Lexicon Devil

2012-01-27T20:35:00.000-08:00

Get your unofficial SST shoulderbag here. No shit.

After you've done that, you can kick back and watch The Tour, the audio/video document from 1985 recorded live at The Stone in San Fran and featuring footage from the Meat Puppets, Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, Husker Du and... err... SWA. For me this concert film remains one of the pinnacle moments in American unpopular culture from the past 50 years, so take advantage of it before Ginn sniffs around and takes it down.

2012-01-25T16:51:00.000-08:00

Well a-heydy-ho. I'd better get active on this blog so it doesn't start withering like an unloved plant. First things first: you may want to read this article by Richard Beck at N +1 online magazine. It's a big piece - bordering on a thesis - but if you have any interest in the state of contemporary music (and despite my perennial complaints, I do), it's worth a read. It details the rise and rise of Pitchfork magazine, a favourite whipping boy of yours truly, but as I've stated to friends: love it or hate it, Pitchfork's success in the world of "music journalism", at a time when everyone else is failing, is a worthy topic of discussion. More than that, it has somehow - through the use of black magic or possibly even quality writing (just a thought) - risen above the herd to become the taste-maker for modern-day "indie-rock". Does anyone care what the likes of Rolling Stone or SPIN think of a given recording at all these days? Thought not. I never did, either, but for once I appear to be in the majority. I don't agree for one second w/ the writer's view on just about any of the bands mentioned within - the Pitchfork cabal of losers (Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver et al) can blow me and swallow - and being a hopeless old mofo pathetically caught in the past, I'd rate "indie-rock" (I prefer "independent rock")'s hey-day as Rough Trade ca. 1978-'81 and the US conglomerate of SST/Touch & Go/Subterranean/Homestead/etc. ca. 1979-'89, but really, would you expect me to say anything different? I'd say that Pitchfork's influence on music today is overwhelmingly negative, trumpeting mediocre drivel and hyping up Next Big Things in exactly the same manner as the corporate music world has been for the past 60 years: more of the same, except this time the intended audience is apparently one which is ripe with "intelligence" and "sophistication", as if those qualitities actually bear any relation to good music (I prefer mine made by bumpkins and primitives, personally). But still, the article in question will keep you off the streets for a good half-hour, and you'll find something to argue w/ your friends about.

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Last night the ABC2 channel, the digital version of the national broadcaster, gave the people of Australia a special treat by airing two programs surprisingly worthy of viewing: Persecution Blues: The Battle for The Tote, and Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard. Both were made last year and played briefly at Australian film festivals. The former documents the infamous Melbourne pub's fight for survival in 2010, when liquor licensing laws, and their related expenses, made life for the music venue untenable. For anyone Down Under w/ an interest in u/ground rock, the story itself is well known. I never saw the film at any of the festivals, as I'd come to find the constant mythologising of the venue tiresome and had little desire to see the usual talking heads singing its praises (even if some of those talking heads are good friends of mine!). The Tote was my home away from home for a number of years - approx. 1996 - 2003 - and I blew more hard-earned cash there drinking my youth away than I'd care to recount. I even played about half-a-dozen shows there in various half-arsed outfits I've performed in over the years. It was also a hotbed of activity for me from 1989 - 1993, though from memory, it went through a few dark years mid-decade, as it changed management and ownership and turned itself into a low-life strip bar frequented by the kind of people you wouldn't want to associate with. For myself, moreso than the management of Bruce Milne and co. in the 21st century or its current ownership (Milne had to sell it; it has since been reopened under new management but essentially kept everything which made it what it was, even improving it by putting in some new carpet and taking out the obstructive support beam in the band room), the people you could credit for really putting the pub on the map would be the Soccio family - the owners of the venue prior to Milne taking over roughly 10 years ago - and my good buddy, Luke Roberts, who booked bands there from roughly 1996 - 2003 and can be held mostly responsible for resurrecting the venue from the dead and putting it back on the map as the independent music venue in the southern hemisphere. Luke gets a brief visual and a line in the film, though he gets no credit. That's OK. When I first heard that neither he nor the Soccios were even mentioned in the documentary, I disregarded the film as a travesty. In the context of what the film is about - the Tote's troubles in 2010, its closing and the controversy it caused, so much so that the state government had to backflip on liquor licensing policy - such ommissions are entirely forgivable. Persecution Blues is not a "history of the Tote", it's a documentary on its dying days and eventual resurrection. If you're at all interested in Australian music worth listening to, I'd rate it as quite essential viewing. That's not to say that it's flawless - far from it - and perhaps my expectations were so low in the first place that its watchability is simply a pleasant surprise. Whatever the case, you can watch it here for the next fortnight on ABC iview; after that, the link closes.

I'll admit it: the music of Rowland S. Howard, who passed away in December 2009, never meant a great deal to me. Not his contributions to Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party, which were manifold and appreciated greatly by myself, but his post-BP solo albums and material w/ Crime & The City Solution, These Immortal Souls, etc. His Teenage Snuff Film LP/CD from 1999, which was considered a major comeback after a number of years out of the limelight (mostly battling addiction problems), was one I heard too many times to mention. Not of my own will, mind you, but due to a colleague when I was working at Missing Link at the time, who played it 1,000 times or more in my presence. Regardless of whether I liked it or not (I did "like" it), I certainly figured I need never hear it again. Same goes for 2009's Pop Crimes: yet again I was stuck w/ a different work colleague who insisted on playing it day in/day out for months on end. It's easy to forget, given that Howard didn't enjoy the same high-profile status as his old musical sparring partner Nick Cave, just how much music he did release in a 30-year period. There were long bouts of inactivity, mainly from the late '90s onwards when ill-health struck him, but prior to that, both Crime & The City Solution and These Immortal Souls (who, strangely enough, were licensed to SST at the time, c/o the good word of Thurston Moore) were active touring/recording outfits, and that was when Rowland wasn't busy recording w/ the likes of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Lydia Lunch, Nikki Sudden and others. As stated in the film, his contribution to the Boys Next Door were absolutely vital, his slashing/shrieking guitar histrionics shaking the band out of their Bowie affectations and putting some grit under their nails. Nick Cave is damn thankful that Rowland joined, and he should be. There's also attention given to Rowland's pre-BND band, the Young Charlatans, a supergroup of sorts which also featured Ollie Olsen and Jeffrey Wegener (later of the Laughing Clowns, and one of the finest skin-hitters Down Under has ever produced), as well as the usual talking heads (Rollins, Moore, Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, etc.) singing his praises, but for me the film's best moments are the ones which document his relationship with a woman throughout the '90s, and the fatherly relationship Rowland had w/ her son (who's interviewed and looks like he could be groomed as a future member of the Bad Seeds), as well as the footage of his last few years. Rowland was no suicidal romantic - he quite obviously wanted to live, be around his family and friends and write and record more music - a fact which makes his death more tragic. There's nothing in this film which indicates to me that he was anything but a good human being who, by his own admission, wasted much of his potential through his own abuse. Autoluminescent is, to put it bluntly, one of the better music documentaries made in recent and not-so-recent years, a truly illuminating look at an artist whose influence is greater than his profile and whose work is probably better than I've given him credit for. At this stage, so far as I can tell, nothing Rowland released after the Birthday Party is actually in print, something which is to be rectified this year w/ a definitive box set. If you weren't a fan of his beforehand, you may just be after watching Autoluminescent.

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For the next fortnight, you can watch the film here.

2012-01-19T01:41:00.000-08:00

I was planning on contributing sweet FA to the blog this week, but then I was greeted with this news: the great Johnny Otis died in LA. This news will mean nothing to most people, and more's the pity for such a predicament. He did more for righteous music in the 20th century than just about anyone else who's walked this planet the past 100 years. And indeed, he nearly made the century: he was 90 years young. He lived a longer and richer life than most, so I see little need for mourning the guy's death as one taken from us too soon. You should just be glad he made the effort. I wrote about him in May last year right here, and you can read other details of his life right here in this LA Times obituary, so I'm not going to repeat his life story once more. What is sad is that his death, even to alleged fans of "rock music", will mean zip to most folks. When Elvis died, you really heard about it. I remember John Lennon songs being flogged ad nauseum for months on end after his death, and you can bet that the malarky to be made over Dylan's eventual passing will be the stuff of legend. And that's OK, because they deserve it. Just like Johnny Otis deserves it. But history is written by the victors, and Johnny's time in the public eye was starting to fade once rock & roll became big news in the mid '50s. He'd had his share of big hits, and would continue to have more in the next half-decade, even making a killer sleaze-soul classic w/ 1968's Snatch & the Poontangs LP. He was no mere 20-hit wonder.

From the '70s on, he hit the revival circuit and could still slay 'em. Meanwhile, he dabbled in cook books, radio, painting, the ministry, Democratic politics and writing. Dylan loved him. Zappa worshipped him. I'm but a neophyte to his genius, having only discovered him about 3 or 4 years ago, but his music, particularly his greasy R & B sides from the '40s & '50s - great slabs of upbeat party anthems and downbeat LA noire-blues - ranks amongst the best which have ever graced these ears. All his best material from the 1940s/'50s/'60s is ably documented by the Ace label from the UK. Sure, given much of its public-domain status, there are other continental types glutting the market w/ his wares, but nobody does it w/ such care, quality and precision as the Ace folks. Some old-time geezers say his music sounds best on 78/45 and scoff at such easily-begotten slabs of digital noise, and such a mentality speaks for itself. You wanna blow $500 for a few slabs of wax on ebay or just get the killers in a heartbeat in a handy, shiny selection? Good. Otis also owned and ran the Dig label in the '50s, and these collections rank among the best in his discography. Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Preston Love, Jimmy Nolen and Johnny himself: these comps are the bees' knees of downbeat/upbeat sleaze 'n' grease R & B. There's a new Otis CD out this very week, part 2 in Ace's Johnny Otis Story series (the first one, Midnight At The Barrelhouse, is the bomb), and I need it. Beat the herd and get on it. Johnny Otis was a man who needed no regrets. My only regret is that I didn't get onto him a whole lot earlier in life.

2012-01-13T22:59:00.000-08:00

Mighty strange to see Voivod being covered in The Guardian, but indeed they have: right here. I've blogged about the band before, notably here, if the urge takes you. The band were one of the shining lights of underground rock & roll during their hey-day (approx. the last half of the 1980s), though they continued to make some excellent records in the 1990s, too, despite the fact that they sounded nothing like the band of yore. But a band like Voivod was never one to musically sit still. Their early discs, such as War & Pain and Rrroooaaarrr!!!, sound like Discharge/Venom/Motorhead hybrids, almost proto crust, primitive in approach and rough in sound, a bag of fun but nothing which gets me that excited. The real goods are the following 3 discs, from 1987/'88/'89, respectively: Killing Technology, Dimension Hatross and Nothingface. By this stage, the band had come heavily under the spell of Milwaukee's mighty Die Kreuzen, as well as everything from PiL to Swans to Black Flag to Rush(!), and incorporating these elements into their own unique blend of sci-fi punk/thrash/metal, they made a mighty roar. Back in the '80s, I was prone to thinking that just about all music which fell under the banner of contemporary heavy metal was a crock, and that was simply the opinion of one pimply-faced pud, but a band like Voivod couldn't possibly be pigeonholed: they followed their own muse, and I'm glad they came to being. Alternative Tentacles has recently reissued their original 1984 demo tape on both CD and LP, and I've been lucky enough to procure a copy of the CD from the label (via my regular "gig", not this blog), and it's an interesting slice of history. The Guardian article's headline is a bit of a misnomer: "... the demo tape that changed metal". The article in no way articulates how it changed anything, and if you were to view this matter via any kind of objective means, you'd figure they'd have a hard time arguing such a point. And none of this is to denote that the tape in question ever was anything but a very fine thing. The recording is rough, by Voivod standards, though compared to most demo tapes recorded by underground rock & roll bands of the day, this sounds like a Jim Steinman production. At the very least, the guitar and rhythm section is crisp and pummeling, w/ "Snake"'s vocal grunt's coming to the fore. There's not one but two Venom covers, as well as a Mercyful Fate tune in the mix, and the rest are very much in the same manner as that from their debut (tracks are duplicated). I'm not sure I would've forked over hard-earned cash for this - like I said, I've never been of the opinion that the band really came into their own until their 3rd outing - but it's a historically interesting slab of primal noise, and fanatics will want to jump on board.

Another article worth reading, from the LA Weekly, is right here. It details life in the early '80s for Black Flag, specifically the recording and release of their epochal Damaged LP, and writer Erick Lyle actually seems to know what he's talking about. For myself, the 1980s possessed the Holy Trinity of God-like noise as emitted by Black Flag, Minutemen and the Meat Puppets, and this well-penned piece helps put the picture together. Unlike The Guardian article, the headline for this one remains a great truism: Damaged did change punk and LA as we know it. Do "they" still make records like Damaged in the year 2012? If so, I'm painfully unaware of their existence, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.

2012-01-12T00:08:00.000-08:00

I raved about Lost Animal's Ex Tropical CD a few entries below when summing up 2011's highlights. I noted that you must hear the highlight track from the disc, "Lose The Baby". Now you have no excuse. This clip is unoffical, though its spacey imagery perfectly complements the effortless glide of the song. Like I said, if this wasn't pulled off so damn well, I may be prone to dismissing its wares as pure pretension: more post-rock & roll (ie. - it ain't rock) of the open-neck-shirt/crumpled-suit variety. But Lost Animal's combination of '70s Eno/Bowie, Suicide, Serge and suit-rock is impeccable. "Lose The Baby" remains one of my favoutite tracks from the last 12 months - hell, I'd rate it as a fave contempo track from the past 5 years - it's something special indeed. Listen to some 21st-century music worth hearing.

And this clip requires little explanation. I've blogged many a time on the genius of Don Cherry, a man whose '60s/'70s works rank amongst the very best. Cosmic ethno-jazz stuck within its own time, and 1971 was a highpoint year for him, recording and releasing his two best discs: Orient and Blue Lake (the former being a top-10 desert-isle disc for moi) and heading for the stratosphere. Check the link here for more killer jazz clips from the vaults: Steve Lacy, Marion Brown, Anthony Braxton, Derek Bailey, Art Ensemble, even a goddamn Milford Graves documentary. What did we do before Youtube came along? That's right, we sat around dreaming of this shit.

2012-01-01T20:31:00.000-08:00

I didn't listen to the outfit known as Dinosaur Jr. for what must've been 15 years. Bought the first three LPs back in '88, loved 'em for the next few years; caught the post-Barlow lineup playing here in 1990 at the Old Greek Theatre and thought they absolutely blew; noticed the concept of the "band" known as Dinosaur Jr. quickly loosen to the point of it being basically J. Mascis and whomever he felt like backing up his enormous ego and... gave up on them. In the meantime, I even - STUPIDLY, mind you - sold both You're Living... and Bug on LP, whilst keeping my copy of the first disc, since it was an original Homestead edition under the original "Dinosaur" moniker, and hey, that kinda thing's gonna be worth BIG bucks one day, correct? (Is it? I doubt it).
You're Living All Over Me was originally released in 1987 and made a huge splash, that much is obvious. The debut, from 1985, caused some ripples, but for many it's an uneven affair, merely a precursor of great things to come. I still have that LP sitting on the shelf in the spare room, though I haven't played it properly - as in all the way through - in over 20 years now. I could pull it out and give it a spin for the purposes of this entry, but frankly, I really don't feel like listening to the thing. That's not to say it doesn't have some mighty fine tracks: from memory, "Forget The Swan", "Repulsion" and "Severed Lips" were fantastic, and the uneven mixture of hardcore, goth and psychedelic metal, along with a roots-rock approach lifted heavily from Neil Young and Meat Puppets discs certainly had and has its charms... but we'll discuss the 2nd and 3rd LPs instead.
You know the Dinosaur Jr. story well, correct? Both Lou Barlow and J. Mascis had cut their teeth in the Massechussetts hardcore scene of the early '80s as young teens, playing in the hyperspeed HC demolition unit, Deep Wound. Strangely, as fate would have it, both Mascis and Barlow can lay claim to having helped to lay the groundwork for two rather disparate music scenes: Deep Wound's huge influence on the Earache diaspora of grindcore bands, and Dinosaur Jr.'s obvious heavyweight status amongst slacker-grunge rock & roll (or whatever you wish to call it w/ a straight face). Drummer "Murph", a fellow HC kid w/ a weakness for musicianly progsters such as Rush, Mahuvishnu, et al also spent time in All White Jury, a band of perhaps little renown outside of the fact that they once featured a guy who later went onto indie-rock fame. When HC had runs it course (listen to Sebadoh's "Gimme Indie Rock" for the story: here), the three teens, juiced up on the SST bands, Neil Young, Black Sabbath, Byrds and the Birthday Party (amongst others), went onto create a new brand of dynamic rock & roll which, for some, reinvigorated high-energy music as we know it throughout the late '80s.
Both You're Living... and Bug were originally released on SST, and has been the case w/ other notables, the label lost the catalogue due to their faulty/slack/useless accounting practices, and have since been reissued via the Merge imprint. These CD editions are the version I now own. I had the original SST version of the 2nd LP, though Bug was licensed locally to Au-go-go at the time (via Blast First), and that was the one I owned (unfortunately: Australian pressings, both the quality of the vinyl and the cover, were notoriously useless at the time). The Merge CDs present the albums in the respect they deserve: copious liner notes from Byron Coley, photos and ephemera, bonus video clips and a mastering job which does unerring justice to their monumental heaviness.
It's easy to see, with the benefit of years, where the band fit in the scheme of things: another missing link (not the missing link) between the original hardcore scene and what was depressingly known as "alternative rock" a decade later; one birthed from punk rock but whom, like their SST compadres, blended their hardcore sensibilities w/ distinctly pre-punk influences (much of it '70s hard rock/heavy metal, something which greatly distinguished these bands from the more overtly garage/Stooges-derived u/ground units of the '80s). But I can tell you this: hearing this records as a 16-year-old in 1988, they sounded like they arrived from another planet. No other SST band of note, barring Black Flag, were as "heavy", musically speaking, as Dinosaur Jr.; the band sounded like a Meat Puppets/Black Sabbath hybrid, but excuded a strange, couldn't-give-a-shit approach to their sound; and the photos of the band members - black & whites you'd see in fanzines - had them looking like hippie college dorks, only they were prone to wearing Discharge and Venom t-shirts (for some reason, those musically-challenged Geordies found a real niche in the HC scene of that part of the US). The band covering The Cure's "Just Like Heaven" fucked w/ everyone's heads (inc. mine!) just a little bit more, too. For a while there, I thought they were just about the best band on the planet, a band totally befitting the Black Flag/Meat Puppets/Minutemen/fIREHOSE/Sonic Youth circle of friends they'd found themselves ensconsed in. Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, the label was firing on all engines at the time: anyone who thinks SST ran out of gas after Mugger and Carducci skipped town in '86 have obviously never had the pleasure of listening to a Slovenly/Pell Mell/Universal Congress Of/Tar Babies/Angst/ET-FUCKIN'-CETRA disc, but you've heard this rant before (and you will again, trust me).
The follow-up, 1988's Bug, may even be better. At the time it wasn't necessarily considered so. I think its predecessor was seen as such a groundbreaking effort - it even had the Limeys entranced by American rock music for a minute or two - that anything less would be seen as a disappointment. Bug was seen by many as more of the same - perhaps as good, but nothing new. It lacks the primitive charm of its predecessor - there's more overdubs, more studio time and more song craft here - though the material is equal to You're Living..., if not better. You wanna engage in splitting hairs? Me neither. The opener, "Freak Scene", became an "indie hit" at the time, and good as it is, it's not the best track on the disc. The band had sharpened their chops, and their ability to get anthemic, and the likes of "Let It Ride" and "Pond Song" made obvious pointers to where the band was heading (ie. - the semi-big time). The other great aspect of the band was their unashamedly experimental bent. Lou Barlow would take this full-throttle w/ his early Sebadoh/Sentridoh recordings (I give full props to Sebadoh's III here), and being smart-assed punkers also clued-in to the mind-frying sounds of Throbbing Gristle and Flipper, they could fuck w/ the punkers and indie-rockers w/ tracks like "Keep The Glove" on Bug (total guitar-noise destruction) and the 2nd LP's closer, "Poledo", a track I thought was a dud for the first three-dozen listens before its ghostly, no-fi solo/stoner vibe grabbed me (it merely sounds like a lo-fi genericus maximus Lou Barlow track now, but back then no one knew his eclectic/esoteric capabilities).
Barlow and Murph quit (or were kicked out), Mascis kept the name going and released a bunch of records I've actually never heard (except the singles, which were radio staples back in the day). I saw Mascis play at the Cherry Bar(!) back in 2000 or 2001 when he did an impromptu show as "The Three Stooges" w/ Mike Watt on bass and his touring drummer (J. Mascis & The Fog were touring at the time) on skins, playing nothing but tracks from the Stooges' first two LPs w/ Watt handling the bass and vocals. It was smokin', totally renewed my respect for the guy and allowed me to chew Watt's ears off for at least 10 minutes before the show (his response to me: Jesus, you seem to know more about my music than I do!).
The original line-up of the band has been back together again and has released two very highly regarded LPs in the meantime: 2007's Beyond and 2009's Farm. I have heard neither, nor have I seen their shows when they've recently played these shores, although friends and people whose opinions I actually respect rate the reformed Dinosaur Jr. very highly. In time, when I get time, I will pay them a visit, that's a promise. The Merge CD reissues of the first three albums, along w/ the chapter on the band in Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, really did plant a seed in my mind regarding just how good, and just how unique the original Dinosaur Jr. was. Like any great outfit, they were beset by tensions, egos and infighting, and the drama played out on their best records. The musical sphere they helped birth - the post-hardcore world of punk in-jokes, 'Sabbath riffs, wah pedals, long hair and beaded necklaces - also birthed a lot of second-rate music you would never bother listening to (though at the time you very well may have!), though Mascis, Barlow and Murph, three essential elements to the group sound, were, for a few records, streets ahead of the pack. Good shit is timeless.

2011-12-31T19:17:00.000-08:00

Holy moly, 2011 came and went like that! And what a tumultuous year it was; not so much for me (business as usual on nearly all fronts), though a shocker for many others - some close to home, some far away. If the 20th century was the period of great ascension amongst the human race, in terms of technology, medicine, communication, entertainment etc., then my general feeling about the 21st century is that we're on a downhill slide, but then again, there was probably someone saying the exact same thing about the previous century in 1912 (as well as others hailing the forthcoming conquests of the 20th century as they set sail on the Titanic). In other words: the more things change, the more things stay the same. The only big change I have coming up in the next month is that I'm about to enter my 40s. I'm looking for big changes in my life, but only I can make them. And all that Z-grade philosophising and therapy is a roundabout way of saying this: one thing which will never change is my ability to belatedly give mention to great releases from years past, and today is no exception.

I didn't mention reissues in my round-up of 2011 as there's simply too many to list. Off to the top of my head, I'll mention... the Opika Pende 4CD/book box set on Dust To Digital, documenting rare African 78s from many decades past; the Bobby Robinson 4CD box on JSP (Robinson was a producer/arranger/songwriter/label boss responsible for many killer sides, from Elmore James to Red Prysock, and this set is a non-stop good time); the Italo Funk Experience CD on Nascente (I reviewed their French Funk Experience set earlier in the year; this series of weird & wonderful territorial gems is the bomb); the Johnny Otis series on Ace, digging up more gems from the '40s/'50s vaults); the Shattered Dreams: Funk Blues 1967 - 1978 set on BGP/Ace (which details the transition of old blues players in the late '60s/'70s into a more contemporary, funkier style of playing. My exposure to this period of music previously had it pegged as one of great bogusness. This CD puts that theory to rest: lots of great tracks here, by Johnny Otis, Lowell Fulson, Icewater Slim, Little Sonny and more); the 2CD Mark McGuire retrospective on Mego (young folks/hipster tunes, for sure, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad. McGuire is a member of avant-synth/drone combo, Emeralds, and releases cassettes/CD-Rs of his tunes like you & I have hot dinners. This 2CD compiles his best material. He has one or possibly two tricks: run a guitar through a series of effects pedals, echoes and loops and repeat... but it's an effective trick), etc. etc. Above is one which requires special mention. It possesses the mouthful-and-a-half title of Psych Funk Sa-Re-Ga! Seminar: Aesthetic Expressions of Psychedelic Funk Music In India 1970 - 1983. Wow. It comes on either CD or 2LP and both sets are handsomely packaged c/o the folks at World Psychedelic Funk Classics. I've got a few Indian and/or Bollywood compilations in my collection, but for me this one's the best of 'em all. Many of the tracks are hideously obscure soundtrack "incidental" pieces of music, from what I can gather they're taken from Z-grade Indian psych cash-in films (they're the best kind!), and many contain "personnel unknown". Some aren't remotely "funky" in a musical sense (I'm thinking obvious bass licks and danceable rhythm sections), though let's not split hairs: the opener by the Black Beats, "The Mod Trade" from 1971, is a killer slice of barely-together surf-influenced garage rock which sounds like an early, instrumental VU number. There's also a mighty strange track featuring kraut saxophonist, Klaus Doldinger (from fusionoid numbnuts, Passport) called "Sitar Beat" which features no Indian musicians (just Germans, including a guy from Embryo) and wasn't even released in India, so its inclusion means that the theme for this comp' is, err, "loose". But a winner it be. There's a zillion of these far-out comps from faraway lands in the market at this point in time. I've heard a heap of them - Turkey, Japan, Nigeria, USSR, Indonesia, etc. - and this is one I spin often.

Unless you're prone to a little feet-scufflin' jig, you won't be dancing to anytime soon to any tracks from Whaur The Pig Gaed On The Spree: Scottish Recordings by Alan Lomax, 1951-'57 (2s & Fews/Drag City). It was compiled by Scottish indie-folk musician, Alasdair Roberts (who has a bunch of recordings available via Drag City), who's a great enthusiast and fan of folk music from his homeland. I'm descended from the Scots, too, so there's interest on my behalf which goes beyond the perfunctory. Alan Lomax - one of the great recorders of sound throughout the globe in the 20th century - was living in London in 1951, working as a radio producer and field recordist for the BBC, as well as being under contract to Columbia Records to curate a series of LPs entitled World Library Of Folk and Primitive Music (where the hell can I get a job like that?!). He was about to draw tracks from the BBC archives from the 1940s for the English edition when he happened to meet Scottish poet, collector and radical, Hamish Henderson. Their meeting changed Lomax's mind, and he spent that summer dragging his audio gear around Scotland, recording Gaelic work songs, pipe tunes, ballads, sea shanties and more. The music of the Scots, a proud people deeply knowledgable of their own musical heritage and whose sense of community ran in tendem w/ Lomax's definition of folk music as a people's music, had Lomax recording hours and hours of music over the subsequent years of the 1950s. And this collection - available only on LP, but one w/ exhaustive and detailed liner notes - puts together the best of them (or what Roberts deems the best). A fair bit of it is a capella, some is accompanied by guitar or fiddle, and there's even a bagpipe tune to round it out. I have a deep love for the traditional folk music of the British Isles, whether it's the real thing as presented here (or on this collection) or one reconfigured by musicians steeped in the rock idiom (from Fairport Convention to Trembling Bells). Whether you're partial to this will determine as to whether you care for this collection's existence. It's beautifully put together and annotated and documents the lives and songs of people most likely long dead. It won't be the feel-good hit of the summer, but it'll keep you warm on those cold, wintery nights.
This release was - and remains - very strangely enough, one of my favourite releases of 2011, and yet I forgot to mention it last week. It is, indeed, a very strange beast. The band is When Saints Go Machine; the album goes by the name of Konkylie. The band is on a major in their homeland where they're a top 10 pop act. Other countries will have to suffice w/ the album's licensing to the German indie, K7. I stumbled across this one whilst at work. After reading the bio, which namedropped Arthur Russell and Talk Talk and gave mention to its homeland success, I figured it was due for a spin. How could I possibly sell copies of this in Australia? Does a top 10 in Denmark count for anything down here? The answer to the first question is: with great difficulty; the answer to the latter is quite obviously "no". This record is a thousand miles removed from much of the music I've trumpeted here over the past 8(!) years: this would never have fitted in on SST, FMP or ESP-Disk'; you would never mistake it for a hidden krautrock gem and nor could it ever be mistaken for a classic slice of 1940s booze-soaked rhythm & blues. It is, for all intents and purposes, a synth-pop album, one w/ the kinds of tunes which top charts. It could well have been released in 1985, so strong is its '80s-retro aura, but it's too smart, too adventurous and way too good to be mistaken for some of the lesser lights of that decade. Perhaps the group's main appeal is the vocals of lead vocalist Nikolaj Manuel Vonsild: he has the sweet, high-pitched nuances similar to that of Arthur Russell, Talk Talk's Mark Hollis and Antony Hegarty (from Antony & The Johnsons). His voice sounds fractured and possesses great depth and emotion - it undoubtedly makes for a highlight - but all that would be for naught if the songs weren't actually good. They're better than that, they're great. For better or for worse, this is arty synth-pop: you could compare it to 2nd-LP Suicide, Arthur Russell, late-period Talk Talk, Byrne/Eno, Another Green World, etc., but you could also say that this possesses the outright mersh qualities of say, Pet Shop Boys(!), Depeche Mode or mid '80s Yello (think Ferris Bueller). In fact, a good deal of this wouldn't have sounded out of place in an '80s slice of teen drama c/o John Hughes, and the track "Kelly" really could've been a chart-topper throughout the whole Western hemisphere ca. 1986, but that was not to be. There's 10 slices of primo art-pop here - great songs, all - and WSGM's combination of electronics, percussion and pining vocals is something I can dig a whole lot. I probably say this roughly once a decade, so I'll clear my throat and utter it: When Saints Go Machine's Konkylie is simply great pop music.

2011-12-25T18:38:00.000-08:00

Huh... Xmas has been and gone and I didn't even get to post anything about it. But hey, you don't need some blogger schlep wishing you well: that's for family & friends. Haven't been here for 2 weeks because the lead-up to Xmas - being in the wholesale business - is non-stop chaos, the last thing I care to do in the evening being contributing to this blog, but the year's nearly up, and so I must give some sort of a half-arsed appraisal to the year that it was.

I'll leave political and world events to those who wish to comment on them (I usually do, but not here), so let's just cut to the chase and give a listing of some releases from 2011 which floated my boat. It was a bumper year for Australian music, and you'd better savour that remark, as I don't believe I've ever uttered it before (and may never again). There were the albums by Melbourne outfits, Dick Diver and Twerps. The former released New Start Again on the Chapter label and it developed into what one likes to call a sleeper, a grower and all things between. Featuring Al Montfort from The UV Race and Total Control (and others... and believe me, this is hard to write coz I work with the guy!), DD mine a relaxed, VU-damaged pop/rock sound which to me incorporates all the best elements of 3rd-LP VU, Marquee Moon (particularly the twin-guitar interplay), The Feelies, early Yo La Tengo and the 3 or 4 Go-Betweens songs I actually like. It's distinctly Australian in sound, though I doubt foreigners would have a hard time placing it in the scheme of things. It took a good half-dozen listens to take hold, but once it did, its sublime, subtle hooks and observational lyrics grabbed me and haven't let go yet. Twerps are DD's "brother/sister band" of sorts, being on the same label, playing shows together, etc., though their sound borrows heavily from the NZ/Flying Nun school of sound. In fact, if their self-titled debut had been released on Flying Nun ca. 1987, you wouldn't have batted an eyelid. Ace songwriting, too. One which came right out of left field and bowled me over is Lost Animal's Ex Tropical, released on the Sensory Projects label. This is probably my fave Australian release of '11. Lost Animal is basically one dude - Jarrod Quarrell - who was one of the prime movers in indie supergroup St. Helens a couple of years back. I never saw nor heard 'em (despite the presence of several friends in the line-up), but Lost Animal's approach to sound is a kind of sparse, dub-influenced and dramatic art-rock which to me brings to mind early '70s Eno, Berlin-period Bowie, primo Serge Gainsbourg and the kind of scattered, suit-wearing junkie-rock perfected by Nick Cave and Rowland S. Howard. Ex Tropical possesses a decadent sleaze which, if it wasn't done so damn well, I'd be prone to dismiss as one big pose, but the strength of the material is astonishing. "Lose The Baby": that's the track you need to hear. Total Control, featuring Mikey from Eddy Current (and more) and Dan Stewart from The UV Race, Straightjacket Nation, etc. also put out a fine, fine release. It took me a while to come around to this. I'd seen them live a few times and been kind of underwhelmed by the obviously late '70s post/electro-punk sound they were aiming for (heard it too many times), but on their Henge Beat album (Total Control/Iron Lung), it coalesced into something more than the sum of its parts. Again, I'll throw around names like Swell Maps, Cabaret Voltaire, Screamers, Suicide, et al, but TC are better than mere imitation. The songs, the riffs, they come together to form a whole - one which sways from the purely electronic to honest-to-Pete rock & roll - which makes sense. It sounds like 21st-century music I could actually give a damn about. Lastly, there was The Necks' latest, Mindset. There's not much more I could say about The Necks which I haven't said before (and I've said plenty about 'em before if you care to peruse this blog). Mindset has two 20-minute songs (and for the first time ever, in fitting w/ the song format, they've also released it on LP) - "Rum Jungle" and "Daylights" - the former being the noisy track, all hammering organs and beating drums, whilst the latter is the sound of sparse piano tinkles and light brushes. This band can do no wrong - they have done no wrong - so you need this one to complete the set.

Internationally, the UK's Trembling Bells put out a killer I reviewed here earlier in the year. The band possess an obvious reverance for British folk-rock of yore ('60s Fairports, in particular), but mesh up ye olde stylings w/ Brit psychedelia of the Syd's 'Floyd/Soft Machine variety, as well as the occassional bombastic sense of harmonic expansion one would usually gild from a Dirty Three platter. A great combo, and they have the songs to prove it. I finally came around to San Fran psych-rock quartet, Wooden Shjips, in 2011, and you can probably thank my line of work for finally alerting me to their sounds. Their critics would dismiss them as a one-trick pony - take a hot riff semi-stolen from the Velvets or Roky or Neu! or whoever - and run it into the ground, mumble something over the top and repeat until finished. Perhaps that is an accurate description, and my only retort is that, judging by their West album (Thrill Jockey), released earlier this year, it's a formula which could still do w/ some more milking before I get bored with it. Both Trembling Bells and Wooden Shjips are unashamedly retro in approach - they make few concessions to the sounds of today as we know it, and it's for that reason I can stand, nay, enjoy, listening to them. Michigan-born brassman, Colin Stetson, put out a puzzling, difficult and rather amazing disc earlier in the year, New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges, on the Canadian Constellation label, one which I only bought recently but which must be mentioned. Stetson is mostly known for his voluminous session work, with everyone from Tom Waits to mega-selling indie-rock nudniks The Arcade Fire and Bon Iver, but his solo work is something else. He plays mostly baritone sax in a circular, atmospheric and repetitive fashion, one not too dissimilar to some of Evan Parker's solo works on the FMP label, the result being a kind of deep and dark industrialism far removed from the world of jazz. New History... also features the vocals of one Laurie Anderson on several tracks - a woman I loathe for reasons too detailed and petty (and possibly unjustified) to go into here - though even she can't spoil the good times to be had. This one's "difficult" but ultimately very rewarding. Speaking of Anderson, I must give special mention to her, ahem, "better" half, Lou Reed, and his collaborative effort w/ mega-selling manchildren, Metallica, Lulu. I procured a freebie of this 2CD set a month or more ago, and for me, regardless of what anyone on planet earth says, it stands as one of the most bizarre, awful, brilliant and utterly unique releases of the past 12 months, if not the past 10 years. The Wire magazine rated Lulu as # 9 in their Top 50 releases of the year, and David Keenan's review in their November issue stands as the only sober and well-reasoned summation of its contents I've read of it in print thus far. Metallica will likely never record another great album in their lifetime (I highly rate their first 3, which I only belatedly came around to about a decade ago), and Reed's chances aren't particularly great, either, but the meeting of these two seemingly incongruous forces of egos, bullshit and bravado has created an entirely different beast. Sure, it rambles, and yes, James Hetfield often comes across like an embarrassing kid trying too hard to impress his grouchy uncle (that's Lou), but anyone w/ an interest in left-field music needs to give this a listen w/out prejudiced ears. The fact that it seems to go on forever (two discs totalling near a 90-minute mark) - as if editing out 10 minutes to make it fit a single CD (something I'm sure the record company was praying for) would spoil its grandiose plans, only makes it even better. It's a startling and absurd mixture of barely-together grunt-metal, raging speed/thrash and extended drones (mostly on disc 2), all laced together w/ Reed's drunken, croaky "poetry". Lulu is a great Lou Reed fuck-you platter, and I'll also give Metallica credit for being just smart/dumb enough to go along w/ it all.

I only watch TV that comes in DVD box sets, and my vote goes to Breaking Bad, a series I've only been exposed to in the last few weeks, despite nagging from friends for the last couple of years. I have now witnessed the first 3 seasons, and for me it stands up there in the Great Television Of The 21st Century pantheon, that select group of shows inhabited by the likes of The Sopranos, The Shield, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Deadwood and Six Feet Under. Curb Your Enthusiasm is essentially just a smart and very funny sitcom, but like the others mentioned, Breaking Bad unfolds and reveals itself like a good novel, each episode playing like a chapter in a book as you slowly watch the show's main anti-hero (all these shows possess an anti-hero: it's the formula for good TV as we know it today) steps deeper and deeper into a world of shit. The main protagonist is the highly intelligent yet similarly under-achieving high-school science teacher, Walter White. He's just been diagnosed w/ terminal cancer and has a pregnant wife and disabled son to take care of. Seeing possible financial troubles for his family in the near future, he goes into the crystal meth trade w/ a deadbeat ex-student of his, his brilliant scinetific mind cooking up the best batch of the stuff the southwest has ever seen. He soon learns that once you dip your toe into the drug trade and make an impression, it's hard to get out. On paper, the storyline sounds potentially awful and unrealistic (or just plain awfully unrealistic), but the clever writing and ace performances, and the way the story slowly and convincingly unravels and begins to involve larger forces beyond White's control (or even knowledge) make it absolutely gripping. Folks, they're still very occasionally making TV for people w/ grey matter between their ears, and Breaking Bad is one of the best of them.

Movies? Books? I have no idea what happened this year. I'm the last person you should be asking. I'll be back before the year's out for more blather.

2011-12-09T19:25:00.000-08:00

In the past week, I have witnessed the American hardcore punk rock band Off! not once, but twice. They lit a fire under my ass and made me want to dance. Well, I would've danced, except the slam pit looked like a match to the death and I got all scared. My brother partook and has the bung knee and bruises to prove it. Fuck that, I'll just tap my feet. They've got an ace 16-track CD on the Vice label, of all people, which compiles their four 7" EPs (which is also available as a handsome 7" box complete w/ Pettibon art. They rip out a mean, lean, short, fast & loud punk rock which sounds like the last 30 years ceased to exist. It's part Germs, part Adolescents and part Nervous Breakdown sped up to breaking point. It ain't nothing new, that's a given, but does it give me a blast? You bet. A truly good sound never ages, and Off! are to be given credit for being a real band: a fearsome foursome who aren't just living off past glories, but emitting a sound which, dumb as this may sound, is also totally fresh. Would I care for them if not for their pedigree? Likely not, but I never said I was consistent. Ginn probably thinks Morris is a first-rate retrograde asshole for being in a band like Off!, but I'll ask you this: what would you rather listen to, Off! or the last 20+ years of Ginn recordings? I thought so.
Anyway, let's speak of one of the bands from whence they came, namely the Circle Jerks (I've written about Redd Kross before, but may do it again in the future). Off! are made up of Keith Morris, Steve McDonald, Dimitri Coats and Mario Rubalcaba. The latter two have done time in bands such as Rocket From The Crypt, Hot Snakes, Earthless and Burning Brides, bands who mean little to me and hence I won't be wasting your or my time tackling their respective output and where it fits within the musical universe. No disrespect to either - Mario is a mean and wild skin-hitter and Dimitri slashes out a cool Ginn/Ashton-style guitar - but I've never even heard the Burning Brides, Hot Snakes or Earthless (who toured here not too long ago and whom I heard good reports of), and haven't listened to RFTC since I lost a cassette a friend made for me of their early singles back in about 1993 (though I recall liking some of the tunes). So on w/ the show it is...
The Circle Jerks' '80s discography is a wildly uneven beast, though one I can claim great sentimental attachment to. Along w/ the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag, they were the first US HC band I claimed fandom for all those years ago (1986, to be exact. What, you missed the silver jubilee party?). High on the fumes of the Repo Man soundtrack, I went out and bought their debut, Group Sex (1980) and 1985's Wonderful in one hit. More on the latter soon. The debut is absolutely one of thee classics slabs of SoCal punk rock destruction. It's duration is a mere 15 minutes, but it packs more twists & turns, lyrical barbs and ge-u-ine musical invention within its quarter hour than most punkers packed into their complete discographies (actually, most of which didn't go beyond a mere 7", but the point has been made). Along w/ the likes of (GI), Damaged and Adolescents, it remains my fave piece of fast-paced LA mayhem from the period. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.... you know the CJ story, correct? Formed by Keith Morris once he was booted from the 'Flag in '79, along w/ Greg Hetson, fresh from Red Cross, bassist Roger Rogerson and sticksman, Lucky Lehrer. They hit the scene quick - supergroup that they were - and made a big splash in the suburban HC market within months of their debut. Sure, they ripped off some tunes from 'Flag and the 'Cross, but musical thievery is what makes the world spin on its axis. You can see footage of 'em here from Decline Of Western Civilisation: during their peak years they were a white-hot unit. Bozo punk-thrash w/ a beer-clutching singer at the helm, though they could pen some hot riffage (I'm thinking of tunes like "Beverly Hills", "Back Against The Wall", "World Up My Ass", "Red Tape" et al), though they never went down the life is pain/I want to be insane world of heaviness & gloom that the 'Flag fellows travelled down. I love that path, too, though the 'Jerks could be kinda dumb and almost, err, "funny" w/out merely being a precursor to Doggy Style. Got me? Group Sex was a huge indie hit for the Frontier label and helped keep a roof over their heads until Suicidal Tendencies hit paydirt a coupla years later.

The band switched labels for '82's Wild In The Streets. The edition I have - an old LP from the '80s - is on Step-Forward Records, some fly-by-night mob whom I know nothing about (the band had an old-school rock & roll manager, so who knows what production/label team he hooked 'em up with). Some subsequent reissues have been put out through Frontier (even via Epitaph at one stage), so who the fuck knows who owns the rights to this one. When I said the 'Jerks were uneven, I wasn't lying. WITS is still a great platter, but it sounds like it's under-rehearsed, sloppily produced and mixed out the ass. The title track is a mover (a Garland Jeffreys cover, in fact), and having just listened to it for the first time in a number of years, there's a bunch of tracks I'll equally vouch for ("Murder The Disturbed", "86'd", "Political Stu"), though there's something about it which doesn't quite make up the greatness of the debut. Subsequent reissues have been re-mixed and -mastered, so maybe they give it an edge the original version lacks. The material's there, but the production and execution doesn't always hit the mark. Still, for '82 punker action, this one's a keeper.

1983's Golden Shower Of Hits is a bit of a clunker. It was the last to feature Rogerson & Lehrer (he's apparently a successful attorney these days; down here we call 'em lawyers), and was released yet again on a different label: Allegiance. You know 'em? Me neither. That may explain why it's never been reissued. Or if it has, I've never seen it nor heard of it. Or maybe it remains out of print simply because it isn't that good. It's got some turkeys ("Junk Mail"... an anti-junk mail song? Sounds like they're reaching), and a good half of it simply sounds uninspired, but it's not a total write-off: "Rats Of Reality", "Product Of My Environment" and the tunes featured on Repo Man, "Coup D'Etat" and a reconfigured "When The Shit Hits The Fan" are hot, and the title track, a medley of schlock by the likes Karen Carpenter, The Association, Paul Anka and The Captain & Tenille is pretty, err, "funny" (tune's good, too). Some of GSOH is strictly punk-by-numbers autopilot material, though, and for me it's my least fave disc of theirs.

Another record, another label. 1985's Wonderful is where, pardon the pun, the shit hit the fan. Folks loved or loathed this. W/ a new rhythm section (featuring actor Zander Schloss on bass) in tow, the band made a direct stab at the hard rock/metal market... sort of. Released on Combat Core (the "punk" sub-label of metal empire, Combat), the production gives it that big, "rock" sound, Greg Hetson grew his hair out to Boltonesque proportions and there's no doubt this was the band trying to hit the big time. This rousing endorsement aside, I dig this a lot. Call me a sentimental old fool - that may just be the sole reason I do like it - but it's got some strong material, and despite the concessions made to the HM market with the production and slightly slower, more accessible material, there's righteousness buried within its grooves. I thought "heavy metal" (as it was known and recognised in the '80s) was a genre filled w/ total bogusness throughout my teens years (it still mostly is, but I'll tackle that non-issue at a later date), but Wonderful keeps things pretty simple and upbeat throughout. If anything, it's really a sell-out to "rock" - just plain, old simple "rock" - and that's not such a bad thing to dabble in, huh? It's got a lot of great tunes: the title track, "Making The Bombs", "Dude", "Karma Stew", "Rock House", "I & I", et al and nary a clunker in sight (even the party anthem, "Heavy Metal Weekend", has its charms). If you're hearing Wonderful for the first time in the year 2012, it may register a big, fat zero to yer ears; as a semi-mersh punk/rock album made in '85 and heard by these ears in '86, it still manages to weave a manner of half-arsed magic throughout my senses.

I bought 1987's VI upon the week of its release. Again, there's another label change, this time to megacorp indie, Relativity (a fake independent label/distro owned by Sony, whom I believe also owned Combat), and the back cover shot of the band had 'em looking like the years hadn't been kind to them: Morris looked like he'd crawled out of the sewer and Hetson was beginning to resemble an audition for the part of either Barry Manilow or Peter Frampton in a musical. I remember the review by Tim Yohannon at the time in Maximum Rock & Roll: he actually liked it. No more mersh HM flirtations, no tuneless thrash: just four-to-the-floor punk 'n' rock 'n' roll. Or something to that effect. A few folks thought this was a "return to form" after the disaster of Wonderful, something I disagree w/ for a couple of reasons, them namely being that Wonderful is a better record than this, and indeed it's a better record than its predecessor, but hey! VI is still a worthy addition to the CJ's canon of song, so to speak. It's got a rippin' cover of Creedence's "Fortunate Son" as well as blazing originals like "I'm Alive", "Living", "All Wound Up" and "I Don't", the production is still slick though contains enough rust to power the songs, and lyrically it's got a more personal angle, detailing Morris's degenerate lifestyle at the time (he cleaned up years ago). All in all, a worthy way to see out the band before they called it quits for many a year and Hetson made a comfortable living playing w/ the mega-successful yet shit-boring Bad Religion.
If you could divide up the 'Jerks' '80s discography, it's into two distinct camps: the classic early SoCal punk in Group Sex and Wild In The Streets and the big-league rock & roll of the latter two. Golden Shower Of Hits stands in no-man's land, being a record I would deem as being too full of mediocrity to rate much of a mention beyond the mandatory collection-filler. Like I said, it's a wildly uneven affair, but stacking 'em all up to each other and spinning in succession will have it make sense, and put the weaker material into a better light and perspective. And what the fuck, Keith Morris is a fuggin' icon in my book, one of the original smart-arsed suburban dweebs partly responsible for the creation of the glorious music form of the original hardcore punk seed, and for that we should all be eternally grateful. He talked his ass off between songs at the Off! shows, and I was happy to hear that slacker, Californian drawl all night. He's the real fuckin' deal, pal. Below is a great clip: the short-lived line-up featuring Chuck Biscuits on skins, whacking furiously as the band tore through a few songs from Golden Shower... (which sound much better in a live context) at what appears to be a pro telecast taking place in a medium-sized arena. Anyone know the story behind this?

2011-12-03T23:00:00.000-08:00

Oh, the irony! It's not lost on me! After having just given a half-baked review of Simon Reynolds' Retromania, what do I decide to do? That's right: give a quick spiel on one of the most unashamedly retro contempo bands of them all, Sweden's Dungen. This quickie is inspired by my raving for the recorded works of Sweden's Turid just two posts below; after a dozen rotations of the lovely lass - musically speaking - I thought I'd skip four decades and stick to the same region by spinning the wares of that country's great white hope of the 21st century. Dungen were kind of a big deal roughly half a decade back - a "buzz band", you might say - though their unwillingness to play the game, to do anything but play by their own muse, has seen them slip back into the comfortable jacket of being a "cult band". You following me? They had a couple of albums - 2004's Ta Det Lugnt included - released on a subsidiary of the Virgin label in their homeland; their 2007 opus, Tio Bitar, was licensed on CD Down Under on the indie-via-a-major imprint, Ivy League and they toured here at the time with (gulp) Wolfmother! (surely one of the most shitawful excuses for a rock band this century) But don't judge 'em by the company they keep. They left Virgin coz it wasn't their scene (maaan), and all this background material is perhaps immaterial to the one very important fact: they make fucking great records. Really, really great records. Along w/ another contempo fave of mine, the UK's Trembling Bells - a quartet I raved about earlier in the year who shamelessly mine a Fairports/Incredible String Band/Syd's 'Floyd realm of sound - Dungen sound like a band caught in the wrong time frame, but their appropriation of this musical timewarp is handled w/ such care and attention to detail that even the hardest of heart would forgive them for their musical grave digging. Dungen really is just one guy: Gustav Ejstes. He is the one constant, the singer, songwriter and renaissance man, although he has kept a steady band under his wings in recent years, one which cuts it ably in a live setting, too. Whilst their two more recent albums - 2008's 4 and 2010's Skit I Allt - have seen the Dungen sound paired down to a slightly less ornate setting, lighter on the psychedelic overload and stronger in the baroque art-pop dept. (I compared 4 to Roxy Music, Amon Duul 2 and Scott Walker a coupla years back on this blog), there's zero drop in the quality dept.: it's just the sounds of a band moving on. The high point for myself, and many others, remains 2004's Ta Det Lugnt, a 2LP magnus opus which very well could've been released in 1971, and if it had, you'd possibly like it a whole lot more. It was released this century, and that's no reason to dismiss it. Available as a 2LP set on the Swedish Subliminal Sounds label, if you read this blog for the music recommendations and not the showbiz gossip, then you know what must be done: it involves the exchanging of hard-earned cash for goods. A 13-song meisterwerk featuring tracks both long & short - from 55 seconds long to 8 1/2 minutes - it runs the gamut from gentle, flute-laden acid-folks ballads to elongated psych-rock jams to jazzy, Soft Machine-style excursions to light, baroque sunshine-pop and even Zep-style riffin' hard rock. Amongst all this remains their constant worship of Swedish underground rock from the '60s/'70s - International Harvester, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Parson Sound, et al - and others from the "progg" scene (follow that link for a layman's explanation of what I speak of). All of this, of course, has been done before. You could even say it's been done better. Rock & roll isn't moving forward, it's feasting on its own corpse, etc., etc., etc. All true and I couldn't give a fuck. Dungen also have the songs to back it up. I just listen to those whose musical output, whether it's ahead of its time or way behind its time, floats my boat. Dungen do it. Every fucking time.

2011-11-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

Allow my two cents to be thrown in the pot regarding Simon Reynolds' latest tome, Retromania (Faber & Faber/2011). I'm familiar w/ some of Reynolds' writing over the years, mainly the articles he'd occasionally pen for The Wire, as well as his book, Rip It Up & Start Again, from approx. half a decade ago. The latter was actually a pretty good one, too, one which dissected and put together the post-punk diaspora which exploded throughout the globe in the late '70s and early '80s into a comprehensive (and comprehensible) narrative. He has a fairly simple and approachable style of writing, conversational like a zine/blog writer, yet he also isn't afraid to throw a few pieces of academic lingo and analysis around. Much like many a Limey music journalist, he also isn't afraid to discuss - and sometimes even create - the occasionally ludicrous music genre (such as "hypnagogic pop" and "hauntological": the kind of phrases I couldn't possibly say w/ a straight face), though he's been living in the US for 15 years now (and recently moved from NYC to LA), and "gets" rock & roll far moreso than most of his fellow countrymen (his chapter on SST in the 1980s from Rip It Up... was pretty spot on).
But anyway, it's 2011, popular and unpopular music hasn't given the masses nor underground a major kick up the backside for about a decade now (possibly debatable, but that's his stance [and mine]), and Retromania is Reynolds' attempt to tackle the topic of the state of music in the year 2011, where technology has taken us and where it's likely to lead us. The rapid change of technological advances the past 5 years, and the way it's changed the musical landscape and the way we approach it and listen to it, has left myself and some of my compadres more than a little dumbstruck. The instant gratification of the internet, iphones, downloads etc. almost has me forgetting what life was like before such gadgets came along. Whilst I'm prone to complaining about the get-it-now culture swallowing the minds of the youth of the land, I'm as guilty as anyone in my exploitation of said technology.
But back to the book.... for the most part, Retromania puts to paper what's been swimming around my head the past few years regarding contemporary music: why, in the 21st century, does the new music I'm hearing not excite me like the music of old? Is it all really that unoriginal, or is it simply a sign of my own age? Do 19 year-olds voraciously devour the hot, new underground sounds in the same manner I did 20 years ago? Does it resonate w/ them in the same way it did for previous generations? In short: has music been cheapened and de-valued? There's no definitive answer for any of this, although Reynolds does claim there to be a general malaise in the originality dept. the past decade, and this can be blamed on the omnipresent nature of information and our ready access to just about any music from the past & present at the press of a key, something bordering on information overload, and something which has led to a near-parasitic music culture which is constantly feeding on itself, almost unable to search for new ideas. In other words, its sense of forward momentum, of breaking new ground, has been lost, or at least stalled. Regional scenes are not given time to develop anymore as they had in the past (think of everything from the blues/R & B of the '30s/'40s - the west coast practitioners had a very different sound to those of the south or the east - through to the distinct HC/punk scenes of the early '80s), as an artist can display their wares to the world via Youtube/Myspace/Facebook/ etc. after one practice, and possibly find themselves being plagiarised in Finland or Estonia within 24 hours... but I digress. Retromania is more fun that that. It's not a whinge nor a Luddite manifesto, and also willingly acknowledges the benefits the internet has brought music fans throughout the previous 15 years.
The first half of the book, in particular, had me interested: it dissects the culture of record collecting and how this relates to the changing world of the 21st century. The story of his son as a five-year-old living in NYC and obsessed w/ collecting bus maps, is both hilarious and illuminating. Reynolds would take his son on weekend bus trips throughout the burroughs so he could collect the maps, until one day he simply said to his son: Why don't we just go to Central Station and pick up all the maps there are in one quick & easy grab? His son was horrified at the suggestion, and at that point the author knew he had the collecting bug like his old man: it wasn't just the collection per se, it was the journey in the acquiring which made it such a passion.
Reynolds interviews and writes about some infamous collectors and label folks well worth reading about - John Kugelberg, Miriam Linna, Crypt's Tim Warren - and for me this was the most interesting part of the book. The latter two, in particular, have always held the belief that, if I may paraphrase, it may be old, but if it's new to me, then it's new, and that's something I can relate to (at least that's how I justify my hopelessly backward-looking music obsessions). Reynolds also gives some major page space to the current trend of famous musicians curating festivals, the constant revival/reunion circuit (something which has a particular stronghold within the punk/independent scene of the '70s/'80s) and the labels dedicated to reissuing old material. I can say this from experience, having worked in the, err, "biz" the past 15+ years: it's a lot easier selling older material tarted up at the right price than it is breaking a new band, no matter how brilliant you may think them to be. Believe me, a well-annotated and -packaged Ella Fitzgerald box set marked at the right price (ie. - dirt cheap) moves faster and more steadily than 99% of "hot" "new" releases.
Reynolds lost me halfway through the book for a few-dozen pages when he started writing about the world of fashion and its constant recycling, but that's probably just because I have zilch interest in clothing (I found a look which suits me 25 years ago and I've stuck w/ it ever since), though it picks up the pace again when discussing contemporary artists he rates (ones I mostly don't), "futurism", sci-fi writing and the 20-year cycle of nostalgia. My workplace is a few doors down from a "community" high school (basically an "alternative education" facility), and it nevers ceases to crack me up when I walk past a big group of its students on the way to work, many of them decked in subcultural uniforms from decades past: there's the death/thrash metal kids wearing Kreator, Destruction and Sodom patches on their denim jackets, the HC kids w/ Bad Brains and Black Flag t-shirts and the crusties w/ Crass and Rudimentary Peni hoodies, smoking out the front on most mornings. There's even a small group of retro-stoners, clad in Led Zep and Hendrix tees, looking like extras from Dazed & Confused. Several times I've walked by in a Black Flag or Sunn O))) t-shirt, only to hear one of them mutter to me, "Cool t-shirt, man". No one's ever commented on my Louis Jordan top, but that's no surprise. Some of the kids wear Darkthrone and Burzum shirts, but none of them sport truly new and contemporary bands on their apparel. If I didn't feel approx. 100 years old in their vicinity, simply as a matter of social research, I'd ask them why they don't appear to listen to contemporary music, but each time I chicken out.
Reynolds is quite taken by the current crop of "hypnagogic pop" bands 20-somethings are entranced by in the 21st century. Hypnagogic pop? I was hoping you wouldn't ask. Loosely speaking, if I have this correct, it's a term attached to a certain retro school of sound which feeds on various forms of pop from decades past: '70s yacht-rock, '80s synth-pop, New Age, kraut, etc. Ariel Pink is the most famous poster boy, though others, like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never, also get major props from more "adult-oriented" publications such as The Wire. Ariel Pink has one great song I can vouch for (hear it here); Mark McGuire and his outfit, Emeralds, even have their moments (there's a great 2CD Best Of on the Mego label; his schtick is looped guitars and electronics which possesses a kraut/Terry Riley vibe); even Oneohtrix Point Never I have enjoyed... but is this the best there is to offer? It's not music to get excited about, and in my grumpier of moods, I'm prone to dismissing all of this stuff as vacuous hipster nonsense few people are likely to care about in 12 months time, let alone 10 years. Taking full advantage of the technology at the tip of my fingers, whilst reading Retromania, I browsed Youtube to hear tracks by Boards Of Canada and the "hauntological" (don't ask) sounds of Advisory Circle and The Focus Group and found myself distinctly underwhelmed. I wanted to be excited by these groups, but I wasn't. I doubt there's ever been a poll conducted to determine whether my reaction is a widespread phenomenon amongst Gen X music nerds who appear to be almost incapable of appreciating 21st-century "young people's music", so you'll just have to accept that as being the opinion of one man.
But Simon Reynolds is a professional music writer, which means he has to - and obviously does - find something of value in these bands, and if he didn't, he may as well give up his profession or enquire about vacancies at MOJO magazine. 21st-century music, both underground and mainstream, may be rife w/ plagiarism, unoriginality and a parasitic nature almost unprecedented - and perhaps much of this can be blamed on technology - but you can't fight it, and I shouldn't resent those born at the wrong (or right) time who are growing up in this climate of rapid change.

2011-11-18T22:01:00.001-08:00

Here's an excellent release which has come straight of nowhere, or, to be more specific, Sweden ca. 1971 - 1975. Released on the RPM label out of the UK, Stars And Angels compiles the best tracks from Turid Lundqvist's three LPs she released on the Silence label in the '70s. You're unfamiliar w/ her works? I was, too. Born in 1949, she'd been playing around since 1965 and was signed to the Metronome label in the late '60s, although her recordings from the time went unreleased (and were apparently erased). The extensive liner notes paint an interesting picture of the music scene of the time. You may already know of some of them: Parson Sound, International Harvester, Trad Gras och Stenar and the Baby Grandmothers. The Subliminal Sounds label out of Sweden has reissued a lot of this stuff the past decade, as well as recordings by the excellent contemporary Swedish psych outfit, Dungen, and it's well worth digging your claws into. Parson Sound let out an almighty low-end, drugged roar, like White Light/White Heat played at a crawl, and International Harvester could be considered a brother/sister band to the original, communal Amon Duul. The Baby Grandmothers played more high-energy rock & roll, sounding like a strange, Nordic take on '60s garage punk and Blue Cheer's first disc. To tie this all in, The Baby Grandmothers' Kenny Hakansson accompanies Turid on most of the tracks here, lending the songs a sublime, acidic quality they may not have otherwise possessed. And that's not to imply that Turid herself is any slouch: her vocal mannerisms sometimes earned her comparisons to Melanie and Joni Mitchell (the latter is occasionally spot on), although her music is way more fried and exploratory than either, thus equally earning comparisons to left-field troubadours such as Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs. You could even compare her music to that of Joanna Newsom, but A) Turid was there first; B) Newsom's music annoys me; and C) I don't see how comparing an artist of 40 years ago to a contemporary one necessarily paints a flattering portrait for either singer (ie. - you're either saying that Newsom's approach is dated or contrived [a distinct possibility] or that Turid's music is boring enough to sound contemporary). But anyway! There's 17 tracks here of wistful and occasionally fruity psychedelic folk music, and despite the frostbitten conditions they were recorded in, they possess a colourful, sun-drenched aura, and given their accessible nature - there's plenty of great hooks here - it has me thinking the cult of Turid is most certainly worthy of breaking out further than the miniscule following she enjoys outside of her homeland. There were plans for her to move to the UK and sign to John Peel's Dandelion label, but it never came to fruition. She would've made a perfect label mate w/ Bridget St. John, and her music fits in nicely next to other UK u/ground eccentrics of the day such as Comus, Jan Dukes de Grey, Twink, pre-T-Rex Bolan, etc. The liner notes tell an interesting story: there was a musical movement in Sweden in the '60s/'70s known as "Progg"; not "prog" as in progressive rock, but one built on a DIY/anything-goes ethos where musical ability meant little. The movement was also highly political, but like most such movements, whether it's the Yippies, Red Army Faction or Weather Underground (though there's no mention of armed struggle amongst the Swedish Proggers), it petered out by the end of the decade, possibly superceded by punk. I have no interest in pursuing musical obscurities for their own sake in the 21st century - that's a waste of everyone's time - the music Turid Lundqvist recorded in the first half of the 1970s stands on its own, regardless of who has or hasn't heard of her before, as something worth pursuing. Along w/ Jan Dukes de Grey and Bridget St. John, this is one of my fave early-'70s (re)discoveries of recent years.

2011-11-15T23:57:00.000-08:00

I first saw the 1975 film Race With The Devil on VHS cassette some time around the dawn of this century. I walked into the video store, stumped as to what to rent, and asked the guy behind the counter for a good, thrill-a-minute action flick I likely wouldn't have seen before. I don't usually ask total strangers for recommendations, but the guy in question was an older rock & roll dude from the area who owned the store, knew his films and was prone to playing a bit of Can, Amon Duul and Cluster over the store speakers (hell, I walked in there one day and he was playing F/i!!). I'd accept his verdict. He recommended the Peter Fonda/Warren Oates suburbanites-on-the-run-from-murderous-Satanists thrill-ride, Race With The Devil, directed by Jack Starrett, a man who cut his teeth making biker exploitation flicks in the '60s and wound up as a bit-part actor in schlocky '80s TV fare such as Knight Rider.
I watched the film for the first time in over a decade just the other night. Far from disappointing me - I liked it a whole lot the first time around - it possibly impressed me more with a re-viewing. When describing it to a friend yesterday, I said it was an A-grade B movie. That is, the basis of the film is a total B-movie premise, and in lesser hands and w/ lesser actors it may well have totally sunk from view, but w/ a tight script, characters that make sense, actors who can actually act and hot stunt/action direction, Race With The Devil is superior drive-in fodder.
The film starts out establishing the main male characters: Fonda plays a professional motorbike rider whose form has recently slipped, and Oates is his best friend, confidante, owner of a successful motorbike store and repair centre and also an ace on two wheels. There's some early riding scenes as the two of them duke it out on the dirt hills, just to show that they're not totally stripped of all machismo in their dorkoid suburban surroundings. When push comes to shove, they may indeed fight back. Oates is usually known for playing the perrenial tough guy, so to see him playing someone so gentlemanly - the two of them are decent and likeable characters - is a refreshing change. Even more refreshing is seeing Fonda act beyond his usually wooden parameters. I usually rate him as one step above Charles Bronson, but this time his performance his believable and sympathetic.
So anyway, Oates has bought himself a mega-deluxe motorhome w/ all the mod cons (even a microwave oven!), so he and Fonda and their respective wives, played by Lara Parker and M*A*S*H*'s Loretta Swit, decide to take it on the road - their own self-contained home - to the back of beyond for a vacation. First night on the road, camped by a creek in the middle of nowhere, Oates and Fonda witness a firelit Satanic ritual across the water where a young woman is sacrificed. Both in shock, and not yet seen by the perpetrators, the shit hits the fan when Swit turns the outside light of the motorhome on, yelling for her husband to come inside, and they're spotted. Soon, the chase is on. But the film is not just 20 minutes of build-up and character development and then 70 minutes of road thrills. The action ebbs and flows, lulling you into a false sense of security that the foursome are finally safe and OK - even in the arms of the local police or at a well-lit, highly populated camp site - only to find they're back in imminent danger once again. It's an excellent example of the post-Manson paranoia of the time, but in a twist, and without meaning to give too much away, the Satanists aren't hippies or counter-cultural cut-outs.
Race With The Devil is a great snapshot of its time: lots of bad fashion, biege colours and a big dollop of whitebread Amerika. The foursome think they've found safety in their self-contained house-on-the-road, but at every turn it's shown to be a fallacy. When the situation seems hopeless, I found myself muttering in my mind, I'd be straight on the iphone to the FBI, but you've got to keep saying to yourself: those were different times. Technology has made it hard to get lost on a map in the US of A in the 21st century. Back in '75, there was still a sense of space between people and towns. When you're out of reach of the proper authorities, you may well be screwed. As they are.
Race With The Devil reminds me a bit of another superior B movie made over 20 years later: 1997's Breakdown, starring Kurt Russell and J.T. Walsh. You've probably skipped over it a thousand times down at the local DVD rental establishment, but like Race With The Devil, it's a great white-suburbanites-in-peril flick, again set in the middle of nowhere (this time in the southwest deserts of America), w/ characters that make sense, both in their actions and motivations, a tight script and ace direction. Kurt Russell has surely made more bad films than good ones in his life, but I'll stand by Breakdown as one of the latter. Regardless, Race With The Devil is an intense, well-made action/thriller/horror flick I'd recommend to anyone and everyone. The feeling of hopelessness and dread throughout is almost too much to bear. In many ways, Race With The Devil is a much better film than it should be, and that's not a bad thing at all.

2011-11-12T16:49:00.000-08:00

Bloody hell, the frogs can indeed rock when need be. These two clips from Metal Urbain have given me a slap across the face the past week, the combo of jagged Stooges riffs and electro scuzz the finest beats this side of early Chrome or Cabaret Voltaire. Hell, if the Screamers had added a James Williamson-style guitar-slinger to their electroid mix, they mighta sounded a whole lot like this. Which goes to show that great ideas - necessary ideas - can often spring up around the globe from disparate sources at an identical point in time, w/ none of the seperate players being aware of each other's existence. Or something like that. Or maybe Metal Urbain were simply a great fucking rock & roll band, and these clips have fried my brain at least a little. Got an anthology CD 'round these parts somewhere, I'm gonna have to dig it out.

2011-11-09T00:26:00.000-08:00

Who's to say what makes great rock & roll anymore? If you were to believe some of the self-appointed arbiters of taste, you'd certainly believe that Lou Reed and Metallica's new collaborative effort, Lulu, ranks among the worst albums ever recorded. If it truly is, then I'm rather curious to hear it, but the barrage of negativity - as if these professional critic types are simply looking for something, anything, to get excited about in 2011, even if it's from a wholly negative perspective - has worn me down to a calm indifference... and I haven't even heard the thing yet! And anyway, if it is as terrible as some people are saying it is, then that's merely following a distinct career path both parties have followed the past few decades. Lou Reed released Ecstacy in 2000, and it wound up being my favourite release of that year. His career has been a total rollercoaster ride to the highest peaks and the deepest valleys, but that's Lou. He doesn't give a fuck what you think. Maybe he should, and if he wasn't such a flaming asshole he would, but I'd also be disappointed if he did. Metallica, on the other hand, hit their peak during their first three albums in the early/mid '80s, and haven't reared their heads out of the muck for any extended time since. I've actually heard their St. Anger album, and it beggars belief that Lulu could be worse, but it may well be. Some chowderhead gives Lulu a blasting here at Pitchfork. When a friend recommended I read it, I blasted back that I found it incomprehensible that someone at Pitchfork would actually know anything about what makes good rock music, but the review, in hindsight, probably hits the nail on the head most of the time. Still, I'd rather watch the clip above - Loutallica obliterating "White Light/White Heat" on British TV - than one by the Fleet Foxes or Bon Iver. It's not that Metallica sound that bad, it's that Reed sounds like he couldn't be bothered. He's sounded that way for decades, you'd better get used to it. There's also this review from Volcanic Tongue. That's the other side of the story. I can't vouch for the opinions, but I'm glad someone wrote it. In a career of Fuck Yous, Lulu may be Reed's biggest middle finger yet. Frankly, if it's upset people as much as it appears to have, then it must have something going for it.

2011-11-04T16:31:00.001-07:00

Originally released on the Prestige label in 1960, Eric Dolphy's Outward Bound was also the very first "jazz" record I bought. I purchased a secondhand vinyl edition of this back in the heady days of the early '90s - 1993, to be exact - when I was dead set on exploring the four-letter music form which until then had evaded me. Dolphy seemed a good place to start - his work w/ Coltrane, Mingus and Ornette Coleman alone put him up there in the pantheon - and the single-digit price tag didn't scare me at the time, either. It didn't blow my head off upon first listen - I guess I was looking for something more musically ferocious, given my penchant for "noise" back in the day; I encountered that soon thereafter w/ a self-titled Albert Ayler bootleg purchased in the ensuing months, one which set my on track for becoming a lifelong jazz dork thereafter - but it's stayed w/ me ever since, a sentimental fave and one I'll clutch 'til I'm under the ground, if possible. Dolphy left this mortal coil in '64, due to diabetes complications, an incalculable loss to the music world, as he had only in his last few years started to really hit a stride which would, had he lived, likely seen him as one of the great innovators of the '60s. His last few discs, notably Out To Lunch (Blue Note/1964), Conversations (1963), Last Date (1964) and Iron Man (ditto) see him branching out into a wilder, more expansive sound, and that's not counting the dozens of bootlegs from this period (most of them documenting European tours of the time) which demonstrate his progressively expressive and outward-bound (fnar!) forays on his instruments of choice: alto sax, bass clarinet and the flute. Check out the clip below for an excellent example of just how phenomenal a player he could be. On Outward Bound, Dolphy is accompanied by the great Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, a guy who cut a stack of killer hard-bop/free discs in the '60s, either as a sideman or headliner, before blowing his wad w/ some lightweight/mersh atrocities in the following decade (something which seemed to ruin his legacy for many observers), Roy Haynes on drums, Mingus sidekick Jaki Byard on piano and Blue Note mainstay George Tucker on bass. Dolphy cuts loose on a few extended solos on tracks such as "G.W." and "Les" and you can see where his music is heading, though it mainly sticks to a sound rooted in '50s hard bop. The revolution hadn't happened yet, though that doesn't mean you won't have a real good time listening to it. As my current jazz obsessions have recently veered towards the Yusef Lateef/Jackie McLean/Andrew Hill school of avant-bop sounds - giving the more hard-line screeching a break for a while - Outward Bound sounds better to me than it did back in 1993. The album itself is still readily available on both LP and CD in various editions on various labels (it's now public domain in the EU, so the onslaught of reissues by anyone and everyone begins), and since any and every disc w/ Dolphy's name on it is worth its price, you know what you should do.

Seymour Stein, owner/founder of Sire Records (prior to it being bought by Warner Brothers), is often seen as a caricature of the music biz, a cigar-chomping fast-talker who possibly embodies all the negative aspects of the industry he works in, but I'll give him credit for at least giving brief exposure to a few artists who would've been lucky to've released anything in their lifetime other than maybe a Bomp 7" (which DMZ did in 1977) when he opened his wallet during the punk/new wave explosion in '77. Sure, he dropped most of 'em like a hot potato when he realised they weren't gonna make him a mint soon thereafter (he was a businessman, not a true believer), but the documents remain. One of the documents is this disc, a release which has escaped my ears until now. It's recently been reissued on vinyl c/o the good folks at 4 Men With Beards, and one glance at the cover above may render me an excuse for my tardiness: THAT COVER SUCKS. I recall seeing it several times over the years at shops such as Au-go-go, when that establishment was still open and would put high-priced rarities on its wall, and despite its rep as a lost punker classic from the '70s, I always found it hard to get beyond that cover. At its best, it might've been a Cheap Trick/Cars blend of new wave/pop nonsense; at its worst, it looks like it belongs in the Boston/Toto/Journey school of '70s atrocities. It is, of course, neither. DMZ existed for a few years in the mid/late '70s and hailed from Boston; early member Dave Robinson had spent time in the Modern Lovers and later did play in The Cars, but for many they're remembered for basically morphing into the long-running Beantown garage outfit, The Lyres, the group singer Jeff Conolly formed after their dissolution (bassist Mike Lewis joined 'em, too, later on). What's so special about this release - one many punk rock releases from '77/'78 unfortunately can not claim an equal boast to (especially for a full-lengther) - is the quality of the songwriting and its ability to really rock. The sound is sharp, punchy, relentlessly upbeat and sympathetic to their aims: rockin'. Perhaps most strangely of all, you can thank none other than Flo & Eddie - the Turtles/Mothers Of Invention dudes - for the production job: the rhythm section of Paul Murphy and Rick Corraccio is hot, the guitar cranked high in the mix and Conolly's yelps the crowning glory atop all of this. DMZ's sound was caught somewhere in the mix between '60s Nuggets rock (there's a cover of "Out Of Our Tree"), early '70s proto-punk (New York Dolls and Raw Power are all over this) and the fast-paced no-frills shenanigans of the Ramones. A pretty good combo - a tried a true combo which possibly now amounts to a musical cliche flogged into the ground these past 35 years - but DMZ were there at the beginning and, judging by this sole studio long-player, did it better than most others. Long obscured to all but a few diehard collector nerds, it's now out and about and available in the few worthy record stores left on this planet. It's 11 tracks of high-octane rock & roll malarky - something I'm prone to dismissing, but something I also get down on my knees and worship when it's done w/ aplomb - and in this case I'll give DMZ's LP a shamefully belated two thumbs up, Fonzie style.

2011-10-30T01:42:00.001-07:00

I've got a few spare minutes, so let's see what's been floatin' my boat in these neck 'o the woods of late. The above box is one which is high on the list. I must admit - hell, I will admit - that the name Mickey Newbury didn't register in my mind until a few months ago when this 4CD box set was thrust in my paws by a colleague w/ the strict instructions that I must digest, toot sweet. Such a confession is one I'm not proud of, and in retrospect it's odd that I'd never come across his wares, considering my fandom for his contemporaries (Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Waylon Jennings), but here we are and that's the story. Newbury was a Texan-born singer-songwriter - one most famous for his songs which were made into hits by others - who made a big splash in the Nashville/Acuff-Rose scene in the '60s and perhaps an even bigger splash in the burgeoning outlaw country music crew of the 1970s. Those who've covered his songs range from the good to the bad to the ugly (from Joan Baez and Tom Jones through to Kenny Rogers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Kris Kristofferson, David Allan Coe, Bobby Bland, Willie Nelson... the list goes on) and right on through to The King himself. You can compare the two versions of his most famous song, "American Trilogy", below. Newbury's is quiet and delicate - a ballad supreme - whilst Elvis' is a blustery showtune spat out with pure spirit wrapped up in a glittery suit complete w/ karate kicks. I'm prone to dismissing Elvis as a monumentally over-rated dunce who landed himself in history at just the right time and place - hell, why would you listen to Elvis when there's Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard? (and don't even get me started on the genius of Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris et al) - a man whose tastelessness knew no bounds, and then I see a clip like the one below and am struck by the man's godlike stage presence. His rendition has an extra coating of cheese, but by golly, that's no reason not to like it. Both versions possess their own unique sense of beauty, and for very different reasons. But that's enough about Elvis. Newbury released 3 LPs between the years 1969 - 1973: Looks Like Rain, 'Frisco Mabel Joy and Heaven Help The Child on the Mercury and Elektra labels. They're collected here on this deluxe box set - designed and put together by the folks who designed the similarly lavish Charley Patton and Albert Ayler sets for Revenant, so you know it looks nice - put out by the UK impint, Saint Cecelia Knows. The LPs have also been reissued individually in the US by the Drag City label. There's also a 4th CD in this set which puts together demos, a radio session from 1970 and publishing-company demos of Newbury songs made famous by Roy Orbison, Ray Charles and others. The collection of music contained within the four discs features some of the most stunning examples of pure songcraft I've had the pleasure of hearing since Townes Van Zandt blew the lid off my head w/ his debut back in the late '90s (I was late to the game then; I guess I continue to be). Newbury's delivery and song style isn't far removed from Van Zandt... in fact their style is so close at times that I could mistake one for the other, although Van Zandt's has a heavier country/folk bent, whereas Newbury mixed his w/ a more Tin Pan Alley Nashville sound, one leaning towards the Jimmy Webb school of slick, urban countrified sonics (not a bad thing). Newbury released a few more discs after these, though was largely musically inactive from the 1980s until his death in 2002. Any songwriter you'd give a damn about in this lifetime owes him a debt, and some of them give their due in the liner notes. The power of his songs are immense, w/ subtle changes of mood which power them along w/ an emotional gravitas like few others. Note the shift in key after the first chorus run on "American Trilogy": it moves the heart and loins. There are many other songs present here which similarly achieve such an aim ("Write A Song A Song/Angeline", the first song on the set is a definite contender for his greatest piece of music), and over time I'm sure I'll discover more. The packaging is incredible (there's now a cheaper, less deluxe edition available - actually the one I own - with the kind of design/layout which still shames most others), the music unbeatable and for me it gets my vote as one of the best reissues of 2011. You. Need. It.

The Washington DC band known as Lungfish are one I've been meaning to give the obligatory props to the past 6 months, and now I shall finally, if perhaps too briefly, fulfill my promise. They're a band who've been on my musical radar for over 20 years but one whom I'd never taken the time to actually listen to until roughly a year ago (despite the urgings of several friends who've been committed fans since their early recordings). They have 11 full-length recordings released on the Dischord label, and for now the band remains on hiatus as members pursue other projects. One of these is guitarist Asa Osborne's Zomes project (whose latest recording on the Thrill Jockey label I reviewed earlier in the year), a kind of basement electronics gig somewhere in the Suicide/Cabaret Voltaire realm, as well as main man Daniel Higgs' various musical outings. Higgs is also well known as a tattooist in great demand (he himself is heavily inked, and combine that w/ a beard of great girth and he cuts quite a striking figure), and his eccentric musical outings outside of the Lungfish brand are well worth investigating. He cut a great, rustic, Sandy Bull/John Fahey-ish LP on the Holy Mountain label a few years back, and his double LP, Say God, released again on the Thrill Jockey label last year, is a recording of great weirdness and beauty, the kind of disc whose peculiarities (it's essentially Higgs yelping out his poetry to the minimal backing of a harmonium and little else) tests the listener, but for those who are up to the test, great rewards can abound. But Lungfish are something different. They could be pegged as being a post-HC DC band of the Dischord mold, but I think they're a whole lot better than that. Higgs cut his teeth in '80s HC unit, Reptile House, and the band occasional deliver w/ the ferocity of their punker past, though the musical pace is rarely, if ever, raised above the medium level. One observation many make of the band is this: every album they've made sounds the same; nearly every song sounds the same; essentially, they've been remaking the same album over and over for 20 years. Such observations are correct, but it's a hell of a formula. For my money, the music of Lungfish is caught in the nexus of Master Of Reality-period Black Sabbath and Joy Division ca. Unknown Pleasures: that is the musical meeting point. There's the thick fuzz and stoner groove of primo 'Sabbath combined w/ a slightly Angloid post-punk vibe, driven by melodic bass lines and a vocalist purging whatever from his system in the process. And this formula has been repeated over and over throughout the years. It might sound dull, but it ain't. They rarely, if ever, cut loose; their music is meditative, hits a groove and sticks with it. Album after album. Some folks have named it "Zen-punk". That just sounds fucking dumb... so I'll use it, too. I've got 5 or 6 of their discs, and I like 'em all, particularly Pass And Stow (1994), The Unanimous Hour (1999), Necrophones (2000) and Love Is Love (2003). Which doesn't mean it's all great. I have, for instance, listened to 1991's Talking Songs For Walking and really disliked it, its slick, lifeless production made it sound like the kind of dud alt-rock I thought sucked at the time (and indeed, continues to suck). But from what I can gather, that one's an anomaly. The band known as Lungfish have cut a long, strange and unique path w/ their singular vision, a mixture of mid-tempo sludge combined w/ Higgs' spiritual rants, and I for one am glad they made the effort.

Lastly, I present for you something really special. My buddy Richard Stanley alerted me to this gem just the other night, as he proudly showed me his copy of a rare Village People 7" (I don't get to say lines like that often enough). Yep, the Village People. In 1981, they recorded and released a truly embarrassing and strange stab at New Romanticism by the name of Renaissance. Predictably, it tanked. If ever there was a record worth its 20 cents simply for its cover, then Renaissance is it (Google it, and I'm told that the non-US version is the one). I'm also told its stature as a truly craptacular classic now earns it a few dollars more on the collector scene. But I've since discovered that its worth lies beyond the merely ridiculous. It also happens to feature this track, "Food Fight" (more alleged facts: some versions of the LP don't contain the song, and that for some territories it's only featured as a B side to some crap single they released from the album... at this point in time, you really have to ask yourself: do you care?). As a novelty New Wave/punk cash-in track, it's phenomenal: a relentlessly upbeat pop-punk jumper which is possibly better than the 2 or 3 Dickies songs I actually like (the band this track most resembles). I don't get to say this often enough: sit back, press play and enjoy this Village People track.

2011-10-23T02:45:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome back to me. I've been away from here for a couple of weeks attending to family matters. Long story and none of your business. In the meantime, I also discovered two things: that I have incurred a massive credit card bill which needs paying off, and that I have a mountain of records, CDs and cassettes in the spare room that haven't even been glanced at in the previous decade. Folks, it's time for a cull. When I announced this to friends recently, they howled in protest that they couldn't believe I was selling all my records. I had to put the story straight: the records I'm selling don't even make a dent in the said mountain of records. Believe me, I have more audio recordings than I could listen to in a lifetime, so some of it has to go. I've got stuff to sell by: Royal Trux, Sun City Girls, Harry Pussy, Dead C., Mike Rep, Screamin' Mee Mees, Alastair Galbraith, Red Krayola, Merzbow, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Anthony Braxton, Derek Bailery, Yma Sumac, Mountain Goats, Unsane, Drunks With Guns, Scratch Acid, Brainbombs (first 3 7"s!), Crass, Grey Wolves, God Bullies, Cows, Sebadoh and many more. Some of these I have duplicates of on other formats (sorry, I go for nice & deluxe CD reissues over original vinyl these days, heathen that I am), some I realised I simply don't like anymore (Brainbombs, Dead C., Mountain Goats, Anthony Braxton's more abstract ventures) and most I simply haven't listened to for about 15 years and don't care all that much about anymore (Sun City Girls, Harry Pussy, Thinking Fellers Union). So, if you're at all interested in some or any of these items, email me at lexdev@yahoo.com.au. I've almost finished pricing the first batch of 7"s and LPs, and I'll shoot you through a list. Some of these records are pretty damn rare, so don't expect a bargain, but don't expect to pay through your teeth either. I've priced most of them somewhere in the medium range, so far as I see it (going by Gemm, ebay and Popsike rates), as I would actually like to see them sell. Just about every item is in "near mint" condition, too. I look after my stuff, and I expect you to do the same!

FOLKWAYS ON VINYL

If ever you needed proof that the Folkways label stands as one of the greatest imprints of them all, then look no further than the following releases. These titles had, until fairly recently, been out of print for a dog's age (several dogs, in fact); that is, until the Runt label out of San Francisco reissued them in LP form. They've been licensing from the Folkways label a few gems from the vaults, and I'm happy to report that they all hold up to scrutiny.
A friend noted recently that whilst he appreciated Folkways' achievements in documenting the weird, wonderful and unwanted recordings which the majors wouldn't touch w/ a barge pole, he also noted that that didn't necessarily imply that he wanted to listen to a great deal of what they released. Sure, the classic country/folk/blues/world recordings are items you'll give a spin on many an occasion, but the esoteric stuff, the spoken word albums, the sound effects recordings, they're for collectors and hopeless nerds inclined to hauling the ridiculous and unlistenable. Sorry, those last few sentences were a quote from someone else. They're not my words. Whilst I can't say I've given my copies of North American frog sounds or taxi drivers of Ghana and their "honk horn" music a great deal of airtime the past few years, I mighty glad they exist. And for the occasional, sublime listening experience, they will be played. The recordings Runt has chosen to reissue don't all necessarily fall within the absurdist realm of sound, and a couple you might even say are pretty darn accessible in their own way.
The one above was released in 1974 by Bilil Abdurahman East New York Ensemble de Music (yeesh, I shall call them BAENYEDM from now on, if I have to), and it documents a man and ensemble I know nothing about. I do know, however, that it rates as a first-rate '70s Spiritual Jazz disc, one which doesn't stray into the outer zone like some of its contemporaries (Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, et al), but one which never gets too mushy and caught in the New Age, either. Most of it essentially sounds like a mid '60s hard bop/modal jazz disc a la Blue Note w/ a heavy dose of Eastern spiritualism thrown on top. Some of the musicians hailed from the Carribean, and the vibes (as in the instrument, not the feeling) present also lend it that flavour. Abdurahman leads on soprano sax and Korean reeds, and he's backed up by another six players on instruments such as Turkish drum, African Twin-Gong and conga drums; there's four tracks, two of which stretch over the 10-minute mark, and it's cosmic jazz of a very high order. This is my pick of the bunch.

This one came as a surprise. It's entitled Jujus: Alchemy Of The Blues, performed by poet Sarah Webster Fabio w/ music backing by a funky outfit which consisted of several of her sons. Fabio was an academic and Black Power activist, friendly w/ Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, and this LP was curiously originally released in 1976, a fairly striking release for a time when America was getting all mellow and about to vote in Carter. Possibly given the limited finances, this possesses none of the sheen which was starting to gloss out the best funksters by the mid '70s, and is a raw, skeletal sound w/ tough rhythms and scratchy guitar licks. Fabio's vocals and poems work to effect, too, the one part of the recording I was fearing would fall flat on its face (possibly sounding too smug or self-righteous, or just plain dated in some of its sentiment). Her words are none of the above, and you can read them in the accompanying booklet. The band rips out an ace James Brown/Last Poets hybrid and her authoritative yet cooly delivered voice makes this one more than a mere curio item. Killer.

This one's a curio, and one I probably won't spin it as much as the others, but I'm glad it was documented at the time and made available once more. It was originally released in 1959 and puts to tape the music of half-a-dozen street-dwelling kids from Harlem - bongos and vocals - all edited together by one E. Richard Sorenson. The record is split into five seperate parts: Percussion Ensembles (bongos, sticks, drums), Rhythms With Voices, Rhythms With Verses, Songs and Rhythmic And Vocal Improvisations Rejecting Personal Experience. Given Folkways' political bent, much of this was, I'm guessing, an attempt to show the blight of the inner city in Amerika, and whilst I'll give props to such swell intentions, I'll give equal props for the fact that a lot of this is highly listenable on a strictly musical level. If you're partial to the exoticism of Ocora's field recordings, then get your head around the bongos & chant mania of this gang who reside a little closer to home. The Last Poets made themselves legends and drug addicts w/ this schtick a decade later. This version sung from the mouths of babes may just be your ticket, too.

And then there's the last one below. The great Michael Hurley is likely known to many of you out there. His catalogue of song - recorded over nearly the past 5 decades - ranks as one of the most erratic, bizarre and brilliant there be. He's an American institution, or at least would be if more than a handful of people had heard of him. I was a big nut for the guy in the latter half of the '90s and still pull such wares from the drawers on a semi-regular occasion. In hindsight, it remains a bizarre yet possibly true fact that for some reason I haven't written about his music once in this blog. Or have I? I'm up somewhere in the 600-mark of entries, so you might have to do my research for me. Back in the '90s, some of his best recordings, such as this Folkways LP from 1964, were completely unavailable to mere mortals and late-comers. I had to make do w/ the more easily-attainable (and equally as good) Rounder recordings and the cassettes which my old UK buddy Richard Mason supplied: he, too, was a mad fan and gave me several original Michael Hurley Fan Club cassette releases. I ain't selling them. In the past few years, I'm pretty sure all his prior hard-to-get titles have been reissued (some by cult nerds Mississippi Records, I believe), and if you're feeling curious, I'd recommend Long Journey and Snockgrass to just about anyone reading this, and most of all I'd recommend 1976's Have Moicy!, Hurley's high point which was recorded w/ his old Greenwich Village freak-folk buddies the (Un)Holy Modal Rounders (so-called due to the absence of member Steve Weber) and others. Heck, even the clueless puds at Rolling Stone gave it props, voting it one of the top 20 releases of the 1970s. It's one of the best party records I own. The record itself sounds like a party, a drunken, rambling one. One in which I would like to attend. It's combination of offbeat humour and rag-tag country/folk/rock/blues rates it as one of the greatest examples of sublime Americana put to tape. It should be held in the same esteem as The Band's early discs or Creedence's finest output, though begging for it to break out of its cult status this late in the game is too much to ask. Hurley's music is not easy to describe. His basic modus operandi isn't a world removed from the likes of Dylan, musically speaking (folk singers caught in the world of rock who still give nods to classic 1930s country-blues), though his lyrics inhabit a seperate universe. They're more Edgar Allen Poe than Woody Guthrie, fused with stories of werewolves and vampires and bizarre imagery, psychedelia w/out the fancy studio trickery. It's a hoot. Now, that brings me to this disc, First Songs, credited to Mike Hurley. It features only Hurley on vocals, guitar and violin. The music is stripped back to the bones (some of these tracks would later surface slightly augmented w/ a backing group on later releases), presenting Hurley and his nonchalant vocals as a voice like no other in his time. This has been out of print forever, and like all these reissues, it comes in a paste-on sleeve just like its original issue, complete w/ inserts. Runt has also reissued on vinyl some excellent Folkways discs by Dock Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb and Elizabeth Cotten - musicians I've written about before on this blog - and if you've got the spare change, you oughta take the plunge on the lot of 'em.

2011-10-05T03:59:00.000-07:00

The awesome Melbourne duo, PIVIXKI, whom I released a CD by last year (get it here), will be touring Europe soon w/ another Melbourneite worth checking out, Marco Fusinato. I can seriously vouch that every time I've seen PIVIXKI play live, they have completely and totally knocked the socks right off my feet, which means I'm seriously suggesting that, if you happen to be on the continent, you should take the time out to see them play. They are truly a force of nature. The dates are below...

19/10: FR – Poitiers @ Le Confort Moderne

21/10: BE – Bruxelles @ Ancienne Belgique

22/10: CH – Lausanne @ Lausanne Underground Film Festival

23/10: FR – Fresnes-en-Woevre @ Festival Densites

24/10: FR – Marseille @ L’Embobineuse

25/10: FR – Lyon @ Ground Zero

26/10: FR – Montreuil @ Les Instants Chavires

27/10: IT – Milano @ Leoncavallo

28/10: IT – Massa-Carrara @ Tago Mago

31/10: CH – Geneva @ L’Usine

02/11: DE – Berlin @ Ausland

03/11: AT – Vienna @ Shelter

04/11: SK – Kosice @ Tabacka

06/11: SK – Bratislava @ Melos-Ethos Festival

*************************************************************

What happened to the font above? Don't ask. Sometimes you cut & paste and just can't control the outcome. On another note, I'm on a break here for a while. Personal dramas and circumstances will keep me away from here for likely a few weeks, but I will be back...

2011-10-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

Just last week I was telling a couple of work colleagues that I virtually never read any music magazines anymore. The fanzine has just about gone the way of the dinosaur (there are actually a number of Australian fanzines around, though given the fact that they tend to mostly cover both new bands I don't care for or old bands I don't care to read the zillionth article about, I never give them a chance. However, I do find it interesting and encouraging that folks in their early 20s are penning articles and 21st-century appraisals on bands such as Simply Saucer and Von Lmo, as well as articles on bands who, for better or for worse, defined ca. 20 years ago for me: Skullflower, Dead C., Sun City Girls, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, etc. Things have truly come full circle Now, please allow me to exit these brackets), and I've found I haven't even been bothered to flick through the monthly issues of MOJO and Uncut which turn up at my workplace like clockwork. In short, I had, until 96 hours ago (you can make that 4 days, if you wish), considered myself burnt out on the concept of reading music periodicals. A colleague, who recently left my place of work, subscribed to The Wire for "work purposes" (on the company's dime), and even that I'd never even pick up for a browse. From the years 1994 - 2002, I read The Wire religiously. The Wire started in the 1980s and was originally a magazine dedicated, more or less, to contemporary jazz and "new music" (you know, Laurie Anderson fans). It was largely a dull read, but at some point during the mid '90s it started covering a broader range of music in greater depth, much of it within my radar of interest. I feel no shame in stating that during the period in which I considered it a compulsory read, it was the best widely-read music mag under the sun. No other publication kept me abreast of what was worth hearing, both old and new, on such a regular basis. William Parker, Krautrock, ESP-Disk', John Martyn, Lee Perry, Acid Mothers Temple, Nurse With Wound, Morton Feldman, you name it, it covered the best music in a manner which got one excited. You knew that in some sense it was up its own backside, but that was OK, because so was I (I probably continue to be so, too). If The Wire was all you read for a musical fix, then I'd suggest that horizons should be broadened, but as part of a Rainbow Coalition of paper & staple productions (which for me included everything from MOJO to Flipside to Browbeat to Popwatch to, err, Black To Comm), it filled a vital hole. Something happened around 2003, and I lost interest. Perhaps it was the internet which killed my enthusiasm (and my attention span), or maybe I got tired of their anorak musical approach and wanted to distance myself from becoming what some friends of mine classify as a "Wire-reading tosspot loser" (their words, not mine). Actually, if you could pinpoint the one moment in time when the mag totally lost me, it was probably when David Keenan wrote the "New Weird America" cover story and I purchased some of his recommended releases (Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Charalambides, etc.), only to be sorely disappointed. They'd just lost their status as taste-makers and for me had fallen into the UK music press trap of attempting to christen a scene for the sake of a story.
Well... as stated, the new issue landed at my feet just the other day, and I decided to give it a go. In the intervening years of my absence, the world of music has changed considerably. Hell, the world of "music journalism" as we once knew it barely exists. There are few writers who hold sway as tastemakers as they once did in the days of yore, and the idea of sitting down and reading a periodical - a collection of articles pieced together and compiled as a snapshot of music worth reading about and hearing - is one almost entirely lost to an entire generation. The Wire has a few of such tastemakers left in their armour: Byron Coley rips out a couple of dozen reviews of recent 7"s here, including a batch from Sydney's RIP Society label, and Edwin Pouncey, AKA Savage Pencil, is still giving props to an eclectic array of artists, including a surprisingly positive review for Wilco's latest album. I only say "surprising" because I've heard it and it very positively bored the complete shit out of me. But I do like the fact that he covered it, just as he gave similarly rave reviews years ago to Radiohead's Kid A and Primal Scream's XTRMNTR, both being records by million-selling "alternative rock" bands I can also vouch for, whether you like it or not (along w/ Beck's incredible Seachange from 2002, a record which bears absolutely no resemblance to the rest of his catalogue, and one which reminds me: I really should do an entry covering such sore thumbs in the contemporary landscape of major sounds). Reading the reviews section has inspired me to come out of my slumber and explore what's going on in the year 2011: the new one by doom uber-group Asva on the Important label sounds right up my alley, and I'd never know of the recently-released Billy Bang 3CD set unless I'd bothered to pick this up. The droll cover shot of sound artist Christian Marclay may give props to the theory that The Wire is all about po-faced adulation of the serious, but there's also articles on ex-Harry Pussy guitarist Bill Orcutt and his recent solo output (records I've heard and find quite intolerable, but I can commend the direction they're coming from), an Invisible Jukebox w/ Chris & Cosey and a guide to "militant tuning" (AKA a certain brand of minimalism, covering LaMonte Young, Harry Partch, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad and others), a lengthy review of the Slayer anthology (not the band, but the Norwegian Black Metal fanzine from the '80s/'90s) and a piece on reggae legends, The Congos. My old buddy Nick Cain (I interviewed him here many moons ago here) is still living in Ol' Blighty, after moving there from New Zealand in the late '90s, and, amongst other things, he contributes a scathing review of Mark McGuire's latest on the Mego label. McGuire is the main guy from hipster outfit Emeralds, an outfit whose guitar/electronics sonics approximate a meeting point twixt Terry Riley, Suicide, Metal Machine Music and Georgio Moroder. I'd consider their music to be generic & vacuous, but not without its charms (there's a rather excellent "introductory" 2CD set to McGuire/Emeralds' work on Mego I could recommend), so I'm surprised that Cain dumps a load on him so hard, but I can respect the fact that someone's giving the guy a bad review (a rarity, given his hallowed status among hipster idiots of a youthful persuasion). So where is all of this heading? I know where print media is, and it ain't pretty, but a thorough reading of the latest issue of The Wire has at least managed to pull my head out of the sand for a few brief hours, and to consume some articles larger than blog posts which paint a broader picture of where music's at right now than I've taken in the last few years. Props to them, I say.

2011-09-28T03:50:00.000-07:00

Excuse the tardiness. Real life has taken hold. I've also been completing my contribution to Niche Homo's Mix Tape Wars piece for their next issue. Niche Homo, you ask? Follow the link, buster. It's a printed zine, made on real-world paper and comprising of two staples. Such a product is going the way of the dinosaurs, though I'm glad some young bucks are still making the effort. I wrote about the concept of Mix Tape Wars here, and actually reprinted what I wrote regarding my contributions as well. From contributors Mick & Nick I had to wax lyrical on tracks by the likes of Roscoe Holcomb, The Flying Fuckin' A-Heads, The Creation, Lightnin' Hopkins, VU, Bob Dylan, Sun City Girls, Henry Flynt, International Harvester, Jimi Hendrix and more, and whilst you may consider this little excercise in the strictly nerdsville zone as beneath pathetic, I will say that it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble. And what the hey, it's a blast having someone force you to write something about an artist you otherwise wouldn't be in the mood for tackling, a problem I'm often beleagured with here. I won't print what I wrote about their contributions here; you'll have to buy the zine yourself when it comes out in a few months time.

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On another note, there's a book in the works which I'm guessing will be well worth reading upon its completion: SST Records: The Blasting Concept, authored by my buddy Abe Goldman and his compadre Willi Muhlhausen. Check out the Facebook link here, if you're so inclined. Abe has spent the past 12 months or more interviewing just about everyone involved in "the scene" - it's no neophyte hack job - and when I say everyone, I mean every yokel and his Paper Bag. He's managed to get extensive interviews w/ everyone from Mike Watt, Joe Carducci and Chuck Dukowski to the St. Vitus fellows, Ray Farrell and The Stains, and from what I can gather by its progress, it's leaving few stones unturned. Goldman also appears to be fully switched on to the aesthetic which drove the label, a spirit of self-contained, artistic anarchism combined with a reverence for rock & roll's past, seemingly oblivious to what passed for cool at the time. A certain part of me is jealous that he's taken the dive and put himself head-first into a project which in the back of my mind I feel I should've started tackling a decade ago (but have been too unmotivated and/or lazy to do anything about), but I'm glad it's in the right hands. Greg Ginn? So far, I don't think he's talking...

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Also of note, at least for me, is the fact that the great Big Jay McNeely will be playing here in November. The guy is 84 years old, fer chrissakes! I saw Marshall Allen lead the Sun Ra Arkestra earlier this year, and that guy is 87 w/ the lung capacity of a 25 year-old, so I'm hoping Big Jay has kept himself in shape. McNeely was one of the great honkers & screamers (to use the vernacular) of the post-war era, a time when stars were made of men who could blast their brass through the roof over a swinging R & B backbeat, an era which was pretty much wiped out upon the mainstream appropriation and success of rock & roll as many history books tell it. This entire post-war era of black American music (roughly 1946 - 1954) has become an almost shameful obsession of mine the past few years, and having one of its heroes on these shores is something which gets an old geezer such as myself more excited than is healthy. There's a thousand different Big Jay McNeely CDs and LPs on the market today - his best material is all now public domain in Europe - though if I was to vouch for one, it'd be JSP's mid-priced 2CD set imaginatively titled King Of The Honkin' Sax. It's got 58 tracks of high-energy goodness and along w/ Joe Houston's Ace CDs (such as Rock & Roll Drive-In and Blows Crazy) and The Big Horn 4CD set on Proper, it stands as the best introduction to the roof-raising sax blasters of yore.

2011-09-12T05:10:00.001-07:00

This is the kind of release which sends a hopeless soul such as myself into a tailspin of desperate activity. Within 30 seconds of witnessing this on a friend's computer screen, I was typing in my Paypal password and ordering it online. Sometimes you just gotta do what ya gotta do. For one, this is the type of release which will likely be deleted by the next time you eat a hot meal; and two, it compiles two excellent Pharoah Sanders titles on Impulse! from the early '70s, 1972's Wisdom Through Music and 1974's Village Of The Pharoahs. Both were only ever in print in CD form years ago in Japan, and buying a copy of one of those is about as expensive as getting an original vinyl edition (and finding a good-condition copy of one of those is next to impossible. Didn't you '70s avant-jazz "heads" take care of your audio wares??). I've raved about Pharoah many times before: his 1965 - 1974 output is about as good as it gets. For me, it's up there w/ Miles' run of goods from 1969 - 1975: perhaps the greatest single successive recording achievement in a brief time period ever laid to tape. You got that? Like Miles, Pharoah's recordings from this period are both much the same yet utterly unique in their own way. You won't mistake Tauhid for Black Unity, but you'll know they both come from the same mind. Village Of The Pharoahs features a big lineup, even latter-day fusion idiot Stanley Clarke within its ranks. It delves heavily into the spiritual/exotic jazz vibes he'd been riding on for the previous 5 years. It comprises a monolith of percussion, chants and a vaguely Eastern aura. The three-part title track is a monster. Pharoah screeches and huffs his horn, but there's a serenity at work, and it's this contrast that really makes Pharoah's work from this period gel. He never gets too New Age or mushy, and nor does he indulge in endless honkin'. There's 7 tracks in total here, and all of 'em are good. Wisdom Through Music sees Pharoah going for a more Afro/jazz sound, the opener, "High Life" being a giveaway for his inspirations. Next is "Love Is Everywhere", which sounds like an old gospel track (complete w/ vocals) intermingled w/ '70s avant-jazz, and the title track and the proceeding "The Golden Lamp" are probably more in the "world music" vein than what you (or I) would probably call "jazz". And that's a good thing. In essence, this is deeply spiritual psychedelia, as good as it gets, and not only would I recommend it to any Pharoah fan, but those w/ a weakness for the similar output by the likes of The Necks, Don Cherry, '70s Miles and Can's primo discs. The bomb. Don't miss it.
This is the best compilation of '70s British folk I've come across... ever! It's not like I've been looking too hard all these years, but I'm mighty glad this one recently fell into my lap. It's released on the excellent UK label, Honest Jon's and compiles a "best of" from the vaults of the '70s folk label, Leader Records, an imprint set up by '60s folk-scene everyman, Bill Leader. So the story goes, by the dawn of the '70s, the Brit folk scene wasn't what it had once been. Popular lore says that it dried up in the '70s, as its main stars of the 1960s folk revival drifted off into two distinct camps, the rock and psychedelia of Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, Jan Dukes de Grey, Comus, Steeleye Span, etc., and the singer-songwriters, such as Nick Drake, John Martyn, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. The more simple, unabashed folk music style of the early '60s, unadorned by the trappings of the rock market, apparently banished. Phooey to that: like the liner notes say, they just went underground. Leader set up his label to release the music of this microscene, and I'm glad he made the effort. If this compilation is anything to go by, there's gold in them thar hills. There's tracks by Lal Waterson of the famous Waterson folk family, and a whole load of stuff I have never heard of. Some tracks are a capella, most are only embellished with a simple acoustic guitar. My favourite is Nic Jones' rendition of the old English folk number, "Annan Water". Its beautiful sense of Englishness, all grey skeys and green hills (and other depressing English crap), is sublime, and similar numbers by the likes of Tony Rose, Aly Bain and Alistair Anderson possess a sparse and authentic feel that has this whiffing of a certain purism I can get my head around. I was a big sucker for this stuff back in the '90s, and it's a pleasant surprise for a release to reignite my interest in it once more. It's not the feel-good hit of the forthcoming summer, but the strength of the songs and their delivery make this one work. Never The Same sounds like rock & roll, and perhaps the last 200 years, never existed, and sometimes I can say that's a good thing.

2011-09-12T05:07:00.000-07:00

I bought a copy of Creedence's Cosmo's Factory LP when I was 16. It seemed like a logical choice. Bands I liked - some so obvious I dare not mention their name - liked 'em a whole lot, and I figured I should, too. Their LPs were a dime a dozen at the time. I think I paid $2. I still own that record; I still play that record. This track was brought up in conversation today. My protagonist, a man of sound judgment prone to hyperbole like we all are, mentioned "Ramble Tamble", noting it to be his favourite CCR song of them all, also noting its similarity to mid-'80s Sonic Youth. He is correct (again, for reasons perhaps too obvious to mention). Prior to today, I had never discussed this song's greatness to a living soul, yet its greatness struck me all those years ago, and echoes today. It remains the band's meisterwerk, a mesmerising slice of rockabilly choogle and expansive, almost psychedelic jamming. The breakdown in the middle, which then leads into an ever-evolving twang of guitars and soaring feedback before heading back into an upbeat 4/4 rock & roll number, is possibly better than any moment in a Velvet Undeground song. They sold a zillion records and yet they still made great records. More on this topic soon.

2011-09-11T00:47:00.000-07:00

It was ten years ago tomorrow that...uh... I quit my job at Missing Link. I'll always remember that date. Why? Because it was 2 days after another drama-filled day in the history of the universe. I didn't resign from Missing Link because I hated it (and since the store shuts for good in a couple of weeks, I feel like I could say anything I please right now, even get a few things off my chest); it was simply because I was bored and had this pretty ridiculous notion that the idea of turning 30 and working in a punk-rock record store was a grand statement of total failure in life. Or at least a note to myself that I wasn't particularly doing a whole lot w/ my life. Of course, 4 months later I turned 30 and wondered what in the hell I'd been thinking. Turning 30 was one of the most liberating moments in my life. I turn 40 in 4 months from now and it doesn't mean zip to me.
Coming to work on the 12th of September 2001 was a surreal experience. I'd been up all the night before, or at least until 3AM, watching the footage of events unfolding in NYC and DC, and like just about everyone else on earth, I was pretty depressed about the situation. No one knew what was going to happen next. At that stage, it seemed like World War 3 wasn't out of the question. I went about my business on the 12th, sold a bunch of records, browsed the 'net at work for updates and went home to remain glued to the TV all night. The next day, I vowed I'd make my grand decision: I'd resign. I'd do it the gentlemanly way by giving them 2 weeks notice. I'd never burnt any bridges in a job I'd held, and wasn't about to start then. I got along well w/ the owner and figured it'd be no big deal. I simply wanted to move on and do something different. I'd been there, on and off, for nearly 3 years. At five past ten in the morning, I announced my plans. At quarter past ten, I was standing out the front of the shop w/out a job. I'd soon discovered that, w/ some workplaces, once you announce you're resigning, they really want you out the door, as if hanging around for a fortnight is going to bum everyone out or something. None of this is meant as a slight against the store: like I said, it closes in a few weeks and I'm bummed about that. I had a blast working there, met people - both co-workers and customers - whom I'll be friends w/ for life, and learnt a lot about the ins and outs of independent retail. Back then, music retail actually really meant something, and it meant something to me that I was working at what was then the finest record store in the country. But anyway, maybe it didn't mean enough, because at 10:15 I was standing out the front of the shop, wondering what the hell I was going to do next. I went home and switched on the box, watched all the misery on TV once more and rang my wife. I told her I'd just resigned, that I was out of there already and thought I might've just made a big mistake. 2 weeks past and I landed a new job. Life started again, somewhat, and that, ladies and gents, is all I have to say about September 11. You expected something profound from this blog? Some new insights? Not on your life. I'll leave that for the self-professed experts and talk about some music.
I've posted up various covers of Blue Note LPs by Jackie McLean and Grachan Moncur III because, A) '60s Blue Note artwork does it for me every time; and B) these are the albums which have been getting the most spins in my vicinity. Both Moncur and McLean played together often in the 1960s. McLean honked on Moncur's Evolution in 1963, and Moncur played on McLean's One Step Beyond, Destination... Out!, 'Bout Soul and Hipnosis concurrently and throughout the latter half of the 1960s. Moncur is a rarity: a jazz trombonist. More than that, he's an avant-garde trombinist. He's been largely inactive since the end of the '60s, recording a couple of LPs and a little session/side work w/ everyone from Cassandra Wilson to Butch Morris, Archie Shepp and William Parker. He also recorded 2 LPs under his own name for the BYG-Actuel label in '69 (I'd highly recommend New Africa). His 2 LPs as leader on Blue Note are easily available on CD and come highly recommended from moi. Both are bridging the gap between the hard-bop and free-jazz scenes, breaking into energetic runs but still w/ one foot firmly entrenched in a jazz swing. But don't think for a second that these discs are finger-clicking excercises in cool. The arrangements are still generally abstract and not the kinds of discs to play within earshot of polite company. I'd rate 'em somewhere between the works of Eric Dolphy (esp. Out To Lunch, another Blue Note classic which also features the hot vibes of Bobby Hutcherson) and the egghead sounds of Anthony Braxton when he's not getting too smart (ie. difficult) for his own good.
Alto sax player Jackie McLean was one of the greats of hard-bop/avant-jazz in the '60s. Some folks call it "free-bop". I think I can handle that w/ a straight face. He recorded about a dozen LPs for Blue Note throughout that decade, and I could recommend pretty much all of them. The ones pictured remain the three I'll vouch for the loudest. Jackie had a clean, energetic tone but let out the occasional squawl when the time was right. He largely retired from music after 1970, heading into academia and heading the Artists Collective, Inc., an educational institute you can read about here, if you please. McLean is most often compared to Ornette Coleman, and people are mostly right. He played w/ Ornette on his own New And Old Gospel LP (Blue Note) in 1967, a record which could pass for an Ornette disc itself. McLean's music is full of fire and energy, but always retains a melodic sense. If the only jazz you wish to hear in this lifetime is Peter Brotzmann blowing a baritone in the name of atonal damnation (I like that stuff, too), then you might think he's too lightweight for your advanced taste. If you're not scared to listen to jazz which sounds a little bit more like your standard textbook definition, but one which also makes a deep enough headway into high-energy blastage, then McLean might be the ticket. 10 years ago, I would never have listened to music like this.

2011-09-01T03:54:00.000-07:00

I had this discussion today w/ a friend at work: we made a brief, verbal list of former hardcore bands and musicians who went "hard rock" in an attempt to make a buck and elevate themselves from the small clubs/no-pay grind of the HC circuit, specifically in the late '80s/early '90s. The discussion began when the name "Mindfunk" was brought up. I don't usually discuss such things in polite company, but I was being egged on. We decided that this particular outfit, who released a couple of major-label failures in the early '90s, takes the cake. The line-up is most curious: Pat Dubar from straight-edge warriors, Uniform Choice, and Mark St. Reed from proto-black metal power trio, Celtic Frost. There's also some guy from M.O.D. in there, just to strike a balance. Their music was cod-ordinary funk-metal, the kind of music I thought blew then, and continues to blow now. Somebody saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns 'n' Roses and Faith No More go platinum and said, Get me a band like that on my desk by monday morning! Hell, maybe they just stumbled over each other at a bar one night and said, Let's start a band! You think so?

Junkyard are another curious example. I remember when they were around - 1989-1990 was their, ahem, "peak period" - and local low-rent rock & roll publication Hot Metal ran a feature on them. I just about spat out my lunch when I eyeballed a shot of guitarist Brian Baker decked out like Slash. The glasses kinda ruined the look. And there was ex-Big Boys bass-man, Chris Gates, looking like he was playing in a biker-blues band. What in the hell are they doing? In the wake of Guns 'n' Roses' massive success, methinks a couple of veteran punkers smelt a buck or two in the bad-boy leathered R & R market and went for gold. They nearly got there, too. Brian Baker was recently asked by Axl Rose to play guitar in the umpteenth line-up of his band. Baker allegedly balked at the suggestion, possibly realising his longterm gig w/ Bad Religion is a steady piece of income, but also possibly forgetting what he did all those years ago.

This was an example shown to me by my buddy today. Slapshot were a Boston HC band from the '80s/'90s fronted by scene vet "Choke", a model and template for hockey-club-swinging tough-guy frontmen ever since. Dude, he was from fuckin' Bostoooon, man! I used to hear some of their music on the 3PBS punk radio show back in high school, and I'd see them featured in mags like Flipside at the time, but I never took any notice. I thought HC in general was beating a dead horse by then, and a band like Slapshot personified its most unappealing qualities. But still, some baldies of various stripes and IQs obviously thought they were the shit. By 1991, the writing was on the wall. Many a Boston HC band had gone hard rock in years prior, but for me this one truly captures the spirit of the time. They saw the possibilities inherent in semi-mersh muscle-rock and unfortunately made a stab at it. Love that tree-kicking in the video, though.

This one won't make a lot of sense to anyone outside of Australia. Hell, it probably won't even make any sense to most folks in Australia. The band known as Killing Time started up at some moment in the late '80s. You're going to have to forgive me here, but I can't recall what other bands the members had previously played in. Civil Dissident? Vicious Circle? I know that Russell Hopkinson - who cut his teeth on the HC circuit in the '80s and has since drummed for Radio Birdman and You Am I - spent some time in the band. Whatever the case, they played all the usual indie/underground/rock & roll dives around 1990. I even caught them one night; I think it was them and local Bad Brains/Husker Du worshippers Suffer at the Richmond Club. They seemed like schlock heaped upon layers of schlock to me, and I didn't pay them any notice. Then Molly Meldrum(!) gave them a very public endorsement one day on TV - just stay w/ me here, this is getting somewhere - and suddenly there was a bidding war. Polydor made a gross error and won that bidding war. I heard persistent rumours of the band pocketing $250,000 for their troubles. The band's first single, "Ruby's Mind", was a decent hit and the label put a fortune into the recording of their debut full-length effort. In the meantime, the band had to change their name - w/ the threat of an impending lawsuit from the NYC HC band of the same name - and that they did: to Mantissa. Catchy, huh? The album tanked. I guess in the wake of Nevermind's success, everyone simply forgot they existed. Or maybe they just sucked. And just to tie everything in: the band toured the US in 1993 with... guess who... Mindfunk!

This is possibly the granddaddy of all funk-metal atrocities written, performed and recorded by ex-thrashers who should've known better. Actually, one listen to any Ludichrist track, the NYC crossover-thrash band they morphed from, and you might just consider the possibility that they could never have known any better in this lifetime. Ludichrist's perennial "Most People Are Dicks" used to get a flogging on various public-radio shows down here in the late '80s: I was well aware of their presence. In 1990, Scatterbrain's "Don't Call Me Dude" was released, and it became one of those surprise hits at the time. It was released by In-Effect Records in the US - nominally an "indie" which I'm pretty sure was actually tied to Sony - and didn't make much of a splash. Down here, in this hillbilly burgh, the story was quite different. Like an evil deity, this track was omnipresent. For about 3 months, you couldn't escape it. Its musicianly blend of rote metal-funk and dopey Cheech & Chong/Frank Zappa-style humour was a smash hit w/ morons everywhere. As was and is the case w/ other thoroughly useless nudniks such as Ben Harper, Michael Franti, Live and The Tea Party, they tried to make Australia their second home. Thankfully the nation came to its senses and the band remains a semi-forgotten one-hit wonder.

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I've only just scratched the surface. Hell, I never even mentioned TSOL's bizarre transformation into Poison back in the '80s, or SSD mutating from Minor Threat rip-offs to Def Leppard wannabes in a mere two years, but you get the point. For myself, the pre-Nevermind phenomenon of ex-HC types losing their cool in the wake of Guns 'n' Roses' and Faith No More's multi-platinum success remains a disturbing chapter from history's path, and one well worth investigating further.

2011-09-01T03:30:00.000-07:00

I was alerted to this today by a friend. I'm glad he did. In my never-ending quest to become a complete caricature of an ageing music dork obsessed w/ all things old, I've been playing a lot of Louis Armstrong lately, particularly his early 5s & 7s material. But anyway, this is something altogether different: the man himself playing a version of the Pharoah Sanders classic, "The Creator Has A Master Plan". This well-informed blog right here tells you the whole story. The fact that the second-last LP Armstrong ever recorded featured a choir of unlikelies such as Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Tony Bennett in its midst... well, I can't speak for you, but that's kinda just blown my mind.

2011-08-29T05:03:00.000-07:00

God bless this interweb thingy. Seven years ago, I wrote about the '80s Dutch hardcore band known as BGK (right here, in fact). Things were primitive back then: hell, I couldn't even figure out how to upload a cover picture to my entries, and Youtube?? Never heard of it. It's now 2011 and apparently there's little reason to leave your house and interact w/ other humans, and in that spirit, I present the clip above. The visuals will not thrill you, but the music just might. I'm playing the LP, Nothing Can Go Wrogn!, just this minute. I have been flashbacked 24 years and once again realised why I dug this record so much at the time. Like the best HC, it's a pure adrenalin rush. The track known as "Jonestown Aloha" by BGK puts ants in my pants and makes me want to dance on a hippie's face. That's all I'm sayin'.

2011-08-26T22:57:00.000-07:00

Here's some great early footage of Kraftwerk from 1971, back when they featured Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, AKA Neu! - in their ranks. Florian Schneider blows a little boogaloo on his flute, though absent is longtime member, Ralf Hutter, who apparently split for a brief while to study architecture. I was a big fan of the band back in the '90s. Hell, I loved them when I was 12 and owned the Tour De France 12", though they were a very different band by then and I liked that particular record for a very different reason (I was, at that age, quite an enthusiast for what is known as "rap music", and that song was nominally seen as hovering in that universe). I still love the band now, though I'll admit I haven't listened to them for a real long time. In the mid '90s I managed to track down bootleg CD copies of the mythical first two albums on the Germanophon label, both of which set me back the unheard-of price of $40 a piece at the time. Those two albums, named Kraftwerk 1 and Kraftwerk 2 and originally released in 1971 and 1972, respectively, have still not been given any kind of official reissue on either LP or CD (or even digitally, if that floats your boat; sorry, that shit sinks mine), apparently because of some legal nonsense too boring to go into here. However, if you do stumble across them, and they won't set you back as much now as they did for me 15 or more years ago, then you should grab 'em, toot sweet. They were a remarkably different band to the computerised/dehumanised electronic outfit they morphed into, and indeed they were remarkable. All their '70s records are worth your time & trouble - in fact my favourite album of theirs remains 1975's Radio-Activity - though the first two are most noteworthy due to their rawness of sound.
The first has a cacophonous, vaguely psychedelic feel, purely instrumental and, at least as far as I hear it, heavily indebted to White Light/White Heat-period VU. Unlike a lot of rock & roll at the time, and mostly in line w/ what I guess you would call the "krautrock sound", Kraftwerk 1, like everything the band did, is completely bluesless and lilywhite in its approach. It contains four long-ish tracks which, whilst perhaps not as fleshed out as they should be, are still a pretty awesome thing to behold, especially considering the fact that they were recorded 40 years ago. The guitar work is particularly scuzzy, like first-LP Stooges: pure rhythm and little else. Kraftwerk 1 admittedly sounds more like a series of sketches than a fully developed album, but if these are just "jams", then I've heard much worse ones in this lifetime.
Kraftwerk 2 is often considered the better of the two. Gone is the acoustic drummer, to be replaced by a drum machine. The sound is more metronomic, though the primitive drum machine in use, a far cry from the slick beats the band would make later on, lend it a Suicide-ish feel. Once again it's instrumental, and the use of tape loops and distorted/treated violin and flute, along w/ more blips and whirls from their electronic gear, give this a rather awesome, claustrophobic early '70s...err, "vibe". I played this the other night for the first time in what must've been a decade, and it struck me just how ahead of the game the band were. Outside of the likes of the Silver Apples, few had applied an almost purely electronic approach to rock music (or at least done it this well). Other krauts like Cluster and Tangerine Dream were recording similarly great electronic-based sounds, though both were also a far cry from what I'd call rock music (and that remark most certainly doesn't mean I don't like them: far from it). Kraftwerk 2 has 6 tracks: four are of fairly normal rock-song length, "Wellenlenge" approaches the 10-minute mark and the albums highlight, "KlingKlang", the opener, veers in all manner of directions, including a few strange moments of seemingly random noises and heavy breathing (so strange it be I had to turn it off when it started freaking the kids out).
The band had originally morphed from an earlier outfit known as Organisation. They released a cool album in 1970 entitled Tone Float, one I haven't heard for years (and don't actually own), and you can check 'em out below. They're a bit more in a west coast acid-rock vibe, w/ Popol Vuh "exotic" flourishes, than what the band known as Kraftwerk were to transform into, though the first two LPs still carry traces of a loose, psychedelic feel. In a mid '70s interview w/ Lester Bangs, Kraftwerk listed the Beach Boys, VU, the Stooges and Blue Oyster Cult as their main influences, something which, over 35 years later, helps make the case of the band being one of the better and more clued-in acts of their day. They went on to sell a whole load of records, too, but that's no reason not to love 'em.

2011-08-26T19:21:00.000-07:00

I set myself a goal this week to write about Michael Hurley, Chuck Higgins and this fantastic '70s spiritual jazz LP on Folkways I recently acquired, and then the pressures and woes of daily life got to me and it all came to nought. In the meantime, in a fit of pathetic nostalgia, I did manage to revisit my Minor Threat DVD and watch all three concerts on its wares. I had the VHS version back in the '80s/'90s, which only had the June 23 1983 show at the 9:30 Club (their final show, in fact), but in 2003 it was reissued in a DVD format by Dischord w/ two extra gigs and a 1983 interview w/ Ian MacKaye. The two other shows in question are the December 1980 show at DC Space, their performance at the Unheard Music Festival; and a November 1982 show at Buff Hall in New Jersey, a HC extraveganza also featuring the likes of SS Decontrol and Agnostic Front. If you're at all partial to enjoying and perhaps over-analysing the development of hardcore punk in the US, they're mandatory viewing. In fact, you will witness its evolution. In 1980, the members were fresh out of high school (actually, Brian Baker, a mere 15 years old at the time, was still there) and the machismo which took over HC wasn't so prevalent. Hell, there are even females dancing in the audience! Things weren't so codified, and the The Kids hadn't yet taken over the scene. Older rockers from the punk/new wave scene, in bands such as The Slickee Boys and The Nurses, were still hanging in there, though I'm sure they figured their days were numbered. By 1982, HC was a national phenomenon w/ key scenes scattered throughout the country, a magnet for angry suburban kids w/ shaved heads and a chip on their shoulder. If you had half a brain in your head, Minor Threat may well have been your soundtrack at the time. Gone are the females, and in comes the head-cracking. By 1983, HC had already peaked and many of the smarter (or better) bands were exploring other musical avenues. Many others ran out of steam. If Minor Threat had stuck around - and if the history books are to be believed, all members bar MacKaye wanted to make a bid for the big time in a distinctly U2-ish direction(!!) - they would've eaten shit in a major way pretty quick, so let's all be thankful that they called it quits. For myself and many others, they remain the quintessential first-wave American HC band. As white as snow and as middle-class suburbia as it comes, they defined it. Check out the collegiate duds on Lyle Preslar in the second clip: he looks like he came straight from rugby practice. I like his (lack of) style. Older observers of HC at the time were highly critical of the then-infant Maximum Rock 'n' Roll's attempt to whip HC into a national radical movement on a par w/ the Yippies, accusing them of being far more interested in it as a social movement than a musical one, in the meantime encouraging thousands of unimaginative dweebs to dull the waters within a few years. I get the point, but that probably would've happened anyway. Within the thousands of practitioners at the time, I'd estimate there were probably 10 outfits I'd rate as brilliant and maybe another 10 I'd rate as great. The rest were scenery, but I'm sure it was fun. I wasn't around to enjoy it, or at least I wasn't old enough to enjoy it when it was fresh and new, but these clips give you some visuals to what a blast it must've been. Like the best bands of the day, MT were totally committed to the music. After all, no one would listen to them anymore if their records weren't that good. "Inventing" straight edge will only get you so far. A friend of mine - the same vintage as myself - noted the other day that he still loved MT because they "rocked", something along the lines of a lightning-paced AC/DC. Check out the riff on "Small Man Big Mouth": it sounds like it's ripped straight out of Back In Black. There are many reasons to dig this, and I guess that's one of them.

2011-08-12T20:31:00.000-07:00

FREAK OUT!

Time to sing the praises of the early career of a man by the name of Frank Zappa, or, to be more specific, him and his band The Mothers Of Invention. The word "Zappa" obviously causes several - perhaps many - of you out there to wince at the mere mention of his name. Isn't he the egomaniac, toilet-humour smart-arse who spent the bulk of his public life acting like a pompous, above-it-all twit whilst simultaneously releasing disc upon disc of unlistenable yet "musicianly" nonsense no one in their right mind (which doesn't include suburbanite pot smokers prone to titty jokes and frequenting music-instrument stores) would go within spitting distance of? By all means, yes. But I have a great fondness for his early works, and I've said it many times before: had he croaked in the early '70s, as opposed to two decades later - at which point his musical crimes were well in abundance - his legacy would be unbeatable. But stick around he did...
I bought his - no, their: The Mothers Of Invention's - debut album, 1966's Freak Out! - back in 1995. I purchased it at the right time of my life, and it hit me deep. Perhaps more strangely, I can thank this guy for getting me into the early recordings of Zappa. Stranger things have happened. Freak Out! was released as a double LP - one of the very first of its kind (possibly the first?) - and is a near-perfect blend of 1960s garage rock combined with greater ambitions. Zappa's R & B/rock & roll roots are demonstrated throughout the first half of its duration w/ a series of concise tunes which mock the stupidity and hypocrisies of the era w/out sounding like the smug, disdainful old bore he'd mutate into within a decade. Zappa cut his teeth as a youth on the LA R & B scene, worshipping the likes of Johnny Otis (his facial hair was a lifelong tribute to Otis's impeccible follicles), Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Don "Sugarcane" Harris, the great Chuck Higgins, etc., and the rock & roll portions of Freak Out! don't stray too far from this worship. The Mothers sounded like a psychedelic '60s Sunset Strip update of the classic Otis sound of 15 years prior - xylophone and all - but w/ a fuzzed-out Seedsy vibe that places it clearly outside of a straight homage. To state the bleeding obvious, Freak Out! isn't that far removed from its contemporaries, whom would be the likes of the Byrds, Seeds, Love and pretty much every white guy on the west coast at the time who wanted to be Mick Jagger. There's a bunch of really great, sarcastic short/sharp/sweet rockers here, such as "Hungry Freaks, Daddy", "Motherly Love" and "You Didn't Try To Call Me", as well as the scorching 6+ minute "Trouble Every Day", one of the few "political" songs Zappa wrote which didn't seem to be coated in smarm and sarcasm.
For the second disc (not that I've ever heard the thing on vinyl anyway: I've got the Rykodisc CD), things get weirder and the songs get longer. Along w/ the aforementioned, there's also "Help, I'm A Rock", "It Can't Happen Here" and "Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet", all of which lay the groundwork for Zappa's reputation as, err, "weird". But rock they do, and the use of electronics and aspirations (pretensions?) towards musique concret were ahead of their time and way ahead in the world of pop music. But they're also "good", and not merely excercises in sheer zaniness. That would happen later in his career. Zappa and the Mothers cut a few other killer discs such as the follow-up, Absolutely Free, We're Only In It For The Money, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets, Uncle Meat, the odds & sods comp', Weasels Ripped My Flesh, and a whole slew of semi-legit product you'll find floating around. I'll even vouch for Zappa's Hot Rats solo disc, which is a great combo of LA freak-rock aesthetics and boogie-blues, but once the original Mothers split, his replacements were seen as his backing band and little else. Sure, there was still personality within his backing groups which could be unique to the individual players (sometimes that wasn't a good thing: I don't need to hear Steve Vai in any context), but Zappa's monstrous ego took hold, and for me the concept of The Mothers Of Invention - a musical circus troupe of identifiable ugly, hairy old freaks who stood in great contrast to the image of record company-groomed pop stars (a template for great rock & roll, if ever there was) was lost. Ex-Mothers such as Jimmy Carl Black and Don Preston played around on and off over the years, but that's a different story.
Friends of mine are aghast of my fandom for Zappa, just as they can be w/ my rabid enthusiasm for the music and long and industrious career of John Zorn. For some, they're one and the same. The latter was, is and forever shall be greatly influenced by the former, and for music puritans, their dabblings, humour and perceived pomposity is an anathema to their musical thinking, an encapsulation of the suburban bong-smoking aesthetic which probably riled them back in high school and persists to this day. I understand, but we're talking music here. In essence, the critics are correct: the strangeness was a put-on; his music was joyless, sexless and perpetually adolescent, like a marathon show-off from the most annoying asshole in the classroom. I guess that all begs the question once more: how could I like this shit? Because there's fun to be had in his catalogue, if only for a few brief years of his recorded life, and since when the hell was being an annoying asshole such a bad thing? Anyone w/ a penchant for his musical offspring - whether it's Faust, Pere Ubu or Bongwater - should head straight for the original source at least once in their life.

2011-08-12T06:39:00.000-07:00

The following is a letter I received from a UK friend just today. It's his attempts to come to grips and try to understand what went on there the past week. I'm reprinting it - with his permission - for the simple fact that it's an interesting view on the riots from someone who was closer to the action than he wished to be. Read on, and please note that I'm not publishing any comments to this entry.

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"Let it be clear there are some very obvious reasons behind what happened in London this week starting. The 'animal' behaviour only occurred after the window of opportunity had arisen, after an uncommon crack appeared in society, allowing such deplorable behaviour.

But how this come to be is very very complex and I think everyone here, after slowly recovering from the shock/trauma of the whole scenario are starting to ask this very question. I will make some simple points which I hope will put into perspective and the reality of what occurred in London this week.

* the economic crisis here is on an enormous level, the results have been not to punish those responsible (the bankers) but to make cuts across society, most to low income family's and the less economically viable communities. The most transparent results of this being the shutting down of libraries, community centre's and more importantly in this matter, youth centres.

* Another fatality of these economic cut backs has been education with state schooling being at a deplorable level. There is no concrete foundation in place to educate children on any significant level, it's a social factory, a token gesture with little substance.

* With regards to education we also had Parliament raise the fee's substantially for tertiary education late last year (from £10,000 to £50,000 in some cases) resulting in young people's prospects of a higher education being wiped out overnight. Resulting in little chance of many of the youth rising above the lower economic class in which they currently reside, ie: no future.

* The enemy this week was the not the 'state' per se, it was the police. There are many plausible reasons for this. After 9/11 they passed a 'stop and search' policy to allow police to stop and search anyone on the street who looked suspicious, of course for a number of years the police enacted this law to the muslim community but as this 'threat' (that has now come to light was completely exaggerated on every level) has started to fade away, the police started to use this law on black people, young black people in particular. Any black person in this country has no doubt been stopped by police and searched, when walking home, when walking in the park, anywhere, anytime of at least an average of 4 times. Very few white people have been.

* When the student fee's were raised there was mass demonstrations in oct/nov last year, I am sure you heard about these. What happened here when the people went out to express their concern for the drastic rise in fees? Up to 50,000 students (and teachers and general public) were 'kettled' (this is when the police corner the protesters in a single area and put up cages around the outside, effectively imprisoning the protesters) this was in winter and the result was that all these people were trapped up to 7-8 hours, they had to burn their school books to stay warm, they had no access to food and water, they had to urinate and defecate in amongst each other and if they attempted to leave they were beaten by police batons. Does this sound like a democratic society ?

* Recently, with the Murdoch scandal, the head of police here and the deputy head of police had to quit as the controversy heightened. Why? As it became apparent that the police had accepted bribes from journalists who were committing illegal activity (the hacking of phones of the general public including a missing teenager who it turned out had been murdered). So imagine being a young person - being hassled by the police on a regular basis and seeing this blatant corruption play out before you. It's ok for them to endorse illegal activity when it suits them (accepting bribes) and on the flip intimidate an entire community who are by and large innocent of any wrongdoing

* The 'stop and search' policy reached it's apex last Thursday when they pulled over a black man in Tottenham under this pretence, this time it resulted in him being shot in the chest by police, he was killed instantly. The police claimed he had pulled out a gun and fired at them. Indeed, 2 shots were fired. On Tuesday it came out that both bullets were from a single police gun.

The riots here rose out of a protest against this incident in Tottenham on Saturday night.

Having (understandably) complete distrust in politicians and policy, the police (zero role models, very few black people in any position of power in this country) and with little chance of an economically stable future what position does this put one in?

The result and actions as a consequence of all this was as misguided as it was frightening. I cannot express how out of control it was here.

On Sat I was out with friends and at midnight I got a text about a riot in Tottenham, about a mile from where I live. My response was, 'what is it now?' as London is a crazy city, but never like this. Another friend called me an hour later and told me to take care getting home. I was fine and assumed, like everyone it was an isolated incident rising out from the protest.

On Sunday night the looting began and caused concern for all here who saw this as gang mentality meets wayward consumeristic tendencies. People were surprised and shocked that it had continued and started to spread to different boroughs and areas, but even after this no one expected what was to come.

On Monday I caught up with a friend around 4pm to go see an exhibition of science fiction literature at the State Library. I was telling my friend that I was concerned about the 'social unrest'. She was more calm than me and was optimistic everything would settle down. As time went on and the day shifted into the evening you could feel something big / terrible was going to happen, it was really strange - the air became thick and claustrophobic. Around 5:30 I got the bus home, I was meant to get my bike from my friends flat and ride home but I told her I was not comfortable doing that and I just wanted to get home. Around this time I heard of riots in Hackney which is the area where I live. I followed this on twitter (all one has in these moments despite it's incredible failings of anybody being able to say anything, there was a lot of hysteria, rumours, mis-truths on twitter all night, it was incredibly frustrating trying to sift for fact and I gave up on this at about 11pm despite it being the only way to get real-time information).

I made it home ok and stayed indoors. I was on 'chat' with all of my friends all night whilst watching the live broadcast, you simply did not know where it was going to hit next. None of my friends were physically effected, in fact, very few people were considering what happened but the fear, anxiety and paranoia was at a level I have never felt in my life. The images were shocking, the part of East London where it occurred, Hackney, is an area I visit once a week at least. This is the area I have lived in ever since moving to London. I could not believe what I was seeing. On Monday it was not an option to go outside, I heard that my neighbourhood was safe as the Turkish community on one side and the Hasidic Jewish community on the other had lined the streets armed with baseball bats, this turned out to be true. This is an essential point to illustrate the level of what this situation turned into. It occurred all over this enormous city, Few borough's were without incident and the omnipresent nature of it was one of the most disturbing aspects. The police were outnumbered and unprepared, not an easy task by any means but they were also a disgraceful at dealing with the the situation (not violent by any means, rather, by simply not doing anything at all) this is after the warning signs were made very clear on the Saturday night.

The leader here David Cameron and the Mayor Boris Johnson were both on summer holidays at the time. There were requests made for them to return after Saturdays incident, they both choose not to. Neither returned until Tuesday morning, after the 'climax' of the entire event. Can you believe this ? Also, as I mentioned the head of police and deputy had both resigned 3 weeks ago over the Murdoch scandal so you had a guy who was quickly put in charge of the police following the Murdoch resignations handling the entire situation that was fast spiralling out of control. So we had complete lawlessness. No Prime Minister, No Mayor and an amateur head of the Police for 3 whole days. The police were outnumbered and ineffective, their tactics were incomprehensible. How can they beat the shit of a number of the 50,000 student protesters (including killing an non-protesting newspaper vendor who had his back to them) but not do anything to stop 200 kids running riot in one particular street? (keep in mind there were gangs of this size all over london) It was an uprising no doubt but please do not slot this easily into the leftist agenda, the reality is that most ALL of the victims were completely innocent people, 95% being small business owners on the lower class of the economic scale, they attacked the very communities in which they lived and raided the shops in which they frequent (mostly sports stores, mobile phone shops, off-licenses etc) it was not a premeditated attack on the state or any such romantic revolutionary notion.

On the monday night there were 6000 police officers for all of london. The riots were all over this enormous city and they were far outnumbered. When Cameron FINALLY returned to office he put a further 10,000 officers on the beat. But this was Tuesday and it was way too late. Why was this not done after Sat, after Sun? No one knows.

As I said all of this allowed a crack to open in society, a window whereby any kind of behaviour was allowed to exist. The results, no matter their genesis were awful for everyone, there is not doubt about that.

For 3 days there was the constant sound of helicopters and police sirens, it started to drive me crazy. It made it hard to sleep and even now 3 days after it subsided, if I hear a siren I get edgy as the sound reminds me of 'that' period, 'that' atmosphere. This will go and of course London is a city with frequent sirens but I am trying to express how insanely oppressive the environment was here. I can't imagine what it was like where the actual events were going on. I ran into one friend who lived on a street where a bus was set on fire and he said it was really the worst thing imaginable, absolute horror. But I am sure you have had plenty of coverage of this perspective over there along with very little opinion from the black community. Of course the initial irrational response of the public was punish the perpetrators as harsh as possible, but of there has to be a reason this all happens. The answer is simply not as clean cut as the various articles I have read in the media this week or opinions I have seen expressed on Facebook et al.

The actions themselves for the most part were not directed at individuals, it was against property and the police (this point remains defunct as there simply were not many around) - it was a confusion of anger and opportunity. All the shiny capitalist goods these people can rarely afford had suddenly become available at no cost, a corrupt government who demands people consume but does not give them the opportunity to earn decent wages may result in this distorted view of commerce as seen by the rampant looting that took place here.

As I said, I was safe and was away from the areas the majority of the action occurred in - Besides the helicopters and sirens, I heard explosions from petrol tankers exploding nearby. On the Tuesday evening I went out around 7pm and came back around 12:30pm, I went to the Turkish district, Dalston, to get a perspective outside of media images which I found irresponsible. The atmosphere was very intense all night, especially when 100's of Turkish men suddenly ran into their shops and left carrying baseball bats and similar weapons. There was a large police presence on Tuesday night but they let the Turkish maintain this area as they were doing a better job than them at protecting the community. The only incident was a gang of 6 very young kids who naively entered this area and were immediately chased by the locals, they all ran passed me, the children were like frightened animals, the Turkish like vicious dogs. This is what became of my neighbourhood, my community. Things were tense all night until a procession of 30 riot vans went down the street just after midnight, symbolically declaring that it was all over. Like some heroes returning from war. The only difference being they had little to do with maintaining order. If violence is a sexual act then it reached it's climax on Monday night and had started to peter away naturally on the Tuesday and most certainly by the Wednesday evening. (sorry for the metaphor but it is one that works with the momentum that occurred here).

The other thing I found weird was how in the mornings (the Sunday, Monday and Tuesday mornings) it was always beautiful and sunny and everyone would resume normal routine, everyone was out doing their usual thing, working, shopping, walking dogs, or playing in the park with their children. But after lunch it changed, things got edgy again and as the day progressed we reverted back to this paranoid, anxious ridden society. Shops closed and put their shutters down around 3 / 4 o'clock, people were allowed to leave work at 4pm so they could make there way home before night started to fall and before' it' came back again, it was a very disturbing week.

Everyone here is scarred. Myself and all of my friends and other people I have spoken to have all gone through psychological shifts between shock, frustration, anger and depression. It was a traumatic experience but as the dust starts to settle I can honestly say I have never witnessed anything like what happened this week and I was not caught up in it in the slightest, for awhile their it was the total breakdown of a society and it happened very swiftly and to an extreme level.

What started out as a protest, turned into something else entirely. By Sunday, this was not a protest, it was not a revolution, it was misguided chaos and wanton destruction of the immediate environment, the years of oppression resulting in atavistic anarchy and consumeristic confusion.

I do not want to pass on 'my' opinion on any of this as there are enough morons on the BBC doing this every day, not to mention the tired leftist blogists who jump at the opportunity to say, 'See! this fits in exactly with what I have been saying for the last seven years'. Life and society is never so clean cut, but I hope I have outlined the background, some of the events themselves and the general mood and atmosphere of London and other parts of England this week. The nature of what happened here is deep and complex and will never fit tightly into any premeditated rationale, left or right."