So, Uh...

I was going to stack up this blog with lots more singles reviews over the next few weeks, but somehow none of them got finished, and I forgot to take account of the fact that I'm now on holiday in Wales, and don't have any singles with me, or a record player.

Hmm...

What's that you say, internet?

An absolutely astounding video of the late Rob Tyner of the MC5 rocking the fuck out on an electric autoharp...?

Testify!

Labels: awesomeness, lameness, MC5, Rob Tyner, things of interest, videos

And Also...



This new blog looks right up my street.

Labels: comics, Josie and the Pussycats, punk, things of interest, weblog round-ups

SINGLES APOCALYPSE:
March – June 2010, Part # 1

My 45s habit has been getting pretty chronic recently, so plenty more of these to come.

The Bitters – East b/w Foreign Knives
(Captured Tracks)

The Bitters are a lo-fi pop type projected helmed by The Young Governor, also of Fucked Up. This particular single is kinda old – they’ve done an album and no doubt a shedload of other stuff subsequently – but I only just got it.

And… well I dunno man, I’d love to tell you I love The Bitters, but there’s something real off-putting (bitter, perchance?) about what they do. Strung out female vox, cavernous, weary sounds, no memorable tunes on the horizon. Captured Tracks have put out a bunch of great stuff over the past few years, and will put out a bunch more no doubt, but in between times I fear the label is suffering from a highly specific aesthetic malaise into which this neatly falls.

Listening to The Bitters puts me in mind of Royal Trux, minus the classic rock fixation, and the humour and the guts. And like those more distressed Trux outbursts, the best thing you can say about them is that they pose some uncomfortable questions for their listeners. Like: is there is some kind of hidden value within this music that the smart kids are picking up on but I am missing, something that would convince people to keep on making it, and labels to release it? Or is it actually just a load of crap? Answers on a postcard with a picture of something gross and dreary on the front.

But, pffff, wouldn’t you know it – listening to the single again as I write this, I’m starting to get into it a bit more. “East”, at least, is pretty decent, with some crisp drumming, some good, weird noises in the middle and a pleasantly melodramatic, almost goth-y, feel as the noise builds up towards the end. Not bad.

I dunno… bloody music. I’m always patting it on the head and letting it go when I should be giving it a right telling off. Some critic I am.

http://www.myspace.com/bittersband
http://capturedtracks.com/

Brilliant Colors – Walk Into the World
(Germs of Youth)

I may have ripped on the other recent Brilliant Colors single, but rest assured, I like this one a lot better.

Maybe that has something to do with the fact I’ve seen the band live since then, and perhaps better understand where they’re coming from. They were sweet, and reserved, and somewhat wary on stage. The guitarist played a very cheap looking strat copy with the cover of The Feelies first album pasted on the back, and… in there is the kernel of what you need to know really.

Refusing to play up to either the distorto fizz blast of their album or the shaky acousticism of some of their singles, Brilliant Colors played tightly focussed, heavily rhythmic music, imaginative but not at all showy about it, with an appreciation of the way their instruments gel together that betrays a wealth of practice and deliberation rare indeed in the field of current garage/punk rock.

Like a determined kid spending eight hours on a single pencil drawing in art lessons, what they do is extremely simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth working on, polishing ‘til every line shines.

They were brilliant in short, and, listening with fresh ears, that’s the music I hear on this European tour 7”.

Mine is number 10 of 300, and at the time of writing they are still adventuring ‘round the wilds of the UK, presumably with a few boxes left. GO GET.

http://www.myspace.com/brilliantcolorssanfrancisco
http://www.myspace.com/germsofyouth

Burning Yellows – Urinal Cakes b/w Drought
(HoZac)

Startling new sounds here from HoZac, you might be tempted to think, but sounds can only really get *so* startling when they sound like the tepid shiftwork of some guys raised on the same Sonic Youth and MBV records I was, y’know?

It’s not dreadful by any means, but… shit, what can I tell you – the A side here sounds like a mid-period Television Personalities track played backwards. The B side sounds like Stereolab if they were born in 1988 and make a big show of not giving a fuck. Either could be the opening section of a more interesting long-form drone/jam, but both end before anything worth reporting happens.

A big SHRUG from the peanut gallery here I’m afraid.

I love ya HoZac, but there are cheaper and more enjoyable ways than this to block out the neighbours for five minutes.

http://www.myspace.com/burningyellows
http://www.hozacrecords.com/

The Cave Weddings – The Last Time
(Bachelor)

Now here’s a sad story; I popped by the Cave Weddings myspace page a couple of weeks back to have a few more listens to “The Last Time” and see if they’d got the 7” out yet, and…. The Cave Weddings myspace page no longer exists. Falling back on a google search, this brief interview with Erin from the band confirms the worst. The Cave Weddings, whose joyous guitar-pop I was giddily comparing to the sound of contentment and marital bliss last year, are no more.

It seems Erin finished off the b-side to this single herself with the help of some guys from the band The Midwest Beat, quietly sent the whole package to the excellent Bachelor label in Austria, and…. that’s all folks.

The good news is that “The Last Time” is still one of the flat-out greatest songs I’ve heard in years. Nothing special in terms of composition/innovation I suppose, but what can ya say? If we’re to take Billy Childish’s formula for what makes a great record – THE SONG, THE SOUND, THE PERFORMANCE – as gospel, well “The Last Time” is just one of those numbers that aces all three. Top of the class. Every time I hear it, it’s a rush, every time that lead guitar hook kicks in, I want to jump around. I must have listened to this song literally 50+ times when it was streaming on myspace, and finally having it on vinyl is a great thing. Taking it off the turntable hurts.

I guess the song’s rather downbeat lyric fits the circumstances of it’s release quite well, but that’s wholly accidental, and the scissor-kicking, power-pop exuberance of these drums and guitars bears no hint of malice. B-side “Never Never Know”, with Erin taking the lead vocal, is inevitably a slightly shakier affair, with the overdubbed bass and backing vox failing to really fill the space left by the absence of the band’s rich rhythm guitar sound. By anyone else’s standards it would be a great song, but it is by necessity the poor relation here.

So let us not shed a tear for The Cave Weddings – their legacy may only consist of eight songs split across two singles and a self-released CD, but they are eight of the most perfectly realised garage-pop songs you’ll ever hear, and I bet that somewhere they’ll still be gladdening hearts and making people dance decades from now. If only more of the world’s rock bands were as concise and considerate.

In the meantime, time to move on. Eric has a new LP as Eric & The Happy Thoughts coming soon on HoZac, and sounds like Erin’s getting some new stuff on the go in Milwaukee. Looking forward to it dudes.

http://www.bachelorrecords.com/

Labels: Brilliant Colors, Burning Yellows, singles reviews, The Bitters, The Cave Weddings

My First New Zealand Pop CD.



>> Download. <<
(90mb .zip file)

Sleevenotes:

The odd and beguiling sounds emanating from New Zealand, from the birth of the legendary Flying Nun label at dawn of the ‘80s onwards, have exerted a huge influence on the world of underground guitar pop and weirdo music in general over the past twenty five years. To see that, you only need look at the impressive rollcall of indie troops marshaled for the recent benefit concerts and album for scene mainstay/Tall Dwarfs member/venerable four-track wizard Chris Knox, who has sadly suffered a stroke.

Due to poor distribution, a lack of overseas publicity and the virtual invisibility of many of the scene’s key recording though, the NZ music has remained a pretty ‘cult’ concern over the years – the sole province of those nerdy enough to actually seek out scattered background info and pay inflated prices and international shipping for weird records by scrappy bands, sound unheard.

For the rest of us, the internet has helped a hell of a lot of course, with most of the key Flying Nun bands being widely featured on assorted shady and not-so-shady download blogs, allowing instant access to those of us who’ve heard the hallowed names of The Clean and The Verlaines being tossed around for years, but have never actually heard the music. Long story short: the record nerds were right, IT’S GREAT, and I’ve been consuming as much as I can get my hands on over the past couple of years.

Mentioning this to otherwise well-informed people now and then, I’ve sometimes had response like “wow, there are bands in New Zealand..?”, and this makes me sad. Frankly, anyone who enjoys the work of all the classic American/British indie-rock bands from the ‘80s/’90s really deserves the chance to hear this music, and will almost certainly get a real kick out of it, I hope.

So obviously this is a mix CD I’ve thrown together of some of my favourite Flying Nun/NZ tracks. Even though I’ve started with a few of the scene-defining hits, the emphasis is definitely on “my favourite”, as opposed to “the best/most representative”, so if you like what you hear here there are still whole (kaleidoscope) worlds left to explore.

I’ve started out with some of the defining moments from most of the essential early Flying Nun bands, but things get a bit weirder in the second half of the disc where I’ve included a bunch of my favourite tracks that originated on the Xpressway label (largely pulled from their excellent “Making Losers Happy” singles anthology). The early Xpressway stuff I think presents a useful bridge between the more pop-orientated Flying Nun sound and New Zealand’s equally fertile loner/noise underground… but that’s another story that some of these cuts will hopefully give you a taste of.

I’d imagine any, er, Kiwi-heads (if you will) stumbling upon this post will be pretty outraged by the limited scope of my selections (Wot, no Gordons? No Bailterspace? Straightjacket Fits? 3Ds? Sneaky Feelings? Birds Nest Roys? Three Bats tracks and only one by Tall Dwarfs? etc), but again, I’ve gone for the stuff I like the best – make yr own comp and I’ll be glad to put up a link.

For the record, tunes reluctantly nixed for running time reasons included “Joe 90” by Bored Games, “ Venus Fly Trap” by Goblin Mix, Marie & The Atom, “Life Is Strange” by Tall Dwarfs, “Oncoming Day” by The Chills and something off the Toy Love album. I can’t really defend pushing that lot out in favour of squeezing in six Clean tracks… what can I tell you? I just really like The Clean. If you’ve not heard them before, hopefully you will too.

And if you do, why not show some love by doing the decent thing and buying their excellent “Mister Pop” album from last year, or the Chris Knox tribute comp, or that last Bats record, or whatever?

Images on the cover are taken from the pop video I still want to live in:



I can’t stress enough how brilliant and magical the songs on this CD are – please give them a listen.

Labels: Chris Knox, mixtapes, New Zealand, The Clean, The Verlaines

Ok, so for no reason whatsoever I’ve been catching up on a lot of ’77-era UK punk recently. Obviously there’s an absolute ton of more recent/relevant music that I’d promised myself I’d get around to writing up for the blog, but the hell with it, I’m grabbing bits of writing time as & when I can at the moment, and today I feel like talking about The Damned.

Traditionally of course, I’ve always been a solid American partisan when it comes to the tedious transatlantic punk debate. I’ve never thought the ‘Pistols and The Clash were worth a damn (their sole beneficial effect being to create an identifiable market/aesthetic that allowed thousands of much better bands to thrive), and beyond that what do I care what a bunch of spit-drenched oiks from, I dunno, Guildford or somewhere have to say on the matter when I’ve got the whole wonderful axis of Ramones/Velvets/Stooges/Dolls/PSG/Huskers/Flag/Threat/Minutemen/Replacements/Teenage Jesus/Zeros/Crime-etc-etc-etc to explore forever?

Obviously there ARE plenty of fun and/or interesting British bands from that era that I’ve always been into, but if I start running of those down here this will be a very long and dull post, and would The Damned stand for that? Hell NO! Point is, a lot of the big names in UK punk are still pretty much unknown to me, and, given my current preference for everything loud, fast and stupid, 2010 is proving a good opportunity to rectify that. Now let’s get on with it….

As a cultural presence, The Damned have always really bugged me.

For some reason they always seemed to be turning up on TV. Whenever it was time for the BBC to dig up the ol’ anglocentric history of punk thing for another go round, there they were clowning around on the Old Grey Whistle Test, making a mess, acting like louts and playing straight into the hands of all the musos who wanted to write off punk as a gimmicky bunch of crap. And then they’d always drag out Captain Sensible for a ‘quirky’ interview segment where he’d talk a bunch of arse about how they single-handedly destroyed the evil hegemony of two hour drum solos that we’re told ALL OTHER MUSIC consisted of in 1975 (I swear every time they do one of these documentaries, the drum solos get longer).

I remember hearing “Smash It Up” on the radio as a teenager, and even at age 16 thinking “what a stupid song – I bet these guys’ fans are a bunch of morons”. I guess I must have heard “New Rose” a bunch of times, but it never really grabbed me the way a big, rousing punk tune should – always sounded pretty weird and crappy and amelodic – b-team stuff by a buncha chancers who happened to be in the right place at the right time, or so I thought. None of the clear intent or fun or sense of purpose or blazing kick-assitude of The Ramones or Dead Kennedys or The MC5 here – just a tinny, raucous mess. Whatever.

As I’m finally starting to appreciate though, this is something like the best tinny, raucous mess ever; a tinny, raucous mess for the ages! The Damned’s songs do business like frantic series of exclamation points and punctuation outbursts, the musical equivalent of “!!!$&”£$>!#:@!!!!” in a cartoon speech bubble, the sound of a bunch of overgrown schoolboys hurtling forward trying to express something desperately important but without a clue in hell how to do it – a hilarious, confounding, stupid, hyperkinetic mess, beating it’s head against the wall and laughing.

Listening to “New Rose” with fresh ears, what a startling and mysterious thing it is. Perhaps the only record I’ve ever heard that manages to be unnervingly scary and brooding whilst also powering full steam ahead in cheerful 4/4 idiot rock mode. The way that that weird, top-heavy riff sorta keeps *almost* turning into a straight up Heartbreakers boogie, but keeps pulling back in the last few notes as the singing starts, perpetually frustrating itself and sabotaging the motorik-punk pleasure principle (that’s probably why I never liked it much back in the day). “I GOT A FEELING INSIDE OF ME / IT’S DARK AND STRANGE LIKE THE STORMY SEA!” Good grief, I know the singer’s a bit of a goth and everything, but what were these guys ON? It’s like The Damned tried to record a big, up-tempo love song that everyone would love as their first single… and when they listened back, it had all gone horribly wrong, turned into pimply hormonal carnage, haunted by the ghosts of Black Sabbath.

The whole existence of The Damned seems like a horrible, glorious mistake. I mean, they look like a bunch of random, poorly conceived characters that Hanna Barbara might have thrown together for a failed ‘punk’ update of Scooby Doo. They make ugly, ham-fisted, beserk music that tries to be enjoyable, high energy rock n’ roll and KINDA succeeds, but basically ends up sounding like an explosion in a confused 17 year old boy’s head. They’re quite famous, but nobody’s ever gonna write a poncey book about how they were influenced by situationism. The Damned never were and never will be cool. How can you not love ‘em?

“Damned Damned Damned” is an absolute riot from start to finish – Brian James’ guitar-playing seems to lunge around in a constant temper tantrum as he tries to throw in ‘chops’ to assert his musician-who-can-play status at every opportunity, wrestling all the while with an amp set up like a giant, farting trash compactor, stumbling into moments of beautiful brutality than inadvertently invent Greg Ginn three or four years early. Rat Scabies’ drumming sounds like a constant, rolling headache that almost buries the rest of the band, and I still don’t know WHERE Dave Vanian is coming from most of the time.

He’s a very strange frontman. I’m not sure where he got the idea from that he’d like to be the singer in a band, but he doesn’t seem to like being the centre of attention much. He mumbles through “Born To Kill” sounding like he’d rather just have a bit of a snooze whilst the rest of the group go off like human fireworks behind him, and somehow he gets away with it. He could be singing about buying shoes on half these songs, or going to the cinema, or stalking virgins through the streets at midnight – I have no idea, but whatever he’s on about it all fades into irrelevance by the time the rest of the band burst in for a yelped, incoherent chorus. The whole album is wild anyhow, and I’m ashamed that I’d not bothered listening to it until now.

The other song on there I really like is “See Her Tonight” – you know the one; “SHE’S SO COOL!!! I’M GONNA SEE HER TONIGHT!!!” – a song so breathlessly enthusiastic it almost loses it’s grip on musical syntax altogether and just explodes into a monkey-like shriek of excitement. Listening to it, I imagine the male protagonist as some supremely dorky teenage amalgam of all the members of The Damned, bouncing off the walls of his bedroom in anticipation. ‘HER’ I imagine being a slightly older, more sophisticated girl, like an arts graduate or a photographer or something, who maybe led him on a bit cos he seemed like a goofy kid who’d be fun to have around, but now deeply regrets it as she sits there trying to have a smoke and listen to Public Image as he literally hops around in front of her wearing a dirty raincoat, army boots, crazy new wave sunglasses and, like, Bermuda shorts or something, blathering on relentlessly, overjoyed by the fact that he’s ACTUALLY HAVING A (one-sided) CONVERSATION with this SMART, COOL LADY!

What a great song – it makes me laugh out loud whilst walking down the street. What a great band – it sounds like they had no idea what they were doing but they just fucking DID IT, and it doesn’t get much more punk rock than that.

Labels: punk rock, The Damned

Modern Witch – Disaro CD-R

I have no idea who is behind Modern Witch (man? woman? men? women? ROBOTS?), never mind the what or the where or the why of this record’s existence. But with a name like MODERN WITCH and a cover like that, I’m buying.

Going by the cover alone, I’m thinking: like if Marianne Faithful had recorded ‘Modern English’ when she was still hanging out with Kenneth Anger? And if the music within doesn’t have the grace to follow up that suggestion, that’s ok, the key point being made here is that this is a recording for and by people who understand such distinctions, and who surely didn’t create that impression by accident.

As Modern Witch hissed from the computer speakers (I may have my EQ set to favour “explodes from..”, but stuff like is made to hiss), I was apprehensive, thinking I might have been suckered into some kind of sleazy, disembodied creep-hop, ala Salem or whatever. One thing’s for sure – those who like their music to sound invigorating, to convey sense of hard work and bonhomie and steadfast, stand-up decency… those people will not be taken to a happy place by this one. The atmosphere here is glassy-eyed fashionista lethargy of the highest order. Real “let-the-machines-do-their-thing-man-I-can’t-summon-the-energy-to-move-my-arm” vibes. Thankfully though, further listening reveals a lot more warmth and interest here than such affected laziness would tend to suggest, for those willing to look beyond it at least.

Just the facts ma’am: Modern Witch focuses predominantly on the familiar (some may say deathlessly over-familiar) combo of ‘80s horror soundtrack synths and low-battery drum machine chug. Unsettling tempo/fidelity shifts, fuzzy neon zapping noises, dictaphone street sounds and police radio noise come and go as required. Some tracks are content to skulk around in the abstract like decaying library music cues, whilst about half the album more fully manifests into the form of brutally repetitious electro-punk songs fronted by a dissolute female vocalist.

More pointless ‘80s pastiche drek foregrounding cheap signifier sounds over content would seem an easy diagnosis – too easy if you ask me.

Let me put it this way:

The British ‘hauntology’ crew, (primarily consisting of men who were growing up just as the odd idyll of post-war Britain was giving way to the ugly ‘“ realities “‘ of the Thatherite ‘80s), have long been building their own aesthetic out of attempts to claw back a glimpse of that just-out-of-reach childhood wonderland, eventually using music and album artwork to build a rich alternate past whose possibilities carry an appeal beyond that of mere dull retro-fetishism.

In doing so, the Ghostbox and Mordant guys have created music that works off an open ticket of subtle cultural recognition, as opposed to brute musical content, and they have been lucky enough to see their efforts widely acknowledged by critics and bloggers of, by and large, the same generation and cultural background – those who understand the cues and codes.

So then, why should we not grant the same liberties to younger American artists, working on a timeline shifted forward approximately a decade? People who whom the ‘80s mark the beginning, rather than the end, of the holy mystery?

Creepy and lifeless as it may initially sound, I think that a hell of a lot of attention and imagination has been invested in this Modern Witch record, and a wealth of effective and chilling moments are the result… if you’re ready/able to pick up on ‘em.

Why has “In Your Eyes” – a hypnotic disco blissout that could have been pulled from a Larry Levan DJ set – been deliberately muffled to the extent that we could be listening to it through a brick wall in the alleyway next to the club? And what are we to say to the dot matrix printer that rampages in far higher fidelity over the end of the track?

What dark secrets lie behind “Not The Only One”, in which an emotionless narrative of “buying food items” with a unnamed an co-conspirator is paired with an impossibly sinister Zombie Flesh Eaters backing track, while the singsong chorus states “I was not the only one / who believed what you said to me”?

“I Can’t Live In A Living Room” is the ‘hit’, swaying closer to punkoid reality by way of sounding like Niagara from Destroy All Monsters fronting a New York claustrophobia-wracked version of The Screamers, but even here they’re very knowingly playing to a crowd for whom descriptions like that actually make sense, almost DARING you to mute your enjoyment long enough to call foul on such internet-era retro-plagiarism. I don’t wanna do that though, cos the song f-ing rules.

And if the more jarring, fragmentary blurts of sound here sound like they could have been pulled straight off the soundtrack to “Liquid Sky”, then similarly, one is dared to recall how that film’s producers had to queue up for the chance to wrestle with a gigantic, public access synthesizer to realise their impossible dream of a twisted fashionista future, whereas Modern Witch presumably had a pretty chilled out time plugging some cool bits of old gear she/he/they/it got off ebay straight into the laptop and letting rip.

Perhaps *because* of such easy availability, the idea of some untarnished progression and innovation in pop music has seemed pretty dumb to me ever since people got bored of listening to exploding-harddrive post-Aphex Twin music a few years back. What else have you got in the future box? Atari Teenage Riot are getting back together to do nostalgia shows – it’s hilarious. Thirty three years after “no future”, is it any wonder that the most fun way to approach the future is to reimagine a new past and project it forward? Will I break some sort of record if I pose any more rhetorical questions?

And furthermore, the early ‘80s seem a particularly effective battleground for such shenanigans – a period in which the scary proclamations of the original Italian futurists seemed to finally trickle down into popular culture, as people started consciously making their music and movies rich with FUTURE. Even today, bands essentially playing Joy Division-style post-punk get lauded by The Guardian for their bleak, futurist vision, even as their reliance on before-we-were-born nostalgia means they might as well be doing a set of Hollies covers.

By contrast, Modern Witch represents a prime vehicle for some more worthwhile re-enactment. Like the British hauntology records, all the jumping off points for a complete sensory experience are right there in the sound. Close your eyes and the visuals will come.

Imagine if in 1981, John Carpenter hadn’t made ‘Escape From New York’, but had instead headed in the opposite direction, making a low budget, experimental feature about anorexic New York models who conduct weird occult rituals in an abandoned porno theatre…? Not that I don’t love ‘Escape From New York’ with every fibre of my being, but… that would have been pretty cool, huh?

Well THIS IS THE SOUNDTRACK TO THAT FILM, as reassembled by obsessive fans taping the audio off old VHS prints.

Seriously - it could have happened. And if enough of us dim the lights (maybe whilst projecting ‘Car Cemetery’ and ‘New York Ripper’ on top of each other on the wall?), drink in some Modern Witch and hope really, really hard… IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.

http://www.myspace.com/dickcavettsmodernwitch

Labels: album reviews, Modern Witch