Things of Interest:
The Hitmen

So here's a new discovery to help cme liven up this Dennis Hopper-less Saturday Night - The Hitmen!

They were kinda like an Australian Undertones!

What, you mean you don't feel like listening to an Australian Undertones right now? Fine, please yourself.

It seems The Hitmen made a TON of videos between about '79 and '83. All of them are pretty much the same, but that's ok, because all of them are pretty great.

Enter Youtube:





That said, I'm not sure "Bwana Devil" was really a good idea from anyone's point of view. I still kinda love it though - fits perfectly into that whole weird sub-sub-genre of early '80s Australian bands who seemed to be into some kinda inexplicable tiki bar/jungle adventure/caveman shtick (see just about anything by Screaming Tribesmen, Hoodoo Gurus, Lime Spiders etc).



I was just reflecting on the fact that The Hitmen's song "Pay Up Or Shut Up" would be pretty awesome if it didn't owe such a huge debt to Radio Birdman's trademark sound, when Wikipedia informed me that The Hitmen's singer Johnny Kannis actually functioned as a kinda odd backing singer/hypeman for the Birdman in his spare time, as can be witnessed in this absolutely blinding video of the band from '77;



So, er, there ya go.

Man, Denis Tek [who you see playing that nifty white guitar in the above vid] rules.

One day when Youtube's been obliterated, we'll weep blood for all these good times.

Labels: Australia, punk rock, Radio Birdman, The Hitmen, things of interest, videos

A Pleasant Evening.. and a few surprises.

It’s been a while since I posted any downloadable mixes on Stereo Sanctity, but now that I have a working CD burner and a reliable home broadband connection for the first time in a few months, it seems like a good time to catch up with some of the homemade compilations I’ve been pottering about with recently.

This one here for instance is the latest instalment in my reality capsizing, galaxy-spanning (well, iTunes spanning at least) overview of my favourite examples of psychedelic music.

A themed edition (y’know, like the Pebbles ‘Surf’ volume or something), this ‘Psychedelic Dancefloor’ one gives me a nigh on endless opportunity to beat my chops (that means talk, in case you were wondering) about the inherently mind-altering nature of dance, and thus how odd it is the psychedelia is often primarily associated with lying around in a heap listening to some hippies wig out at a glacial pace. Or about how my upbringing and cultural circumstances meant I never really got the chance to engage with dance-music-as-genre. Or hey, how about that whole thing recently with people claiming that one of the best ways for avant/psyche/drone/noise etc music to find new purpose is to reconnect itself with repetitive dancebeats to form some kinda planet-smashing form of ultimate hypnogogic disco whatever that we’d all listen to exclusively for eternity..?

I’m not sure how that’s all coming along (I’ve not read The Wire in years), but hey, I’m sure I could find an opinion on it, and if the monged out club bits on that great Blues Control album from last year or thousands of kinds going nuts at Animal Collective concerts are a stumble in that general direction, you can surely count me in.

ANYWAY, I’m NOT gonna talk about any of that stuff or try to explain/expand on any of my selections here. Let’s just say this is a collection of great, mind-bending fuzzy tunes that you could actually dance to, in the idyllic imaginary nightclub environment of your dreams, should you wish.

Sorry the cover’s not up to much – my photoshop skills leave something to be desired, and I’ve not had the time or desk space to knock anything together on paper. The original comic book panel comes courtesy of no less a personage than Gentleman Jack Kirby though, so that should more than make up for my artistic failings!

Enjoy!

1. Peter Wyngarde – Come In
2. The Index – Shock Waves
3. Ros Sereysothea - [title unknown]
4. Ennio Morricone – Nightclub Scene from ‘Danger: Diabolik!’
5. L’Oeil – Bernadette
6. Ruth – Mots
7. Paula Sheppard – Me & My Rhythm Box
8. Black Devil Disco Club – Follow Me
9. Ellen Allien & Apparat – Way Out
10. Arthur Russell – In the Light Of The Miracle
11. Betty Davis – Git In There
12. The Group – The Feedback
13. The Science Fiction Corporation – The Whistling Astronaut
14. Francesco de Masi – New York: One More Day
15. Land of Giants – Cannibal Dolls
16. Baby Huey – Running
17. Sparks – The Number One Song in Heaven
18. Peter Wyngarde – April

DOWNLOAD
(93mb zip file / 78 minutes)

(If the link’s not working for you for whatever reason don’t suffer in silence – drop me a line and I’ll get it to you some other way.)

Labels: dancing, mixtapes, Psychedelia

Dum Dum Girls –
I Will Be (Sub-Pop)
vs.
Blissed Out (ArtFag)

After a year or so of hoarding every single bit of Dum Dum Girls music/media the internet saw fity to throw into my reach, of recent I’ve found myself overwhelmed by a veritable polyphony of alternate Dum Dum Girls identities, as the band chase the dragon of major-indie label success and (here’s hopin’) iconic pop culture status.

Seeing the DDGs’ new live incarnation for the first time back in February, I was completely wowed. Minus the lo-fi/noise affectations, and plus the instrumental contributions and shiny new gear of the new members, this group is a different beast from the home-recordings I fell in love with a year ago, AND from the new Sub-Pop LP, fleshing out DeeDee’s preexistent material into masterpieces of exquisite, Mazzy Star-like, psychedelic pop.

There has been much cause to reflect recently on how easily blog-hyped home recording projects can crash and burn when they find themselves prematurely pushed into actual ‘band’ status, but that just makes the way Dum Dum Girls have transformed themselves into a world class live proposition all the more worthy of celebration. Like the Velvet Underground reborn as beautiful, impeccably attired ladies playing elegant minimalist rock n’ roll filtered through some opium-fiend reverie, it’s hard to imagine anything better actually existing in the whole world whilst watching Dum Dum Girls playing live through a good sound system, however carefully managed and aesthetically cross-referenced their stage persona and sound might be.

A certain amount of confusion seems to have been created though by the fact that this fully fleshed out DDG 2.0 has been touring in support of the I Will Be LP – a debut album that essentially still consists of DeeDee’s solo recordings recreated and/or remixed in a studio environment with the assistance long-standing doer of good in the music industry Richard Gottehrer. Several of the reviews I read have seemed to assume the full band is playing on the recordings, with one major league website in particular singling out Frankie Rose’s drumming for praise, despite the fact that the same vintage drum machine used on the earlier DDG material is prominently clattering away throughout. A sorry state of affairs indeed.

That said, DeeDee and Gottehrer should definitely be applauded for resisting the temptation to go the Big Production route on “I Will Be”, instead sticking relentlessly to the established palette of drum loops, lead vocals and a variety of guitar textures so heavily effected that they barely sound like guitars anymore. As noted, the general fidelity has been raised and the extremes of distortion and deterioration has been cleaned up, the reverb settings have been dialed down from maxed-out-Digitech-pedal to ‘80s-New-Wave-band. Squares may find the uniform sound, metronomic machine-thwaks and flat intonation get a bit samey across a 35 minute album, but for those of us with sufficient imagination what really shines here is the strength of DeeDee’s songwriting.

Now that we can hear the lyrics a bit better, old songs and new both reveal an unexpectedly compelling narrative aspect, transforming “I Will Be” from merely a collection of really cool pop songs into… well I hesitate to say it, but it’s sorta almost a concept album, or at least a record whose themes and images have been so carefully formulated that each track appears part of a greater whole.

From the narrator of “Jail La La”, who wakes up dazed at a strip club and winds up in jail yelling the chorus through the bars, to the rather more self-assured protagonist of “Yours Alone”, who’s known exactly what she wants out of life since the age of five, to the paranoid would-be starlet of “Line Her Eyes”, each song here seems to represent the first person statement of a different woman in a different phase of life. Factor in the brilliantly fierce 70s-era cover shot of DeeDee’s mum and the statement-of-intent title-track and “I Will Be” perhaps, kinda, sorta stands as something approaching a tribute to the struggles and achievements of 20th Century American femininity.

And, interestingly, it’s one that doesn’t seem to emerge from the overtly feminist perspective of [the good bits of] contemporary indie rock, but instead looks back with bittersweet glee at the kind of subject matter – starry-eyed teenage marriage, vicious fashion/fame-related rivalry, defining oneself as the adjunct to a male partner – that is (maybe, hopefully) less of an inevitable part of the female experience than it used to be back in the ‘50s-‘70s, the aesthetic golden age where Dum Dum Girls make their spiritual home.

So if you’re looking for a bit of honest-to-god content from your neo-girl group fuzz-pop, well look no further, but beyond all that blather I’m sure many listeners will be more concerned with the fact that just about every song on “I Will Be” is a hit in the established three chords / three verses mold, with a couple of great new rockers, and in particular, a handful of straight up love songs sweet enough to make you levitate through the skylight. “Rest Of Our Lives” in particular is incredible, with crashing percussion, swoon-inducing emotional heft and huge, swinging, r’n’b-influenced chorus-line coming together like the best bits of ‘60s and ‘00s chart pop crashing head-on and creating a song capable of reducing workplaces to dust as it blares over the AM radio in the staff-room. Or something.

I don’t like the version of “Baby Don’t Go” on here half as much as the old home-recorded one (and I never knew it was a Sonny Bono song either!), but aside from that, pretty stunning debut album right here, with a bit more depth to it than doubting parties may have expected.

And the same week I got my copy of “I Will Be”, a jiffy-bag hit the doormat containing my pre-ordered copy of Blissed Out, a cassette put out by ArtFag that conveniently compiles what I think is pretty much ALL the pre-Sub-Pop Dum Dum Girls tracks, minus the ones that were reworked for the album, and plus a handful of previously unheard cover versions and the like. Naturally sounding more wrecked, more aggressive, more mysterious and more eerily harmonious than the ‘official’ release, this, I suppose, is the real motherlode of why-we-cared-in-the-first-place, pulling DeeDee’s emerging pop classicism back under its original cloak of a more US Girls/Circuit Des Yeux affiliated take on emotionally-savvy tape-noise catharsis.

I’ve been listening to most of these songs various different formats for over a year now – from myspace to source-mp3 to poorly mastered vinyl to ripped-mp3 to tape and back to mp3 again – and their skuzzy aura of orchestrated chaos just seems to gotten even more captivating along the way, as the sound gets shakier and more compressed. “Put A Sock In It” and “Hey Sis” in particular seem to have benefited from process, sounding more than ever like some kind of neon-lit industrial presses of pop songs. The way the ultra-reverbed sounds seem to lose their original instrument-form entirely, imitating other things instead (VHS static, hissing gas pipes), the way these textures are threaded so carefully around the central luminous song-core – this continues to blow me away.

My favourite new find here is “Long Hair”, originally issued on a Hozac 7” I missed out on and one of the best ever DDG tracks, handily exemplifying everything that sets this original loner-bedroom-noise incarnation of the band from the more outgoing, expressive entity of the “I Will Be” era; forbidding and introspective of both sound and lyric, but as hypnotic and inevitable and unfuckable-with as the Ramones or Ronettes, as wasp-swarms of amp buzz circle about the multi-tracked, mantra-like chant; “long hair to cover my long face”, bringing back memories of that chick crawling from her well and through the TV screens in those ‘Ring’ movies.

The other big winner on the tape is the closing “Dream Away Life”, perhaps the most beautifully swoonsome true love ballad in DDGs’ increasingly formidable catalogue of swoonsome true love ballads – again, a song requiring no additional commentary to help make it’s impression on the world.

“Blissed Out”s weak link is the cover versions, which are impeccably chosen, natch, but in practice range from the basically acceptable (Black Tambourine’s “Throw Aggi Off The Bridge”) to the shoulda-stayed-private (an acutely mismanaged stab at Delta 5’s “Mind Yr Own Business”). These are strictly bonus track material, sounding more than anything like DeeDee working out her recording techniques before laying down the good stuff, but all grist to the mill of this tape’s fans/completists-only status I suppose.

So there’s a circa-2010 indie-rock Cinderella story for ya I guess – from bedroom sulk-noise to serious songwriting proposition to all-time-perfect-girl-band showstopper to be caught blitzing blurrily across badly mixed European festival stages in the mid-afternoon… take your pick, happy in the knowledge that every step along the way is proving a fine place to be.

Here’s some Mp3s:

Rest Of Our Lives (from “I Will Be”)
Long Hair (from “Blissed Out”)

And here’s a nice video for the single, in lieu of any live footage with decent sound:



Actually, this one's pretty good, although it looks like a dreadful corporate bruhaha they're playing:

Labels: album reviews, Dum Dum Girls

I Like Colleen Green.

Not that I want to dedicate this blog entirely to weird kids in America making drugged out Ramones music on Myspace or anything, but... well actually, I probably do, let's face it, and honestly, do you think there was a hope I wouldn't totally love Colleen Green?

You should download her EP, it's great.

She does goofy comics like this one too:



God bless.

Labels: Colleen Green, I like

Agh!

Clegg, you spineless, dead-eyed fuck!

I’ve never much trusted the Liberal Democrats in the past few years thanks to their general shifty uselessness, but for the party whose box I ticked the other day (if admittedly only in the hope they might put a dent in the two-party system) to sell us all out to the Tories… well, shit. Unless they manage to swing some proper electoral reform post-haste, fuck these guys.

Here’s a good election song – not one that’s been terribly relevant until today, but it popped up on my mp3 player recently and I thought it would make for an appropriate listen if poor old Gordon Brown collapsed with amphetamine psychosis or flipped out and lamped somebody. I guess this evening I offer it to him in a more celebratory frame of mind;

Mike Rep & The Quotas – I Resign

And it’s not big and it’s not clever, but here’s a collection of one of my favourite themed sub-sets of songs for Nick Clegg;

Labels: 8 Tracks, impotent rage, Mike Rep and the Quotas, politics

Blah, Blah, Blah.

So I was going to wait until we got a decision on who's in charge of the country before writing a new post, but I'm bored now.

So, seriously, how great are Shonen Knife?

The chorus of that song has been playing in my head continuously since I watched the video three days ago, which really shouldn't come as a surprise, given my history.

When I saw Shonen Knife at The Windmill last year, they played a new song about barnacles. Yeah, that's right, barnacles.

Naoko said that she admired the tenacity of barnacles in clinging on to rocks and so forth. The song went;

"Barnacle
HEY!
Barnacle
HEY!
This is a song about the barnacle!"

Shonen Knife are fucking brilliant.

I suppose at this point I could heave in some unwieldy metaphor comparing Gordon Brown to a great big barnacle or something, but... let's just not.

Labels: politics, Shonen Knife, spacefiller, The Ramones, videos

THE RAMONE MANIFESTO.

(Brought to you via Flaming Pablum, and this ILX thread.)

Things The Ramones did want to do: Be your boyfriend, sniff some glue, dance, be a good boy, Carbona, be well, have something to do, have some fun, have some kicks, get some chicks, be sedated, live.

Things The Ramones did NOT want to do: Walk around with you, be learned, be tamed, go down to the basement, be a pinhead no more, be taught to be no fool, live this life anymore, be buried in a pet semetary, fight tonight, grow up.

Things The Ramones could not, would not, or did not do: Be, care, give you anything, make it on time, care about history, know why she wrote that letter, go surfing 'cause its twenty below, let it happen, seem to make you theirs, control themselves.

Things The Ramones did do: Make a living by pickin' a banana, serve as green berets in Vietnam, go out west where they belonged, swallow their pride, know your name, know your game, remember you, want you around, go mental, be affected, live on Chinese rocks, hate the teachers and the principal, watch Get Smart on TV, want the airwaves, want everything, sit in their room (humming a sickening tune), think of you (everytime they ate vegetables), believe in miracles, love you.

Things The Ramones told you to do: Shut it up, beat on a brat with a baseball bat, ring up the FBI to find out if their baby's alive, eat that rat, give them shock treatment.

Things The Ramones warned you about doing: Shutting it up, killing that girl, talking to commies, opening that door.

Things The Ramones did not like and were against: politics, communists, games, fun, anyone, Jesus freaks, circus geeks, summer, spring, sex, drugs, waterbugs, playing ping pong, the Viet Cong, Burger King, anything. Also crummy stuff.

Things The Ramones wondered about: why you want to walk around with them, why things are always this way, if you've heard about the bird, what you want to talk to them for, if you remember rock n roll radio.

Things you didn't do for The Ramones: come close, mean anything to them.

Things The Ramones would do next time: listen to their hearts.

In my head, I always vote Ramone.

Labels: politics, The Ramones