Forgotten Greats of the ‘00s # 2:
Mr. Airplane Man

Mr Airplane Man came from Boston, and were a duo of Margaret Garrett on guitar and vox, and Tara McManus on drums and backing vox. Quite why two women with no obvious links to the aviation industry chose to call themselves ‘Mr Airplane Man’ remains a mystery, but that’s band names for you – sometimes they’re just bloody stupid.

Anyway, I LOVE Mr. Airplane Man, and like literally all things I loved in that recorded-off-the-radio C90 saturated golden age between about 1999 and October 2004, John Peel played matchmaker. I first heard them when Peel played ‘Sun Sinking Low’ off their second album ‘Moanin’, and I’ve been sucker for the dark mysteries of their unique approach to the blues ever since. They even made a cameo appearance in a comic strip I was drawing at the time, cos in my head they were recording the soundtrack.

Thinking vague “records of the 00s” shaped thoughts last month, I reckoned that I’d probably played ‘Moanin’’ as much as I’ve played any other album this decade. It’s just always been there, and always hits the spot. Post-internet, I’ve tracked down most of their other stuff (the self-titled debut, the demos collection “Primitive” and their final album “C’mon DJ”), and in the past year or so I’ve listened to Mr. Airplane Man more than ever.

So what’s so great about them? Well it’s difficult to really get it down in words…

Ok, so they’re bluesy, clearly there’s no denying that – they cover Howlin’ Wolf and Fred McDowell and do trad arr songs and have slide guitar all over the place. But coming to my attention as they did at the grimmer tail-end of the post-White Stripes garage boom, Mr Airplane Man sounded more than anything like the antidote to all the raucous, testosterone-fuelled, obnoxious mess of modern blues-rock.

Mr. Airplane Man’s blues is a more subtle, more intangible beast, a lither, scarier and sexier thing entirely. Sometimes, especially on the earlier tougher stuff, they get so disconnected and hypnotic, so lost in their own cloud of sound, that it almost borders on Charalambides territory, even as they rock it up like beef-eating bastards. And what rocking! At their best, Mr. Airplane Man rock out with the vicious restraint and jackknife repetition of John Lee Hooker, spilling over only occasionally into flat-out emotional tsunami, as Margaret hits her fuzz pedal and howls into the night. It’s a beautiful thing.

Big, warm, woozy guitar tone as thick as your arm, totally radical, restrained playing and churning, destructo riffs – that’s what Margaret Garrett’s all about. McManus’s slow, swinging percussion is sweet and essential too, crashing around the song like the waves of a high tide, as she counts out the gaps between cymbal thwaps and hammers on the tambourine like a reconfigured Motown death march. Mr Airplane Man sound like a gentle wrecking ball, crashing toward you in no particular hurry; even in their more overt garage-‘rawk’ moments, they still let things breath and spark, leaving their more lumpen contemporaries in the shade.

I’m not explaining myself very well here, but hey, thankfully this is the 21st century and I don’t have to anymore. This brief live clip, cruelly cut off at 1:33, helps demonstrate what I mean pretty well:



Not to drag gender into things unnecessarily I hope, but you know that old train of thought that says that the blues, before it was recorded and formalised, was primarily a female form of music, and that when Blind Lemon Jefferson came along, they had to sell him by saying ‘this guy sings it almost as good as a woman’? Well a century later, in a completely different context in which blues-derived rock music finds itself in a generally pretty moribund state, a good listen to Mr. Airplane Man can kinda remind you all about all that stuff.





Mr. Airplane Man seemed to stop doin’ stuff in about ’05 or ’06, but Margaret Garrett has recently resurfaced, playing solo as Magi Airplane Man: http://www.myspace.com/margaret-airplane-man. Fingers crossed for some new records, shows, etc.

Labels: blues, Forgotten greats of the 00s, Mr Airplane Man

8 TRACKS: 2010 THUS FAR.

Seems like ages since I've made one of these, so thought I'd get my act together. A few favourite tunes of 2010 thus far. Newness from Best Coast, The Spits, Myelin Sheaths, French Kissing etc., oldness from Dust, Gene Vincent, Epic Soundtracks, rediscoveredness from Carl Simmons, Sarolta Zalatnay; awesomeness from all concerned.



(Link.)

Labels: 8 Tracks

The Maggots – (Let’s Get) Tammy Wynette

Ah, what better way to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day than by kicking back and spinning “(Let’s Get) Tammy Wynette”, San Francisco band The Maggots’ mean-spirited 1979 ode to girl-on-girl violence? Surely one the stupidest, weirdest and bestest teen punk singles to emerge from America in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s boom.

“Kick her teeth out, punch her face in, notify her next of kin,” shouts singer Vicki Maggot in a flat, nasal voice like a pissed off doctor’s receptionist over a killer wavo keyboard hook and a rhythm section best described as enthusiastic, “she’s so scared, she’s so upset, let’s get, let’s get Tammy Wynette!” Add a totally unhinged guitar un-solo in the middle and we’re looking at 90 seconds of complete genius.

I first heard this song on the ‘Bloodstains Across California’ compilation and have since thrown it onto a bunch of mix CDs, so when I saw the recent reissue of The Maggots single on Discourage records in the racks in All Ages, naturally I had to BUY BUY BUY without thinking. It was only later that I examined the cover more closely and saw that it reproduces a newspaper photo and headline relating to the ACTUAL Tammy Wynette ACTUALLY getting kidnapped and beaten…

I mean, when I first heard the song I wasn’t quite sure whether the violence described was directed against the popular country singer – a notion so bizarro it’s hard to take offence – or whether “let’s get Tammy Wynette!” was just some amazing piece of forgotten slang, like “let’s get violent” or “let’s get crazy” (my preferred interpretation).

But no, a quick google of “Tammy Wynette + kidnap” left me with the knowledge that, yes, poor old Tammy WAS kidnapped outside a shopping centre in 1978, and, whilst there is some argument regarding the facts of the incident, it's clear that someone beat her up pretty badly. And then these nasty fucking punks went and recorded a sneery, dumbass song about it, leaving me feeling as if I’d been sitting in the pub casually laughing at a bad taste gag when someone at the next table got up and shouted “THAT HAPPENED TO ME, AND IT’S NOT FUNNY!”

*awkward*

Well, needless to say, unprovoked attacks upon much-loved country singers are absolutely the last thing we at this blog would seek to condone or celebrate, but what can I say… I’m a weakling in the face of a great record, and the Maggots track still makes me smile like a fool. Crass bad taste and ‘70s California punk always go swinging down the street together arm in arm, and I guess I’d probably put this one about on the level of The Hollywood Squares’ “Hillside Strangler” (“who knows what the night will bring / express myself with a simple piece of string”); definitely more on perversely goofy, parent-shocking end of the spectrum, as opposed to, say, the rather grim homophobia of Fear or The Angry Samoans.

For what it’s worth, The Maggots dole out the same bile to their own kind on the equally fantastic b-side “2/2/79”, which delves into the death of Sid Vicious, and a crazy bonus instrumental and a way-rough demo take of “Tammy..” are thrown in too to help spin out the Discourage reissue into a swell little EP.

What makes it an even more satisfying purchase though is the enclosed booklet, which presents a complete history of The Maggots through a wealth of contemporary flyers, photos, typewriter scrawl and fanzine blather and makes for highly entertaining reading. Formed around the nucleus of drummer Jane Weems and bassist Robert Mostert in ’78, it seems The Maggots proceeded to get through a veritable bus-load of additional members in their short existence, all arriving and departing from within SF’s high school-age punk milieu, raising merry hell in some parental basement and swiftly developing into the kind of band just as concerned with pasting together fake biographies and press releases for themselves and developing their own brand of icky goofball humour as they were with finding shows to play or recording songs. I can dig that! The songs on the “Tammy..” 7” sadly seem to be their only real recorded output, but the booklet makes amends with a whole load of the other rubbish this unique grouping of individuals left to the world.




Discourage still have the 7” on sale here.

Mp3: Let’s Get, Let’s Get Tammy Wynette!

Labels: fanzines, punk, singles reviews, Tammy Wynette, The Maggots

Neon Angels On The Road To Ruin..?

So it looks like Hollywood’s gone and made a biopic about The Runaways, starring a couple of young actresses who are apparently a big deal just at the moment. Here’s the trailer:



Pretty rad, huh? Fictional biopics about cult rock bands/stars are pretty much always a terrible idea, but hey, who knows? For a band who were pure Hollywood right from the outset, I guess it *might just work*.

Anyway, to get you in the mood / set the scene prior to release, here’s Lisa Fancher’s article on The Runaways from the Spring ’76 issue of "Who Put The Bomp!", as scanned from “Bomp! Saving the World One Record At A Time” by Suzy Shaw & Mick Farren (Amazon link).

As you’d expect, there’s a high quotient of Fowleyan shuck in the mix, together with an unsavoury touch of the icky obsession with underage teens that seems to have been pretty inescapable in the ‘70s LA rock scene, but at the same time it’s a real genuine article that I think captures some of excitement and enthusiasm that the idea of a bunch of gals busting out some Stoogified heavy rock was capable of generating back in the mid-70s.... much in the same way that The Runaways themselves were a really kick-ass band with a dedicated following that went way beyond their magazine ad origins and the image Fowley shouldered them with, I guess.

Anyway, you also get a Jackie De Shannon discography and a picture of DEL Shannon too, so whata you waiting for - left click to embiggen, right click to save;







From the ‘where are they now’ angle’, here’s a recent Quietus interview with lead guitar goddess Lita Ford. She quit the music biz to go and raise her family and build a hurricane-proof house on her own private island! Too cool.

And I can’t end this post without sharing with you possibly The Runaways finest recorded moment, the juvenile delinquency epic “Dead End Justice” that ends side 2 of their self-titled album. File under totally one of greatest things I’ve heard in my life: "You don't sing n' dance in Juvie honey!"

Labels: fanzines, JOAN JETT IS GOD, Kim Fowley, Lita Ford, movies, The Runaways, Who Put The Bomp

The Ex & Brass Unbound / Zun Zun Egui / John Butcher
Tufnell Park Dome, 03/02/10

The Dome in Tufnell Park is an odd place to be when itís two thirds empty. Not actually a dome in any fashion I can appreciate, it is room with a distinctly old fashioned air to it - something like a municipal drill hall operating in tandem with the village scout hall of it’s downstairs neighbour the Boston Music Room, where Billy Childish is still packing ‘em in one Friday night in most months, and long may he continue to do so. Where the downstairs is a generally rather comforting place to lurk though, the larger open space of the ‘Dome’ can’t help but add a certain low level malignancy to the atmosphere. A big, draughty hall essentially - the kind of place you’d imagine as the setting for a scary punk gig circa 1980, where they brought in extra muscle on the door but skinheads threatened to beat everybody up anyway, enraged by subconscious memories of primary school gym lessons, as The Lurkers or somebody stood on stage wondering why they bothered. Or such is the desultory picture that the history books and Billy Bragg songs paint for halls such as this anyway. Obviously I have no idea, I wasn’t there. Maybe the Tuffnell Park Dome was a shining beacon of happiness and hope during the Thatcher years. But I doubt it.

Anyway, no such anachronistic shenanigans are on display tonight, making me give thanks that I’m lucky enough to live in an age in which I’m extremely unlikely to get punched whilst attempting to watch men play guitars. And in a round-about sort of way, maybe it is the inclusive and forward-thinking spirit of bands like The Ex that I have to thank to thank for that..? Kinda? A bit? I don’t know whether or not they played in the UK when they were getting started as an anarcho/squatter affiliated buncha punks back in the ‘80s, but I guess if they did they might have experienced grim scenes of infamy such as those imagined above. Now though, all is relaxed, all is cordial, and all the world is one beneath a plastic cup full of Guinness as one of those Sublime Frequencies Asian radio pop CDs plays over the PA - jolly, magical tunes from Thailand or Korea or someplace, probably knocked out as filler for a domestic market where there weren’t enough Beatles records to go around, and now rediscovered by us over-saturated nth generation indie kids for whom THOUSANDS of Beatles records are only a few clicks away, appreciated on a whole new level cos it sounds so weird and cool and different, and , like, cos it’s wonderful how forty years of tape hiss and radio distortion make it all sound like one big, distant drone from an ancient party in another room where people long dead are having loads of fun.

This implied sense of respectful, fourth-world open-mindedness continues to prevail as John Butcher walks onstage alone, and is greeted not only with a complete lack of mockery or dismissal, but even a general lack of *talking* from this relatively rockist crowd in a relatively cavernous rock venue, as he presents a somewhat academic set of “hey guys, listen to these funny sounds I’ve learned how to make” style electro-acoustic improv. I don’t know about you, but I always find solo performances in a jazz/improv vein a bit of a hard sell. Regardless of how abstracted or abrasive things get, it’s always the aspect of ensemble playing that opens it up for me, the basic drama of musicians ricocheting around each other. I’m pretty sure I must have even seen John Butcher in that context in the past and enjoyed it, but when there’s just one guy up there on his own blurting noises into the void, it all gets a bit, well, y’know. More like watching a talented player doing his daily exercises in public than something we can really engage with.

That said, I’ve got nothing better to do at this point in the evening than sip my ale and pay attention, and some of the noises Mr. Butcher makes are very curious and nice. I especially appreciate his preference for playing short, distinct pieces rather than the twenty minute blowouts favoured by many of his peers, and to my mind this helps make his music a lot more approachable. He does some good stuff on his sax with some kinda didgeridoo style circular breathing creating a bit of a drone, although I’m less enamored with the results when he picks up a… shit, my horn recognition skills aren’t what they used to be - was it a soprano sax? Or a kind of clarinet? One of those smaller, straight ones anyway… and plays a sorta high-pitched birdcall medley. Too much treble, man! He also does a good bit where he angles the horn on his bigger sax around the mic to create a kind of rumbling, pedal-aided feedback that he manipulates into a sorta slow rhythm by clicking back and forth on the... what do you call the bits you push in and out on a saxophone? Valves? (honestly, you wouldn’t get this kind of crap from Nat Hentoff would you? And to think, I could probably draw the guitars of the last ten rock bands I saw from memory…) - it sounds terrific anyway, which is the point.

A point should be well-remembered by Zun Zun Egui, who are on next. Almost as soon as they got on stage and started tuning up, my internal alarm bells were ringing. “MUSOS”, I hissed, crushing my beer mug in my hand and destroying the feel-good vibes of the gig for all within earshot. Ok, obviously I didn’t do that, but you get the picture. I won’t begrudge it to ya if you like Zun Zun Egui, I’m sure they’re pretty great if you’re into what they’re doing, but stuck as I am at the moment on a uniform diet of three chord pop, mechanical 4/4 rhythms and repetitious noise, they are Not. My. Thing. At. All. Or, let’s put it this way: I suppose I currently like the idea that musicians should treat every note as it were a close friend, and I’m very much the kind of person who prefers to maintain a small, clearly defined group of close friends, so that significant time and rewarding engagement may be dedicated to each. Zun Zun Egui on the other hand are veritable social harlots, rushing around the octaves like party-mad bastards, but ultimately not making a great impression on any of the, er, tones they encounter along the way. Too many notes! Not that I have a kneejerk distrust of musicianship or anything you understand, it’s just that… I guess if all those notes are there, I want to hear them channeled into something monolithic and awesome, not just, y’know, played, and there are only fleeting glimpses of potential Frippian grandeur within this set. Of course, they’re too smart to ever sink on stage into the kind of morbid practice room ‘funk’ I was worried might manifest itself, but behind closed doors I dread to think what these guys get up to. They have that sort of self-absorbed “no we won’t stop playing, we’re so fucking good” swagger that makes me run for the hills.

Zun Zun Egui’s most distinctive feature is the singer/guitaristís habit of communicating via a startling Tropicalia-style affirmative yelping that he uses to try to incite dancing and excitement, apparently steadfast in the belief that he is playing the most powerful and sexy music imaginable and that we are callow, inhibited FOOLS for remaining still. I don’t wish to sound demeaning, cos I’ve gotta give it to the guy, he performs this role extremely well. But the intensity of his appeals can’t help but seem somewhat alarming in the context of lugubrious prog-rock in North London on a Wednesday evening, and it’s likely that if he were exhibiting similar enthusiasm from within the crowd, there’d probably be a ten foot gap opening around him in all directions and a doorman looking on wearily. The big question is of course: if this music was presented to me as some kind of dusty French or Brazilian early ‘70s artifact and reissued on 180gm vinyl on Finders-Keepers or something, would I think it was awesome? No comment.

Gee, that was a lot of words wasted on knocking down a perfectly well-meaning band - sorry. Best move straight on what we’re all here to see: perennial Dutch art-punk godheads The Ex, here accompanied by Brass Unbound, their own hand-picked quartet of European horn colossi. And holy shit, have they ever got a show in store for you.



Watching the above promo video for this tour earlier the same day, I was slightly taken aback to see what hard cases the brass contingent appear to be. They look like they could all be wrestlers or rugby players or something; certainly of a different cut from the kind of lily-livered males I’m more used to seeing on stage. This got me thinking about how saxophone players are often pretty big guys, and wondering whether this has anything to do with the physical demands of playing the instrument. But best leave that unrewarding train of thought burnt out at the side of the road and cut to the chase:

The Ex & Brass Unbound was fucking breathtaking.

A total hour of power, so loaded with climatic, fiery, cacophonous beauty, it sprawled straight over across the 80 minute mark and still left me feeling like it’d only just started. Righteous, rabble-rousing music, unshackled from genre and tradition pretty much entirely, but so primal and self-explanatory it could get everyone from the most haughty jazzbo to your granddad psyched up and ready for action.

It’s always been interesting to read interviews and stuff about The Ex’s DIY tours around Africa, and without getting too starry-eyed about it, a set like this really does give the impression that they could essentially pitch up anywhere in the world with their amps and just jam it out with whoever’s around, and people would GET IT. It’s angry music sure, and there are whole centuries and continents-worth of cultural upheaval buried within it, but so full of forward motion and universal ON-ness, it’s just undeniable. So much stuff to love within this performance, and I scarcely feel able to express any of it.

I love how The Ex, despite several decades-worth of experimentation, collaboration and global cross-pollination, are still unmistakably an anarcho-punk band front and centre, grinding out barre chords on distorted guitars and barking lyrics about global warming and surveillance society like the European answer to Fugazi they essentially are, but just keeping it open enough for all the other influences and musicians to filter in around them.

I love how despite having no less than seven serious-minded men up front, all blurting, hammering and sweating away with all the gusto of a construction team, The Ex & Brass Unbound never sound macho or blustery or overbearing. Quite an achievement for a group with mr. elephantine death-rattle himself Mats Gustafsson in the line-up! Their sound is a lean, sinuous, breathing thing, full of sparks and always moving forward, propelled not by a motorik march or by syncopated funk in any way we’d conventionally understand it, but by a sort of lurching, unstoppable, ramshackle force, like a boulder crashing down a mountainside.



Much credit for this must go to drummer Katherina Bornefeld, who is simply an amazing presence, her style is sometimes as unconventional and post-punk instinctive as Palmolive on the Raincoats records, but solid and muscular enough to keep all these rampaging guitar n’ hornslingers ON MESSAGE, heading in the right direction. And when she takes the mic and sings - for an adaptation of a Hungarian folk song, and another number later in the set - it’s stunning. Her voice cuts straight through the sea of instruments, sounding like some haunting, baleful lament pulled straight off a hundred year old Eastern European folk recording. Every musician on stage gets the chance to deliver similar moment of glory though. Terrie Hessels clatters away on his battle-scarred five string guitar in a completely inimitable fashion, essentially fulfilling both the rhythm and bass roles in this bass-less three guitar line-up, whilst also finding time to throw in outbursts of amusical skronk wild enough to make my hair stand on end.

Obviously I never saw The Ex with their now departed singer G.W. Sok, but Arnold De Boer seems to make for a fine and imaginative replacement. Weirdly enough, De Boer used to essentially BE the fuzzy nerd-pop band Zea, whose album “Counting Backwards Leads To Explosions” I picked up and really liked a few years back. Seeing him fronting The Ex seems crazily unlikely – it’s like if Major Matt Mason from Schwervon became the new singer in Crass or something – but it’s great to see that he seems to have carried across some of the lo-fi toy keyboard rocking antics of his former band, furthering the idea that The Ex operate like a kind of cultural sponge, absorbing anything and everything into their central framework the name of continued awesomeness.

Roy Paci is my pick from the horn section – he’s bloody beautiful on the trumpet, playing with real guts and humour and warmth, and I’d love to see him let rip in a more traditional jazz context. Ken Vandermark on sax comes a close second though, and as for Wolter Wierbos on the trombone, well… have you ever seen a man hunched forward and violently hopping up and down whilst playing the trombone? An easy enough idea to convey on paper perhaps, but just try to picture it - imagine the physics for Christ’s sake!



I hope this doesn’t make me sound obsessive or mildly autistic, but after years of trying to write about music, I find that when I’m watching a band or listening to a record, I’ve often got a separate track of back-chat going on in the back of my brain as I come up with daft observations and descriptors I could maybe later use to write about or discuss it – don’t blame me, I don’t do it consciously, it just happens, ok? Usually this stuff is little more than an annoyance, but I always know I’m at a REALLY good gig when it goes into overdrive and my synapses start throwing out ridiculous crap that’s NEVER going to be fit to print, on the level of some kind of opium reverie.

After The Ex & Brass Unbound finished off one particularly fiery number prominently featuring Paci and Wierbos, I found myself taking a step backwards and thinking;

“Holy shit! That sounded like Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western brass section riding into town on a fucking tank made out of Mussolini’s bones!”

Lunacy, clearly. I mean, a single skeleton, even one belonging to a big fellow like Mussolini, would never provide enough surface area to construct any kind of vehicle, let alone a tank. But if I had to swear to it in court, I’d still have to say that that is EXACTLY what the song sounded like.

All things considered, I’m afraid that Dead Moon are still the band Iíd most like to see out the apocalypse with. I’d feel more comfortable in a smaller, more self-sufficient group like theirs, I think. But when that ragtag army of nomads and punks gets together to stampede into your capitalist enclave and burn it to the ground, like a rather more affirmative version of Tom Savini and his pals in ‘Dawn Of The Dead’, well make no mistake, it’s THE EX who are gonna be belting it out from the back of a flatbed truck with a portable generator, in the spirit of general chaotic celebration.

PHEW.

*collapses*

Labels: jazz, John Butcher, live reviews, punk, The Ex, Zun Zun Egui

Pointless Lists Week.

#6 My Favourite Albums, 2000 – 2009, limited to one per artist.


1. Comet Gain – Realistes
2. The Mountain Goats – The Sunset Tree
3. Mclusky – Do Dallas
4. The Detroit Cobras – Life, Love & Leaving
5. The Exploding Hearts – Guitar Romantic
6. Silver Jews – Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
7. The Thermals – More Parts Per Million
8. Guided By Voices – Isolation Drills
9. The Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
10. Herman Dune – Switzerland Heritage
11. Oneida – Anthem of the Moon
12. Dead Meadow – Shivering King & Others
13. Jeffrey Lewis – Em Are I
14. Birchville Cat Motel – Our Love Will Destroy The World
15. The Caretaker – A Stairway to the Stars
16. The Heads – Under Sided
17. Help She Can’t Swim – Fashionista Super Dance Troupe
18. Mr. Airplane Man – Moanin’
19. Lift To Experience – The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads
20. Cat Power – You Are Free


Runners up (no particular order):

Melt Banana – Cellscape
Greg Ashley – Medicine Fuck Dream
The Dirtbombs – Ultraglide in Black
Vivian Girls – s/t
Those Dancing Days – s/t
Future Of The Left – Travels With Myself And Another
Robert Wyatt – Comicopera
Nodzzz – s/t
Stephen Malkmus – s/t
Holly Golightly - Down Gina's At 3
The Wave Pictures – Instant Coffee Baby
Apples in Stereo – Velocity of Sound
Mastodon – Leviathan
Electrelane – Rock It To The Moon
The Buff Medways - Steady The Buffs
Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabete – In the Heart of the Moon
Helen Love – Love & Glitter, Hot Days & Music
Slumber Party – s/t
Charalambides – Joy Shapes
Grant – Something to Believe In
Party of One – Caught the Blast
Le Tigre – s/t
Ikara Colt – Chat & Business
Comets On Fire - Blue Cathedral
Animal Collective – Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished
The Micragirls - Feeling Dizzy Honey
And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Madonna
Vibracathedral Orchestra – Hex Hostess
Hang On The Box – For Every Punk Bitch & Asshole
The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster – Horse of the Dog
Pelt – An Empty Bell Ringing in the Sky
The Loves - Love
Todd – first EP
Hotpants Romance - It's A Heatwave
Sunn 0))) – White One
Carla Bozulich – The Red Headed Stranger
Jennifer Gentle – Valende
The Boredoms – VisionCreationNewSun
Nile – In Their Darkened Shrines
Yo La Tengo – And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
David Thomas Broughton & 7 Hertz
Weird War – If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Bite ‘Em
Tinariwen - Amassakoul
Double Leopards – Halve Mean
Fursaxa – Mandrake
The 5678s – Teenage Mojo Workout
The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow
Anaal Nathrakh – The Codex Necro


Well I’m bloody glad I got that out of the way.

Proper, non-list based content returning imminently!

Labels: best of the 2000s, Comet Gain, Pointless Lists Week

Pointless Lists Week.

#5 Five Musicians With Pleasant And Reassuring Names.


1. Monty Buckles (singer/guitarist, Lamps)
2. Mornington Lockett (British saxophonist)
3. Cecil McBee (jazz bassist – Alice Coltrane, etc.)
4. Smokey Hornell (session guitarist)
5. Fats Domino (Fats Domino!)

Labels: goofery, Lamps, names, Pointless Lists Week

Pointless Lists Week.

#4 The Five Bands Whom I Own The Most Music By, according to iTunes.


1.The Velvet Underground (29 albums; 251 songs; 2.09GB)
2. Guided by Voices / Robert Pollard (36 albums; 592 songs; 2GB)
3. Sonic Youth (26 albums; 262 songs; 1.43GB)
4.The Mountain Goats (31 albums; 354 songs; 1.29GB)
5. Neil Young / Crazy Horse (26 albums; 221 songs; 1.20GB)

Labels: Pointless Lists Week, The Velvet Underground