My ears are bleeding

mouth to mouth

2011-01-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

it seems that lately, in popular music, there has been a renaissance moment occurring for nostalgia. bands have been going out to perform their “classic” albums, in sequence, and in their entirety; the recent vinyl boom has seen spates of high-fidelity reissues appear; and bands who have lain dormant for years and decades had resurfaced to popular and critical acclaim.
sometimes these forays back into the limelight have proven unwise (or at least imprudent) for some acts, who have aged poorly or blindly or both. but surprisingly, many of these resurgistes (teenage fanclub, the clean, members of galaxie 500) have defied the old rock’n’roll wisdom that it’s better to live fast and die young, and are turning out material that sounds both fresh, relevant and vibrant amidst contemporary hot shots, yet pleasantly and undeniably kindred to their past work. amidst the “indie” ranks in particular there is no one who conspicuously acts the “mick jagger” role as stubborn dinosaur. ok, maybe black francis…

with some of these bands, they haven’t really been away, but their output has dwindled the such a trickle it’s seemed as though they have. i mean, sure the clean broke up more than twenty years ago, but they’ve been reformed for a long time already, and it’s more their disparate geography that keeps their output lean and hungry.
with one band however, they really did, for all intents and purposes, disappear, breaking up almost instantly after their first lp was released, way back in 1989.
i discovered them four years after the fact, spurred on as many others were by the exuberence of a local guy who’d made good and who was a big, big fan, and who had covered several of their songs.
their original material was difficult for an indie-newbie like myself, and i was content by a sub pop compilation, but spent years wishing more had been put out.
but now they’re back with a new lp, also on sub pop, and remarkably even produced by the same fellow who did the deed twenty-one years earlier; and in doing so they made it possible for me to deliriously utter a phrase i never in my life expected to voice:
“hey, have you heard the new vaselines record?”

i don’t know if i can adequately express my feelings about the vaselines.
as a young nirvana fan, it was exciting to follow any clue towards the origin myths of the band; original, loud and punk, seething with honesty amidst the “grunge” ego acts, they held me, and most of my friends in a sway that transcended merely liking a rock band, and inspired us to seek out and be critical of, more and more music. kurt cobain’s admiration for the vaselines seemed fervent and unappealingly fanboyish, but the nirvana versions of “molly’s lips” and “son of a gun” were overwhelmingly tantalizing, and i remember how thrilled i was when i found the 1992 compilation “way of the vaselines: a complete history.”
the thrill lasted until i got home and got the disc into my cd player, then it was replaced by something more akin to bewildered awe.
i had never heard anything quite like this before.
the vaselines were a racy, raw and twee band, and to a more-isolated-than-average teenager in seattle, who had not quite yet become aware of the olympia scene, eugene kelly and frances mckee’s jaunty little punk tunes sounded both scandalous and true. of course, it took very few years for their influence to take hold, but for me, for a small space of time, they acted upon my malleable emerging artistic conciousnous as a tinderstick, sparking ideas and appreciations that would resurface in myriad ways as i grew and understood ever more. more than anything though, more than the slightly seedy and sneaky, yet very intriguing sexuality to the vaselines (both in the material and in the name), more than the buzz about how they disappeared and then got famous, i think what made the biggest impression on me, and the most lasting influence, was the way the vaselines sounded. they were raw and a little awkward; they had a punk sound to them, but they had something else (which i didn’t know was called “twee pop”), and the juxtaposition of their grit and cuteness stuck with me.

it was awesome then, to hear that same balance in the songs filling “sex with an x,” the second(!) vaselines studio lp ever. The sound is sometimes a little more lush, a little more accomplished, but the energy, the smartness, the weary wryness and yes, the sexiness, are all there in spades, with the “young” vaselines sound filled in by years of experience as both people and musicians (both mckee and kelly have kept playing through the years, in groups or solo). “sex with an x” kicks off rough and punk with “ruined,” then rolls through forty-two minutes of bouncing between songs that sound as though they went through a wormhole from “dum-dum” (the 1989 lp) to today without pause, and material like “exit the vaselines” which evokes a sonic texture not unlike the best songs by another scottish outfit, the delgados.
there is a hint of glaswegian superstars belle & sebastian on “sex with an x” as well, although it’s more detectable as the quality of that band rather than any specific likeness; and it’s all too easy to explain, as belle & sebastian guitarist and bassist, stevie jackson and bob kildea, respectively, have lent their talents to the recording (and to the touring band as well).

it seems like so much of commercial pop these days is still relying on hooks and images to sell “units,” in the same way they’ve been doing for decades. what this return of the vaselines, the “return” of vinyl, and the continuance of unexpectedly venerable old indie bands, can tell us is:
when the music is this good, why stop?

i hope I don’t have to wait another twenty years now for more of this good stuff.

fire-jumpers and singing saws

2010-12-25T13:22:00.000-08:00

i make the following admission only with the certainty that i do not stand alone in its embrace: as a genre, "christmas music" instills in me the urgent desire to make madly for the hills.
there are certainly exceptions to this acerbic and frankly humbuggish rule. the lush limited-edition seven-inch "he's coming home" b/w "old toy trains" by dean and britta (with sonic boom) is one of them; so too low's genre-busting ep, "christmas," originally self-released on cd and now available on vinyl. (both succeed where most pop x-mas offerings fail in different ways. dean and britta's little disc downplays the overt christianity of traditional carols and focuses instead on the warmth and feeling behind the rituals and atmosphere which permeate the holiday season--nostalgic reference points for even we amongst the secular cynic listening audience. as practicing mormons, low brings their spirituality to the table with their album, which includes some christmas standards, but also originals. however it withdraws to a matter-of-factness that doesn't try to proselytize, and the music can be heard and felt without inner conflict for all but the strictest existentialist.)

anyway, with this holiday caveat ideologically embedded, i found myself at a crossroads when i was invited to a leg of the music tapes' marathon "caroling" tour, which a pair of good friends was hosting in their home.
on the one hand, i was excited that my friends had landed the opportunity to host the gig, they being enthusiastic fans of the elephant 6 collective, and because i (rightly) suspected their house, with its impressive stacks of tapes, records and cds, its andy kaufman and kiss figurines, and its daniel johnston and james mcnew art, would provide an apt and welcoming venue for such an intimate event.
on the other hand, there was no escaping the cheery holiday vibe as the show loomed closer on the calender, and the un-apologetically christmas-ness rumored to be due fostered a finicky apprehension that i would go to an intimate gathering around former neutral milk hotel instrumentalist julian koster, and find myself nose-deep in schmaltzy regurgitated indie versions of "rudolphs" and "jingle bells."
on the other hand, the chance to attend (and as it turned out, to participate peripherally in) such an unusual event was palpably intriguing. and with the venue a scant five blocks away, it was too ridiculously convenient to skip out on. of course, if you're following along, this math results in three hands, which is creepy. hmmm...

in the end, of course, we stuck a flask of bourbon into warm coat pockets and strode through the frigid night to my friends' place.
the house was lit with colored lights and filled with a small crowd of cool-looking people; the sense that we were all in on a secret together was inescapable. no real spacial divide existed in the living room between the audience, seated in folding chairs, sofa and floor, and the three band members surrounded by lights, vague automatons (a snowman, bell-ringing mice, etc), and a barrage of well-worn or outright tattered instruments. still not sure what to expect, we settled in as koster, in a high, excited voice, began his show.
what followed was a journey through a highly personalized version of the idea and practice of christmas, set to music ramshackle and sophisticated, eked out through bow-played banjo, collaged re-purposed recorded material, singing saws, brass and keys. subtle moments of beauty, such as the pure sonic bliss of saw duets, were juxtaposed with almost over-the-top jokes and nearly too-saccharine personal stories (some no doubt based in fact, some certainly false, and both peddled with equal candor and import). the impression was that koster was actually living the fantasy he was acting out for us, weirdly evocative of pee wee's playhouse, the film "delicatessen," indie shows and schoolboy recitals, and though it was actually magical at times, at some points in the show the only thing that saved it from being pathetically contrived was that sense of honesty. it was a delicate balance struck, therefore, with the scales tipped just to the right side, but retaining that sense that catastrophe was lurking in the corner, waiting for its opportunity to spring.
with this in mind, the utter disregard for the "fourth wall" shown by the music tapes seemed especially ballsy but, in that they succeeded in compelling jaded seattle hipsters to happily be woven into the fabric of the performance through highly interactive actions (including passing around a huge gift-wrapped box, being blindfolded, and incredibly, jumping over a flaming can full of our own incinerated totems). this is remarkable in that people here seldom even move at shows, much less dance, and audience participation is a rare and painful-to-observe occurrence at the best of times. so koster's blend of musical ingenuity and (faux-?)naive presentation definitely seemed to have charmed rather than chagrined.

after collecting our coats and shoes, we walked home, keeping warm with a shared nat sherman and sips from the flask, we debated: what did we just see? was it good? was it weird? i guess it was both. and that was alright.

i dreamed last night that i saw the music tapes play a more conventional show, and woke up thinking, "aha! now i can contrast the two for a better review!"
i have no idea what they must have played like in my dream though, so that write-up will have to wait until reality provides me the opportunity to see them again.

it's not the radio

2010-12-13T22:15:00.000-08:00

with almost exactly one year passed since my last post, i supposed it might be time to renew my ramblings on the meagre wealth of indie rock. though funds have been severly short of late, somehow music has still managed to eke its way into my life, slowly in the earlier days of 2010, but more steadily as a new job paid it's way up to the point where mere survival had been sated and small luxuries could be brought home.
the first of which being a decent turntable.
accordingly, i have been listening to a lot of records on vinyl.
accordingly, i have been listening to other people's vinyl records also.
it's cool, i get to hear stuff i haven't really heard or paid attention to before.
like, whe alex chilton recently died, i felt like i was the only one who didn't know who he was, because i never listened to big star before. rectified!
also, how did i never pay attntion to teenage fanclub?
well that, too, is being paid proper due now.

amongst this cultural re-excavation, i happened to become re-acquainted with the two albums by low, "secret name," and "things we lost in the fire," that i had on cd, and enjoyed listening to once, but never really got deeply into. i thought they were pretty, especially the harmonies of singers alan sparhawk and mimi parker, but it never made too much of a impression besides.
as i listened to those records again with the attention one feels requisite for playing such things on vinyl (which takes "more work" obviously, and therefore yields a sweeter response.... right?), they struck different chords within me, and their impact was deepened by listening also to previously unheard (by me) "trust" and the collaboration with the dirty three, "in the fishtank," which is frontrunner for my favorite record of the minute.
the sounds i was hearing somehow resonated more in my head this time around, as i became of their structures and technical merits, and struck anew by the gorgeous simplicity of low's practice, and so when the opportunity came to catch the band on the opening show of its west coast christmas tour, and nearby in my neighborhood, and for fifteen bucks, i felt i ought to go along.

seattle's tractor tavern is a venerable rock club in these parts, intimate, immediate, raucus and raw all at once. boots line the ceiling joists, and crushed (though seldom dry) pabst cans litter the floor. the stage rises a scant few feet from the floor, and the performer is only an arm's length from the front row.
after dinking around with his guitars for a little, low frontman alan sparhawk retreated to the green room to reappear in a handful of minutes with wife and drummer mimi parker, bassist steve garrington, and eric pollard from the sparhawk/garrington side-project retribution gospel choir, in tow.
two rows back, between the majority of the room and the band, it felt like old friends were being welcomed into a home, though who played the role of which protagonist seemed negotiable.
with a minimum of fuss and banter, low kicked into gear with their long, droning, gorgeous songs, working with tight skills and enthusiastic energy through their set. the energy and synergy between the performers was palpable, with silent looks and nods being exchanged throughout, and with a good deal of grinning during songs, especially between sparhawk and garrington, who seemed to be enjoying the experience mightily.
after regaling us with low songs newer and older, eventually the tone switched to seasonal topicality, and the carols were broken out, with the band running powerfully through nearly, if not all, of their fabled self-released christmas ep.
were that not enough, after the set, when they returned to the stage for an encore, the band entertained requests and happily played six more songs, bringing the entire set to a run time just below two hours, and a memorable time indeed!
the only real downside of the evening, musically, was that the opening performer, minnesotan bluesman charlie parr, was brought on to the stage twice to accompany low on his resonator guitar, and though his achingly beautiful sliding notes could be discerned, it was only just barely, which was a shame (we could hear them where we were because we could hear them partially un-amped as well as on the p.a., a luxury many present could not have been accorded).

otherwise, the show, for me, was a revelation, seething with an energy i had not expected, and a pleasure to be playing that inspired and awed. the sonic crush enveloped one, with sparhawk's guitars (there was a gorgeous white les paul custom, an epiphone les paul-style baritone, and a fender twelve-string that defied belief; bassist garrington was rocking a gorgeous vintage fender) growling and cooing while parker's drum sent reverberations rollicking through the floor into our bodies. the singing was at once lush and spare, and pollard's keyboards and effects set the stage for the the six-string acrobatics that scratched the songs into existence. all the while garrington carefully and precisely delineated the rhythm with sharp, heavily amped bass notes, his long fingers poising and pouncing on the strings.

alan sparhawk remarked somewhere towards the middle of the encore that "[they] don't usually play for so long," yet neither he nor his bandmates seemed tired or bored; rather they seemed delighted to be back on the road, and the crowd surrounding us could not have agreed more.

hometowns & heartbreaks

2009-12-16T15:58:00.000-08:00

sometimes one finds one's self far away from what he knows. saint louis, missouri, for example: a city with enough similarities to long-ago places like iowa, wisconsin, chicago, and minneapolis, that the chilly, hard midwestern air feels familiar, but different in those small essential ways that bring on a sense of mild alienation and discomfort. what does one do in such circumstances? if one is this one, one gravitates towards the consumption of beer, and the warmth of cuddling under blankets, illuminated by old movies.

but then one's companions might suggest that life is far too sedentary, and one may don long johns and gloves and heavy coat, pile into a small car, and travel twenty minutes or so, past college campuses and the odd minaret, where one finds one's self on a dark, brick-lined street, under the towering shadows of the old lemp brewery, freezing one's nuts off, and wandering into a tiny saint louis rock club to listen to a band who, like one's self, comes from far away, in their case, from canada. to be more specific, the band in question is the three-piece outfit, the rural alberta advantage (henceforth "the raa"), who continues the astonishing trend of canadian indie music sounding totally awesome in a particularly un-american way, and with great verve and elan. (for the record only one of the band is from alberta; originally a five-piece, there used to be three from that province. woo: useless trivia!)

i have not been to a rock show like this one in some time. sometimes in seattle, the "blue-collarness" of many concert-goers is questionably poseurish at best, and one can detect the distinctive odor of irony in the spilt pabst blue ribbon on the sticky floor. i would not go so far to say this hipster attitude was entirely absent in the club "off broadway," but there was a discernable sense of un-pretension that one finds more seldom at home. pbr was consumed, but also on offer was the home-grown lemp beer (we were, in fact, on lemp street), distinguishable as the first lager brewed in america (potentially arguable, but i will bite). it was cool. it was a cool club. i felt at home there in a sense, with its long wooden bar, tiny, wall-less stage, and modest attitude; and that was good.

and then there was the first opening band.
i will immediately confess that the name of the band, blood pony, caused in me an immediate impulse to cringe. their actual set only scarcely reinforced that impression, with a full band (six dudes! and yes! they were dudes) incorporating chamber-pop instruments like glockenspiel, horns, and strings to the standard indie rock kit, sometimes to positive effect, sometimes with a bit too much neutral milk hotel shadows cast upon them. the greatest disadvantage to my ear was the lead singer.
now, indie rock is notable for its great tolerance of vocals which are, quite bluntly, raw. however, blood pony's myspace discribes the vocals as "wounded," and sadly, that fits better than they should hope for. often the complete sound of the band compensated for the lead singer, but the "off" moments were memorable, and not positively so. there was also a lack of cohesiveness that is less apparent/more forgiveable with smaller bands, but which was more grating with such a large ensemble.
sadly, it should be said that i would've been a lot less judgemental about this stuff had blood pony behaved differently. unfortunately, they acted exactly like the stereotype of what they, in fact were: a local band, given the opportunity to open for a buzzy touring band, who abuses the privelege. blood pony played for over an hour, which is thirty minutes longer than i consider appropriate for a band in their position, and fifteen minutes longer than the maximum i think is ever appropriate for any opener anywhere. considering that the headliner, the raa, played a set of just more or less sixty minutes, the local boys were even more notably egregious. they also were very focussed on pimping their free cdr, available on a little table in the back of the room, which itself was advertising a show of their own the following week. altogether pretty bad form, and ultimately behaviour that darkly colored my otherwise positive impressions of them.

the second opener hit a little closer to home, figuratively and literally. portland, oregon's, the shaky hands rocked their way through a blistering set dominated greatly by their deft guitar work. the sense of relief amongst many in the room was palpable as the band brought the competance level notably up. oddly, my impressions of them are less distinct that those to blood pony, but the overall sense was far more pleasant. coming in at a standard 40 minutes or so, the shaky hands' set took some of the bitter taste of their predecessors out of the mouth and fulfilled their mission to whet the appetite for the headliner with great aplomb.
i have been listening to the songs on their myspace with pleasure, and am disappointed that they will not be accompanying the raa past portland on their way north by northwest (i hope to see the canadians again at the vera project; we'll see, haha).
however, i will certainly be keeping an eye out for my slightly-southern neighbors, with the intent to catch them again. (is it just me, or is it bizarre to travel so far to discover someone so near?)

so, finally the raa took the stage, making apt comments about precisely how unexpectedly cold it was on that night. singer nils edenloff began a little story about the mysterious lemp brewing dynasty which ended up a vicious tease as many audience members affirmed that they already knew the story. my friends and i felt unfairly teased! oh well.
edenloff, with percussionist paul banwatt and multi-instrumentalist amy cole, launched comfortably, energetically and cheerfully into a set which vastly eclipsed sonically the assumed potential of a three-piece. both cole and edenloff had keyboards planted in front of them, and driven at a viciously unforgiving pace by banwatt's stellar drumming, the three combined powers to create a rich, layered and harmonic sound that seems like it may only be found in canadian indie rock. with positive echoes of bands like (inevitably) the new pornographers, stars, and immaculate machine, the raa's members alternated instruments and vocal duties within songs to create a densly packed soundstorm filled with multiple keyboards, vocal harmonies, hard-strummed acoustic guitar, and glockenspiel--one that never felt the absence of the non-existant bass player so common in indie rock. the democratic spirit of the raa's playing was felt most strongly in a song ("frank, ab") where edenloff started the chorus with a trilling "oo-oo" which was seemlessly picked up and imitated by cole, shifting the dynamic to startling effect. another instance was on a song where banwatt abandoned his full drum kit and stood next to cole where both musicians played the same stand-alone drum. it was awesome. sadly, i cannot recall the song... oh well, haha.
i was given the raa's 2009 release, hometowns, on a week when i was clearing out my glutted itunes library: i listened to it once, thought "oh yeah that's nice," and put it away. having now seen the band play live, i have dug it out again, and hometowns is racing quickly into the top-ten list of this year's records. there was such passion, such positive energy, and such fluid skill displayed by the rural alberta advantage, that one can't help but envision a long, fruitful future for the band.
i hope so, at least.
i want more, please.

their own pretty ways

2009-09-08T16:57:00.001-07:00

i always think it's funny when i can precisely pinpoint where and when i heard a band for the first time; especially when it's love-at-first-listen.
i'm not much of a net-freak, blog notwithstanding. however, there is a particular chatroom where i sit-in frequently (but due to the overwhelming amount of trollish dowshes on the web, i'm not going to reveal it), and as the general focus, much divurged from, of the room is a band, the subject of what we're all listening to is a regular one. noticing the brightly colored, naively painted cover of a newly-acquired lp in one user's photos, i inquired what it was. "first aid kit," i was told, and another user sent me a link to a fantastic video with two elfin, flannel-clad young women sitting in a forest, singing a spare and full-throated version of "tiger mountain peasant song," by fleet foxes.
whoof. i was hooked.
the video begins with a sweet, but hardly-shy, dedication to fleet foxes, by way of introduction, then klara söderberg begins playing her guitar (thrum-ba-ba-ba-bum) with simple assertiveness. she begins, with a sweet, clear, slightly-accented voice, to weave the first verses into the song as her sister johanna sways shyly beside her. the shyness only lasts until the second verse though, when she opens up her mouth and adds her duskier contribution before both girls sing together in haunting harmony. every time i listen to it it still sends chills down my back.
to the best i can tell, first aid kit already had their ep "drunken trees" in the can before this video was made, and that due to the intense popularity of the cover, they re-released it with "tiger mountain peasant song" appended as an eighth track.
i tracked down a purveyor of said ep, and should add that it is very seldom i get so excited when a padded envelope arrives in the mail.
the only real criticism i have of "drunken trees" is that the reasonably charming, but long, sample that introduces both the album and the opening track, "little moon," is not on its own track, but is inseperable from the song. as a fan of listening to albums all the way through, and also of creating an overall texture and atmosphere, i'm all for that. however, i would prefer to sometimes not hear it, and get right to the music, y'know? but that's it. otherwise, the ep is fantastic, flat-out.
on their website(s) the band, or an especially adroit press agent, describe fak's sound as "gary numan if gary numan played folk music," which, yes, is glib, but is also a way of not taking their efforts overly seriously. basically, at it's roots, first aid kit is two teenaged swedish girls playing folk songs on acoustic instruments. the potential for overly earnest treacle is immense, but its well-circumvented here. on the album itself, the voice/voice/guitar relationship is deepened by autoharp, keyboards and subtle percussion--more rattles and shakers than drum kits--to restrained-yet-lush effect. at its core, however remains the simplicity of two sisters singing together.
the band has a single coming out in early october, anticipating a full-length effort sometime in winter. a song from the single has been posted on the band's myspace, and its shimmering, jangly guitars suggest that, not only will the lp be as good as the ep, but that winter may be just exactly the right time to receive it.

please turn off your dance music

2009-09-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

this, if i know me, may well end up as one of those meandering and utterly pointless exercises in the documentation of catching up with all the other cool kids. so i may as well just come right out and admit that until last year sometime, i was not familiar with the work of julie doiron.
i am sorry. does that help? to be fair, i'm really the one who's been missing out, not you. trust me, i'm boring at shows. i wouldn't buy you a whiskey. and i just shuffle there, with my arms folded. getting into the music, y'know?

well. now i'm clued in. of course i'd heard doiron's name before, and that of her previous band, eric's trip. considering the copious stacks of indie material i accumulate, it would have been an act of will to avoid hearing about them. but, as so often happens when other bands fall to the wayside of some other obsession du jour, i never actually got around to listening.
until last fall (?–this date may be erroneous, can anyone remember when i got the big pwelverum & sun order? that's when; yknow, for those keeping track...), that is. that's when i got the mount eerie/julie doiron/fred squire record, "lost wisdom." i listened to it one time, and thought, not for the last time, "my god. i truly have a shitty needle on my record player." however, i also at this time downloaded a recording of many of these songs performed at the 2008 primavera sound festival, at the parc del forum in barcelona. (if said recording is still up on archive: get it.) i have listened to this recording any times, and am here to tell you, it is damned swoonable. the set features julie doiron's earthily fresh voice prominently, whereupon she compliments the weary boyish voice of phil elvrum to a remarkably effective degree, particularly with a strong-yet-empathic forwardness to his reticence. what was even more remarkable, was the song breaks, though, when this sensual and masterly voice broke into the most girlish giggles imaginable, ephervescent without being "bubbly," belying not a ditziness, but a great and holistic joy.
determined to delve more deeply into the discography of this person, i was distracted almost immediately by something else. that something was probably related to one of the three ridiculous eps that the mountain goats have recently, semmingly grudgingly released. i accept that i have a problem, can we move on? once i remembered that there were other albums in the world that desperately required my acquisition, i began to think about julie doiron again. as if by the intervention of fate itself, i "had" to order something from jagjaguwar/secretly canadian/dead oceans anyway, and thought, oh, i should get some julie stuff too! i imagine since i have been out of work, small labels and distributors have been starving...
so there i found myself ordering a handful of julie doiron cds, and sat back for the refreshingly old-school label to take the order, find the discs, pack and mail them, all without the urgent reassurances of normal e-commerce. i had to wait a little, and i must say, it actually whetted my appetite. not that i'd want to do that all the time though...
eventually, "broken girl," "lonliest in the morning," "goodnight nobody," and "i woke myself up" arrived at my door, and found their way into rotation on my stereo, with "broken girl" asserting itself most surely. sadly, i missed ordering the most recent album, "i can wonder what you did with your day," my order placed a week shy of its release. i figured then that i would order it in a month or so, but then i found myself out of work. it leads the list of "things to buy when re-employed," a long list, i'm afraid. happily, the wealth of material on these recordings is immensely satisfying, and is work i go back to often for inspiration, but also for its sheer beauty. much has been written about the qualities of julie doiron's voice and material, so i won't re-remark on those, but i will say she was one of my happiest discoveries of last year, and would certainly urge anyone to look into her work. for an easy first step, daytrotter has a lovely set from this year's sxsw session. or you could check out julie's site, which features taster-mp3s from a good portion of her work. oh, and there are lots of those youtube thingees.
i found the experience of searching out julie doiron's work, and the resulting rewards, as being akin to going out to the grey and cooly damp woods, with heavy boots, and and a sturdy vest over a wool sweater, to hunt for wild mushrooms, turning corners to find wild, beautiful and delicious growths nestled in unexpected places. happy foraging.

chunky, not smooth.

2009-07-13T21:10:00.000-07:00

remember the eighties and nineties? there were those tape thingees. and for most people i knew that meant that you had a pile of pirated cassettes (taped on double-deck stereos of real, bought tapes sometimes, but mostly they were from records. i certainly had a high percentage of my music on tapes horded from friends. it was (cough. and is) a good way to exponentially increase one's buying power. barry would bring in the pixies. jay would get the retro stuff. all of us would tweak out on sub pop's many offerings. don't even get me started on the mixtapes; john cusack can do a better job singing their praises.

i used to have a superchunk tape. leave it to me to not even know which one i had*. i doubt i knew anything then more than their name, and how that tape sounded. how it sounded was different. different from the ur-indie stuff we could scrabble together, like the pixies and the smiths and the vaselines. different from the scene happening around us: the green river and mudhoney, mother love bone and screaming trees, the butthole surfers and nirvana. i was maybe as snotty then as i am now, but i really didn't have the knowledge or experience to explain how superchunk was different from grunge. i couldn't articulate now how i thought it was different. it was though, and i enjoyed listening to that tape. that, and pj harvey, and seaweed and they might be giants. haha.
as with so many parts of our youths, that tape disappeared somewhere along the line and, rather than miss it, i forgot about it as new sounds greeted my young ears. explosions of screaming riot grrls and gentle strums of twee maestros vied for attention with the newly-discovered (for me) nicks cave and drake. and others, more and more, for years.
i remembered superchunk's name, and "oh, those guys.... i had that tape." couldn't remember how it sounded though.

a few years ago i was rifling through the used cd bin at a local record store and i came across a superchunk cd ("on the mouth"). i said, "oh hey, those guys," and picked it up. it sat on my shelf for a little while, and when i put it on the player, i was a little shocked at how good and how raw it sounded. i hate to admit that after that playing, it went back on the shelf as some other record (in all honestly, probably one by the mountain goats...) took over my affections with an iron grip.
then several months (okay, maybe eight or so) ago, i came across another cd ("come pick me up"), this one for a real price, and i picked it up, and both went onto rotation chez matt. it all started to come back to me, the significance of this fine exponent of rocking the fuck out without being douchebags. i started getting wistful thinking about mac playing with the bats for their stellar "spill the beans" ep; about how jon was revitalizing the otherwise two-man mountain goats with his insanely good drumming; about the whole romantic history of a great band giving birth to a truly legendary label, merge records.
it was all just to much, and i fell in love properly this time--not just a fleeting crush.

i would've been content to harbor my feelings within if a few recent reminders had not spurred me into some rusty writing: i discovered mac mccaughan's excellent "portastatic"** blog, and have been enjoying that; then came the announcement, timed perfectly to co-incide with my recent unemployment, that not only was a superchunk ep now available, but a 7" single on clear vinyl would be available for pre-order--two more temptations from the nearly irresistable merge catalogue at just the wrong time; then there was portastatic's gorgeous cover of franklin bruno's "tableaux vivant" that scott from fayettenam hooked me up with. it was all too much. i caved and ordered the ep and single--i couldn't hold out any longer, and after all, what are credit cards good for if not going into debt for what you love? amiright? (it's gonna be rough this fall when merge puts out the clean's new studio album. argh. gnashes teeth.

unfortunately the single, "crossed wires b/w blinders (fast version), and crossed wires (demo)" met the vinyl production delay indie record geeks have come to regard as a natural pitfall of their endevors. however, in a classy move, the label sent out the download coupons included with purchase early so we who bought would not lose hair waiting. they are absolute darlings down there in north carolina, i tell ya. so i've been listening to three songs all day (ok, with a little julie doiron thrown in for swoonability purposes)--actually, two versions of one song, plus the middle one. ha. nerdy? yes i am.
but holy shit, they are so good.
especially good is the third track, the demo version of "crossed wires." the single track is awesome, and kicks every ass in the room, but the intimacy and immediacy of the more-acoustic version, with stereophonicly jangling guitars perfectly setting up mac's inimitable high-pitched and plaintive drone, is nearly impossible to top in my opinion. it showcases the strength of the song, one that's capable of being rocked to the edge, but also the depth of a more "humble" treatment. that it also highlights the range of this venerable punk band is a point almost rendered redundent, but it is one i will make nonetheless. can't wait to get some income again; then i can delve deeper into the back numbers...

* upon reflection, it was most likely 1990's "superchunk"
**portastatic being mac's longstanding other project.

it's a mystery how we're so unaware

2009-04-18T09:10:00.000-07:00

sometimes you take a long time to express affection for someone or something that you love.

i love the bats.

try doing a google search for this fixture of new zealand indie rock (before that they were 'alternative', before that 'new wave'--at least according to the daddy's highway press kit, or was it law of things, i forget?). try it, and all you'll get is 'release the bats'--and not even the birthday party song.
oh, you may stray across the myspace page or wiki listing for the bats, but it may well be obscured by the fog of lesser entities. you would do well to clear away the cobwebs and give an ear to one of the most enduring and consistent bands i've ever heard, a four-piece outfit who sound as fresh and vital on their 2009 release the guilty office as they did in 1984 when they began making records.

i first heard the bats about six or seven years ago (oof) on local 'college-radio' station kexp, and from the first notes i was hooked (on the guitar hooks! har). i have tried several times to figure out what song it was, but everytime i'm convinced i know what it was i get fogged out by another that's just as jangly-rifficly good. it was either boogey man off 1991's lp fear of god, or one of the brilliant tracks from the previous year's law of things.it's ahrd to tell, as the sound from that 'first period' is like one huge fantastic album. from 1984 to 1995 releases came out every year or two, but since then the rate has slowed somewhat, with an entire decade seperating 1995's couchmaster from the shock re-emergence of at the national grid. it's been another four years until guilty office. these extended gaps stem from the fact that the bats, unlike many bands, are fairly heterogenous in their activities. songwriter and lead robert scott writes approximately two songs-a-day by some accounts (that may be an exaggeration) and performs solo, with nz legends the clean, and with a handful of local friends, most recently gina rocco, with whom he has released a solid full-length and a stunningly spare ep, called moonlight potato which to me, recalls his work with jane sinnott as the magick heads--a ridiculously difficult-to-track-down band (although douglas wolk still has an available release at dark beloved cloud). from what i understand, the bats do new stuff when robert comes up to christchurch, where kean and woodward, and grant all live, from the otago port of dunedin where he lives. up north the other three bats members keep active with the wonderfully jangly minisnap, for whom kaye writes most of the material.
i keep using the term 'jangly' and it's a bit of a crutch, i admit, but the reason is that the bats, along with the clean and the chills, were part of what defined the so-called 'dunedin sound' slapped onto flying nun bands in the eighties the way 'grunge' was slapped onto everything in the pacific northwest a decade later. i only mention these three bands because they're really the only ones in the fn stable who fit the name! the verlaines had a little jangle-jangle too, but the tall dwarfs didn't, and many of the subsequent bands on that label didn't either. anyway, i'll search for other adjectives!

after hearing the bats on the radio, i couldn't find out anything about them! it was very frustrating (especially since i was sub-savvy on the intraweb at the time), and it was probably more than six months before i happened to stumble across fear of god in a used cd bin. i actually let out an embarrassing whoop in the store. i got it home and popped it in the stereo, and just sat there in my chair for the duration, just listening. i can list the amount of records i have done that with on maybe seven fingers.
the used bin became my tried and true ally since most of the flying nun output has been o.o.p. for longer than i care to admit. i found the all of the first five albums (i don't count compiletely bats because it's a compilation, although i don't have it, and i want it desperately) and the stellar ep spill the beans (featuring mac mccaughan 'duelling wahs' with kaye!!!) in them bins, and when national grid came out i was so stoked to be able to actually buy a new bats record!
so often in my musical history, i've come across great bands too late to be a part of their extant lives, like young marble giants or beat happening, and it's been very special to me that not only have the bats (and the clean, for that matter) kept going when they easily could've called it a day before i'd even come across them, but i've even had the great privelege of corresponding with them. it's such a wonderfull feeling to have such a small connection with a band one loves...

back to the record at hand, the bats' first on nz label arch hill (who released the clean's live album mashed as well, i should note):
much has been written already about how the guilty office 'breaks new ground' with the sound, but stays true to the 'driving guitars' and lyrical 'darkness' affiliated with past releases. well, that's true, i suppose, but not definitive. the 'bats sound' being referred to is a simple set-up of the solid backdrop of malcolm grant's drums and paul kean's perfect-punctuation bass-work (on his hand-made 'barracuda' bass--so cool if you can find piccies of it). this tight rhythm works the low end and the bridge to kaye woodward's soaring riffs and jangly (sorry--that word again) trebly lines and hooks is made by robert scott's solid and subtle rhythm guitar (mostly, sometimes they switch roles). all the instrumentation is set of by the frankly lovely harmonies of bob and kaye's voices. bob has a low croon-to-high warble and kaye sets him off well with her sweet melodic backing vocals.
all of those characteristics have been present since 1983, and they continue to be the definition of what a bats album sounds like. which apparently draws some accusations of 'samey-ness,' which i find ridiculous. i think if a band sounds identifiable from record to record, then that's a good thing. if they sound the same i can see a doorway for objection, but when a band like the bats--or for that matter like the mountain goats, who sound like the same chords are used ad infinitum (not a criticism, btw)--places a high priority on the songwriting, as they do, then such claims become more baseless.
for the record, a lot of the 'new sound' talk comes from the strings (with harp!) arrangements done for the album by allan starrett, though these commentators are either forgetful or unaware that the band has past associations with dunedin's alastair galbraith. speaking of the starrett contributions, it was a neat experience for me to follow the progression of one of the songs on the record, crimson enemy. i first heard the song on a 'live to air' recording of the bats on kfjc (a san francisco college radio station) in 2006, a recording i got directly from robert, actually. it's a song the band 'just learnt up today' according to the recording, and i had to sit there for nearly two years waiting for it to resurface! slightly faster and higher-pitched than originally, the song popped back up on the bats' myspace page late last year, but didn't yet have the added strings. than the record came and the song had overdubs and other juicy studio details. it was really cool for me, trying to learn how to master my own songs, to see how theirs progressed.
anyway (how could this be one of my posts without an 'anyway'...), i should stop this epic post now.
if you can find bats records buy them. if you find actual vinyl bats records, buy them and email me and snail mail them to me and i'll paypal you!
seriously though, the bats defy the rolling-stones-dinosaur-please-please-stop model of how a band matures and ages, still making great, and sadly underappreciated, music. they have this new record (only a few months old!) and a 7"(i think?) in the works. they're touring europe this summer. one can only hope they'll make it to seattle eventually...

get onboard, ay?

you've never seen when i wear a turban

2009-04-17T22:57:00.000-07:00

in the same line as getting to know a new band (new to me, natch) via the world wide double-yoo, i am obsessing about herman düne who, despite their recent seattle gig, i have not seen outside of my 12-inch laptop. have you heard of these fellows? i had not until quite recently. my friend carlos (a massive shrimper fan) turned me on to them when he asked me if i wanted to check out their show down in ballard towne. i say, well, who are dey? any good? he sez, well they're okay, i heard them on the shrimper, and i want to check them out. i say i'd like to go, and file it away in my head. i also go to their myspace and listen to a tune and think, oh french-swedish jonathan richman kinda thing, i can dig it. and so i friended them and planned on going to this show.
so a few weeks later, the night of the show's come up and i've got some nasty diarrhea (if this offends your delicate sensibilities, and/or you think it's too much information, you probably won't like it here... i still like you, i'm just sayin' though...) and anyway, going to a tavern in --it bears repeating-- ballard, was lowest on my priority totem pole. s i didn't go, and the next day my (former!) co-worker adam says to me, so dude, why weren't you there last night. shit shit. now i'm totally kicking myself because i have been listening to this shit over and over again. i don't know what it is, but sometimes i just can't kick a record. when i first got sweden i listened to deinara crush over and over and over for weeks before moving on to nine black poppies.

anyway. i've mentioned the concerts a emporter, the 'take-away shows' at blogotheque before, and they were key again in this instance. (if you don't know these, they are al fresco semi-improvisational and über-stripped down videos of musicians performing in unusual circumstances--check them out, you won't regret it.)
i've been on this whole kick for a few years of appreciating bands/performers highly based on their versatility, or more specifically, their ability to adapt to minimalist modes of performance. calvin johnson, mount eerie, and the mountain goats are the types who dress up a little for studio, but i've also flipped that esteem to compare favorably with guys like john vanderslice, the clean and (non-guy) st vincent, who drop all the studio trim to bust it out solo (or trio-lo). i don't know if i'm awake enough to articulate what i mean. i like maximum sound out of minimum means. that's what i mean.
anyway, these herman düne dudes, currently a two-piece, sound fantastic. their studio recordings have a lot of nice ixed percussion, layered guitars (like, rhythm and lead!), bass and lovely-voiced angelic back-up singers. but on the blogotheque vids it's just the two (david-ivar (yaya) and neman herman dune) guys singing and playing through the parisien streets. david-ivar plays this little parlour guitar and sings and neman follows along with a varity of little percussions like wood blocks and rattles. and that's all they need, and it blows my mind.

so is song of samuel. i cannot stop listening to this five-and-a-half minute story-song of a blossoming love between a young rich girl ad a violinist from the ghetto. goddamn it's gorgeous...

anyway, i don't have money now, and can't buy up their records, so until i get a new job (new life?), i'll have to make do with the blogotheque, with the myspace, and the excellent daytrotter session they did. right now they're on the top of my 'when i have money again i will buy...' list.

we're all gonna die

2009-04-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

in the last several months i've been hustling to grab as much music as possible as soon as i hear something good, i've been hitting the interweb asap and bagging as much of said band/songwriter/whatever's back catalogue as possible. it's been quite effective as an acquisition strategy, but the downside has been that my 'absorption' rate has plummetted. with some exceptions, i've been giving most of the new stuff a listen or two then moving on to either a) old mountain goats b) new mountain goats or c) the next record. add to that the stuff i come across on myspace and daytrotter and blogoteque and you get one big pile of mess.
so now that i have no job, i've been obsessively listening to handfuls of records at a time, and am developing plenty of new music crushes. so the next few days should be a bit of a torrent...

in no particular order, i am starting the deluge with scout niblett.
i've heard about scout niblett for a while now, but had not heard 'them.' see? i didn't even know that they were a her. but then i finally got tired of not paying attention and started digging around. the first thing i happened to come across, by pure chance, was a youtube video from february, 2007, of scout (née emma) playing dinosaur egg at shepherd's bush empire (a london club).
i was gobsmacked.
there she stood on stage in a tatty pullover, long skirt and tousled hair, and a vintage fender jag (rather than the mustang she often favors) strapped around her shoulder. she played the first notes and they viciously carved their dischordant harmonies into my brain. as she began to sing, the high girlish whisper accelerated slowly into a febrile shriek rife with emotion and desperation.
i listened to dinosaur egg about ten times in a row that first sitting, just over and over.
then i got serious and started simply following the youtube links. the next video i watched was a performance, with her drummer, of song for scout in ten years. with just the three elements of her voice and guitar and his percussion i was convinced that studio engineers are highly overpaid individuals (sorry loren). the song started softly, but abruptly launched into a raucous hard rock attitude, then back, and so forth.

i haven't been so thunderstruck by anyone in a while (musically, *cough-cough*), and i was just in shock that this woman had been out there doing this for some little while. i immediately ordered whatever of her records i could find. have you ever ordered from the secretly canadian/jagjaguwar/dead oceans trifecta? it's very old-school (as these things go); no instant gratification, just some dudes in indiana going into their storehouse and mailing stuff. while it killed me to wait three weeks after hearing this shit, i still appreciated the hell of the fact that labels still function this way sometimes. insrt smiley face.

in the meantime, as i waited, i kept digging up stuff on the net, learning that scout niblett's songs are sometimes just her accompanying herself on drums, and that she's partial to a blonde wig or a roadworker's neon-orange reflective vest. i found the concert a emportér episode of her wandering up and through a parisien apartment building, in oberkampf, walking down a hall sweetly passed by an inquisitive and dapper frenchman, and finding herself in someone's flat where, when she finishes her song, the guy says "hello, would like some tea or some-zing?" and she giggles back "yeh, that'd be really nice." she's sweet and shy and goofy and ferocious and passionate and feral, sometimes at the same time, a bizarre combination of the insouciant type of woman you seldom find outside of england, and a patti smith-type chanteuse-maudit.
i also came across a lot of lazy descriptions of scout niblett in relation to either pj harvey, catpower, or both. i also came across a lot of reactionary denials that she was anything like either of them.
funny, that.
she reminds me a bit of what polly harvey sounded like back in the early nineties: both women are smallish with big grinding guitars and voices that whisper and scrape and wail equally effectively. that those voices are also english adds to a certain sense of sorority (and perhaps it is silly, but i have always found it sexy to hear a british woman's voice--a cliché i'm sure, but true).
i don't quite agree with the catpower assertion, though both are intense and powerful singers. i tend to think that the comparison stems more from chan marshall's supposed bipolar status and some sort of insinuation that scout niblett is as unstable. i think that feeling tends to come from people who, were they asked, would describe themselves as 'normal' for the most part. heh.

blah-blah. i could go on and on musing on the little things, i suppose. it seems a little innecessary to try to use words to describe scout, when one should listen to her. i'll leave this with words from niblett herself. i went over to her myspace page to listen to the tracks from her new single that she had just posted, and saw that she had updated the page thus: in the 'influences' box, she had written:

i just went up to a woman i didn't know to ask her about her dog. this is how the conversation went: me: 'arrr, what kind of dog is that?' she: 'chiwawa ....his name is weston' me: 'is he a puppy?' ( a logical question it seemed to me as he seemed extremely tiny for even a chiwawa) she then ignored my question and added before she walked off... 'you could turn your life around you know, ...do you know that? at any time, .....you could have a weston too!'

brutal. <3

from the vaults

2009-03-10T16:30:00.000-07:00

several years ago i interviewed martin donald of the australian twee-pop trio the lucksmiths for a small seattle lit/culture magazine called rivet. it was pretty exciting. i was crazy about this band (still am to be frank), and very people had heard of them yet on this side of the pond. the rivet issues were conceived around central themes like "perspective," "invention," "value," etcetera. regular columns and features would reflect these themes, as would specials and illustrations, haikus and whatever else. so when the theme was announced as "luck" i thought, well, i'll shoot an e-mail to [the now-defunct label] candle records requesting an interview, they'll shoot me down, and my editor will know i tried. much to my delight however, candle's head honcho chris crouch not only hooked me up with an interview, but was nothing short of totally generous and encouraging. i was so stoked. i may as well have been interviewing tom waits or david byrne. or at least belle and sebastian. i nervously compiled my list of questions and sent them off to lucksmiths' lead guitarist and main songwriter, marty donald, in january 2005, as the band was finishing work on a new record.
a heavily edited version of this interview originally ran in rivet issue #13, the "luck issue," in spring or summer, 2005, i can't remember which. my friend andrea jean, a librarian, recently sent me a note saying how she'd come across a review of the magazine (in general) by one douglas mcclemont, of the library review service, which noted, "an interview with the possibly fictional band, the lucksmiths is a highlight [sic]." i lol'd as the kids these days say.
my mom's an editor. maybe that's why i've never liked being edited, i don't know, but i thought why not run the original, uncut interview for posterity. many thanks again to crouchy and marty for the generous sharing of their time and energy.

here it is:

matt neyens: in all your albums, there is a great mix of humor and heartbreak, sometimes combined. is there a concerted effort on your part to create that balance, or does it just happen in the songwriting process? also, how important is the humor to your songs?

marty donald: the combination of humour and heartbreak is not accidential, though neither is it entirely self-concious: i don't get to the third verse of a song and think 'this is a bit gloomy, better whack a pun in.' most songwriters i admire (and writers of all sorts, for that matter) strike a balance between the two; morrissey is probably the most obvious example of this, although david berman and bill callahan spring to mind as well. without wanting to get overly heavy-handed about it, i suppose having humour leavened with a little sadness, or sadness lightened by humour, appeals because that's largely what life is like, and artists who tend towards a more simplistic point of view generally seem to me to be missing something. a good deal of our early material seems (in retrospect) excessively jocular - favouring cleverness at the expense of emotional content - and as a result i shied away from that in my writing for a while. so i'm pleased if you feel i'm striking a good balance between the two.

matt: on the subject of songwriting, do you tend to bang things out quickly in a flash of inspiration, or do you tend to ruminate on songs over a long period of time?

marty: very much the latter. though there are exceptions (notably "the great dividing range," which i recall coming in a couple of hours), after the initial inspiration - usually just a line or a title - most songs take me weeks or months even, occasionally, years to finish. and this seems to be increasingly the case over time, which probably should be something of a worry.

matt: you write the lion's share of the lucksmiths' output. is this a comfortable relationship with you guys, first, and second do mark [monnone] and tal [white] tailor their songs to be similar to yours stylistically, are they similar naturally, or is there more of a collaborative effort musically than just bringing in a tune and saying, 'here, play this?'

marty: for me the balance of writing duties within the band is a comfortable one, although as you point out, i'm the one with the lion's share, so it might not be so for the others. but it seems to have evolved that way naturally; it's not something we've ever really had to discuss. i'm not much of a musician, as such (certainly less so than mark or tali); songwriting has always been the primary attraction of being in a band for me. as for the similarities in our writing styles, i'm constantly surprised by the extent to which this is commented on (even though i have the same problem with other multi-writer bands such as teenage fanclub and sloan). to me, there are very obvious differences between our songs. but i suppose these are disguised by the lucksmiths' sound they inevitably assume, and in this regard you're right to suggest a degree (albeit varying) of collaboration. arrangements and often individual parts are worked out collectively in the rehearsal room. and given the amount of time we've been playing together [as of this interview, about twelve years], stylistic similarities are unavoidable.

matt: i recently saw your label-mate darren hanlon (who has guest-musician-ed with you many times) perform here in seattle, and very few people knew who he was. how much exposure do you feel you and other bands from your local scene are getting, both in australia and abroad?

marty: i find it very hard to judge precisely how paltry the level of fame we have achieved is, and even harder to explain. within australia, we have been playing and releasing records for long enough to have established ourselves fairly well - an interviewer recently called us 'iconic!' - without having broached the mainstream to any real degree. as for the rest of the world, there seem to be handfuls of fans dotted here and there, and generally when we visit the handful seems at least a little bigger than last time. when we first toured to the northern hemisphere we were amazed that anyone at all had heard of us, and i suppose the novelty of hearing people on the other side of the world sing along to our songs has never really worn off.

matt: related to the last question, the lucksmiths have been kicking around since 1993. how do you guys feel about where you are as a band? you've obviously influenced a lot of the newer chamber-pop" bands, and your sound has been consistent - and terrific - over the years. are you a success? are you guys happy about how things are going for the lucksmiths?

marty: related to my last answer, i find it hard to say whether or not we're a success, although the very fact that we're still making music together must count for something. in a recent interview tali employed the frog-in-a-saucepan-of-water analogy to describe our career, which seems apt: even if it's been slow enough coming that we might not have noticed it ourselves, i do look at our (however modest) success with a degree of pride. and this is certainly so in a less careerist sense, and more an artistic one, which has always been more important to all of us: i have been happier with each successive record we have made, which is a nice thing to be able to say.

matt: you have a new single (which will be out by the time people read this) called the chapter in your life entitled san francisco. presumably this is anticipating a new full-legth[ed record] to be released soon. would you say something about either or both of these projects?

marty: i am typing from audrey studios, where we have just begun the mixing process on our forthcoming record, provisionally titled warmer corners, from which the chapter in your life entitled san francisco is taken. it's been a while between releases for us, and i'm quite excited about both the single and the album. it's distinctly more upbeat, and more fully-developed or textured than naturaliste [2003]; the songs seem (to me, at least) simultaneously more adventurous and more 'classic' than much of our previous work. (i should warn you, though, that this is the first time i've been forced to describe it at any length, so i don't yet have the pat little phrases from the press release at my disposal.) a big feature is the brilliant work of louis richter, who has been the fourth lucksmith in the live context for a year or two now, but whom we have not worked with in the studio before; he has brought to the songs an unerring ear for a jangly guitar line or a tasty organ part. ad we have again had the pleasure of working with producer craig pilkington, whose beautiful string- and organ-arrangements are the aural icing on the cake. the single, which is to some extent indicative of the direction of the record, takes its somewhat unwieldy title from a 1930s pro-californian-emigration pamphlett i stumbled across a couple of years ago in a secondhand bookshop.

matt: lastly, you're over there on the other side of the globe, and i often wonder what you guys are listening to that sounds great to you. what were your top five records from last year [2004]?

marty: my top five records for last year (already largely forsaken for the two new bright eyes albums; and including, given the geographical-remove thrust of your question, at least two australian releases) were okkervil river's down the river of broken dreams (which i think actually came out in the u.s. in 2003, so i'll include their sleep and wake-up songs ep as well); shearwater's winged life; the concrete's self-titled album; art of fighting's second storey; and our labelmate darren hanlon's little chills.

19 january, 2005; 14 february, 2005.

in addition to below:

2009-03-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

i was racing yesterday to finish the post about the hollow earth benefit, and as time before an appointment grew shorter i was getting to the part i really wanted to discuss, but ended up barely hitting the pitch i wanted. so i thought just as a supplement i'd add something to the mix: the subject of mount eerie, specifically the album lost wisdom with julie doiron and fred squires, came up on a forum i sit in on, and after the show i posted the following:

update: overcame extreme anxiety and saw mount eerie last night (although technically it is now monday morning; so saturday night, then).
tiny vipers and a trio including lori goldston (who played cello for nirvana back in the day) opened: both acts very good.
but then phil took the stage and made the floorboards in the old church we all were in tremble and shake. there were bearded kids with flasks lying down on the floor, and people in chairs and people standing.
the stacked amplifiers practically shimmered with feedback that harkened to sonic youth and metal equally. phil 's body contorted and twisted, following the energy of his guitar like a dowser's twig on water's trail. his hands left the strings and arced throught the air like a modest diva as his body responded to both music and the emotion of his singing (slightly high-pitched, earnest and fervent).
i have seen very few performers, [the mountain goats] included whose emotional pitch reaches such an apex.
if anybody out there has a chance to see mount eerie live, i would certainly recommend it.

not really new information, since i covered most of this in yesterday morning's post, but i kinda like the phrasing in this; i was drunk at the time (highly) and tend to wax poetic in those instances. there's no real reason to add it i suppose, except that it's my blog and it amuses me to indulge myself...

...

mount eerie revealed

2009-03-09T10:11:00.000-07:00

in what could become an (un)alarming trend, i went out again to a show! huzzah, my anxiety has been quelled once more. *knocks wood*

again, it was at the fremont abbey mere blocks from my home, but it was kind of special. it was the eve of dailight savings enforced sleep-loss, after a ten-hour bartending shift, and with another looming at 6:00 (no, make that 5:00) the next day. i had wanted to go to this show, a benefit for hollow earth radio with mike dumovich (who i'd not heard of) and lori goldston (who used to play with nirvana(!)), with tiny vipers (whom i had heard on the youtube but not in the desert of the real), and with mount eerie (over whom i've been mildly obsessing for about six months--this was my first oppurtunity to see him live).
i had wanted to go this show, but was convinced to the penultimate percentage that i would not be doing so. as it happens though, the restaraunt where i eat every saturday night is twenty feet away from the abbey, and as i left i thought, "oh what the fuck; i'll check it out."
i got up to the door as the h.e.r. emcee was opening the evening and found a solitary folding chair at the edge of the crowd and i settled in. i was gassy. sorry if anyone noticed...
but the show was well-worth the worry, and even worth the sleep i lost.

the dumovich/goldston/anne marie ruljancich trio was a nice solid opener, with acoustic guitar, cello and viola? violin? (i honestly couldn't see) combination taking full advantage of the excellent acoustics of the performance space to create longish lulling harmonies. goldston's cello work impressed me as much as it did when i saw her on perform with that other band a long while ago, with her proficiency creating dense sounds for her partners to ply into. anchored by dumovich's lead and ruljancich's accompanying vocals, the trio had a depth and feel that i intend to hear more of.

i first heard about tiny vipers, née jesy fortino, in the ramblings of kazutaka nomura, aka pwrfl power, when he interviewed himself for the stranger. since then she'd been on the back burner: i wanted to check it out, but hadn't got around to it. then a couple weeks ago when i was writing about cumulus, i noticed a concert bill with both of them, and i started checking out what was available on the world-wide double-yoo. i like what i heard, and that only added savor to my desire to attend this show--it also added bitterness to my surety that i wouldn't make it.
as for the show, fortino stepped quietly up to the chair set out for her, a small woman with a large guitar, which she hunched intently over, pulling back only when her songs required the full bore of her voice. she played long intense songs with a voice much older than her appearance, rich, soulfull and with a sense of fragility and damage whisping at its edges, set against the harmonics of seemingly every one of her steel strings, which seemed to resonate impossibly. i don't know if that was her sexy fender amp or the dynamics of the space, but the sound was overwhelmingly beautiful. i was pretty skint, but i bought an ep from the merch table (manned by phil (mount eerie) and genevieve (ô paon)--i felt shitty that i was buying someone else's record! but i didn't have nearly enough for his book, and i had almost all of those records already; i still felt churlish), and i'm looking forward to listening to it a few times.

as for mount eerie, phil elv(e)rum stepped up to the stage, solitary with an well-beaten electric guitar and massive amp stack, and smashed the acoustic ambience of the evening with a massive, powerfully distorted, sonic barrage. he writhed and contorted himself over his instrument, coaxing his lyrics out of himself with operatic gestures and obvious emotinal presence. his sound, a little metal, a little less folk, and just the right amount of sonic youth, was a great deal like his recorded material, but far more emotionally cohesive in person. the old church's floorboards shook and one felt almost lost. the songs were short, and many of them (apparently) new, but the immediacy and intimacy of both the songs and the singer were astonishing in their frankness and accesability. it was an awesome performance, and one of the most impressive i've seen i would even say that the ability of phil to entrance the audience was up there with john darnielle of the mountain goats. which is saying something, considering the rapid nature of his fans!

all in all, very happy to have gone. now if only i could get time off for what the heckfest...

still happening

2009-03-04T22:42:00.000-08:00

when i was a kid, my parents listened to judy collins and abba and john denver.
i remember feeling pretty fucking cool in 1987 or so when i discovered this amazing band called the beatles.
there were only a few radio stations that i could get--on my brand-new magnavox am/fmradio/doubletapedeck/recordplayer stereo--in the room that i finally had to myself, away from my little brothers. one of them was not kcmu, the college radio station that was broadcast from less than ten miles away, but which was overridden by larger in-city frequencies. at least in my neighborhood.
i got the king fm, the classical public radio station, and kbsg, the oldies station, at first (technically, when i was twelve i listened to top-forty shit to try to understand girls in my class at school; in retrospect it was not worth it, and it didn't work anyways). but it was these two stations i actually listened to a lot. especially the oldies, because it was actual rock'n'roll, which mysteriously drew me in. i knew all those old songs by heart, buddy holly, herman's hermits, ritchie vallens, tommy james & the shondells, all sorts of stuff. as the eighties waned, more songs from the seventies started creeping into the playlists, but at school i was getting hooked up with period music that didn't fit into the suited and boted conformity of '60s pop product. late beatles, like "obladi-oblada" and the acid-trip psychedelia were tantalizing and taboo and i flew through generations every couple months or so.
then two things happened when i was maybe sixteen or so. 1). a friend gave me they might be giants and violent femmes tapes, and 2). the slot on fm 107.7 became kndd the end, which started playing home-grown "grunge" bands in a mix with band like iggy and the stooges, david bowie and talking heads: bands that were already either venerable or deceased elsewhere, but still raw and vibrant on seattle's shitty commercial radio, and therefore, to its young listeners. i remember being blown away by elastica without knowing how deeply they werein debt to wire and the fall. i heard L7 and thought they were the meanest sexiest things on earth.i was scared my parents would hear this degenerate noise and take my stereo away from me.
you could not see (good) live music in seattle in 1993 if you were under 21 and you were me. obviously some kids got away with it, but i was way too timid to even think about getting a fake id. i didn't even start drinking until i was twenty.
finding new and interesting music became a game for my friends and i. we felt triumphant to have discovered the pixies, so raw and smart, from exotic new england. we swooned over belly's tanya donnely, and we were amongst those fooled into thinking urge overkill was worthwhile. along the way we learned about the vaselines from kurt cobain, realized that pearl jam was less relevent than superchunk (though if you'd asked us why, we would have had a hard time answering). we were beginning to catch up with those more savvy than we, but while most of us were thrilled to have a label like subpop operating in our own downtown, only the edgiest of us (of which i was not one) knew that the real shit was happening, and had been since the early eighties just down the interstate in olympia where calvin johnson's k empire was one of the hippest enclaves outside of the bowery.
i began getting a hint about this activity on my self-imposed exile to upstate new york for my one inglorious year of college. my new jersey roommate was listening to bands from olympia, and my reaction was nothing short of shock. really? this was going on under my nose? my high school cohort barry was also getting awoken to the rest of the world, and he sent periodic mixtapes from home off to me on the east coast. so did my friend jay. things were opening up and i think we all felt like we'd been blindsided a little. or maybe it was just sheltered me...

anyway, i don't remember exactly when i first heard beat happening, but it was not1983, when they first started recording songs like "our secret" and "down at the sea." it was not even 1992, when you turn me on was released.
i often wonder how different my brain would've processed things if i had heard beat happening earlier: would i have started making music before my thirties? as it was, i first started listening to calvin, heather and bret in my mid-twenties, and they were a revelation then, years after plunging into the musical deep end head-first.
beat happening still stuns me.
the wry disregard for polishand studio tricks; the offhand lyrics, ripe with poetic import but too playful for the arty-farty folks, and far too hip to be dismissed as gimmicky; the utter contempt for anything other than emotive immediacy where recording and production were concerned; all these things make bh's music unique.
the very name is romantically hip, summoning images of some musical lovechild of the two great counterculture allens, kaprow and ginsberg.
one sees old photos of the band, heather lewis' big glasses and roni horn-haircut, calvin johnson's slouchily sensual pout, and bret lunsford's impenetrable veneer or cool quietude. a litany of borrowed drums and guitars, that sexy old archtop, the crappy sears silvertone (sadly stolen recently from bret's protegée karl blau), all these brutally yet sweetly coerced into providing the minimal support for heather or calvin's plaintive voices.

when i listen to beat happening now they summon a nostalgia that i am not entitled too, but which should have been mine.
i had the ratty sweaters, and the yearning for something simple and beautiful: rimbaud with a snare.
bat happening could have helped to fill the void that haunted me back then.
but i didn't know they were there and as happy as i am to have them now, i wish i had them then...

little grrrls are gonna rock ya

2009-03-02T22:01:00.000-08:00

i'm just jotting this note down real fast 'cause i wanna just say something. not gonna add a picture, not gonna add hyperlinks or anything all researchy or whatnot.
a good friend and i were talking today about gender and expectation in young girls (she has two) and i mentioned my blog (below) about cumulus and about how i came of age in the era and cradle of the riot grrrl ('90s, pacific northwest) and how i have been feeling, since the ascendence of britney spears, an increased discomfort and depression about how american society tends to commodify and objectify (everybody, but most specifically) girls and young women. to get very personal, i grew up in a household where i never was given cause to assume anything other than gender equality, and most (like all but two) of my best friends have been girls (then women, natch) my whole life, and everywhere i've ever looked i've seen competant, driven and talented females achieving things in whatever sphere in which they chose to operate. when i was in high school it became evident that my friends and classmates saw the world differently, and that opened my eyes to the ways women and girls were (and are) systematically and purposefully, or carelessly and unintentionall given short shrift by society. as i've always identified strongly with a feminine sensibility (fyi, i am an heterosexual, european-american, middle class male in my thirties) i have been partcularly sensitive to these issues for some time. which, not-incidently, was why the music of cumulus and the blow affected me so strongly).

so after this discussion with my friend, she lent me this dvd she had rented called GIRLS ROCK! the movie, 2008, a documentary about an all-girls summer camp in pdx where women like carrie brownstein and beth ditto help to give girls from 6(?) to 18 the option of rock'n'roll, teaching how to play music, how to write songs, and a host of other related activities like zine-making and band dynamics, and also (positivly, but sadly) self-defense classes.
there is a horde of little girls banging away on a (mouth-watering) selection of instruments, encouraged and encouraging, allowed to succeed and fail and laugh and love each other in an accepting way that, as far as i know, is totally unavailable amongst the company of boys and men.
some of them suck so goddamn badly, but seriously, they're children, and despite all the feminist history that preceeds them, they're oppressed by unfulfillable expectations and derisions that they are far from deserving, and this fact, coupled with the simple fact that (for all the "empowering" identification of these girls as "women"--they are not, many of them) they are beautiful and difficult children allowed to access creative wellsprings within them that were sometimes previously acknowledged, but which in many cases were heretofor untapped. for all these reasons it was beautiful to behold.
and then there were kids like the ready, who were indeed ready for a fucking record deal. i'd release their record at any rate! (btw, if you are a kid in that band--seriously, you are really good, i promise).

this may be too personal (is that actually an issue for a "web-log?"), but i want to go into vulnerable territory and say how very much i empathized with these girls. as some of you readers may be aware, i suffer from anxiety of sometimes overwhelming proportions, and depression. without going into too much detail, i will tell you that body, sex and identity issues have plagued me since puberty, and the self-destructive patterns i have fallen into have been eerily similar to some present in the girls in this film. i identified with them a lot.
i found myself rapt watching this documentary, wishing that i could do something to help the project (which i intend to discreetly look into), even though men are, by and large, not allowed into camp (the filmmakers--both male--and bandmates of guest performers (like The Gossip) were exceptions), and knowing that for all my feelings of identification i would not be understood or welcome, i wanted to add my voice to the chorus telling these girls that "things aren't okay, but you will be; the world may not think it needs you, but it's mistaken; you may be fatter, or not as pretty, or not as smart, as you think you should be, and as tv says you should be, but you are beautiful and special."
i also wished i had a place like this i could've gone to as a kid.

go rent this dvd. or video. or buy it.
if you live in portland, or don't, see if you can help this program.
america fucks most of us over. it's just what it does. sometimes it makes us better for beating back our adversity. sometimes we're broken and detroyed altogether, or forced to endure with nagging, dull, narcotic pain. mostly we fall somewhere between. to see women passionately devoted to helping girls find the positive aspects of life was uplifting in a decidedly non-oprah way. not only should their efforts be supported, but imagine a day when all children, regardless of ethnicity or gender, are given pragmatic-yet-encouraging environments in which to grow.
maybe...

happy two-for-one surprise

2009-02-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

are you sitting down? as christopher lee so memorably said in the wicker man, "shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent." so are you sitting down?
i hope you're sitting down, because what i'm about to tell you will shock you.
i. went. out. last. night.

i know, i know. of course maybe there's one or two of you out there in the cyberspace who, unaware of my irritating social phobias and anxieties, are all like, "okey, you went out big deal, right?" right? no.
it should allay any major surprise if i qualify the above statement with the additional information that i went to a show at a venue which lies almost perfectly across the circumference of my little daily neighborhood walk. so that was easier then. wasn't it.

where (oh, where), you must be saying, was this place? well that's what i'm here to tell you. i only recently discovered that the nearby fremont abbey arts center plays frequent host to musical programs of the indie nature, and though it had occurred to me that i should investigate, it being a whole six blocks from my house, i had not yet found a bait significant to lure me from my hole. then i noticed that a performer i had a desire to see live, karl blau whom i've mentioned before, was going to be down from anacortes in a panel-type threeway performance (not nearly as dirty as it sounds) with led to sea and jason webley, neither of whom had i heard of.
and so, last night, a bitterly fucking cold tuesday, as jeopardy wound down, i thought, "y'know, i should go over there and check things out."
i was trepedatious, because i have been very sick lately, even missing work (a highly uncommon occurence, to be sure), and i was a little shaky still, but on went the hoodie and the gloves and the heavy coat and the converse low-tops and the little indie knit hood cap head-wear thing from south america (that everyone has, i know, but hey! WARM!). over i walked.
and then i saw more bearded young men than i have seen since lancaster, pa. many of them had glasses too, and i began to feel, if not at home at least invisible amongst the peoples. like that last page in "where's waldo" where there are hundreds of waldoes, and only one real one.
after a litany of arty introductions from the abbey's major-domo, my pockets already bulging with home-made merch, the performers came up to the stage. it should be mentioned before we get further that the space is really neat. it is the basement. the space is low and wide, with massive old-growth beams framing the intimate stage. scads of folding chairs arched around before the performers, but there was ample space for the standing others (among whom i was one), and, being that it was in a (former?) church, there was not the usual raucousness and there were no beverages stronger than cocoa. that and the all-ages made me feel very old, although not as old as the "trendy" grandads who are still looking for the sequel to the sixties. when their lives meant something, i suppose...
so the way this concert ended up working out was that the three performers, led to sea, hereafter known as alex (since her name is liz alex guy), karl blau, and jason webley, from stage right, in that order, would each play one solo song. then, a poet would come up and (sloppily, loudly, over-emotionally, and in one case with a sad case of "i'm a nerdy white guy, but i read my poems like samuel l jackson" way) read a(n ironically well-written) poem. then, alex would start a song, and karl and jason would (purportedly without having heard the song before, which actually was an inaccurate illusion, since alex and jason tour/record together, and at least one of them has shared a bill with blau; whatever) then accompany her, improvisational-like. then karl would start one, then jason, and the others would follow, et cetera. punctuated by more of the poetry (sigh).
a totally interesting (if, as i said, totally corrupt) concept.
i forgot to mention that, on stage behind the musicians, a painter was quickly painting a picture on an old cabinet door.

now, i had heard karl blau in his collaboration with bret lunsford and phil elvrum on bret's d+ project, and if he records with laura veirs as well as tours with her then i've heard him there too. in fact, if you are doing any looking into the anacortes scene, he is in every single photo, more zelig than waldo. i eventually got around to his myspace page to check him out for his own sake, and the first of his solo songs i heard was "mockingbird diet," from his k records release nature's got away (the title of which puns on a line from that song actually), which i reallyreallyREALLY liked (then i bought the record), then i saw the listing for this show and thought, oh yeah, maybe next month i'll go see that.
so that was why i went. and he was really good. it was a very interesting way to see a noted muliti-instrument and prolific musician like blau, and he played "mockingbird diet" which made me even happier, and i was glad i went. as i stood at the merch table before the show, i was informed by a small and attractive, but incredibly earnest, young lady volunteering there that many people were there to see this jason webley fellow. despite her insistence that this was the case, i decided to wait to buy some of his (massive pile of) records until afterwards. in retrospect, this was wise.
now i don't wanna be a hater or anything, and i will state right now that webley was not a bad musician, he just rubbed me a little against the grain. it may have simply been that he seemed so goddamned happy, which, if you know me, is excuse enough for me to be alienated. i found his schtick (he's got one, even if it's honest) a little weary and his songs a little hackneyed. everyone there was totally into him though, so this is most likely a personal thing, so no offense to him or his clearly numerous fan base. it's like michael jackson, to throw the metaphor out of proportion: clearly a star, but one i can't stand.
what i will also say about webley is that he was a phenomenally sensitive and generous accompanyist for the other two players, which i recognize and respect as being a hallmark of a really skilled and aware musician. major props to him for that.
of course he was already familiar with alex's songs *cough-cough* but whatever the artifice, the sound these three musicians made was truly fucking awesome. an unholy blend of gypsy, russian, indie, emo and minimalist tendencies.
also, he played a massive old accordian and a cool vintage guitar that sounded fantastic.

so i went to see karl blau, and karl blau rocked.
but what i did not expect was to be so blown away by led to sea, whom, as i said, i had not ever heard of.

wow.
so this woman comes out on stage with her viola and sits down, and, not knowing already how the evening would progress, there she was on blau's right, and there sat jason webley on blau's left with his big-ass accordian, and for all the world they looked like blau's back-up band. but then they were given the cue to start and alex starts hammering out this pizzicato rhythm, simple and penetrating and seductive, and then she bends down and i realize "oh, holy shit, she's got a looper down there" and as the rhythm continues to permeate the room she starts bowing out this haunting legato melody and then she leans into the mic and starts whispering the most gorgeous song. the song, btw, is "this moment," which is on her live ep fear of flight (i *heart* alliteration), but not on her self-titled eleven records release.
she used every trick in the book with that viola, scraping, keening, hammering out a percussion on the body, with the looper and the (either pick-ups or) mics shoving these fantastic sounds into our ears.
her songs are really stand-out too, and since i picked up both the ep and the full-length last night, i've been listening to them this morning, and they're all really good.
i look forward to hearing more from her.

so all in all, it was that (almost)rarest of rare things (the rarest is a good date) in my life: a good night out. woot.

the quiet rage of clouds

2009-02-08T09:42:00.000-08:00

a few years ago, when i started writing my little poems and ur-songs, when i didn't have a guitar yet, i was just starting to open up to the idea that, on the cusp of my thirties, i might be able to expand my creative life, for years dominated by painting and other visual artistic processes, to accept the inclusion of music. it was a little scary. i can't read music, and had no musical skills to speak of.* i was writing things though, for the first time in over a decade, and the idea that i could expand, in my maturity, into other fields that had previously cowed me into the role of mere spectator. i could play songs? i could make my own (tiny, modest) records? i was wholly seduced.
of course every band and "band" faces the existential hurdle of the infamous "band-name" question. and of course, i was no exception. even those who know me well will not bother to deny my gloominess, my greyness, my moodiness. it occurred to me that "the clouds" would be the perfect name for my endevours, and for months i photographed cloud formations from seattle to hawaii, with the intent of building up an archive to use for various album art compositions. i had pencilled in "by the clouds" on my lyric sheets. i was excited. i then realized that no less (and likely many more) than four other bands had already assumed this mantle. one of whom, the australian incarnation from the nineties (which morphed, in this decade, into "the girls from the clouds") i became quite fond of. damn damn damn. so i briefly considered another name before settling on "the black lines"
the name i considered was "cumulus."
i am now glad i didn't use it, because recently i discovered the music of a young woman up to the northern musical enclave of anacortes, washington, who performs under that name.
when one listens to cumulus' music, one can understand why a very minimal amount of information is available about her. apparently she is a small twenty-year old named alex, and her songs are quiet, beautiful, as bitter as burnt coffee and as angry as hell. she channels the eyes-wide-open indignation and what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-the-world rage of your average sensitive and intelligent college student into songs that are anything but generically angsty or tritely simplistic.
in a voice tentative yet strong, and whispery yet full throated and melodic, with an unobstrusive infusion of reverb, alex sings against minimal soundscapes of gentle nylon strumming or plucking, looped patterns of voice or percussion, and sweetly-sung overdubs. each song is filled with a slightly rustic soulfullness that is aware and cogniscent of pop trends without the glassy over-singing of the commercial pop tart. however, despite the mathematics of girl+guitar, cumulus sounds less like the prototypical girl-troubador enabled by joni mitchell, and more like someone like laura veirs** or a less throaty, less-rocky kristen hersh. the intensity of the lyrics and the sweetness of the voice, combined with the simplicity of the guitar work does mean that cumulus could run the risk of being shoved (unwillingly, one suspects) into the chick-folkie corner, but her work is capable of rebuffing such efforts.
as far as subject matter goes, cumulus sings with the tender rage of early ani difranco, pointing out the inequities of the lives of girls and women under the threat of the implications of the male gaze. directly challenging this threat is the shockingly frank "wolves," which begins

you cast your gaze, but who says she wants it?

and launches into a document of young woman who is sexually assaulted and then blamed for the act by the curse/virtue of her womanhood. the tone echoes andrea dworkin, valerie solanas and early riot-grrl bands like bikini kill, particularily in it's sarcastically taunting accusatory refrain: doesn't every woman just want it? doesn't every woman just want it?. the "album art" that accompanies the song on cumulus' myspace page is a still from the disney "classic" sleeping beauty; it's an apt slap in the face of male fantasy, and a canny analogical thrust.
in some of the other material, the caustic tone of "wolves" is less in-your-face, but the general feeling seems to be not merely anger of female subjectivity, but a deep sadness. "why" is a compelling partner to "wolves" with its girlie-punk aesthetic of "oh-oh-ohs" combined with a looped rattle providing a pretty wallpaper for the indignant and vulnerable graffiti of lyrics scribbled across it. in "morning coffee" however, the disparaging tone is replaced by the sense that the cumulus' alter ego, with nostalgia and a sweet sense of loss, is nonetheless moving forward from lost little girl to empowered and sensual woman. the palpability of a relationship's arc is evident in the song as alex sings:

last night your lips touched mine
like a strawberry touches the ground
when it gets too heavy
when did this begin to
feel so heavy?

in my own relationships (not just romantic, but with close friends as well), i have encountered many girls and women who are facing this dilemma, of how to retain their individuality and assert themselves fully, even as they wish to be open and sensual, feminine as it is commonly and reductivley accepted. the paradox of being strong and yielding as it were. in the song cumulus seems to state her forward trajectory with positivism, but also allows for the recognition that love is nice too. it seems almost tragic that in this era, a girl entering womanhood still has to feel like prey and feels like she must reject certain emotions to be strong. honestly, coming of age in seattle in the nineties, in the cradle of the riot grrl movement, and having grown up amongst girls and women who settled for nothing less than respect and equality, it pains me to hear of young women still feeling opressed. it suggests that while many of my generation have gleaned personal triumphs for their efforts, those younger women cumulus speaks for have not (yet).

In "get close" alex says, "i don't wanna feel like i'm wasting your time."
that seems unlikely to be the case.

*less-kind listeners of the black lines may suggest that the situation in this regard has not changed...

**interestingly, anacortes luminary karl blau has played bass for veirs, and cumulus has recently played drums for blau.

purty

2009-02-05T21:27:00.000-08:00

i would like to clarify that i am not actually a member of the cult of st vincent, by whom i mean miss annie clark, the saucer eyed gamine with the insanely rich and lilting voice and the ridiculous guitar chops, and not the home of the bearcats or the celebrated saragossan martyr of 304.

that disclaimer aside, i will admit to being wowed by (the video of) her performance at new york's other music. it's pretty impressive, with clark ripping through a net solo set with a sexy vintage archtop and a double-mic set-up that allowed her to channel billy holiday ('bang bang' in particular, is dope).

what really lights my candles though is a "dumbo" session (so-named for the chic brooklyn sub-neighborhood) where st vincent punches sweetly through a cover of the jackson brown song 'these days,' the one often attributed to the enigmatic teutonic chanteuse nico. as a fan of both the velvet underground and 'the royal tenenbaums,' the song is rich in associations for me, and annie's lovely version is less a "cover" than the sort of translation that used to happen when a jazz musician would perform/record another's tune: a tribute, a nod of the head, a chapeau of sorts. nice.

google it.

i don't want just a girl to ball

2009-02-01T22:21:00.000-08:00

as i was setting up the bar where i work this morning, a co-worker had his ipod plugged in, and much to the delight of we two, and the chagrin of everyone else, he was playing the eponymous 1976 release by the modern lovers (the original line-up of jonathan richman, jerry harrison, david robinson and ernie brooks). i have been feeling a little low lately. i am growing a little loving feeling in my dark, cold little heart, and along with the natural warmth that causes, there is a disproportionate monster of anxiety and unsurety, and jonathan richman's lyrics are a salve of sorts to those feelings. it's tough being a sensitive fellow, and jojo understands. and as he would no doubt add, it's tough too for the girls, and ladies, jojo wants you to understand that he knows this too.
i was especially drawn to "someone i care about." do you know these lyrics?* do you know this song? my goodness, it's so appropriate to all of my amorous intentions in my whole life, i suspect this richman of reading my mail. that is, if the song hadn't been written three years before i was born...
i first became aware of jonathan richman as a solo performer when my friend steven and i went to see belle & sebastian** years ago. we ran into my friend barry from high school outside the theatre and he was going on and on about the opening act (jojo) and how amazing he was. we were like "zuh?" because we did not know him. i have never seen repo man, and so didn't know "pablo picasso" from that, and i had seen something about mary but didn't know that the "greek chorus"-like troubador in that movie was jonathan. i was blown away by this performance. i don't recall richman's steadfast drummer tommy larkins being there, just this skinny, goofy guy, alone on stage with his acoustic guitar, singing these clever and darkly sweet songs.
i was hooked, man! from there i tracked down some of jonathan's solo records (mostly in used bins--a shame, i could not find new copies for the longest time), and the modern lovers "live at the longbranch" record (from france, no less). over the years i have delved deeper into jojo's repertoire, and saw him again in the far-more intimate surroundings of seattle's famed rockabilly haven, the tractor tavern. the circumstances in which i saw him on that night were fraught with my hopes of another sort of intimacy with a sexy polish girl, but in true modern lovers fashion, the romance was not to be (but i did not die--so some day we'll be dignified and old together). the show was awesome though. i can imagine some jaded indie so-and-so listening to jonathan richman and thinking, "say, my friend, what is this? raffi?" and i would say, "my goodness, you ignorant trollop. you simply must experience jonathan richman live in order to appreciate that in order to be cool, you need not in fact be cool. you must witness his spontenaity, his joie de vivre, his whole-body devotion to putting music into the world, and his unabashed willingness to smile while doing so." i suspect i would get a dirty, befuddled look for saying such a thing, but it's true. i am a gloomy, black-hearted pessimist, but even i defy anyone to see jojo play and to not smile. such people who are capable of doing so are the ones who will do horrible things to you if they catch you in a dark alley. they are pure sociopaths and need be shunned.
anyway, jonathan richman put out a really interesting record in 2007 called "revolution summer" named after the film for which it serves as soundtrack. amazingly, it is a lyricless album, and the deceptive simplicity of jonathan's musicianship is sidestepped by the revelation (were one needed) of his minimalist mastery. with many songs floating around the one-minute-mark, and one at 40-something seconds, "revolution summer" is essential listening for anyone who has a belief in the one-man-band conceit *cough-cough*.
then last year, another record came forth, "because her beauty is raw and wild", but this time it was a full-fledged studio release, jojo's first since 2004, with real songs and everything, but what sets it apart is that the stripped-down feel of "rs" remains, with jonathan's plaintive, sighing voice accompanied by his gentle, jangly strumming and tommy's unfussy drumming.
the typical ethos of a jonathan richman record is all there: the sweetly near-obsessive attention towards a particular lady; the dangerously emotional pitch, somewhere between deviousness and utter naïvité; erudite epigraphs such as the paen to johannes vermeer that sound simple despite their acuity; the prediliction for speaking in tongues, specifically spanish, a language richman truly seems to cherish. it's all there, like finding cats flitting around the paginated corners of a haruki murakami novel, and the familiar elements bring a sense of welcome that's nostalgically underlined by the lo-fi texture of the album as a whole. it reminds me personally of being in that small club on a bitter cold winter night, with a cheap lager in hand, leaning against a ragged old-growth pillar, as a goateed fifty-something stepping out from behind his microphone and, swinging his hips, and yelling passionatly into the crowd, winning their hearts.

*this is a selection:
well i don't want some cocaine sniffing triumph in the bar
and i don't want a triumph in the car
i don't want to make a rich girl crawl
what i want is a girl that i care about
or i want none at all
i feel warmer now.

**incidently, this was the first time i saw b&s live. it was amaaaaazing. i'm twee. i'm sorry.

the past is still ahead of me. hmm. could be a problem...

2009-02-01T21:31:00.000-08:00

i have noticed that many of my posts begin with "so." to which i might be tempted to say, "so what?" i'll work on new intros.

this one time, at... oh shit.
i have a flickr account, as some readers may already be aware, and apart from clogging the internet with my own images (of late, an ongoing catalogue raisonnée of my entire body of work--ongoing with the possibility of completion-failure, that is), i also like to just surf from page to page, following a general search to start out and going from there. while on one of these immensly satisfying little cyber-treks i came across a photo of a musician i think highly of onstage with another musician at the second guy's show (doing the whole "and here's our friend john darnielle, to sing anchorless with us" thing) and someone had commented something like "o ye mortals, behold this trancendent moment, would there were a record of this auspicious occasion, to be celebrated through repeated digital viewings."* to which the author of said photograph replied "the internets doth provide." such a small suggestion, yet the hyperlink attached became a wormhole to an audio bliss-- an awakening not unlike the one robert deniro experienced with robin williams' firm administration of l-dopa. except for the whole thing of being in a coma. nonetheless, a coma is a good metaphor for the state of not knowing who the weakerthans were (for the record, this is a severely late-written post considering the actual timing of this event, just fyi, but i wrote about another canadian band last time, and figured maybe i'll try to get it out of my system).
whatever. i was hooked. apparently i have been missing out for some time, since the weakerthans arose from john k samson's evacuation from propaghandi in 1997 (and technically, the song on the video, "anchorless" predates that split, but what-evs). i am resolved to make up for lost time.
however, as yet i haven't actually gotten ahold of any of these records, cursed, unlike my friend steven, as i am to not hold a job where i have easy and free access to a, shall we say library? of albums. *cough*
i have however been listening to mp3s and youtube clips and mysoace samples and all that, and i am really loving this stuff.
i just wanted to say that.
(i mean, i could analize john k samson's gritty-yet-warm voice, or the interplay between jangly, delicate guitar lines (like in "strangulation" or "night windows") and the rocky rhythm section, or the charming love/hate relationship with the band's native winnipeg, manitoba, which indelibly flavors their sweet-sad lyrics. but maybe if you don't know the weakerthans, you should be like me (probably only in this endevour should you be like me...) and hunt them down.)

*this is a very liberal translation of what may actually have been said. -ed.

i call "bs" on you! yes i do!

2009-01-12T22:19:00.000-08:00

i was going to start out by saying, "ok, man, you know i don't like calling people out, but..."
i shouldn't start out that way though, because my mouth has gotten me in more trouble oer the years than i'd like to think about. almost getting kicked out of college? yup. gotten me into a bad relationship? oh yeah. landed me the job i've had for the last nine years? worst of all...
however, though i've tried to temper my responses (slightly) i still itch to voice my contrary opinions. laced with less salty language perhaps...

a couple weeks ago, while meandering through the youtube labyrinth, i came across this video of "the new pornographers" in the back of an english taxi (at www.blackcabsessions.com--which sounds like a porn site, but in fact is comprised of musicians in the back of black cabs performing in situ and rough-and-ready versions of a particular song). it was not, in fact, the whole band, but rather carl newman and kathryn calder, with carl on lead vocals and acoustic guitar, and kathryn on accordian and harmonies.
wow, it sure was gorgeous. that sounds a little disingenuous, but i assure you, i'm straight up. it wa so good, i'm convinced tnp should do an album just like that: acoustic and stripped alllllll the way down. it would be amazing. a.c., hook me up man?

anyway, i had heard kathryn singing with tnp when they opened for belle & sebastian a couple years ago, when they were "controversially" touring without neko case, and everyone was poo-pooing them, because she is the indie-goddess, and they are thebacking band (i could mention that bejar wasn't with them either, but that doesn't help my case). kathryn sounded fantastic, hitting all the "neko" notes right on target, and delivering a powerhouse performance with the rest of the band. so after seeing this video (in the interest of disclosure, i am a lonely-boy songwriter guy, and kathryn calder is ethereally lovely with a voice to match)...
*coughs sheepishly*
...so after seeing this video, i did the ol' google-search to see if kathryn calder, like the other members of canada's most hippest "superband," had a side project or two, and i came across immaculate machine.
i have just spent waaaaaaay too much money on music in the last several months, and though it is on my hotlist(!) i haven't ordered their cds (ones and zeroes and immaculate machine's fables, both on mint), i notice there's another due this spring, so maybe i'll just make a typical matt-move and buy them in bulk.
there are a couple videos out there on the web, and (and here comes the gripe!--"aha," you say, "i wondered when (if?) that would come along") a daytrotter session.

now. i am not gonna ladle out a heaping serving of shit upon the good peeps at daytrotter dot com, because i believe in and am appreciative of what they do.
BUT
in the mini-essay introducing the session, author sean moeller writes:
"[immaculate machine] find familiarity in "dear catastrophe waitress" era belle and sebastian and travel with the wind-dried melodies of the new pornographers,* but they write songs that have some of that crackle of grungy seattle, via the 1990s, when sub pop was just getting its sea legs** there in the salty northwest."
to which i responded with a silence. mainly because i was alone, with no one to talk to. not that i am deterred by solitude. i talk to myself for hours. but i was stunned, in this case, into speechlessness.
immaculate machine do in fact sound a bit like the new pornographers. one could argue that if your uncle were in a hugely popular and influencial band, you might sound similar, too.*** i can see the b&s comparison too, since there's a nice amount of melody and musicality to the band that has been given more free rein since chamber-pop's ascendency. i can even see the 1990s thing. it's official, we born in the seventies are officially oh-el-dee (but luckily not as old as you even older fogies out there!), and the styles of "alternative" or "college rock" bands that we grew up on have deeply influenced a number of newish bands. but the '90s band that i hear most in immaculate machine is belly, the tanya donelly project that had my friend pulling out his hair in obsessive frustration back in high school. of course also the breeders and throwing muses and all that crowd (not so much pixies, though). they also sound like the defunct australian band the clouds. they kinda sound like the feelies a little too, but honestly, every other indie pop band sounds like the feelies (hello vampire weekend. i am talking. to. you.); i need to get ahold of their records so i can stop relying on their myspace fansite and the three songs available there. serious. also, it's a little funny that all four tracks (i never catch on fast enough for the temporary downloads) start with a very similar snap of the drums.
what bugs me is that, strictly from my own experience of seattle in the nineties, im doesn;t sound like anything me and my friends were listening to (from seattle--they sound like the boston stuff (but not "boston," which, in all honestly, we were listening to. i am so sorry...). they sound nothing like grunge. is that what the rest of the country thinks we were doing? i mean, "grunge" was the unholy spawn of hard rock (sometimes metal) and punk rock, with a very small dose of sarah records and postcard records stuff. that stuff was more of an influence on the olympia scene though (which in turn influenced kurt cobain and others up here). grunge was hard. it was violent and angsty, loud and emotive (it had close ties to proto-emo bands like fugazi and even ministry--all mentioned in the same breath with nirvana and mudhoney (we try not to mention other associated acts like pearl jam and chicago's urge overkill). grunge was scary for us kids. we liked it a lot, and we totally tapped into that rage and anger (and the indisputable feeling that there was depth to it: substance to enrich the feelings of frustration and anxiety--remember, we were involved in an iraq war then too). on the other hand, we were pretty sure that if we ran into mark arm at dick's he could've happily kicked our asses into the ground. (i hear mark arm is a great guy, but when we were in our teens, these guys were like "all doing heroin" and smashing guitars and all sorts of things we imagined happening behind the impenetrabe doors of the comet.****
i could be really nitpicky and go into how pavitt and poneman actually got revved up in the eighties, and how, by the early-nineties, sub pop was not only in full-flight, but was on the way towards transcending the "seattle sound" and becoming more eclectic, and *gasp* gentler. much later i would recognise, retrospectively, that arc in the rise-and-plateau of the "dunedin sound" in new zealand, and its connection with flying nun records, not to mention the untold number of scene and label histories out there.

i should actually make it clear that i am in love with immaculate machine. i heart them. they sound so good. i want to buy their records. i want to kiss kathryn calder's hand. their melodies will rock you with beautiful chiming feedbacking harmonizing pounding dance-in-your-chair songs.
they really sound a lot like belly though...
and that essay wasn't really bad, i was just all, "yo man, i was there! that's my youth you're talkin' about!"
knowwhaddimean?

notes:
*i don't know what this means: they're crusty? dessicated? pleasantly unscented?

**maritime references abound in the piece

***fyi: calder is newman's niece. and she in that band.

****one thing a lot of people may not understand, is that it was really, really difficult to get into shows if you were under 21 here. there were bands i had to wait a decade for (until they came back to town), and the ones i did see were in horrible stadium or festival formats--i mean, seeing nirvana and the meat puppets was groundbreaking for me, and seeing sonic youth at bumbershoot was like the deus ex machina, but largly we felt that the only way we could connect with our own hometown scene was to trade tapes and buy whatever records we could with our scrounged funds.

not a top ten

2008-12-31T22:42:00.000-08:00

is there a problem with top-ten lists? nope. artforum does 'em every month and their end-of-the-ear issue is almost exclusively t-10s. some buck-toothed dood on teevee does 'em too. they can be funny. evry music mag and blogger does 'em too. so why should i?

my friend hatedeverysong sent out a best-of and a worst-of list this year (on the myspace) and that was cool, except he is an indie fanatic (especially when it gets west-coast), and i can only gawk/be jealous at the amount of shows and records he seems to absorm per annum.
which is a little disingenuous, heh.
i bought more records this year than i ever have (in a one-year period). i didn't really pay much attention though to what year they were released in, though, so a "best of '08" seems a little dishonest. it also seems a bit silly: i mean, john-effing-darnielle released three records this year; sorta tilts the field, y'know?
the clean and the bats, new zealand legends, put out new albums this year, and so did plenty of other bands, but i spent most of my money stuff by bands i had just come across/focussed on for the first time, and whom i was eager to absorb into my crammed conciousness.
i can't believe that i hadn't heard of some of this stuff before, so i'll sacrifice any snobbery so i can say "wow" about this stuff.
i get really excited about new stuff! give me a little leeway!
oh, right. i didn't say what i was doing...

so instead of a "best-of" list, i'm just going to do a list of bands/performers i didn't know about until sometime in 2008 (an who i am happy to have found, natch). it'll be in "top ten" format, but please don't ascribe any major significance to the actual order. that wouldn't be really fair since my memory is terrible and i'm just going to try to remember what i want to remember!
okay. here goes:

1) phil elvrum, aka: microphones/mt eerie/d+* (really the whole anacortes scene, as well...)
2) woelv/ôpaon
3) dirty projectors
4) the blow (yeah, yeah, everyone's been telling me about this for a while--i get easily distracted, ok?)
5) simon joyner
6) peter jefferies
7) the cannanes (how did i live without this band?)
8) the mad scene (this is 1/3 of the clean, so is it fair? the answer is yes: i didn't know about hamish's other band before)
9) elf power**
10) mark szabo (how did i live without this either?)

*when i say d+, i should point out that i'm really getting into this band of former beat happening-er bret lunsford, and also band-member karl blau's stuff as well. just sayin'.
**this is dishonest. i knew elf power before because i've had a couple of their records for three years, but i never was obsessed with them until this year, when i became obsessed with them. sooooo good.

of course there's the pile of stuff i got from 555/red square (ie jen+stew) that i am still working through, and honorable mention goes to fly ashtray, who i just got psyched about via douglas wolk's singles club. i will obsess more soon...

help.

Shut the f*ck up

2008-12-18T10:59:00.000-08:00

this is just a quick note, but it regards a long-time problem that has been on my mind of late: the incessant talking at shows. i have been listening to a shit-ton of boots lately (mostly mountain goats and mount eerie--woo!), and people just won't fucking shut up. why is this people? i mean, i usually don't go to shows alone, and between songs i am likely to be overheard saying something along the lines of "oh, holy shit, i can't believe he played neon orange glimmer song" but in that particular case, i also am paying attention to the onstage intro/banter/what-not, and will keep my own commentary to a minimum.
but you people, o you bastards, who prate and snigger while the songs are being played, seriously, why are you [t]here?
if you want to have discourse, a fellow like myself would position himself far from discouraging it, but there are inappropriate times for it, like when they are putting your mother into the cold hard ground, or when colin meloy is singing red right ankle.
it's aggravating in person, but reaches a sublimely new level of inanity when it's preserved for posterity on a bootleg. an example: a fellow asking a particularly chatty girl to please be quiet during the songs, her saying what? what? me? ohsuresorry. then immediately slagging him off with her chums and using the sad justification that she paid to get in [too].
i have apparently been fortunate to have found myself in a life where i have not needed to pay a cover charge to have a conversation, so obviously my heart goes out to these deprived kids. poor dears.
another example: phil elverum politely pointing out at a show that the venue has a front room where conversationalists might be able to hear each other better, where they won't be distracted by the music he's playing.
sooooooo:
shutupshutupshutup.
thank you.

The drone of eight-bit choirs

2008-11-18T00:50:00.000-08:00

so I was following the threads of a forum, and came across a site with archives of mountain goats shows. omg. i have spent the last twelve hours rabidly going through them. ain't even done yet. more tomorrow. oh holy shit, you guys, have i told you how much i love the variation and subtle nuance of live shows? fuck, it's all so cool. i'm peeing my pants in all the right ways right now.

OH AND SORRY--I'M NOT GONNA TELL YOU WHERE IT'S AT. DO YOUR HOMEWORK.

oh! hey! more lucksmiths:

2008-11-13T20:51:00.001-08:00

you can get the first frost easily. i am a liar and a bastard.

go to http://www.indiepages.com/matinee/

they also have tali white's new guild league record, which i am buying RIGHT NOW in another window...

if i'm babbling, please forgive me

2008-11-13T19:50:00.000-08:00

for the longest time, i would mention one of my favortie bands, and people would say who? luck-whats? i would go to their rare shows at small sardine-packed clubs full of twee kids from portland and vancouver who'd come the distance to hear melbourne's finest LUCKSMITHS play a little set for them. these were fans who knew all the words, and jumped around (danced! in seattle!--if you don't know why this is strange, DO NOT move here). finally, people are slowly coming around, and apparently the boys are enjoying some well-earned love back home in 'oz, but they are still a long ways from belle & sebastian levels. which is far from coldplay levels. which is far from rolling stone levels. and, urm, all of that is good for me, i'd say... selfish bastard, me.

so the lucksmiths started out back in 199(3?) when one of them was the age i was then, one was a year younger, and one a year older. they're of my generation, is what i'm sayin, and back then i was not savvy enough to have my own band, thank you. nor was i savvy enought to pick up vinyl from an obscure australian trio on a label that you couldn't get over here.
in '98 i heard a track on seattle's kexp (was it still kcmu then? i don't remember...), but it sounded great--chamber-pop, twee, whatever you wanted to call it. and then when 'why that doesn't surprise me' came out in 2001, i was onboard for the haul. in short order, i hooked up with their indie label (the late candle records, run by chris crouch, was home to a host of massively talented antipodean acts, like darren hanlon, the girls from the clouds, richard easton, ruck rover (now fred astereo) and a bunch of others-it was one of those watershed labels that opens up a whole genre for an entire scene *sigh* i miss them) and ordered the back catalogue, and quickly became very expert on them (interviewing main writer marty donald several years ago for now-defunct 'rivet magazine'), and bugging all but three of my friends about them. the three in question became fans as well.

anyways, the lucksmiths are a blend of jonathan richman-esque self-deprecating humour, smart, clever and touching lyrics, and twangy jangly guitars, set up by frontman tali white's stand-up drumkit and velvety falsetto. mark monnone sets the bass down and all three have written songs for the duration, though donald has written the lion's share. mid state orange's louis richter joined the band for the tour supporting 2005's 'warmer corners' and he has become, after more than a decade member number four. his first song for the band leads off the newest release, 'FIRST FROST,' which just came out last month. the boys went down to a rickety little cabin in tasmania, were tormented by local mice, failed to see a thylacine, and made a beautiful little record which their new label (owned in part by monnone, by the way) describes as being a record for those who "think the lucksmiths sound too much like the lucksmiths." i don't actually get that. 'first frost' sounds EXACTLY like the lucksmiths, and i do mean that as a good thing. the lyrics have the same gentle humour and sweetness, and the quality of the music is as high as ever. it's a little fuller with a fourth guitarist, especially one so good at embroidering hooks and driving riffs through donald's kinks-y jangle, but that hasn't been new for more than three years. whatever. if that gets the punters in the door, then well done. monnone has some real gems in there, and donald's tone is pitch-perfect in sweetly articulated numbers like "good light" and "california in poular song." donald and monnone rarely, if ever, sing lead vocals, and i consider a rare gift for a band to have such synergy between a dynamic singer and other writing band members--with tali white, the lucksmiths have carried it off with aplomb for years. every song sounds naturally organic and well-fitted to its components. my only complaint is that white, who is capable of some great emotionally cutting songs like "sunlight in a jar," here only contributes a track ("up with the sun"). hopefully this means he's been writing for his other project, the guild league. never a prolific contributor to the lucksmiths, white has a slightly different tone to his writing (whereas monnone and donald, while slightly discernable to the connoisseur, are fairly complimentary) and i always want to hear what's rattling around in his brain. espaecially since he's singing...

if well-crafted little love songs are your cup of tea (i ain't talking angsty emo here, by the way--just real good aussie indie-pop), check out the lucksmiths. you may have a little trouble right now getting ahold of 'first frost' (unless you order from their label, lost and lonesome, in 'oz), but it'll come (hopefully the band will be back through again soon--last time they were here they played the croc' and it was a little sparse; i mean granted, it was a cold wintery monday, but I WAS THERE, and i almost never go out). in the meantime, catch up. then come dance with me.

oh for fuck's sake.

2008-11-13T19:45:00.000-08:00

so, yeah, i don't have firefox, or whatever, so no more cute formatting.

*sighs*

*vows revenge*

i dug my heels in for the winter

2008-11-13T19:05:00.000-08:00

so i spent about an hour or so, earlier in the week, writing this really long, drawn-out post about the mountain goatsand kaki king12" black pear tree e.p. oh man, i worked on that for a wahile, checking all fucking sorts of facts and shit, and sticking in this and that hyperlink, and would you know it? this fucking platform screwed me over on it, and i seriously considered smashing the shit out of my screen, but thankfully i did not, i cannot afford to spend another 2K right now, thank you. but now, i'm logging on the write this new post and the stupid shit has changed the formatting tool selection, SO, is this in the font i prefer? who knows! is it in italics? bold-face? zapf-dingbats? how the hell would i know?
pretty damned irritating.
so, i meant to write this stuff earlier. i was all poetic before, but fuck it at this point. get on the mac train, blogger. i mean seriously. i only know two people who use PCs. one of them is very attractive. one of them, not so pretty, works for microsoft. but he runs vista on his macbook pro.
john darnielle of the mountain goats uses a mac.
and he also works with people like scott solter who "committed" bpt to tape in north carolina this summer. those who visit mr darnielle's flickr page have ben tormented with the existence of this record because of one tantalizing, teasing picture. i am not going to hyperlink to it. look it up if you want to. i am feeling nasty tonight, sorry.
so the mountain goats used to put out shitloads of stuff in small tasty packages, like eps and singles and splits and comps and all this shit. sometimes, things like jack and faye wouldn't even be released, but dammit, you knew they were out there somewhere (like online). sometimes they would ave etchings by nikki mcclure, like new asian cinema and sometimes they would be in elaborate little sacks, like on juhu beach. and then, of course, sometimes there are only 666 of them, like the ep mentioned below. black pear tree is not quite so elaborately manufactured. it has a simple, classy cover. there were some pretty swirly vinyl copies (200) distributed randomly amongst the edition, but the music is the same, and the selection of who got the swirlies was random, as i say, so it was fair. the only thing that freaked me the fuck out, was that, like satanic messiah, bpt was a tour-only type deal. fortunately, john gave some copies to various distributors, and peole like me were able to get copies (i couldn't make it to the last show here, because i am a mess--it is a long story, we ain't going there). so thank you (again) three beads of sweat. and also for the other stuff i will mention another time *cough-cough*.
oh, wait, there's music in this ep. i should mention that, right? so, it's good, i think i mentioned that already. i was not before, and am not intimately now, familiar with kaki king's oeuvre, but i checked out a video of her on letterman doing ridiculous things with (to?) a guitar, and it's fairly obvious why on the liner noted to bpt she's credited with "greater guitars," whereas jd is credited, somewhat self-dis-servingly, i will say, with "lesser guitars." king is also credited with music credits for tracks 2 and 5 (mosquito repellent and roger patterson van respectively), but the overall tone of the album is far from broken by any disparity. it sounds like king and darnielle have been a band for yonks, although, as the story goes, jd's been a fan for a while, but kk was unaware of who tmg was. lol. anyway, king does vocal service on the opening title track to darnielle's lyrics (he wrote 'em all, goats fans) and sings them as if they were her own. so if anyone ever ascribed a gender bias to tmg's lyrics that conceit could easily be overturned in this one song.
the record is pretty spare, going the opposite direction from the rockiness superchunk drummer jon wurster has lately brought to the band (king does percussion, and it's subtle and rasping)--much like the sm ep. it would maybe be ineffective, stylistically over the length of an lp, but in this form, the atitude, the sounds and the words all come together beautifully to form a very authentic and organic whole.
special shout out to supergenesis, the first track on side b. it's a miltonian tale of failure in the diabolical vein, and of the rueful lust for retribution. analogic and quietly vicious, it slides comfortably into the ranks of jd's great pissed-off-and-gonna-cut-yer-nuts-off songs. which is one of the reasons we're all here, i suppose.

i've been thinking a lot about the vinyl situation lately, by the way. especially as i've been buying a lot of vinyl. i read something recently by damon krukowski about victrolas and old wax, and it seems like that's all anyone's talking about on the mg forum, and i have mentioned its merits myself in relation to boyracer and k records and stuff. but (and this will be the focus of its own post soonish) i keep thinking, well, if you can hear the music and the music's goo, does it REALLY matter what format it's in? i mean, it's nice, and i would not part with my special records--or any album art or notes or whatever, but it seems like this schism between the vinyl-fetishists' totems on one side, and the vapid itunes download on the other, and a wide gulch between that threatens to engulf other options. that's the part that worries me. opinions on this welcome. i'll be writing more about it later.

so to sum up: black pear tree=so good. jd assures the people (many of whom are highly anxious wanting this record) that it is not meant to be unattainable, and that somehow people will be able to get hold of it. maybe not on vinyl (lol). probably not on tape thought, thank goodness (hold on, carlos! i got no hate for the cassette, but my deck ain't worked for about eleven years, and i want those damned daniel johnson tapes (not to mention tmg stuff!!!)--i just want options, alright?).
in the meantime, go download satanic messiah. don't be a baby, it sounds just fine. of course, it may sound amazing on vinyl. i wouldn't know...

Not about the music.

2008-11-04T20:12:00.001-08:00

I am sitting here on my couch watching the election results. There are tears rolling down my cheeks, and I am an unsentimental man. The war is finally over. It's time for a change, and to quote the catalyst:

Yes we can.

What a birthday present...

update pending / relief

2008-10-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

after drunkenly raving about tenuous nick cave/john darnielle connections last time, i finished typing (out of a sense that i needed to just stop more than anything else), and quickly became relieved that i had not followed the thread i was originally going to write about. which was, that while it was cool to be able to download (in a cool way) satanic messiah, i was angry that it was going to be nearly impossible to score the other tour only mountain goats record, the 12" six-song black pear tree e.p., by tmg and kaki king. i hadn't any tickets for the forthcoming show (the one a week ago, now) and i was all "shit, it's great to be able to download thank you mario, but our princess is in another castle, but i am an addict, and i need every goddamned bootleg version and alt-take and un-released tracks, thank you very much, and i can't have it and i wants it (sob, sob).

but then while i was getting ready to go in that direction, i hyperlinked the address for three beads of sweat and when i did that, i noticed that a.) they were still in business; and b.) they had copies of the bpt ep!!! i ordered one immediately, and, i was later to discover, none too soon. so i was one of the really lucky people to have been able to get an ep from that avenue, and i now have it in my little hands, and know two things:

1. it's really good.

2. i will blog more about it soon (as soon as i finish the illustration, probably)

so, i thought i'd mention it. also thought i'd mention what's on deck in the next month or so.

-the long-promised anacortes special (elvrum, woelv, d+, etc.)

-elf power

-vanderslice

-david kilgour

-the lucksmiths

see you soon

a howl like screeching tires

2008-10-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

so i woke up this morning. sadly, i am not on kawara, so the event in itself wasn't so notable, but i did wake up with the seeds of this post germinating in my loamy little brain. that's pretty unusual, me hosting cognitive activities first thing in the ay-em. usually i think the following (in order): poop; clothes; coffee (there's a whole subset of making sure i have the money for the coffee and the keys to my little kingdom so i don't get locked out, but that's hardly here nor there).

so, anyway, i had this fairly well-formed thought stream about how the recent mountain goats stuff--or rather the transition john darnielle seems to be making, resulting in new mountain goats stuff--has a remarkable similarity to the arc of nick cave (and the bad seeds, but specifically, nick cave).

what?

oh, sorry, i should probably go into detail. actually, i should be specific that there's no way the folkish yelping of john darnielle could be mistaken for the gravedigger's baritone of nick cave, they look totally different (especially since nick grew the stache), but there is a strand here to follow, honest. to wit:

i should probably start with a little background for those without a working knowledge of either protagonist.

•nick cave started out with seminal aussie punk band the birthday party, and with heroin. his raw rough lyrics and grinding music helped define a certain "eurotrash" sort of sensibility that tapped into latent post-war anger and frustrations, particularly in west germany (with die haut), but also with the post-punk transition in england and eventually, especially with the formation of long-time partners in crime, the bad seeds, an influence on more esoteric american artists, and also claimed a kinship with this country's native genres, particularily blues, particularily delta blues (especially in the case of 1985's the firstborn is dead). themes of death, god, redemption, hell, sex and violence were packed heavily into cave's output for over a decade, up until the rollickingly morbid murder ballads of 1996, a record that was funny and disturbing, and a blistering meld of traditional and folk flavors with cave's own particular black sensibilities. a mere year later, however, cave released the boatman's call, easily one of the most beautiful albums i've ever listened to. the hysteria of the past few years evaporates, and the most tender love songs fill the void, every cranny of it. somewhere between the release of boatman and its successor, no more shall we part, i saw cave perform a 'solo' set (he had a few backing musicians, but not the bad seeds, and they were very subtle), with many of the songs featuring just nick and a piano. incidentally neko case opened that show (at seattle's paramount theatre, if you care), and the combination of the two made for an indelibly potent evening. anyway, the point i thought about making *ahem* was that after a fairly straight trajectory, nick cave opened the door to this far-more melodic strain of musicianship, crooning and emoting. however, he continued to make more blistering hell-and-brimstone rock'n'roll as well, and as evidenced by his other project, grinderman, that aspect was strengthened by the divergence.

well, that seems to be the process that john darnielle (of) the mountain goats is going through as well these days.

•the mountain goats, as many must surely have heard by now, is the brainchild, little baby, deranged child, awkward teen and crazy young man of singer/songwriter (sorry, i know that's a terribly abused term) john darnielle. for many years of tmg's existence, jd has been the sole member, but the band has also held to its bosom: bassist rachel ware zooi; maniac genius franklin bruno; superchunk drummer jon worster; producers-du-luxe john vanderslice and scott solter; and of course longtime enabler peter peter hughes, who has been a mainstay of tmg's live shows and recording sessions for years. tmg began with john making home recordings and selling tapes at shows and puting ou compilations and little splits and eps. he carved out a place with brutally good lyrics and a manic yelp paced by the standard of american music: the acoustic guitar. it should be mentioned it was many years before he bought a strap.

(a shit-ton of that early stuff can be found on the compilations protein source of the future...NOW!, bitter melon farm and ghana, all put out on the entirely worthy chicago label three beads of sweat. they are an excellent primer for anyone wanting to gain an encyclopedic knowledge of american lo-fi history; i am not exaggerating).

at a near-fever pace, darnielle has pumped song after song out for years, with a deep lyrical sense of the debauched poverty and rusting ecstacy of the soul of america that is on a par with jack kerouac and tom waits, among others.

gradually though, the minimalist scratching of sweden and zopilote machine gave way to a tighter "band" aesthetic which broke through, as they say, with 2002's tallahassee, tmg's first "major label" (4AD) release, and which, for better or worse, gave the world track seven, no children, which would get my vote for most-requested-song-ever song. tallahassee was followed up by the amazing full-lengths we shall all be healed and the sunset tree, the latter of which was the first to explicitly tap into john's own past for subject matter. there was, notably, still a bit of yelpin' going on.

on 2006's get lonely, however, the typical mountain goats "sound" gave way to an emotionally charged, but sensitive and subdued suite of quiet songs which departed starkly from people accustomed to best ever death metal band in denton, going to cleveland, and especially no children. if you can track down a bootleg of jd playing the songs (some for the first time in public) at easy street in seattle (it's worth the trouble), you can hear the real raw feelings they open up, and when you combine them with the babylon springs ep, a slicker, more produced pop album that, wierdly, isn't included on a bunch of discographies, there is a similar sense of a related convergence, like nick cave's (ah-ha! you thought i'd maybe strayed too far into my own mind!). the next full-length release, this year's heretic pride, featured an integration of the recent piano-heavy work (like tianchi lake) and more "mountain-goaty" numbers like autoclave and lovecraft in brooklyn. it was, for some i know, a relief (as some freaked out about the "over-production" on babylon and the "pussification" of get lonely (neither opinions shared by me)) that the hard edge hadn't been dulled. the trend (of "growing up" maybe?) seems to be continuing, as jd's work becomes more (and here i cringe) "competent" and more diverse in their production values.

of particular relevence is 1) the performance john gave at sxsw (in 2007) where he played three non-album songs (that i know of), pinklon, ethiopians and the traditional cowboy song red river valley. (incidentally, this is one of the love-hate factors of being a mountain goats fan: john writes songs all the time and not all of them survive more than a week or so, or even a day; once on kexp i heard him play a song called the mummy's hand that he had written the lyrics to on the plane into seattle, and the chords to in the hotel that morning; it was gorgeous, and i've never heard it anywhere else. ever. he does this shit all the time, playing stuff i would KILL to have on my ipod. i mean, there's this song, tulsa imperative, that jd was annoyed with so never kept working on, but pph recorded it with his band diskothiQ and it's great!). anyway, 2) is the brand-spanking new ep, satanic messiah, four piano songs of great narrative power which were released on a ridiculously limited edition of 666 copies (apparently #666 will not be on the market, being reserved for it's earthly creator) on vinyl. thankfull, john loves you and wants you to hear the music and has set up this site: satanicmessiah.com, so you can download the album, for free if you wish, in multiple digital formats. you may also make a donation of your chosen denomination (because, as jd says, "jah knows it wasn't free to make"). your humble host donated $6.66. less commercial than rainbows, this enterprise is a little more interesting considering the considerable depth of the artist, and john's long-standing endorsement of music sharing, legal and otherwise. i found it a warm gesture. i still really want that vinyl (it's being sold only at the merch booth at tmg shows; i have little chance i fear).

what was i saying?

oh yeah, the interesting similarity between the career trajectory of nick cave vs. the mountain goats.

if you can't apply what i've been going on about to your own experience, you should go out and listen to these two mammothly influencial entities' outputs. i assure you, it will be well-worth the time.

everyone's heart should be broken

2008-10-08T22:50:00.000-07:00

i am aware i am segueing from my promised post yet again. sue me.

i just received an historic package in the post (well, not "just," it was more like five hours ago, but i had things to do, and i just now am sitting down to bloggify (that's like testify, only less religious malarcky, and more indie crap)).

"what, what, matt, what historic package was this," i hear you say (because i hear things).

well. let me just tell you.

i have mentioned boyracer here several times already, and here i go again. the england-to-arizona twee punk legend(s) have put out their final record, and are calling it a day. as boyracer anyway. stewart anderson has said it's time to focus on new baby and herd of cattle (hopefully in that order), and the pipe dream of being a rock star is currently untenable. he has since said there will be a new project from him and jen turrell (featuring a violin!), but after its incredibly long run, it's time to put boyracer to bed.

to commemorate the occasion, stew and jen have released a brilliant lp on vinyl in a limited edition of 100 copies. they sold out in about a week or something.

pretty damn good. they record is too.

or rather, it kicks you in the balls, then when you've crumpled to the ground, it cracks your skull with steel-toed doc martins, and as the brain and blood oozes out, it puts out its cigarette in the waste. in a good way, that is. exellent fucking record. punk rock in all it's speedy-drummy-squeally-grindy-guitar-attention-deficit-disorder-basslines-andspitspitspitoutthemlyrics-delivery-glory. stewart's rapid-fire whine wheedles you into thinking it's 1995 again, and jen shrieking in the background is vintage riot grrrrl.

side two starts off with a drone of some outrageously bureaucratic flavour, which yields seconds later into a grinding guitar riff which opens up one of my favorite songs on the lp, "northshire coastline", followed by the likewise excellent "a sober truth." the riot of drums and maelstrom of feedback provide a gorgeous trapeze-artist's net for anderson's high-pitched voice, and it's hard to think of any young bands today who can deliver the clashing favours of disaffection and lusty joy of what punk has to offer--certainly not the crop of teen-rebel idols. i don't watch american idol, but i've seen glimpses of it, and i have to tell you, i genuinly feel sorry for the insipid little shits who think that's what music is. maybe i'm just getting old, thinking how much better "we" had it (actually, it sucked. the music was just really good). i really don't see bands like mudhoney, seaweed, boyracer, galaxie 500, the violent femmes, the vaselines, or a hundred other bands relegated to the dustbin of indie-history (oh, you never sold a million records? mariah carey and whitney houston are obviously better artists).

it makes me want to puke.

so does the whiskey i drank on a troubled tummy...

i could rant aimlessly, drifting from one fragment of thought to another, surfing the conciousness stream, but i want to mention the coda to the lp, and to boyracer itself, the last song on the record, "the last word."

it jells everything that brought me to boyracer in the first place (a lucksmiths cover of "i've got it (and it's not worth having"). enough punk to take the piss out of the geezers, enough melody and sentiment and smart lyrics to enamour the indie cognoscenti, beautiful guitars and clamouring drums. it's an unabashed "goodbye," an autobiographical paen to what's behind stewart, a "my way" without frank's misogynistic psychopathy, with a final flourish that could have been treacly if it wasn't so whole-heartedly good: a cameo from jen & stewart's baby tallulah, who gurgles with delight and closes this chapter on a truly great little band.

i feel really lucky to be one of the one hundred...

oh yeah, the lp was called sunlight is the best antisptic, featuring a slice of corrugated cardboard with a horse in the desert silkscreened planly in black. the track listing, record sleeve, lyrics, all are just tucked into a plastic cover with the cardboard; a simple, in-your-face d.i.y ride into the sun. and did i mention it's all sold out? what a way to go.

***

also, i just have to mention that jen also made the most gorgeous hand-decorated t-shirts. the best band shirts ever.

on the devil's tail

2008-10-06T16:07:00.000-07:00

i seem to have a problem with my resolution. i say i'm going to write about something (and usually i get around to it) but then i write about another thing instead. like eel.

don't worry, i'm not writing about eel again (for now).

i was going to write about the anacortes vinyl, but i haven't really processed any of it yet (although i listened to 2/3 of the microphones, and the watery graves of portland and genevieve, and they're really good).

today though (a monday) i have been lurching through one unfinished chore to another. my hot water's off and i want to take a shower, and i'm waiting for the man to fix the pipes. i'm greasy from work yesterday, and irritable, and my mind keeps wandering (small wonder, since i've only fed it coffee today). i've been playing all sorts of stuff as i scuttle around my apartment, with the constant rainfall serving as interlude between the discs. i've already listened to the microphones (as i said), pet politics (the swedish band, not the silver jews song, or the mountain goats cover of the silver jews song), shonen knife (in english), shonen knife (in japanese), and finally a buttload of john vanderslice. about halfway through suddenly it all went dark (a limited-edition cd from barsuk feauring j.v. in a chicken coop in california with a two-track and the songs from trance manual) and i saw the postman out the window trudging wetly away from the house.

there's very little i enjoy as much as the anticipation of what the mail will bring, and there are many pending parcels somewhere in the world heading my way, so i walked down the stairs to check the box. apart from the new issue of dwell, there was also a new cd-r sent from a young guitarist in ireland called cian nugent.

his first solo disc, a recording of his fourth-ever live performance, childhood, christian lies & slaughter, is a quietly strong instrumental set filledwith stunning meanderings through cian's original songs. sounding much less than "trad," traditional irish music, and far more like american blues married to spanish classical, nugent's able fingerwork and slightly unholy sensibilities make for the perfect accompaniment to the grey tedium of early october seattle. listening to it i think also of the eerily cheerful score to the wicker man (1973) by paul giovanni. there's an appalachian twang in some of the phrases and a timelessness as well, and the overall effect is compelling and slightly ominous (hence the affinity with the wicker man--actually, it also sounds a little like the creepier work by the decemberists, like the tain and some of the songs on the crane wife). and then of course, there's the fine, suggestively flawed character of the album's title. nice one.

i should also mention, as an aside, the reason i came across cian nugent in the first place. i was surfing around the myspace music world (on midday veil's page, if i'm not mistaken) and i saw one of those "ad-comments" labels/bands/venues/whatever tend to pop onto the space. the ad was from the flemish label audiomer, and it had this gorgeous image of a bloodred medieval landscape with a massive, po-faced donkey (or something) hauling in its mouth the prone body of a man (these in black ink rather than crimson). the whole scene was super-creepy, and gorgeously drawn, by belgian designer/audiomer-honcho wouter smeraldina-rima, to resemble germanic woodcut engravings of the sixteenth century. the image also reminded me strongly of the illustrations for the arturo pérez-reverte novel el club dumas (which was adapted (sloppily, but engrossingly) for the screen by roman polanski as the ninth gate) the woodcuts in that story, executed by lucifer himself, lead a wolfish book dealer named corso (johnny depp, very well-cast, in the film) on the path to ultimate seduction by the devil.

while the recording is far less diabolical than the path of associations that led me to it, the seduction of nugent's strings is evident, as is his clear talent.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

2008-10-02T15:39:00.000-07:00

oh, holy shit, i just received the pile of vinyl i ordered from p.w. elverum & sun (source of wind). shit, shit, shit, it's amazingly gorgeous and i haven't even listened to it yet... as soon as i wipe the drool from my self i'll lie down on the floor and absorb it. omnibus blog coming soon...

freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

2008-09-26T21:45:00.001-07:00

i'm a'gonna come right out with it.

"hi. i'm matt, and i spend too much money on records."

and you say,

"hi, matt."

no really. i'm bartending. i'm (pathetically) single. i have several guitars and a stack of "to-read" books this high, and my fridge is well-stocked with beers (thank you) and i have a bottle of whiskey. and i can't think of anything else that needs my liquid assets more than new fucking records. *sighs(dishonestly)* i suppose i could buy stocks...

or i eard there was this bridge in brooklyn...

but it really is a little disconcerting when i look up at my paypal account and go all "shit!!!!--where the hell my money at?"

(well, right now it's being funnelled northward to the little community of anacortes, washington, and their fine, fine independent diy records industry. i am waiting for this pile of stuff to arrive--you'll be the first)

but in the meantime, as i wait (less than patiently, it must be said) for the GODDAMNPATHETICKNUCKLEDRAGGINGINDOLENTAPATHETIC"RAINSLEETSNOW"MYASSPOSTALSERVICE to bring me my fine, fine white vinyl, i have been goulishly haunting the good people at daytrotter. for the ign'ant, pay heed: the daytrotter is a bastion of pseudo-bootleg material for the pathetically completist indie-nutjob (present). so many sessions of good hard-workin' bands swinging by these humble studios to put down several (usually four) tracks live which are then posted on the site and d-o-w-n-l-o-a-d-a-b-l-e-f-o-r-f-r-e-e. of course. OF COURSE, you should support their sponsors. and then you should buy tickets for the bands as they continue their tours. and you shold totally buy those cds, people. but you should also chec out his site and get a butt-load of good stuff that really isn;t coming out anywhere else.

yes they have deathcabforcutie, kirsten dunst. your indie-cred will be safe. yes, sadly over-indulgent, overly tattooed baby-dyke, ani is there. yes rabid horde of speed freaks and SO SO SO earnest folkies, the mountain goats has graced DT with their gentle presence twice.

for my sins, i own up to digging out auckland band the brunettes (oh, so twee), southern wonders someone still loves you boris yeltsin (no, really), and dischordant geniuseseses dirty projectors, who i discovered completely by accident while sifting throught the googleage for information on julie doucet (OMG), and found in a related D&Q blog, where i saw pix of this band rocking out something cute, with a very stylish man and woman center stage, replete with upside-down geetar (ie left-handed). i downloaded the seven challenging and meandering tracks of slightly aboriginal seasoning (hello paul simon, hello ezra koenig), but in a way that rapes africa a little less and fucks hipsters maybe (hopefully?) a little more.

i'll certainly be looking for a little more.

having segued into montreal, if you are at daytrotter you must also check out the lovely, dark and moody stylings of canada's young galaxy. seeing the name i sustained a hope that they were following in the footsteps of krukowski, yang and wareham. they were not. but they are damned good.

to sum up: free is good. just don't be a douchebag (ie buy things too). ain't no reason you can;t do both, people.

and speaking of phil elvrum, and the digital world, and how sometimes it's great and sometimes not, i urge all of you who cherish the snailier mail to check out this brilliant plea.

brief note.

2008-09-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

i have in the past mentioned the ridiculously good label dark beloved cloud. it is headed by pop-polymath douglas wolk. i wholly grant douglas' knowledge of arcane antipodean pop-punk could be considered superior to mine. that would be fair. the man has actually released a clean single. on vinyl. which is a gorgeous anarchic bullshit session committed to posterity by three of my own personal heroes. oh, how i envy douglas his profound connections across the disparate but ultimately fulfilling nerd-overses of independent labels and the might comic book. oh to be in über-trendy pdx rather than in sad-bastard seattle. etcetera. whatever. i have just this little flicker of pride at my disposal: that i blogged about the clean's uncompromisingly sweet live album mashed before douglas did. it ain't a competition. he'd win. i'm just officially ahead of the curve for a change. it's nice.

Blow me!

2008-09-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

yeah, yeah.

i was supposed to be writing about woelv, but i 'haven't absorbed that one yet.' i mean, fuck, it's really good, but it's darkly beautiful and subtle, and i just had some coffee and my leg's all twitchity and my mood is less inclined to over-analize quietude. so i'm writing about the blow instead.

subtle too, the blow (currently, and relevant to this blog, comprised of khaela maricich (constant) and jona bechtolt (current side-man) is anything but quiet and subdued. at least on the only record* i have so far, 2006's 'paper television' (k records). kicking off with a jaunty drum sample, 'pt' is a distinctively pop-informed album, with more samples, staccato synthesizer tones, overdubs and a general sense that if one were in a sweaty club, with sexy kids writhing in drug-induced agonies, the record would feel just as natural as it did to me, sitting in my otherwise quiet studio, where i stymied my attempts to work with the record on by playing it. it grabs the attention unrelentingy with smart and deeply (and ambivalently) sensual lyrics, and in the urgency with which they are expressed. the songs struggle with the balance of sexy-cool assertiveness and a raw, heart-rending vulnerability, all the while keeping a beat that races on unrelentingly. i had to listen to it three times in a row at first. usually i only do that when john darnielle puts something new out.

musically, it's interesting to look at how the blow relates to the 'other' northwest music culture (contrasted with the macho-pathetic-druggie-flannel era of the early nineties), the more diy-informed strain that, with olympia's beat happening, among others, predated, ran concurrent to, survived and thrived past the notorious 'grunge' moment that launched an ill-prepared seattle onto the world stage (an attention that was partially responsible for a socio-econimic influx that decimated our infrastructure and anticipated the increasingly national trend towards a dissolving economic diversity). the oly' bands were loud in a more dischordant way than the more academically punk-metal combine of bands like nirvana and mudhoney, whose thrasher heritage was evident in their long haired head-banging and rough, heroin-chic. the bands a little to the south tended to be more akin to east coast icons like the velvet underground, with minimalist tendencies and performances, but more importantly, with a focus on politics that flew in the face of their contemporaries, especially with regard to gender and sexuality. olympia was the cradle, if not the birthplace, of the riot grrrl bands, and homegrown label k records, founded by calvin johnson in 1982, tapped into the international underground tendency of bands and micro labels who were trying to truly do it themselves, and opened the door for west coast artists less interested in sales and mastering and stereo, and more focussed on their individualistic outputs. when i was in school in upstate new york in the mid-nineties, i heard more stuff from olympia than i had when i was going to high school in the early part of the decade in seattle itself. funny how that stuff happens.

khaela maricich is from seattle (queen anne, specifically) and moved around from seattle to olympia and portland, and her locality both informs the blow and is defied by it. the play between girlish rasp and the assertiveness female strength are contrasts that are characteristic of bands like sleater-kinney, bikini kill, le tigre and others. there are also echoes of miranda july, specifically the type of fluidly quotidian aesthetic she espouses in her multi-media works (it should be mentioned that maricich is also a multi-media artist), most clearly in her film 'me and you and everyone we know' (2005). maricich's lyrics are confident and desperate, with a certain gender neutrality that is also echoed in her androgynous physical appearance.

i'm droning on.

khaela maricich makes juicy-sexy-poppy-scary-goddamniwannacry-goddamniwannafuck-jump!-jump!-lie-in-a-ball-on-the-floor love songs. sometimes they are in french.

i'm totally crushing on this record.

****

*when i say record, i do mean it. i've been getting on a selective vinyl kick lately (yeah, yeah, the hipsters have been espousing vinyl for decades (see: 'high fidelity' (the movie, not the book)), but i'm talking about something simpler, i suppose, that when i can, i prefer some bands on the medium of a scratchy vinyl record. everyone knows that vinyl carries a certain tonal richness that is difficult to reproduce on digital media (especially my least favorite, the mp3 format), but i would like to just say i'm not a snob about it. i just prefer the copy of 'strangeways here we come' that i bought with my newspaper route money (no fucking joke) in 1991 to the copy of it i have on cd. i always listened to side 2 first when i listened to that record (which was a lot), and it always sounds wrong to hear it right! then of course there's bands that i've written here about like the cannanes and boyracer and all that, whose output just sounds better when it's fucked up (i don't actually own a decent turntable--just a shitty record/tape stereo from the mid-eighties--and the tape deck hasn't worked since 1997). recently got some beat happening on vinyl from k records, and listened to it for the first time on its natural environment, and that was kind of cool, kind of comforting (remember, not so much cd sales for indie acts in the eighties). anyway, to sum up: not a snob, but certainly appreciative of the options available...

Back in action

2008-09-16T15:48:00.000-07:00

hi, i'm back.

it has come to my attention that there are people who read this, so to they, the gentle bodhisattvas of diy-indie rock, i humbly apologise for my extended absence. i have been working too hard. if you want to know what i've been working on you can check it out here, and buy it here.

i know, i know. it's trés gauche for me to promote my own machinations on a blog purported to celebrate the music of others. i clearly am a selfish cad. buy my fucking record though, please.

***

i have really been dumping a lot of hours into that ep, but i've also been buying stuff in massive shit-piles, so as i work it deeper into my head, i'll regurgitate here. soon. really, i promise. first up will likely be the 'gris' ep from geneviéve castrée's 'woelv' persona. more soon.

No blind spots on a leopard's eye: WIRE

2008-08-23T19:30:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write something about Wire for awhile now, and the points have converged. I may be either revealing or dating myself here, but when I explain that I was a mere two years of age when Wire recorded their groundbreaking album Pink Flag at London's Advision Studios, I expect to be forgiven for not being a life-long fan.

I am a fervent admirer now, I should add.

I thought that the first time I heard Wire was on the beautiful little Luna 7" Outdoor Miner, 1996, on Radiation. The track (oh, sorry, that would be "Outdoor Miner," track 10 from 1978's Chairs Missing) was re-released on the awesome download-only album Lunafied, a magnificent collection of covers by Wareham et al over the years, and it is a gorgeous version of the song: rolling along groovily in that distinct Luna way, with Dean Wareham's plaintive wail doing the cover better (in my mind) than the sublime original (it's always something special when an musician paying tribute to another manages to better the song). Anyway, I loved the Luna "Outdoor Miner" so much I started hunting down the original, which proved harder than I had hoped, but since the original LPs had been out of print for more than a decade, I was very lucky indeed to find them recently re-issued on CD by Revolver USA.

After tracking down several albums, I realized the remarkable permeation Wire's work had worked into my subconcious mind over the years. Their general influence over most every (rock and punk) band I've ever liked was crystal-clear, and surprisingly (there was a time when I was much more lax about reading liner notes, credits, or even *gasp* titles), I discovered that the REM track "Strange," on 1987's Document was, in fact, a straight cover from Pink Flag, and that Elastica had ripped off wholesale the guitar riff from the same record's "Three Day Rhumba."

As I made my way through repetitive listenings to the records I felt a sense of welcome, that this music had been out there waiting, in a sense, for me to make my way to it. The lyrics were paranoid and disjointed, and the jagged, often robotic, sonic barrages (particularly on the then-startling Pink Flag) were fraught with the potential to turn-off or overload, but they felt so right, so fitting. I was sinking backwards through the strata of 1990s post-punk, down through the feedback to one of the original sources.

So I was thrilled when my friend Rodney told me the other day that Wire had a new record out. A new studio record, not some unearthed collective of unfresh vintage. And so i got my hands on the nine songs that make up the thoroughly excellent Object 47.

The first track, "One of Us," makes clear from the first beat, a lone, stark snare strike, that Wire has lost none of their potency or freshness, and just in case it was too subtle, the first note is followed by an intense, grinding bass that leads into a quietly growling rhythm guitar melody and then the slightly louder growling of Colin Newman's vocals. The beat is pulsing and rapid, with all the best nostalgic feel of Joy Division or, indeed, Wire itself back in the seventies and eighties. The repetitive crescendo builds up, with high whingeing tones aching like sirens, "Declining... dividing... / One of us will live to rue the day we met each other."

As the album progresses, a history of punk/post-punk as filtered by the British exponents, slightly more conceptual, definitely artier (in bad- and not-bad-interpretations) is laid out for the educated listener--certainly anyone coming across Object 47 without prior knowledge of Wire will come away with the impression that the band is actually retro, unaware that they actually pioneered the sound. It really does sound fantastic, though less similar to Pink Flag than to the band's subsequent efforts, which makes some sense when one notes that the first three Wire records, Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 1979's 154, which were all released within one frigging year of another on EMI's Prog-rock division Harvest Records, boldly diverged from a distinct formula, each breaking new ground, as it were. Object 47, on the other hand, benefits greatly from 20/20 hindsight, and one can trace strands of the nine tracks back to references, sensibilities and sound from the collected back catalogue. One listen down. I can't imagine this will be leaving my CD player any time soon...

うなぎ

2008-08-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

So this is the post where I break my mandate to talk about music.

BUT I just had the most awesome dinner. After trying a lot of amazing food from all over the place (second place, andouillette in Paris with mustard sauce and frites; third, Armandino Batali's ridiculously good pasta with pork cheeks and tomato paste--i could have died--actually it could have killed me...), but my favorite isn't a specific dish, but a type of food: godDAMN i love me some eel.

Just ate a bowl of Japanese eggplant, carrots, broccoli and huge, yummy chunks of braised eel. With rice and saké.

Fuck off, it was good.

It occurs to me that my actual favorite food is the sandwich, a creation capable of the sublime as readily as the mundane, but sandwiches are so ubiquitous, we'll just give them their own place and let the unagi rule the rest.

OH WAIT: hey, I finally got around to listening to the eponymous album from Vampire Weekend that my friend Steven gave me. It's good, and I knew it was going to be good because I saw this months ago, but every fucking person i know has been flinging their poo around the room for this band, and dude, i'm not that down on bandwagons. I mean, I must be the only indie-musician in Seattle who doesn't read 'Pitchfork' (you can check my browser--ain't never been there). Anyway, I give, their pretty kick-ass. But I''ve got the disc-changer stocked with the new Clean, the Magick Heads, Ladybird and The Cannanes too, so...

OMG

2008-07-31T16:18:00.000-07:00

I don't have a (like, one) favorite band, and on of my guiding philosophies in life (along with "Rightists are always wrong" and "mmm... bread is good") is that people who have A SINGLE FAVORITE BAND are

a. not paying enough attention to the world, and

b. not spending enough (time or money) on records, and

c. are ig'nant.

If I did have a favorite band, it would be the result of a bloody fracas between several totally legitimate contenders, knuckle-bruised veterans of my stereo who have witnessed the rise and fall of my fickle affections, one of whom would have broken bones and emerged bloodied and torn-of-tee-shirt, wiping someone else's effluvia from his jeans, and would say, "IT IS I."

That could conceivably be The Clean.

Seriously, those guys have the chops to mince the competition. True, they're not that prolific as The Clean, but between that trio's output and the sum of their parts, they pretty much could knock Prince out of the water, and could probably draw up neck and neck with John Darnielle.

And then there's the wealth of bootleg material...

Today, however, we shall briefly discuss the disc that's in my machine right now, which is the brand-spanking-new Clean record, Mashed.

This is the first of two (TWO! I just peed myself...) records expected this year from The Clean, the later one is the long-awaited new studio album (it's been seven years since Getaway), and Mashed is a live album from the New Zealand leg of the "Bangers and Mash" tour. Shamefully I had to order this from an online store in New Zealand because it's not (yet?) available in the US. That makes me hurt. Merge should have been all over that puppy, or Matador, or whoever, right? I think the studio album will be coming out on Merge, based on something Bob Scott said in an interview, but to my knowledge they haven't (yet) picked this up--maybe they'll do a two-for-one.

It's actually really hard to get anything out of the antipodes these days, and one can only hope that when Scott's other band, The Bats, releases their upcoming studio album later this year (peed again) it'll have a US distro deal (I mean, I'll probably order it directly from the band, but everybody should be lining up at their record stores for anything from either of these bands). Fortunately for the human race (particularly me), David Kilgour's gorgeous recent release (The Far Now, 1997) was released (as well as other DK stuff) by Merge, as have several of Hamish Kilgour's Mad Scene records. Incidently, I just got DK's brilliant second solo album Sugar Mouth, from 1994, and while it's very different from The Clean (less irreverent, less punk, more indie-rock-progenitor), it's worth tracking down, if nothing else than for "No, no, no" the opening track.

Returning to Mashed, though, the recording is (appropriately) crisp and clean, and the idiosyncracies of the band's shambling, improvisational sound is allowed full reign. Always impressive sonically, considering that there's only ever three guys (when playing live), The Clean barrels through a edgy but necessarily minimal selection of their back-catalogue, with 1981's "Anything Can Happen" from Boodle Boodle Boodle (incidently, you need to see the video), Robert Scott's lovely lead on "I Wait Around" from 1990's Vehicle, "Safe in the Rain" from Modern Rock, 1994, and a kick-ass version of Lou Reed's "I Can't Stand It" (the opening of Reed's eponymous solo debut from 1972--a totally underappreciated classic, it's much harder than the glam-flavored and more-known Transformer), a really nice choice of cover for The Clean, as Reed/the Velvets were clearly a deep influence on Scott and the Kilgours, breaking out as musicians in late-seventies Dunedin.

The record totally rocks. One listen down, countless more to follow.

Can't wait for new studio, the appetite is well and truly whetted.

Also, for anyone deeply interested in this band, check out the snippets of them in a breathtakingly stripped-down show at a New York record shop. I wished (in vain) that some of this would be on Mashed, and if anyone out there has a copy of the show itself, PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE send me a copy. I would be eternally grateful.

Regressive tendencies?

2008-06-24T23:02:00.000-07:00

Uncovering the obscure is exciting. Carter was elated in the valley of the kings, Stein recognised that recognition was recognition when she allowed herself to believe she'd discovered Picasso. Colmbus was draming of metaphorical sugarplums when he discovered what Leif Erikson had been relieved to land upon 500 years earlier (and what Siberians were probably nonplussed to find 15,000-20,000 years ago, since there was probably no real distiction from the steppes of northern "Russia" to an isthmus of indeterminate "american-ness").

We like discovering stuff. Sometimes people make a big deal out of it, like when the press discovered that the American military (and, by default, the CIA) had no scruples,videlicet Abu Ghraib.

I try not to make a big deal out of "discovering" bands that other people have known about for years, but that doesn't make me any less excited about doing so.

I am currently excited, scilicet about Mark Szabo.

Mark Szabo, you say? Isn't he a coach at Shoreline Community College? To which I would answer, sure, sine qua non Google as ultimate reference material. Thankfully, I read this, which brought me elucidation.

I had never heard of Mark until I read this, but now I have the album in question, a copy of "Alone With Mark" thoughtfully provided to me by an extremely astute Brooklynite, and a zipfile of the cassette "Regressing" generously provided here.

Since I can't (in any way) top what has already been written here, or in the liner notes of this by Franklin Bruno, so I think you should follow the links already (jeez) and get on the bus, bitches.

plug, yo

2008-06-22T22:14:00.000-07:00

so as you may be aware, i also make music. and if you're reading this, this may not be news, but you never know, maybe you aren't on myspace, and have come here inadvertently and said, "oh, such prose! how delightful--and what's this? a record by the webmaster? i simply must check it out (and acquire it)!"

you might say that.

YOU PROBABLY WON'T...

but just in case:

the black lines have released their (or "my") second album.

it is called "your blood trail", after the chorus in one of the songs.

it is very minimal, and slightly folkier than my usual fare. i like it though.

and it's free.

i'm not going to drone on about it, but please do check it out. if you like it, feel free to send me flowery praise.

i ♥ new music; part ii

2008-06-22T21:45:00.000-07:00

This isn't going to be a long post, just sort of an teaser, an amuse-bouche of reviews to come. It may be a little bittersweet too...

So, I've mentioned the good people at 555records (which is to say Stewart Anderson) and Red Square (which is to say Jen Turrell)--and it could be further mentioned that both of these indie-entities are blissfully entwined by marriage--and now I'm going to mention them again. A box recently arrived on my doorstep from Arizona, and it was crammed with a butt-load of indie CDs and gorgeous coloured 7" vinyl from the aforementioned labels. I haven't even got halfway through it all yet! I'm so stoked. Not just Boyracer and Mytty Archer (Stew and Jen's "main" bands) but also Steward, Que Possum, The Bright Lights, Jean Bach, Faintest Ideas, The Cannanes, The Love Letter Band, The Tall Boy, Kyoko, The Escargo-go's, Origami, CEX and more.

I don't think I did mention that Stewart's going to semi-close up shop soon. He's got cows and a wife and a baby and a life that takes every ounce. And he hasn't much left to pursue a music career that results in 25 sold 7"s. I wrote him a note saying how much I would miss his creativity and input, but I also sent him about a hundred and fifty bucks to get all this stuff. If you're reading this, go visit Jen & Stew's sites and buy some of their immense back catalog. A lot of the stuff is out of print, and there are some real gems to be found. They are records (not just in the disc-sense!) of a DIY ethos that was once beautifully analogue, but which is being subsumed by the vastness of cyberspace. It's so worth finding, and worth holding close, and listening loud to.

Of particular note, by the way, is the Red Square "The Way Things Change" series. It's a set of compilation 7"s, in coloured vinyl, of some of the best indie bands in the last several years. You can find Dennis Driscoll, Boyracer and Architecture in Helsinki on Volume 5 (blue vinyl), Mirrah and The Cannanes on Volume 3 (yellow!!!), and the brilliant Lucksmiths on Volume 4 (green).

I can't believe how good some of this stuff is.

Help prevent it from just disappearing into fanboy nostalgia...

Pigskin

2008-06-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

I want to set the record straight right off the bat:

I do like sports. This may surprise several of my friends, but in fact it is true. Oh! cycling, a boon to humanity thou art! Tennis! How sublime is thy Federer, how gorgeous thy various Russian women! How irritating yet impressive your tiny spunky Nadal! Oh! football (by which I mean soccer) the poetry (and by the way, anybody catch the fucking awesomness the Spain vs Italy quarterfinal match at the European Cup-- 0-0 in full time, followed by two scoreless OTs, preceding one of the only awesome shoot-outs I've ever seen) of your brutality (and vice-versa), your chess-like depth! Etcetera!

I should also come clean here and say that I couldn't give less of a bloody shit about the degredation of rugby internationally known as "american football", and locally referred to without the national bias.

I don't like it. I grew up with the Vikings, and didn't really care, but then I moved to Seattle, and the Seahawks drove the coffin shut with their toolbelt full of crooked, rusty nails. I have noted that George W. Bush likes football, but insufficiently so to choke to death on a pretzel in its presence (almost, though...). I have noted that everyone (male) who ever bullied me liked football, and the idiots that try to bully me these days do as well. I suppose there is a balletic nuance, a poetry and beauty to the game, as there must be in all humanity's endevours, but to me such graces are obscured by the sheer ugliness of its lower adherents.

I guess I could have just said I don't like it...

Which makes my following admission all the more paradoxical:

Goddamn(!) do I love The Football Albums by DiskothiQ.

"Is that a joke?" comes the voice from the chorus. "Whom, did you say?" perhaps from another voice.

Well.

Let me just expound, shall I?

DiskotiQ is a band made up of Peter Hughes, Kevin Hughes and Kevin Trapp. It doesn't do much right now, because one of its members is really busy with a more-well known project, but, before 2000, the band produced five records (four of which were released).

Two of these records, which came out in 1999 on Sonic Enemy, are The Football Albums. The first volume (the blue one) is The Football Albums: National Conference; the second (red one) is The Football Albums: The American Conference. The ridiculousness and the genius of this project is as great and silly as Stephin Merritt's monumental 69 Love Songs and I albums, which is to say, a hare-brained concept gorgeously realized.

Basically, you've got 32 songs about 32 teams (somewhat dated due to time rolling on, but hey...). That is, thirty-two songs about the thirty-two teams in the USA's two professional NFL football conferences.

And the songs are really good. Like, really.

As I've said, I don't really know football, and even I get some of the stuff in these songs. And some of it you don't even have to get. Some of the lyrics are all insidery (with loads of name-dropping of coaches and players), but like most good music, some of the strongest stuff relies on acute social commentary. Like track 13 on National Conference, "Redskins."

It goes like this:

"Is there anything more offensive than the name of the Washington Redskins?

Why not just call yourselves the Darkies?

Why not just call yourselves the Yellow Men?

Why not just call yourselves the Filthy Thieving Jews?

Why not just call yourselves The Towelheads?"

Now. Peter Hughes is a football fan (and baseball fan, too) and he is still capable of this brilliantly vicious indictment of the casual racism of the continuance of the aforementioned team. He goes hard against the common tendency to shrink from criticizing something you love out of the fear that such candor will damage that thing--like the Bush administration saying that if you criticize America, then you can't possibly love America, as if patriotism were un-patriotic, or some bullshit. A more apt comparison, closer to home for me, might be that the sport of bicycle racing is followed and supported not just by left-leaning Independants such as myself, but also by a great number of Rightist conservative heels and racist Euro-centrists; the sport itself is not the cause, it's just that some fans are douche bags (and to be fair, the same is true about American football--it's not evil, I just don't care to follow it).

That's just one example, by the way. The emotional gamut is complete:there are songs flowing as paens to childhood inspiration and dreams, love songs to heroes and scourges of villains, teasing of coaches and weak points, extollations of sporting prowess--all the pageantry and emotion that makes people tune in to "Friday Night Lights" as well as Sunday Night Football. Al the things that make my brother, father and uncles go ape-shit in front of the tube on holidays. All in a capable and fluent indie-rock vernacular.

Sometimes the ridiculousness rears up (like in "Giants", a frenetic drone-freakout filled with rolling drums and shrill feedback, the entire lyrics of which consisting of "Giants.", and "49ers" which you should hear rather than make me describe). But usually, the effect is really great, and cute, jaded indie girls should be able to shake their hips (while staying aloof) without necessarily buying into the macho "american-ness" of the subject matter.

My favorite song on the collection, by the way, is the 1:15-long track "Los Angeles." On the subject of growing up in a football-franchise-free city (LA) and how the TV provides an all-access arena, the song is a (willingly? un-?) parable of Americana.

I came across DiskothiQ (or DISKOTHI-Q) sort of by accident (not, with much regret, having been up on every Shrimper release--sorry Mr Callaci--and I admit this knowing that my friend Carlos V. may indeed kick my ass (although I would counter that he don't know shit about 1970s New York (even Lou Reed) or British (WIRE!!!!!???) stuff) and while I thought The Wandering Jew was amazing (you can download all this stuff for free by the way, as well as The One-Hundred Thousand Songs of Peter Peter Hughes, but you could also pony up a couple of bucks, and PPH will mail you the discs direct--you should do that, these guys are not corporate suck-dogs like Metallica, Madonna or Britney Spears, and also, the second track of The Wandering Jew, "Tulsa Imperative" is a cover of an unreleased Mountain Goats song, so...).

So anyway, I have not been converted to the pigskin army, but who cares? You don't have to be gay to get a lot out of the brilliant songs of Canada's The Hidden Cameras (or the "gay and loud" Mr Merritt, for that matter), although I am assured by my friends of that persuasion that it doesn't hurt either, and you needn't be a wife-beater (or wife-killer, like OJ) or a mustachioed bully to get a great deal out of The Football Albums. In fact, like myself, you don't even have to like football. You just need to have appreciation and Respect (yes, capital "R") for the good, good indie rock of DiskothiQ.

I could mention that each album is ten bucks. Where I live, that barely buys you breakfast anymore. So pinch your pennies and eat a bagel or something, and send PPH some cash. These records are worth that much.

Review: The Cannanes

2008-05-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

Do you know that feeling, the one that you get when you are totally sure that there is something happening, but not only that, but that also the something that's happening has maybe been happening for quite sometime, that there are peole who have known about the something (and they didn't tell you--why didn't they tell you, what did you do wrong?) and that the something has been really interesting and possibly really beautiful too; and all this time, maybe since about 1984?

I've been having that same feeling lately!!! Ohmigod!

This feeling has been centered around a band from Melbourne, Australia (this of course is not that new; everyone who knows me is well (and occasionally painfully) aware of my complete and utter dependence on antipodean music). This band, however, has been around since the aforementioned year, and I've only just (a couple weeks ago) become aware of them. They are The Cannanes.

They have produced over forty albums. They have appeared on dozens of compilations. They have never ever (like, not once) appeared on any mix tape that has been given to me. And at the moment I feel a little stung.

The Cannanes slipped onto my radar quite by-the-way, when two things occurred. The first (chronologically) was that I came across the Dark Beloved Cloud website while I was trying to track down anything by The Magick Heads. As far as I am aware, only Flying Nun and DBC have put out TMH releases, so I was super stoked to find them. I have mentioned before (and will undoubtedly do so again) DBC, and how great their catalogue is, and it made me join their Singles Club (see below for more). Well, one of the mini-CDs that was due to be released was one by The Cannanes, and while it didn't actually mean anything to me at the time, the name found its way into my head. I placed my order with DW and eagerly awaited my treasures.

Meantime, Stewart from 555 Records sent out a note about the Boyracer/Mytty Archer/Cannanes 7"-split, which I was apparently one of twenty-five people to subsequently order. Seriously, people, go to 555 and buy some gorgeously lo-fi indie-punk records. Right now; did I mention the hot-pink Boyracer vinyl?

Anyway, due to obsessions with other bands I found myself unwittingly targeted by two releases by The Cannanes.

Then I followed the link from Stewart's myspace to the Cannanes myspace and listened to the smattering of songs therein esconced, and fuck, i was smitten. I then became very eager to receive said parcels.

So then within a couple days I got the packages in the mail.

CANNANES/MYTTY ARCHER/BOYRACER split 7" (55548/7JF05; (I have #11))

For those unfamiliar with Boyracer and Mytty Archer, they are both Stewart Anderson and Jen Turrell (who are also married, and who are also 555 records, etc etc,), except that sometimes Anna Winfield plays for Mytty Archer (for whom Jen writes) and sometimes Boyracer (which is, essentially, Stewart) has contained one or some of its forty-plus former members. They share one side of the split, with a pretty, breathy, Mytty Archer song, "Too many lovers" starting slow and mounting to a frenzy of drums and buzzy fuzz before plumetting down to a simple guitar line and Jen's whispered vocals. "Supremer Queener", a more frenetic number by Boyracer comes hard and fast on "Too many lovers"'s heels, with furry staticcy tone and tortured high notes riccocheting off a meaty drum and vocal pop arrangement.

Then the needle abandons its groove, you get up, slightly dumbfounded, and walk over to your turntable, where you turn over the record, drop the arm down again and, if you're like me, you've put the record on before reading the inner sleeve, and so you are surprised by the familiar, if gentle, strains of the Blue Oyster Cult. With nimble guitars and a smoky trumpety thing that sounds like it's being piped in somehow from another time and place, possibly by TARDIS, and possibly from the never-was Paris of Jean-Pierre Jeunet (although it is actually a pump organ played by Stephen O'Neil). The song rambles on from melody to discord and back again, veering into feedback, zagging off the fragile vocals of Frances Gibson, dueting with herself and an eery tenor recorder.

THE CANNANES, Grassy Flat mini-CD (DBC250)

I got this four song EP from Dark Beloved Cloud, and so it is only 3x3 inches in diameter, and while it has a pretty scribbly line drawing of birds on the disc, there is no track listing. There is however, a sweet collage of string, dinosaurs and giraffes, made by Brittany (with a heart at the end) that serves as the cover.

So "track 1," as I shall settle for, kicks off with a pounding drum beat, and you're like "oh, shit!" After about a couple seconds , though, this winding gorgeous tone (like a melodica or a recorder maybe) starts looping around the place and we're off, with lovely vocals and various winds playing tag over a driving bass and subtle guitar track. It's a really beautiful song, and I really should email DW about getting a track listing, but since I'm me, i'm thinking that now in the middle of my post. Oh well.

Track 1 slowly grinds to a halt, and the mood shifts to Track 2 with a residual twang against steel strings being replaced by a pipe organ drone that seeps into the ears. The lovely vocals slowly and sadly add themselves to the mix and then are joined by a haunting echoing trumpet. Frippering around the peripheries of your audible range come the tinkles of a glockenspiel or xylophone or something, gently lightening the heavy brew stewing in your head. Track 2 drifts and swells through layer upon layer of reverb and drone and loop for over eight minutes (and actually feels a little like some of the more desperate songs on The Magnaetic Fields' 69 Love Songs, particularly the one's sung by Claudia Gonson--except wayyyyyy longer than a typical Stephin Merritt composition).

One feels lulled by Track 2, and the synthetic beat that kicks off track 3 comes as an awakening (whether rude or not would depend on an indivual's mood, i think). The plaintive vocals and simple chords (and eventually the ubiquitous trumpet) set up a great little set-piece of indie recording that harkens to early K records stuff, The Weakerthans, Destroyer, the Dunedin sound, whatever. It finishes off with a meandering bass line and twinging on the guitar strings until it flops down in a heap.

The final track (Track 4) is a snappy jazzy number that definitely recalls Calvin Johnson in the Beat Happening-era, as well as other indie duos like Auckland's The Brunettes, and the Holly Golightly - Dan Melchior Desperate Little Town album. The rollicking little finale barely breaks a minute-and-a-half, but it's a tonic to the longer dirge of Track 2, and creates one more character in an ensemble of very different tracks.

Now I have to track down more of this stuff.

Heavenly [kiwi]pop hit

2008-05-22T21:53:00.001-07:00

I forgot to put the link in that article for the Flying Nun documentary.

So here it is.

Hey, pass me the pesticide

2008-05-22T20:50:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, in the far south of the world, there was a man with a guitar, an attitude, and a pair of jandals.

He rejected the constructs and clichés of manufactured fame and pressed to his antipodean heart the skinny ghost of DIY punk rock.

His name is Chris Knox.

Born in 1952 in Invercargill, a city as far south as you can get on the South Island of New Zealand, Knox made his way up as far north as Dunedin, where he started what Flying Nun records refers to as "Dunedin's first punk band," The Enemy. His subsequent band Toy Love actually managed to produce one full-length, two live albums, one EP and three singles between 1979 and 1980. Dig up a copy of "Cuts", a two-disc greatest hits volume put out by Flying Nun in 2005 (if you can find vinyl of anything off Flying Nun, buy it immediately, it's rarer than rocking horse droppings), and listen to "Don't ask Me." It sounds so hard and good, and favoribly comparable to anything happening in London and New York (such as Television and The Soft Boys, for example--put it on a mix tape with "I Wanna Destroy You", and it will sound totally fresh and raw. and between them, there's thirty years passed). "Swimming Pool" is another gem that should be in every primer on Punk rock. It reflects on what was going on with the Kilgour brothers at about the same time, and you can practically see the sonic umbilicus reaching ahead a few years to The verlaines and The Chills. Toy Love was one of the seminal bands in New Zealand and Australia (where the band spent much of their two-year existence), and their influence would spread with its disbandment. Bassist Paul Kean became a member of Clean bassist Robert Scott's new group The Bats, and Chris Knox and guitarist Alec Bathgate would form the two-piece indie legend Tall Dwarfs.

The Tall Dwarfs (no, that's not spelled wrong) took little loops often put together by Chris on his four-track and made a range of inspired songs with minimalist structures--there are echoes of Young Marble Giants, The Clean, Neutral Milk Hotel; there are songs that are sweet and endearing, softly pained, utterly ridiculous, and really, really fucking vicious. "Pirouette", off 1990's "Weeville" features a high whining guitar drone backed up by a frenetic tap-tapping rattle of (one assumes, jury-rigged) percussion and a growling rhythm guitar loop. The earnest, pained lyrics denounce conformity and banal cliché as a fever-pitch gradually builds. The violence, anger and scatological sociological assaults are part and parcel to Knox's approach to music, as is his insistence that the music, the making of it, the artists' integrity, comes before anything else. Burned by Toy Love's exprience with big business music, Knox became a resolute practitioner of home recording and lo-fi techniques and aesthetics.

This course of action was to provide Knox with a lot to do, and was to become the backbone of New Zealand's burgeoning punk scene.

As aficianados know the legendary label Flying Nun was formed, in Christchurch by Roger Shepherd, circa 1981, it was partly in order to put out The Clean. As The Clean began to garner local respect, Knox determined that he would be damned if this was going to happen around him without his involvement. Chris' grandmother had passed away, and with inherited money, he bought a four track and became the main engineer for Flying Nun. In 1981 he and Doug Hood recorded "Boodle Boodle Boodle" for The Clean, and after it's November release it became the first "hit" for the label.

Chris also was a talent scout and distributor for the label, roaming the South island with his four-track and bearing the Flying Nun standard. His taste was eclectic, but resolutely anti-pap. He believed so stridently in the down-tech method of doing things, and so fervently rejected the musician-as-businessman ethos that he caused some trouble for the label and some of its more ambitious acts, but on a label that could not even afford to press the records it had recorded, Knox' efforts ensured that when the money was there they would have something amazing to press.

There is a fantastic documentary about Flying Nun that anyone interested in this period/region of punk-pop absolutely must see. I've been unable to find it anywhere outside of youtube, and watching it in nine seperate sections is a little grating, but well-worth it (the archival footage of The Chills is terrific, and the interviews with Knox and Shepherd are, to a DIY junkie like myself, nothing short of inspirational).

In the inroduction to "Almost", a compilation of songs written for albums but not included for some reason, that was put out by Dark Beloved Cloud, Chris writes the following:

I'm constantly amazed by those who actually seek fame. I can't think of anything much worse... a little more exposure would be nice..."

Most Amercians these days would be gobsmacked to even contemplate this sentence. But turn the tube on to one of those soul-numbing shows like Entertainment Tonight or something, and cringe with me at the vapid celebrities and their controlled, haunted privilege. Watch the sycophants rend each others' flesh to get a better spot at the trough where they suckle the shit from these bloated swine. Witness the vultures of the paparrazi hordes swarm over these people as they try to scratch back even a fragment of normalcy. Then there are the multitude of "reality" shows where people abase themselves for a tiny taste of precious fucking fame.

Pathetic.

Artists want to interact with society at large, it's what we do, but when creative people suckle at the tit of Commercialism and Capitalism, and do a little more to kill their competition--to make art-making a competitive blood-sport especially--they betray more than themselves alone. They destroy everything we all are working for.

Chris Knox makes good music. He also provides a great example of what can be achieved with a delicate balance of ego and humility (not necessarily mutually exclusive traits).

Go out and listen!

i ♥ new music; part i

2008-05-19T16:09:00.000-07:00

there are few thing i love so much as getting new music. if i've gotten jazzed up about it from a mix-tape (or one of these new-fangle muxtapes) or from a myspace page or on the radio aor even if i haven't actually heard it but heard something by someone else who likes it and has name-dropped it or if a band opened or was supported my another band and i haven't checked out that band or heard of them and this goes on for a while. i'll stop.

i found a copy of 'loose in the air' by the double in a used bin at sonic boom last summer, and i've never heard the double, but i bought it because of this:

"y'all catch the double? did you catch the double? they're going to be in stadiums this time next year, so i hope you caught the double. they're really fucking awesome, it's good to have them."

this is john darnielle at a tmg gig in san francisco in 2005. the double was not on the bootleg, but this snippet remained in my head until i was sifting through used records. now jd is undeniably catholic in his music taste, and while i can't honestly say i've enjoyed all the bands i've heard him enthuse about, i will certainly give due consideration to his recommendations. which is why i bought it.

and y'know what? it's really pretty good. very slanted and enchanted, if you know what i mean. shimmery geetars and yelping vocals bouncing off the walls with the occasional falsetto on 'idiocy' sound like the pretty bouncing baby bastard resulting from a rough drunken night involving stephen malkmus and graeme downes.

but i don't like kimya dawson, i'm sorry, john, i don't.

maybe i'll write about barbara morgenstern sometime, she's another positive tmg-discovery.

i'm getting off-track.

today my eagerly-awaited package from dark beloved cloud arrived with sixteen new records in it!!!!

omg, i totally hyper-ventilated.

if you don't know dbc, and you are actually reading this blog,well brother get on it. it's a little indie label formerly of the big apple and now residing in verdant portland, oh-are. almost everything i've been listening to for the past several years is less than six degrees of seperation from dbc's catalogue: robert scott, franklin bruno, barbara manning, the cannanes, chris fucking knox, even. it's one of the only places you can even get ahold of records by the magick heads, a scott project with jane sinnott. i even found a copy of the clean's 1994 'late last night' 7" which is (a-side) brutally rocking, and (b-side) absolutely ridiculous. the clean are working on a new album, but haven't locked in distro yet (from what i've heard, and neither have the bats) which is a disgrace. someone should be paying them a shit-ton of money right now to do whatever they want. because they're one of the best bands ever.

so i haven't evn scratched the surface yet on this new shipment, but i had to drop down this blog after hearing the 3" mini-cd ep by the cannanes, 'grassy flat.'

it's simply gorgeous.

in a mailtruck somewhere between seattle and arizona is a split 7" with boyracer and the cannanes, and now i'm so stoked for it. like more than i wa last week when i orered it from stewart anderson. who you should check out. his band boyracer has existed in one form or another forever, and now he's rocking on solar power in the southwest. i first heard boyracer when the lucksmiths covered 'i've got it (and it's not worth having)'. stewart and jen put out small-batches of 7"s and he lamented recently that they languish in storage. so if you're reading this, go buy some of them. it's pure diy punk rock like the type oldsters-in-the-making like me grew up on: rough and ready with a sensitive side.

so i'm going to sign off now and listen to more of this awesome new music.

good tip

2008-05-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

my myspace friends minisnap live in new zealand. they are a really really good band and you should finish reading this (or, well, you don't have to finish, but do as i say anyway, ok?) and then go out and buy their music and t-shirts and anything else. did you know they are 3/4 of indie/kiwi-pop legends the bats? i bet you didn't. do you know the bats? if not, i may not be able to help you, but i'll try. check them out first, especially 'fear of god', 1991, flying nun records. the first track, 'bogey man' is like everything you love by the smiths and the clean and the chills and rem and anyone else you thought was (emo-)cool back in the early nineties.

if you know that, you know that bob scott is the bats honcho, but then you have paul kean (bassist from toy love) and mal grant backing up kaye woodward (mrs paul) singing her amazing songs in minisnap. they have two great little self-produced eps (march hare features a cover by the clean/the mad scene's hamish kilgour) and a full length. they are everything that is good about jangly indie-pop.

really. fucking. gorgeous.

so they sent out this little bulletin on mysoace that said "check out this video" and i got really really excited, because i really liked their video for 'new broom' and i was like, 'hey, awesome! new minisnap video.' it took me about three seconds to realize this was not the case, but i watched the video anyway, and it was this band called the dø. they are ostensibly a two-piece, although they obviously employ at least a drummer for shows. this song in th video was called 'on my shoulders', and it started with this super simple drifting little guitar sequence, with some whining synths in the background. suddenly this drum beat kicks in and a high, plaintive voice starts, in a voice stained with finnish vodka and sex, wailing "why..."

the voice is that of one olivia bouyssou merilahti, of french-finnish descent, and whose voice hits an anxiety-pitch of both little-girl-vulnerability and fervent, desperate, feral strength.

the video does nothing to allay this impression as merilahti, darkened eyelashes masking her squinted eyes, moves like a trance-afflicted doll through an urban-blight landscape with her partner dan levy. they duo stare disaffected at low-flying aeroplanes from the bed of a pickup (on backwards-run film) and the wind toussles merilahti's black hair and teases the slight wisps of blonde highlights at her temples. little tricks in the video, such as the pair moving forward (towards the camera) inside the stowage bay of a lorry, as the lorry moves forward (in the opposite direction) and creating the impression that they are moving in-place, add to the surreal immediacy of the song.

the dø make music in the same vein as indie-groove acts like leslie feist, but they have an endearing little anarchic twist as well. they remind me a little of the blow as well.

merilahti's feral-sensual scream coupled with levy's beats set up a nice juxtaposition, all-in-all, and i intend to keep an ear on this pair.

thanks for the tip, k + p.

hello

2008-05-19T00:19:00.000-07:00

hello,

i like music.

this is where i will discuss what i like now.

and what i will like later, which will be "now" then.

and what i might dislike.

oh, and i may mention what i'm doing. sorry, 'bout that.

sweet, huh?

no? i know. sorry.

oh well...