard’s solo career. Pollard even survived his first solo tour, and left many people thinking that his Ascended Masters might have been the greatest band that has even backed the old sot. I’m sure the wealth of new material probably had a hand in that (I think even the Postal Blowfish seemed to be getting a little tired of hearing the same songs off of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes tour after tour). While From a Compound Eye was a sprawling double-album of metallic shock and majestic sweep, his latest, Normal Happiness, is on the other end of the Wizard’s rainbow; rooted in a quick and quirky structure, this is the album Pollard tried to make with Do the Collapse. There are very few synthesizers and shake-your-head-in-shame prog on this one, showing that either producer/one-man band Todd Tobias has restrained himself in the studio or Pollard himself has rekindled the simple formula that made Kid Marine, Waved Out, and Not in My Airforce so endearing and easy to like. I am really excited to hear these little pop songs on Pollard’s trek out to the East Coast in two months, because there are some extraordinary songs on Normal Happiness. Two of my favorites have to be “Rhoda Rhoda,” with its heavy chug and immediate hook, and “Whispering Whip,” which boasts a Superchunk of chorus and then is over before you can say… “precision auto.”

I think that Pollard pulled out yet another winner with Normal Happiness and those who picked up one of the many Fading Captain releases that were released since From a Compound Eye’s release in February will be relieved that the codger's skip has yet to slip. Go ahead and listen to it for yourselves for free over at Merge. I do have to say that this is one of the worst album covers I have ever seen. Why Bob, why? Oh, I guess that there will be a bonus for those of you actually pick up Normal Happiness as it comes with a nice little 15 song cd featuring Robert Pollard and the Ascended Masters (Tommy Keene, Jon Wurster, Jason Narducy and Dave Philips) live at the U.S. Bank Arena in Cincinnati, from this past June, when they opened for Pearl Jam. Yep. Great album... shitty artwork... a great first solo tour... with Pearl Jam... looks like it's two steps up and one step back.

1.16|

2006-09-15T17:52:00.000-04:00

There’s nothing like pouring rain on a cold Friday off the Coast to put you into a sleepy lull. Before heading over to the studio this morning I spent a half an hour trying to figure out what I wanted to listen to today; something to bring me up a bit, but not annoy the hell out of me by sunny cheer. I think I got it.

The Rock*A*Teens The Rock*A*Teens (Daemon, 1996)

I think I saw The Rock*A*Teens about five times in one year when I was at Ohio State- no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get away from them. They seemed to open up for every band that I was into at the time, but in hindsight The Rock*A*Teens were far cooler than any of the headliners that they would support (with the exception of Neil Hagerty on his first tour) it just took me a while to realize it. Their sets were always either great or terrible (there didn’t seem to be much of a middle ground), but they had a couple songs that were pretty fantastic and I presume that most of the stuff they were playing was off of their final album Sweet Bird of Youth. Fellow Marble Stature blog-man Jared Phillips had this album lying around his apartment on Summit and Lane and we drank a few beers to it. Was this really the same band?!! Not quite, guitarist and songwriter Kelly Hogan would leave The Rock*A*Teens after their second album, Cry, but I think that time has been very kind to The Rock*A*Teens, who, in the lifetime, never seemed to be able to pull themselves out of their supporting act hole. After hearing this album I picked up all of their other albums, and while each one is rewarding in its own right, this self-titled debut is the moneybag.

Singer Chris Lopez is a wildman; like Dana Hatch and Tom Shannon (of the also unappreciated Cheater Slicks), Lopez is a tortured rocker, bound for anonymity, destined to imbibe like a legend and leave a trail of words as the ultimate suicide note. But unlike the desperate voices of the Slicks, Lopez pushes himself into a frenzy shrieking at the top of his lungs and leaving his shaky laryngitis at the end of the crescendo. Of course, these over-the-top performances start wearing you down over the course of the album, but the inventive songwriting, like a collision of slightly out-of-tune R&B, surf, punk, gospel, rock ‘n roll, the Pixies and Pavement (for beginners) through a heap of reverb, is nothing but relentless.

The Rock*A*Teens are a group that need to be written about some more, because I would hate for such an unique band to be forgotten, especially when there is so much stuff out there right now reaping in critical acclaim when The Rock*A*Teens did it better ten years ago. Buy The Rock*A*Teens and talk some shit about all of the bands that try to sound like them and pass it off as something new; The Rock*A*Teens knew their history and created something that sounded like nothing that ever came before them. Wait; is that not the goal of all bands? Yeah, hearing this for the first time last summer was like a bitch-slap from the past... just listen to "The Ram's Den" and you'll feel the sting.

1.15|

2006-09-13T18:27:00.000-04:00

The airline lost my luggage, searched my luggage, confiscated my laptop, and ditched me on some pretzels on the connecting flight from Philly, but I made it to Providence safe and sound, followed by my luggage in the early morning hours of Sunday, September 10th. Meghan’s friends were in town visiting from Columbus, and they wanted to have a look at Boston while they were up here, so we had ourselves a little train ride on Sunday. I was a bit groggy from traveling, so I wasn’t too keen on taking a trip, but you got to bite your lip sometimes. As we were walking around Cambridge, I remembered that there was a Newbury Comics (see, I can get away with Newbury Comics because there’s enough there to entertain the group, if I would’ve mentioned the great Twisted Village I would probably still be up shit creek) nearby, so I thought I’d see if I could find something interesting.

Pere Ubu Why I Hate Women (Smog Veil, 2006)

I grabbed this right when I saw it, because I think that the store’s employees didn’t notice the release date of next week… but maybe they just didn’t care. Yeah, so not a whole lot of people probably care about Pere Ubu these days, sure they made more than their fair share of stinkers in the past (you can use your own judgment as to which phase is their worst), but you really can’t really say that Pere Ubu ever really abandoned their weird impulses, even at their most accessible (Cloudland, Worlds in Collision, Story of my Life). My brother, who was living in Cleveland at the time, picked up Ray Gun Suitcase at a Half-Price Books and played it for me in the car and I remember feeling really weird about music for a couple of months afterwards. I haven’t heard RGS’s follow-up Pennsylvania or 2002’s St. Arkansas, so I have been having some trouble finding an appropriate context for Why I Hate Women, so bear with me. First of all, Robert Wheeler’s playing on this album is impeccable; his EML synthesizer boldly sears, scratches, and colors the band’s rhythms with a combined sense of claustrophobia and magic that made those first three Ubu alums so groundbreaking; never questioning what Master Ravenstine would do? The drums are a prominent instrument in the album’s mix, and Steve Mehlman does well to provide a stable rock-beat throughout this very weird (you probably could’ve guessed that one) album, while guitarist Keith Moline and bassist Michelle Temple take turns pulling out of the middle’s murk. Even Jack and Robert Kidney from the Numbers Band (see post 1.05 for a review of their classic Jimmy Bell’s Still in Town) make appearances on Why I Hate Women, but you can’t talk much about a Pere Ubu album without talking about the big guy in front, David Thomas.

In an AllMusic review of St. Arkansas, Robert Doerschuk convincingly states Thomas’ case of being an equal of Tom Waits, and this album should do better to reaffirm his somewhat bold thesis. The two possess two of the most distinct voices of all time, but seem to be polar opposites of each other in terms of pitch and tone, but both are haunting and carnival-esque. Thomas’ voice takes on a unique tone for each song and his performances on Why I Hate Women are as electric as anything he did in the 70’s, but without the escapist excitement fueling the Cuyahoga. Here he is tired, frustrated and direct. Even on the charging “Caroleen,” which sounds a bit like a song off of The Breeders’ Title TK, if the Breeders would have been helmed by Black instead of Kim, Thomas is in contrast to the raging band that is backing him; barely able to keep up, never missing a beat, but baring his soul lost in amidst the clouded fury. It’s hard to find anything to criticize about this album, because it has a quality about it that is so deliberate and constructed, without ever sounding difficult or laborious. Every time I listen to Why I Hate Women, its dense layers reveal a new level of complexity and sophistication which is rarely seen in music these days, and when you do see it, is usually a product of ignorance rather than intelligence. This is probably the best thing that I’ve heard this year. Thanks Ubu, thanks!

1.14|

2006-09-08T08:04:00.000-04:00

I was going to write a review today, but I have all of my cds packed up and only have on hand some sentimental favorites to get me through my last day of work:

-84 Nash A Secret Reward (Insect Siren/We Want Action, 2003)
See post 1.13.
-Times New Viking Dig Yourself (Siltbreeze, 2005)
It was great getting to know these guys over the past year, their new mini-lp The Paisley Reich is going to be coming out on Siltbreeze in the next few months and it's fucking righteous man. It looks like it's next stop Matador, as the indie-powerhouse has been vieing to release the next string of little TNV classics.
-The Double Palm Fronds (Catsup Plate, 2004)
I got this along with A Secret Reward and the Moc Records comp because I remember listening to Loose in the Air with Vertical Phil back in September of last year, but I figured that I would look this one up and I am really liking it right now. The Double is about 1000x better than the Animal Collective.
-84 Nash The Kings of Yeah (Rockathon, 1998)
Yeah!!! ...so fucking good.
-Blue Diamond Phillips Presents Volume 1: This is My Life (Moc, 2000)
This comp had an 84 Nash song that I didn't have, so I decided to pick it up. M.O.T.O.'s "Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance to the Radio" is not the same version that's on Kill M.O.T.O., and the Kleenex Girl Wonder song is pretty good too, but (no surprise) it's 84 Nash's "I'm Not Famous, I'm Nobody" steals the show in my book. James Brent's drumming will make you rubberneck on the bridge.
-The Stapler Metaphysical Haircut (Columbus Discount, 2006)
I came to Columbus last June with the goal to record and release this album, and it finally got an offcial release a couple of weeks ago via Matador Direct; listening to this is always going to bring back some great memories.

My time in Columbus have been great; thanks to everyone who made it such a great experience for me. Keep Daymon Dodson alive and well, stay close, hold your heads up high, and keep in touch. I'm going to miss you all and am anxious to see everybody on December 22nd at the Carabar for The Stapler's homecoming show (other bands will be announced closer to the date). You'll hear from me sooner though; look for my next post this Monday or Tuesday.

1.13|

2006-09-07T09:17:00.000-04:00

I got an email the other day from Insound- one of those weekly sale updates. They are having a “Back to School” trivia quiz with a new question every day for a month (I think), I’ve been trying not to buy anything before my move (in two days) but after shooting 3 for 3, I decided to use my 20% off to pick up an album that I’ve owned on (count ‘em) 3 different occasions; I first picked it up at a show at Oldfields, and then Vertical Phil gave me an extra copy he had on hand, and then this one from Insound… which will hopefully not be lost or stolen; I guess I’ll have to keep it under lock and key.

84 Nash A Secret Reward (Insect Siren/We Want Action, 2003)

I first reviewed A Secret Reward for the Vertical Slum’s inaugural issue (Davy Jones’ Looker) and, at the time, I really was having some mixed emotions about it. I had almost worn out my copy of Band for Hire awaiting the new album, which was highly anticipated by 84 Nash’s growing fan base, so much that rumors of it’s production, recording, title, artwork, release date, and format circulated up and down High Street. I remember one rumor that the album would only be released on vinyl, which made me quite nervous because I didn’t own a turntable at the time. I found myself working at a summer camp in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts during the summer of 2002, and I remember calling up my girlfriend to see if there was any development on the new 84 Nash album. No shit. It was a cold rainy day in the early months of 2003, when I first heard A Secret Reward; Jeff Fernengel (painter, driving instructor, noisemaker in the Tree of Snakes, and my pizza brother) called me up on a Saturday morning looking to get some chicken wings and he flashed a burnt copy of the puppy. He gave me permission to walk it to a campus computer lab so that I could secretly burn a copy for myself. I spent the entire walk to Brown Hall flipping through the tracks trying to find my favorite 84 Nash song, and live staple, “Tired of You.” AND IT WAS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND! I just figured it was a mistake, but sure enough it was saved for their next album, which as of September 7, 2006, has yet to be (and will probably never be) released. A couple of months later I went to an 84 Nash show at Oldfields (about two weeks before their release show) and they had a couple copies of it, down low, for sale at the show. I didn’t have a cent to my name, but Adam Anderson (Tree of Snakes drummer) bought me a copy from merch-man Doug Elliott for something like $8. Why such a long-winded history of this album? I’ll tell you why- because I had to go through years of torment in order to finally hear this, so you should have to wade through some idiot-speak in order to get to the meat. When I reviewed it for the Slum about 6 months later, I wanted to write about it, because there was something so compelling about the album, but at the same time I was a bit disappointed with it, because my expectations were just multiplying in my mind with each rumor and each day. I let Shy Girl borrow it up in Providence and she informed me after hearing it that the loan was permanent, so when Vertical Phil gave me a copy last September, I hadn’t heard it in a while and it seemed to sound a little more natural than I remembered. I lost Phil’s copy back in March of this year, so I decided to pick it up before it becomes as scarce as everything else that they have released. I am so glad that I did, because I think that I have finally gotten over the shell shock of my initial response and I can now, three years wiser, truly enjoy the bizarre album that A Secret Reward is.

The first thing that about A Secret Reward that sets it apart from the two previous 84 Nash albums is the production. It’s as clear as day; instead of relying on the mid-fi mud to thicken up their sound, keyboards were used to fill in the gaps with extra hooks, creating a dense texture to the powerful live sound that they have. Drummer James Brent pounds away with accuracy and abandon, and finds melody within his percussion; a quality not found on previous albums. Kevin Elliott’s vocals are clean enough to hear the lyrics for a change, but still retain the distortion that made his voice so unique and charming in their early stages. And the guitars… bassist JP Hermann and guitarist Andy Hampel are playing so tight, that, like in “Mathematical Park” and “She’s a Warrior,” they seem to trade off lead and rhythm at every hook; creating a intertwining frenzy of buzzing power. I was put off by what I thought was a lack of creativity, but now I think that I just couldn’t quite grapple with the complexity to each of these songs. A Secret Reward is simultaneously their most structured of the three albums but it is also their weirdest. They leave their Guided By Voices comparisons spun out in the dust; and have seemed to bring themselves to a new sound that is all theirs. Possibly the closest thing to this would be The Thermals, but them northwesterners don’t even come close to matching the versatility and explosiveness of the 84 Nash we see here. If you haven’t heard A Secret Reward yet, pick one up from Insound or We Want Action before it’s too late- just be sure to be patient with it, it’s rewards are well worth the effort.

1.12|

2006-09-06T07:56:00.000-04:00

Last week I wrote about one of the most beloved of the bands that ever came out of New Zealand, the Verlaines. I went to Used Kids on Saturday morning right when it opened at 10, to avoid the Campus Buckeyes madness and mayhem, and like I was saying in the previous post, came upon a cd by a band who’s name I’ve heard a few times while waist-deep in Kiwi waters a few years back.

Cyclops Goat Volume (IMD, 1994)

I first heard about Cyclops from Drag City’s I Heard the Devil Calling My Name seven-inch, on which they make an appearance. Now, I’ve never heard the aforementioned seven-inch, but I did some digging online and this Goat Volume compilation cd came up via Peter Jefferies entry on Trouser Press. It turns out that he was playing drums for Cyclops in their three years of activity, 1991-1994. Yeah, yeah, Jeffries drums for most every band on the Xpressway, so nothing new there, but what really got me is that Cyclops featured bassist/singer Kathy Bull from the completely overlooked and avoided (probably because of their unfashionable round glasses and long church-lady floral print dresses) mid-80’s Flying Nun outfit Look Blue Go Purple. If you haven’t heard any Look Blue Go Purple, do yourself a favor and check them out; they are one of those weird girl-groups who weren’t so much The Slits as they were a cross between Young Marble Giants and The Monkees. Now back to Cyclops… I listened to this on the second half of an hour car ride, expecting to take it out after a song or two, because I just figured that it was going to be soaking in Xpressway murk (I did get this in the Avant-Garde section). Jefferies signature double bass-drum pedal wallop is always an immediate attention-grabber, but wait: “is that a melody?” There’s Kathy Bull for you. After listening to this thing a couple times through, I finally looked at the liners last night and what I heard turned out to be quite different from the truth. I thought Bull was one of (at least) two female singers, and there was one male singer (not Jefferies- you can tell his frog croak from about a mile away), and at least two guitarists within the wall of harmonious din. I was pretty surprised that there is actually only one guitarist, Bruce Blucher, and that Blucher and singer Andre Richardson were actually singing the songs that I thought Bull was singing along with. Their combined voices bear an uncanny resemblance to Adam and Beth of Times New Viking, especially on “9 Unknown Men,” which is a raging punk rave-up bound in a tight albeit simple structure of verse and chorus. It’s worth the price admission alone, especially if you are looking for one of those great, “what-the?!!” anthems for a mix-tape. Not the case with most of this lesser known, or in this case almost completely unknown, New Zealand groups, Goat Volume is really solid; venturing from dark-folk, melodic punk, spoken word, and filled in the gaps with memorable kiwi-rock (reminiscent of The Exploding Budgies, Look Blue Go Purple or the Victor Dimisich Band). I was wondering why this never came out on Flying Nun, but it kind of makes sense because Flying Nun was putting out garbage by 1994, and these guys seemed to operate as one of those anomaly bands hovering around the Xpressway camp and still making interesting music, like the 3D’s, the Cakekitchen or the Terminals. Cyclops is easily as good as the best of them, (and “9 Unknown Men” might be the great lost NZ single) although they seem to only exist as a minor stop in the path of their well-known drummer. Next time you go out to the record store be sure to cruise the cheap bins for this, because it’s one of those albums that you don’t see very often at all, and when you do it’s either $5 or $50, and everything always sounds better when you’re on the winning end.

1.11|

2006-09-05T13:43:00.000-04:00

So there was a “down low” New Bomb Turks show at the Carabar this past Saturday night- kind of a coincidence because they last played Columbus a week before I moved to Rhode Island two years ago. I got the call about the secret show from CDR co-chief Burger J about two weeks ago, who wanted me to draft up some fliers, to which I responded (more or less) “why? …That sucker’s gone be packed.” I just figured that word of mouth alone is going to put the hot spot at capacity… and it was. Some pre-show drinking occurred at the House of Pleasure on the occasion of the Buckeyes’ season opener, but the party got moved over to the Outer Spacist compound smack dab in the woods of West Tulane. We put on a Feelies album and lost track of our minds, and almost missed Necropolis kick-off spot; luckily we only missed two songs because thems on fire. Probably the best set I’ve seen them play, but who am I kidding, they’re always great. Grafton staggered onstage and walloped with some dirty ass rock ‘n roll. I leaned over to Adam Smith during their first song (and first song on their new album Jumpstart Wire), “Never Had Less,” and said, “I just hope they play the whole fucking album.” Sadly they only got about halfway in then they decided to call it a night, I probably would’ve been pissed if I weren’t so excited to see the Turks.

When the Turks played Skully’s two years ago with The Spitzz and Mike Rep and the Quotas, the place was beyond crowded even though the Skully’s is at least twice the size of the Carabar (and about half the cool). So I was pretty glad that the Comets on Fire show at Little Brother’s helped distract enough people to make the Carabar attendance bearable. I always wondered what it must’ve been like to see the Turks back at Stache’s in 1992, when Destroy-Oh-Boy! was just the word on the street, and Saturday night was about as close as I’m ever gonna get. They were on fire. The crowd up front was rowdy and packed in tight, and when Eric Davidson hopped up on stage we all just realized how intimate of a stage we’re dealing with at the Carabar, and everybody just exploded with wild furor upon hearing Jim Weber's first riff on “Id Slips in,” from their second album Information Highway Revisited. And the momentum never stopped. Even when Don Bovee took a nasty spill trying to get onstage to sing Batman, he eventually sopped up the blood from the throbbing gash on his forehead, stood up and started singing his signature tune; thus turning his serious fall into his crowning moment. After the Grafton set I stockpiled 4 cans of Pabst and put them safely by the PA monitor, but after the first five songs, I could hardly drink ‘em and decided to use the beers for some beer showers during “Sucker Punch,” “Tail Crush,” “The Anal Swipe,” “Tattooed Apathetic Boys,” “Born Toulouse-Lautrec,” and even had a few drops for their encore closer, “Last Lost Fight,” which the rocked the crowd so hard that I was flung up on stage. I think every member of The Feelers crowd surfed, and Davidson crowd surfed on a few occasions, it was like seeing my first punk show all over again. There was an after party at the Outer Spacist West Tulane compound, but it didn’t really matter, I was rocked so hard that my mind was completely blown; I sat in a chair with a blank expression hearing the Flamin’ Groovies, but still listening to the Turks in my head. I couldn’t even listen to anything on Sunday and drove around in complete silence. On Saturday morning I went to Used Kids and found Cyclops’ Goat Volume for $5 in the avant-garde section and that finally lulled me awake from my coma on Monday afternoon. I’m going to write a review for it tomorrow, so check back for that.

1.10|

2006-09-01T13:40:00.000-04:00

I used to work in a computer lab at Ohio State’s School of Greed (pretty punk, huh?) for a couple of years. This one summer I worked there and it was one of the most boring experiences of my life. I ended up spending every paycheck online buying cd’s and records, because I was so bored. I was even buying so much stuff that I would get bored with buying new shit, so then I took to reading about music via the internet, and I think that’s when I finally got beyond the initial surface of New Zealand’s big three: The Clean, The Chills and the Verlaines. It’s kind of weird thinking of those three great bands as the three entry points into the epicenter of the cool that was New Zealand throughout the 1980’s, because their stuff was actually a lot harder to come by than the still-great but far more obscure or “out-there” stuff from the time. I still challenge you to find The Clean’s Compilation or Oddities, or The Chills Brave Worlds or their singles collection Kaleidoscope World or anything from the Verlaines with the exception of their last three albums. Luckily each of those groups has an anthology-type release that still is in print (although The Clean Anthology is the only one that is really worth your time), but Heavenly Pop Hits and You’re Just Too Obscure For Me are just the tip of the iceberg… put in a little extra effort and you’ll end up tracking this stuff down from all over world. And hey, although this is what I consider the “big bopper”; one of those albums you listen to for months on end, it still is able to surprise. Are we past the age when a compilation could be more than the sum of its parts... sucka?

Verlaines Juvenilia (Flying Nun, 1993)

You probably already know the kick off track, “Death & The Maiden.” It’s the one that has the “Verlaine, Verlaine… etc” chorus (oh yeah… that one!) so I’m not going to waste hours going into how it’s the most amazing song, and how Malkmus (true fact) tried to rip it off for “Box Elder.” Graeme Downes was a genius. He’s still alive, so when I say was, it’s because he hasn’t put anything out since that odd solo album that Matador put out a long, long time ago. I haven’t checked any facts in a few years, but the last I heard he is a music professor at a College down in New Zealand. Yeah, I think he has a degree or two in music, but don’t hold that against him… it’s not his fault that music majors tend to be in only the absolute worst bands of all time. I think that has to do mostly with those shitheads studying Rush albums with a metronome and diet Dr. Pepper in their chubby hands. Anyway, Downes was one of those clever cats: able to understand the entire evolution of music, and translate his vast knowledge into complex compositions that never feel complicated or overindulgent. In that way he is not unlike Richard Thompson, John Cale or maybe Brian Eno. His voice is yearning (like Robert Smith but minus the clownish bits) and he just shreds through his guitar strings strumming like an epileptic in a strobe light on the hits: “Pyromanic,” “New Kind of Hero,” and my personal favorite “Crisis After Crisis.” Hell, they’re all hits! Try not to jerk a tear for “Joed Out,” it’s one of those tortured lover pieces, but devoid of the crap that makes chicks want to ax their serious singer/songwriter (soon to be) ex-boyfriend types.

It’s a bit hard to believe that these collected singles, which were released in such close proximity to each other, were followed up by two albums (Hallelujah All the Way Home and Bird Dog) that are almost of the same high caliber; that’s probably because Downes spent something like three years writing these singles before the group even went public. "Haste makes Waste," right? The Verlaines, who were a three-piece mind you, were rounded out by bassist Jane Dodd, who would go on to join the great twee-pop group the Able Tasmans (who have recently, well… within the last ten years, released an impressive compilation Songs for the Departure Lounge, and it’s on Flying Nun of course), and drummer Robbie Yeats, who left the band to form The Dead C. The fucking Dead C. Graeme Downes wasn't the only genius working the wheel here; it makes you wonder the size of impact that these early works left on the whole of New Zealand. Remarkable. Hell, I’ve got to get back to work… I can’t pull another “long lunch” this week, track down Juvenilia, it’s just one of those things you got to hear. Still, the defining moment from perhaps the best band of the 1980’s that most people claim to have heard, but most likely never have.

1.09|

2006-08-30T22:54:00.000-04:00

3 from the Listening Station, 2006 so far...

The more I make these nerdy Best of the year lists, the more I realize that every year is a good year for records... the variables for how I feel about the year are really all about me: what i happen to hear, what moods i happen to be in, what albums are recommended to me, what albums i "find". No matter what, I'm always going back and grabbing something from the recent passed that i "missed". This is one of those years where my major transitions in life have encouraged my ear to search for the familiar, the accessible and the reliable. Here's three of the many albums consistently spinning in the philmobile:

Fortunately for me: Touch & Go's brooding yet romantic indie rock outfit The Black Heart Procession released their 5th studio album, The Spell this year. Like clockwork- The BHP deliver winding and eerie piano driven tales of love and loss on this one. The production and instrumentation are extremely consistent with those of their previous album, Amore Del Tropico, and executes the kind of sweeping and enticing melancholy one often finds in bands like Mercury Rev or even Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. Solid.

And then there is Morrissey's Ringleader of the Tormentors. Now don't get me wrong folks.... I'm not one of those people you'd be likely to find front row at a Moz show throwing his shirt at the last of the famous international playboys- but we're gonna have to face the fact that we're very lucky this man continues to enlighten us with his witty and tortured songwriting. ...Tormentors is no exception to this man's consistently amazing output. His single- "You Have Killed Me" is another heartstopping heartbreaker. Oh Morrissey how I hope you retain your angst and continue your solo work and refrain from lending your talent to the highest bidding indie rock band (see: Johnny Marr joins Modest Mouse). There really is no such thing in life as normal...

If you know me, you know I'm a sucker for most things Thrill Jockey. Besides the obvious Tortoise Box Set that is well worth the cash... the interesting and worthy yet somewhat lacking Extra Golden...and the always incredible Howe Gelb... But....my favorite of the last few years, CALIFONE, are soon to release Roots and Crowns. Since this album has yet to be released, I'll put it simply: this is the Califone every Califone fan wants to hear. A mature combination of the sensibilites of their last two Thrill Jockey releases: Heron King Blues and Quicksand/Cradlesnakes- Production by Boxhead Ensemble conductor Michael Krassner... Americana mutations by way of Tim Rutili & Co.- this one is so close to perfect...If you like that sort of thing that is.

1.08|

2006-08-29T08:10:00.000-04:00

So I finally figured out the problem that I have with the whole “power-pop” thing: the power. Where is it? Most of the power-pop crap I’ve heard is polite and overtly anal; I guess that’s the crowd that we’re dealing with anyways, so I guess the dogs reflect the owners after all. I think that those first three Cheap Trick albums just decimated all of the power out of power-pop, leaving the rest of the popsters to cruise on the fumes. Nearly two years ago, however, Chicago-based reissue elitists the Numero Group unleashed the double disc Yellow Pills: Prefill compilation and became a minor phenomenon. The compilation was, for many, the introduction into the Numero Group reissues (which have gone on to be quite popular and respected) because the material was so drastically different from the NPR-friendly releases. Although it was clear that Yellow Pills main-man Jordan Oakes has got to have quite an impressive collection of power-pop records, a lot of the material was kind of a snooze; real wimpy-like. That being said, all it took was one fucking righteous song to make the whole double disc worthwhile, and Prefill has “The Sun” by Toms, which is possibly one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard… which alone is worth the $20 for the compilation, without it… I’m not so sure. That being said, if one of the leading authorities in power-pop criticism can only find one diamond in the rough in his big moment to shine, I would say that the whole power-pop thing doesn’t have a whole lot to offer me. A few weeks ago, I picked up the Hyped to Death #101 compilation and came across this song called “Person to Avoid” from this group from Lawrence, Kansas called the Regular Guys and just couldn’t get it out of my head. It sounded like it came from a practice tape from the first New York Dolls practice; everybody gets together and tries to play along with a riff (or in this case a chorus) that the guy who started the band came up with even though he doesn’t know how to play any instruments. “Person to Avoid” is just one of those great songs that inspires people that rock ‘n roll is in the flesh and not in the know-how.

Regular Guys Jayhawk Pop (Hyped to Death/Teenline, 2004)

I didn’t really like this one at first; in fact, it kind of pissed me off, seeing as I was so excited for it to show up in the mailbox. All of the trappings that irritated me about power-pop to begin with, were in full effect from the get-go, and I didn’t even see “Person to Avoid” on the track list. I just tossed it to the back seat of the car and put the Hyped to Death #101 comp back in. I noticed last night that “Person to Avoid” was in fact on Jayhawk Pop, and I decided to fall asleep to the album last night after watching the, always exciting, Emmy Awards show. I really started to like it, and have been listening to it all day at work today. The Regular Guys only had one release in their two-years (1979-1981), that being a little four-song ep that Trouser Press named “one of the best… of the…” or something. Those four songs are the first four tracks on Jayhawk Pop, but are kind of the worst four songs on the whole collection. Now that I’ve listened to this thing a bunch of times, I’ve gotten past the pussy production-style of the ep, and have determined that the songs aren’t that bad, but they are still nowhere near as good as the eleven studio demos, and the ten great live songs that round out the release. I guess a band breaking up after one release isn’t that bad, because they were spared from a producer coming in and molesting all of these great songs (we are dealing with power-pop guys though, I’m sure they’re still quite pleezed with the quality of their sole ep… perfectionists, hmph). From what I read, the bassist’s sister joined the band and although there is only one song on here that has her singing on it and it has quite a nice little melody, and like the varying fidelity, really helps break up the album from sound too similar, it’s almost a shame that more of her material isn’t on here (but hey, maybe she only wrote only great song, and in that case, one great is better than a bunch of duds).

Although I initially thought this might have been a waste of $9, I have really grown to like this little release a lot, and it’s only taken a few listens to do the trick. If you are familiar with those first two Wilco albums, Log, Bill Fox's Shelter From The Smoke and maybe Grateful Dead's Terrapin Station you might like dig on the Regular Guys, because some of the stuff on here is reminiscent to these ears. Songs such as “Let’s Dance,” “Love and Wrong,” “Leave,” “I Don't Wanna See You Tonight,” “Person to Avoid,” and the live version of “I Forgot the Flowers,” are going to inevitably make appearances on some future mix tapes, and those are only the songs that motivated me by “the hook” to go over and have a look at the track list. I don’t see myself frantically buying all of the stuff from Hyped to Death’s Teenline series (like I did with their other three series: Messthetics, Homework, and Hyped to Death), but this one has really hit the spot for the time being, and makes me wonder if power-pop does have something to offer me after all? Maybe…

1.07|

2006-08-28T13:04:00.000-04:00

Although I moved into my new place up in Providence about a little less than a month ago, I am still in Columbus for another two weeks. It’s a little humiliating having to move back in with your parents after all of this time, but hey… it’s only temporary. This past year has been a great and really important year for me, and what better way than to sum it up with a string of great shows during my finals weeks in Ohio. When I found out that 84 Nash we’re playing their final show at this year’s Slum-B-Q III, I felt a bit privileged to still be in town to see off one of my favorite bands.

84 Nash, Times New Viking, Necropolis, Dirty Johnny & The Makebelieves, Church of The Red Museum, Ron House, Guinea Worms, Sarah Asher, Jeff Fernengel, The Lindsay, Kyle Sowash, Two Cow Garage Slum-B-Q III at Little Brother’s (Columbus, Ohio) August 26th, 2006

The two previous Slum-B-Q’s we’re a blast; packed with an always-interesting blend of regional, local and national acts, with the smell of pulled pork sandwiches and delicious homemade macaroni and cheese in the air. New Dark Ages-honcho Bobby Miller really delivered this year as well, although on paper it looked as if it might, at times, be a little underwhelming. So far from the truth; in fact, the only thing I was a bit disappointed with was that I spent too long talking Guided By Voices over some Sparks with Night of Pleasure’s Jim Cowman over at CDR before the show that I missed the entire Two Cow Garage set. I did, however make it just in time to catch almost the entire set by The Lindsay, who were just on fire and playing in front of a crowd which was already pretty sizeable… even at 7:45 pm (probably thanks to Two Cow’s kick-off slot). Earlier that day, I heard some of The Lindsay album (to be released on Ron from The Carabar’s new label, Man Up Music) over at CDR and was just blown away by it, so this impressive Lindsay set really just hit the spot. I believe that the Guinea Worms we’re up next (this is where the timeline starts to get a little fuzzy). Everybody has come to expect a lot from these guys over the past year, and after a string of performances that have been nothing short of transcendent, I can honestly say that this has been the best performance I have ever seen come out of these guys. Their set-list was impeccable, propelling their dirges to the point of Fall-like hypnotic repetition, but cutting away to the next song just short of each song’s breaking point, yeah. Sarah Asher, a local “songstress” (don’t worry, that made me cringe too) who has gained quite a following over the past year, and her band were the first to perform on the obligatory Slum-B-Q side-stage, where they had no technical problems or microphone feedback here), and seemed to be far more comfortable with the DIY intimacy of the side-stage and you could really tell by the music. Lush, weird but pretty, she’s doing well at pushing herself away from the obvious Cat Power and Scout Niblett influence and into her own interesting territory. Saturday was the first time that I’ve ever caught a set by another band that has really acquired a big fan base around town over the past year, Church of The Red Museum. They reminded me of the Black Heart Procession, Ugly Casanova, and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, but their material seemed to be really stylized, a little too much for me to get into. There’s a “fucked-up” element in all of the aforementioned bands (Heroin... an endearingly irritated voice... Heroin, a great voice and Blixa Bargeld), but these guys lack that, and seem to be a little too professional for their own good, but entertaining as a live band, nevertheless. Ron House kicked off his side-stage set with the Great Plains classic “Hamburger Boy,” and although a massive two-beer spill at his feet proved to be a bit of a technical difficulty, he trudged on with early classic “Book Taped to My Forehead,” and the Ego Summit stunner “Ego’s Bridge,” which I was very excited about, especially since I was pretty drunk at this point. Athens, Ohio’s Dirty Johnny and The Makebelieves were everything you’ve come to expect from The Garage Rock Mecca of the Hocking Hills; like their brethren Drop Dead Sons and We March, they were wild and furious... kind of like a cross between MC5 and Judas Priest, they were just phenomenal and really revived the party atmosphere at Little Brother’s following some dark sets by the Guinea Worms, Sarah Asher, Ron House, and Church of The Red Museum. I bought their six-song ep from two-years ago immediately after their set, but I don’t think it even touches the power that they got onstage. If you have a chance to see these guys, do it! I think that Necropolis really felt the pressure, having to follow up the Makebelieves, but they nailed it; drunk enough to not appear nervous, but nervous enough to rip through their set with a fiery fervor. Times New Viking kept the momentum going with some offerings from their neo-classic Dig Yourself and enough new ones from the upcoming mini-album on Siltbreeze to make you wanna shit'cha pants over. I’m just about to start talking about 84 Nash, but then I would be forgetting about the last two side-stagers, Jeff Fernengel, local pizza celebrity and frontman of Tree of Snakes, and Kyle Sowash of… The Kyle Sowashes! I missed their sets! The reason: well, the crowd was pretty wild at this point, so when I was hanging out by the main stage, I couldn’t hear anything coming from the side-stage and therefore, and regrettably, missed their sets. I really wanted to see Sowash, because he gave me a copy of The Kyle Sowashes album, What’s Important (And What’s Not), on Friday night and I really liked it a lot.

and now for the topping...

84 Nash were, in my opinion, one of the most important bands to come out of Columbus since TJSA/Turks/V3/Gaunt. They used to play down at Bernie’s almost every other week, and rocked as if the place was packed, but it never was back then. With two classics (yes, classics) released on Bob Pollard’s underappreciated Rockathon label, the group took their sweet-ass time recording and re-recording their third and ultimately final album appropriately titled A Secret Reward. Through their anthemic songwriting, a trail of imaginative recordings, and rare but absolutely electric live shows, 84 Nash rose to become legendary around these bouts, and you can hear traces of their influence in the burgeoning scene that now defines Columbus; Times New Viking, Night of Pleasure, The Lindsay, The Squares!, Tree of Snakes, El Jesus de Magico, Greenlawn Abbey, and Psychedelic Horseshit, to name a few (of the many). The last time we were treated to an 84 Nash show was a year ago, when they opened up for their old Dayton friend Dave Doughman’s Swearing at Motorists. It seemed as if the had already played their last show, so when this finale was announced a month or two ago, it seemed like less of a farewell and more of a homecoming. The spirits were high, and they were as just as impressive in their final show as they were the first time I saw them, some seven years ago. I spent most of the set spilling beers while dancing like a mad fool among mad fools, but I remember some distinct songs: “Mergatroid in Megacity,” “The Night They Drank Vandalia,” “Cinnamon Block,” “Everybody’s Gotta Skull,” “Bright Orange Hearts,” “Marcher’s Fallout,” “Sandful of Hand,” “Roadtrip to Columbus,” “Be Perfect,” “Mathematical Park,” “Tired of You” …satisfied? You bet! The Kings of Yeah closer “Electric Light Parade” closed out the wild star-studded encore (see the picture), before segueing into Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” May the chain keep us together… very appropriate, considering that I met some of my best friends through a mutual love of all things 84 Nash. Even on a bit of a grander scale, 84 Nash was the chain; linking the mid-90’s explosion of Ohio-mania that had all but simmered out by the time I ended up on campus in 1999, and the new golden age that we are lucky enough to be basking in right now. I was lucky to be involved in that little slice of local history on Saturday, but maybe we all might be lucky enough to be treated to a posthumous release, from the wealth of unreleased classics that were recorded over the years. If only we can be so lucky.

1.06|

2006-08-27T12:56:00.000-04:00

Ow what a weekend! You may have already read that the Vertical Phil has joined the ranks, but what you don't already know is that the Jared Phillips, the Two-Eared Man himself, has also joined the Marble Stature Blog teeeam; MF-er's possibly got one of the coolest record and tape collections around, so this should be interesting. Yes, a very exciting weekend, indeed.

1.05|

2006-08-25T15:54:00.003-04:00

Yes, I am very pleased that one of the best guys I’ve ever known, Vertical Phil, has conceded to join Marble Stature Blog. We had a lot of fun writing reviews back in the Vertical Slum, so it’s excited to be writing again with my old colleague… oh and thanks for revealing all of my guilty pleasures (Matthew Modine, Adam Sandler, that video clip of Kelsey Grammer falling off of the stage, Bowfinger) out and onto the table with entry 1.04, reminding us all that whenever you are at a point in your life that you think that you can start from scratch and somehow renew your identity, there will always be that old friend that reminds us that we never truly grow up. Ha! It’s good to have you back!

I was in New York a few months ago and spent a day walking around the Village looking for some “finds,” although I was on a pretty tight budget for the trip. I was a little disappointed with the first couple record stores we went to; real “we know what we got” stores, but the long trek down to Other Music was well worth it.

15-60-75 Jimmy Bell’s Still In Town (Hearpen, 2003)

If you haven’t heard this album you’re really doing yourself an injustice. Originally released back in 1976 on Water Brothers (not a misspelling), and then digitalized onto cd (in DIY fashion) by Reedurban records, in order to celebrate the Numbers Band’s 30th anniversary in 2000, only to be given a proper cd release three years later by Hearpen, a label run by longtime friend and fan David Thomas. I was given a copy of the Reedurban release a couple of years ago by Rubber City music fan and Columbus’ own gin-boy Turco Gura, but I couldn’t get a feel for it from the first minute or so, so it just sat in my computer. I’m glad I picked it up at Other Music that day, because the Hearpen reissue benefits from better sound and some of the most eloquent liner-notes I’ve ever read. Although, he’s not credited for writing them, these must be the work of Thomas, who’s writing is quite unmistakable for anyone who is well versed with his work as frontman of Cleveland’s greatest non-athletic institution, Pere Ubu. The liners give a succinct history of the Numbers Band; unveiling the many interesting and progressive concepts that time had buried beneath the noise. I was considering typing them out for you, but the magic would be lost, so you’re going to need to just pick it up, put it on, and snap into the Numbers’ hypnotism.

I was talking to Mike Rep a few weeks after I bought this reissue and he told me it is his all-time favorite Ohio album; which is interesting because it doesn’t really sound much like anything that’s ever come out of Ohio. They’re armed with dueling saxophonists (one of them horns is none other than Chrissie Hynde's brother Terry) that weave Stax-type R&B and avant-garde Impulse screeching into a magnetic accord. Robert Kidney is the singer/songwriter of the band, his voice is cooler than Lou Reed’s, and has a certain cadence that just adds another layer of percussiveness to the David Robinson’s tight drum set and brother Jack’s rolling hand drumming. The twin guitars are articulate and hold the true Blues rhythms, acting as a foil to the Saxophonists freedom. The antithesis of Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, each minute brings a new thrill, a new peak, a new insight like some wicked crystal ball foretelling the past, present and future of the Blues in one psychedelic vision. Yeah... wow.

1.04|

2006-08-25T12:36:00.000-04:00

Fits of Inception, Bouts of Depression...

Hi All!

My dearest friend and biggest Michael Stanley Band fan has invited me, verticalphil, to contribute to his newest web-creation... Marble Stature. As I will soon be returning to my blogging duties on newdarkages.net I could think of no better inspiration than to also help seanzilla spread his undying appreciation for Kelsey Grammer, movies starring Matthew Modine, and of course- Rock and Roll- on a weekly, bi weekly,and inter....errr...mediately basis on this forum. As always, my wit will reflect both my inner toil and outward disdain for all things Adam Sandler.

Stay Tuned.

verticalphil

1.03|

2006-08-21T11:06:00.000-04:00

The summer’s (almost) gone, and I waited too long to find that great summer-feeling album. I bought a couple earlier this year that I swore would make my summer right (Love Is All Nine Times That Same Song, Mors Ontologica Dead and/or Famous, The Keane Brothers Blues and Boogie Shoes, to name a few early contenders), but for one reason or another have had to rely on some old summer favorites to get through one of the most least favorite summers to date. There’s something to be said about a bright, loud, fast, blast of fun that captures the eternal youthfulness of the season, and all of the adolescent pitfalls that we once thought were fall beyond us. When I was going to work a few days ago, I noticed a smashed eggshell and spilled yolk on the driveway that was obviously a failed attempt at egging my car. I remember egging a car or two when I was younger, so I can relate, but I was pretty annoyed about the whole thing, and those kids didn’t even succeed. But hey, another summer has gone by and I finally found the appropriate album for this, somewhat stressful and disappointing, summer of 2006.

Gil Mantera’s Party Dream Bloodsongs (Audio Eagle/Fat Possum, 2006)

I remember hearing about the Party Dream when I was a sophomore back at Ohio State, six years ago (from what I can remember). Some friends caught one of their shows and were trying to explain their whole shtick to me. It didn’t really seem to interest me that much, but a few months later I decided to see what all of the excitement was all about, and really flipped for it. These guys, er brothers Gil Mantera and Ultimate Donny (real life step-brothers, I hear), were just two normal guys setting up their equipment, and then they came out in costume and they transformed themselves into these flamboyant characters who did high kicks and interpretive dance in between choruses and guitar solos; with each song an article of retro-wear clothing would be peeled off of them by their followers up front. Five songs into their set they were down to their fluorescent bikini underwear, which they really had to fight the crowd from pulling off and exposing them completely to the rest of the bar. At one point a girl jumped onstage wearing a bathing suit and a fur coat peeled back Gil Mantera’s bikini and started drinking a beer that her was pouring down his butt crack and into her mouth. I really had never seen anything like this dance-pop circus before, but the thing that really got me was that their music had some great hooks, despite it being campy, self aware and over-the-top in irony.

A few years ago when their debut cd, Once Triangular, was released I picked up a copy at Used Kids just to hear what a Party Dream album would sound like (actually, my old roommate had their Best Friends cdr which he played for me before I had seen them and I didn’t really like it) but I was really impressed by Once Triangular, and still am to this day. The album was genius in the way that it felt like a live album, due to the live banter and skits that appear in between every couple of songs; those live bits were just essential to the album’s flow, which started off as campy and ironic, and eventually revealed a pretty side to the music, especially on the album’s apex, “Don’t Go.” After the album was released the Party Dream toured for a while, but then they just kind of vanished from the Columbus scene. I just kind of figured after a while that they’d kind of given up on the Dream, content with releasing an album that successfully summarized the group’s lifespan. And then from nowhere, the always informative "Ear of Cleveland", Vertical Phil, informed me of a rumor that they signed to Fat Possum (by-way-of the Black Keys', fellow Northeastern Ohioians, off-shoot label Audio Eagle), and sure enough, there they were on the Fat Possum website. I was excited for them, but then I started dreading what they would come up with as a follow-up to Once Triangular, an album that picked the best of what they had been playing out on for several years. I was prepared for disappointment from the get-go, and that is one of the reasons as to why it took me so long to pick this up. I went with my mom to a Border’s around town, and she offered to buy me a cd if there was something that I wanted; couldn’t turn that one down, although Border’s tend not to stock my kind of music, I figured they’d have something that I could add to the racks. I saw Bloodsongs and just went with it (beating out Mott the Hoople Mott, and a replacement copy of that first Stooges album that some jerk stole from me five years ago).

I was initially pretty disappointed with Bloodsongs, and I think it was mostly due to the fact that the album starts off a little slow, and there were no big hooks or big laughs, for that matter, to keep my attention, but still far from terrible. I gave it a couple of listens, at work and in the car, and finally started to get a feel for a couple of songs here and there. The final track (not the hidden track, which, by the way is the great “Chalklit Phye II” from Once Triangular) “Emotion Road,” is the one that I really grabbed on to; it took me a few days to stray from that one, after I heard it… if this ain’t the hit I don’t know what is. It’s just a spectacular epic pop song and far more sophisticated than you might initially expect from a group who have been criticized for not taking their music seriously enough. Gil Mantera's Party Dream really do make you wonder if all synth/dance-pop is supposed to be boring live (Magnetic Fields (yawn), Unicorns, Postal Service hey, does Ben Gibbard's fat ass even dare to venture out on stage?, Erasure... you get the picture)? It would be really hard to remove my memories of seeing these guys live while listening to the music, but it does make you wonder what people, who have never seen or heard about their stage personas, will think of this album? With the live clips on Once Triangular, you could still get a taste of the g-string, but what about the evil twin? I think that the material on Bloodsongs is entirely capable of holding up on its own, but Ultimate Donny’s over-the-top boy band vocalizations and goofy, clichéd, nonsensical ponderings would most-likely be lost in the translation. Pick your Wahlberg- Bloodsongs is the summer winner, better late than never; it’s one of those albums that i'll be able to put on a few years from now and will blur out all of the shit that I’ve had to deal with over the last few months, into a hazily nostalgic after hours porch party. I suggest that you pick it up sooner than later, anways, September has always counted as the best part of summer in my opinion.

1.02|

2006-08-10T12:43:00.000-04:00

The Tabula Rasa: if you read back to entry 1.01 you will know that I used to be a writer/critic (albeit flair, for the lowest level), and that recently several factors have persuaded me to jump back into the hot-seat. So there’s a certain conflict that I am facing, because the reviews I wrote for the first issue of ‘The Slum’ we’re quite terrible compared to the quality (is that even the right word?) of the last issue. So how do you begin? I thought about writing about something current and local, but it would lack a certain context that, unless you were an avid reader of the Vertical Slum or a good friend of mine, you would not know (1) where I’m coming from, insofar as tastes and knowledge and (2) where I intend to go. Of course, I expect very few people to actually read this any time soon; there still is a level of quality that you want to establish from the commencement. I decided to start off with something close enough to home, yet far enough in time to show some sort of where I am coming from…

Peter Laughner & Friends Take the Guitar Player For a Ride (Tim Kerr, 1994)

I think there’s certain legitimacy to the claim that there was a renewed interest in the work of Peter Laughner over, say, the last 7 or 8 years due to Wilco’s break-through double album Being There. The haunting opener “Misunderstood,” still a staple of their live set, quotes a few lines from Laughner’s “Amphetamine.” Although none of us really knew the extent of the quote, because it’s safe to say that the majority of Wilco fans at the time did not to stray very far from the alt-country/roots-rock that was “it” for a few years at the end of the 90’s. Of course Yankee Hotel Foxtrot really changed that, but who cares!? Luckily, many people (myself included) did some research and found out that the guy was at one time a member of Pere Ubu. But if you listen to Terminal Tower, it’s fairly hard to decipher Laughner’s genius apart from, well, the genius of every member of the group (c’mon, it’s Pere Ubu we’re talking about here). I borrowed the Datapanik box from an old roommate of mine and remember hearing “Amphetamine” for the first time; it was so different from Pere Ubu, and I think that’s why I grabbed onto it so quickly. I didn’t think that it sounded much like “Misunderstood” at all. For a long time I looked for more Rocket From The Tombs stuff but never had any luck. I even found out, while visiting the Cleveland’s Westside with an ex-girlfriend, that Peter Laughner was at one time married to her aunt, Cleveland historian/poet/writer Charlotte Pressler. My interest in Laughner/RFTT died down a bit after I heard in first person what a complete jerk my ex-girlfriend’s parents thought he was (they even likened him to Howard Stern- tall, arrogant, obnoxious, etc). Thankfully in 2002, Smog Veil released the almighty The Day the Earth Met the… Rocket From the Tombs. I finally understood what the big fuss about Laughner was all about; his guitar is a squealing, shrieking wall of solos, and his songs “Seventeen,” the snarling “Ain’t it Fun,” bratty "Life Stinks," and the original version of “Final Solution” were frustrated teenage-hedonist anthems. The image of a 70’s rock’ n roll hero (ala Rock ‘n Roll Animal or Ziggy Stardust) seemed to fuse perfectly with the description of Laughner that the ex’s parents gave me- hell, the version of “Amphetamine” on this puppy could blow out The Who in all of their Rock ‘n Roll Circus prime (but honestly who gives a shit about The Who anyhow?). I still listen to that Smog Veil album regularly, and of course, I’ve known about Take the Guitar Player For a Ride for some time now, but being the highly sought after collectible that it is, I could never find it for a “reasonable” price, so I just kind of gave up; content with the Smog Veil retrospective. But a few months ago, one of these suckers popped up on eBay and I finally just decided to grab a copy while I still had the money.

I put on the cd and started leafing through the booklet and was immediately struck by this picture of a smiling Pressler seemingly in mid conversation, a forward-looking Laughner with a knowing grin, and “an unknown admirer,” eyes shut and leaning the back of his head on Laughner’s shoulder, on the first page of the booklet; the exquisite “Baudelaire” is on, sounding like something off of Blood on the Tracks. Clinton Heylin, author of From The Velvets to The Voidoids, titled the liners “Searching for Peter Laughner” and likened Laughner to Robert Johnson. Sure the two had their share of personal demons, but don’t we all? Those liner notes are 13 years old, and were written long before Wilco, and Guns ‘n Roses did their part to get the guy’s name out; these were written 9 years before the Smog Veil retrospective saw the light of day, so in order to find out anything about Laughner, Heylin had to go straight to the source; interviewing past members of Rocket From the Tombs, Pere Ubu, and his ex-wife Charlotte. It makes sense that Heylin himself compiled the album from a wealth of home demo tapes and concert footage that Laughner left behind without the intent of seeing them released, because the album has a nice narrative quality to it’s compilation, ending with a cover of Robert Johnson’s “Me & The Devil Blues,” which was written the night before Laugher’s death. The material on “Take the Guitar Player for a Ride” straddles the whole spectrum of critic rock, covering, in addition to Robert Johnson, Eno’s “Baby’s on Fire,” and Richard Thompson’s “Calvary Cross,” the latter which is given a exquisite violin/guitar treatment by Laughner’s cover-heavy group Friction and even surpasses the original. Really. “Dear Richard,” an “answer to an unwritten suicide note” is a raging rocker with a great chorus, but the majority of the material here is more reminiscent of Dylan or even early Springsteen stuff; just an acoustic and a voice captured on a tape player after bars close, after the bands get paid, after the point of emotional and physical exhaustion. What you hear on this album are songs that are straight soul, not a performance. There’s a cohesive sloppiness that ranges from the stuttered chord changes of “Cinderella Backstreet” to the drunken ramblings of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” that don’t matter in the long run, because they are devastatingly descriptive of a man who’s number was just about up.

If you think there was more to Peter Laughner than the bigger-than-life rock star face that he put on, you’re right; this is the most heartbreaking look into a side of a man who tried so hard to conceal the pain of his past and the ultimate hopelessness within his own life. This sort of thing would actually be kind of hard to listen to if the intentions that are conveyed in his songwriting weren’t so poetically universal and personal at the same time. This is one collectible that is worth every cent, in fact it’s scarcity is more than appropriate.

1.01|

2006-08-09T18:20:00.000-04:00

Per Ardua: Marble Stature

Marble Stature Blog
c/o Sean Wright
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Providence, RI 02906