Witch Cult Boogie:
Halloween Mix CD 2010

(Cross-posted with Breakfast in the Ruins )

Here without further ado is thee third annual Stereo Sanctity/Breakfast in the Ruins Halloween mix CD.




>> Download link. <<

Some notes:

i) Not the most imaginative cover art ever realised perhaps, but gimme a break – drawing these covers is my only chance to get the crayons out all year these days.

ii) If I’d thought it through a bit more, I could have called this comp “Season of the Witch”, which would have tied in perfectly with my preferred witch theme, and the fact it’s, y’know, my THIRD Halloween CD, AND I could have put Vanilla Fudge’s Manson family nightmare rendition of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” on it, which could have gone right after Mike Rep & The Quota’s “Donovan’s Brain”… then I could have added some dialogue and sounds from the George Romero movie of the same name, and the whole thing would have just been, like, COMPLETELY thematically consistent!

iii) But I didn’t think of any of that in time, so it’s just a bunch of horror related songs and pieces of audio that don’t really have much to do with each other at all, although hopefully the whole thing at least flows nicely… lots of soundtrack extracts and instrumentals this year, and overall the tone seems to have emerged as slightly more, um, genuinely scary/creepy, as opposed to comedic, than previous instalments, perhaps..?

iv) Somehow, I’ve also somehow forgotten to include any Electric Wizard – I always mean to. But I am going to see them play for the first time tomorrow night! Yeah! I hope they play “The Barbarian”!

v) Previous instalments can be found here and here. I don’t know whether the links are still active, but just give me a shout if you want a re-up.

vi) Disappointingly, there is little or no actual boogie on this CD.

Happy Halloween everybody!

Labels: Electric Wizard, halloween, horror, mixtapes

Quotes of the Week.

Actually quotes of last week, but current affairs got in the way.

“We were playing a festival in Dublin the other week. There was this other group like, warming up in the next sort of chalet, and they were terrible. I said 'shut them cunts up' and they were still warming up, so I threw a bottle at them. The bands said 'that's the Sons of Mumford' or something, 'they're number five in charts!' I just thought they were a load of retarded Irish folk singers.”

- Mark E. Smith, shining a light in these days of darkness (any offense caused to actual retarded Irish folk singers notwithstanding).



“Pure Joy! I can’t be unhappy while listening to this. Here’s every crazy smile, or hilarious dance -- the whole thing bucks and twitches with delight and energy! And as for the SOUNDS, the concept of modern high-fidelity has to be called into question when you hear these old 78s on a cheap, old, valve mono amp -- through a 4-inch speaker. Wooden instruments sound wooden and varnished, the vibration in the trombone brays like brass hammered by air, and there’s a UNITY OF EAR I find hard to describe. If a microphone is an ear-analogue, perhaps it’s a relief to only have a couple.”

- Alastair Galbraith on “Tiger Rag” by Kid Ory & His Creole Jazz Band.

I’ve always liked Galbraith’s approach to sound and recording (there’s a great bit in an interview with him in the Tape Op book, where they ask him what kind of reverb he was using on a particular track, and he’s like “huh, what? I was just singing down a drainpipe..”), but anyone who does a top ten for Dusted and picks a Major Bloodnok skit from The Goon Show has my eternal admiration.

Labels: Alastair Galbraith, Jeffrey Lewis, Kid Ory and his Creole Jazz Band, Mark E Smith, quotes, The Fall

Moe Tucker Update.

A new interview with Maureen Tucker from the St Louis Riverfront Times.

As suspected, her current views are pretty much a dictionary definition of ‘cranky’, but far distant enough from dumbhead conservatism for us to let this one lie, I hope. If nothing else, hearing her let rip with a kinda scattergun attack on the entire world is pretty entertaining;

“To be honest, I never paid attention to what the hell was going on. My always voting Democrat was the result of that. My philosophy was and is all politicians are liars, bums and cheats. I make decisions on an issue by issue basis. I'm far more of an independent than a conservative or liberal. I don't agree with all of either side, and I think anyone who claims to is either a fool or a damn liar.”

I’ll go that far with ya Moe, and let’s agree to disagree on the Donkey Museum.

Labels: Maureen Tucker, politics, weirdness

Deathblog:
Ari Up
(1962 – 2010)

(artist’s impression)

If I were digesting this news in a leisurely fashion in the wood-panelled study of my dreams, rather than choking it down on a freezing, hungover morning at work, counting down the hours until my employers decide who to start sacking, I could hold forth for days about how amazing The Slits were.

Their recorded output up to and including the second LP is pure amazingness, exploding in every direction – a clusterfuck of amazing. Early Peel sessions and live cuts are some of the best punk rock ever laid down, “Cut” is an eternal mindblower, “Return of..” is off on some other brave, weird journey entirely.

Whatever else you may think of them, the Slits were bad-ass. Just watch the bit in Derek Jarman’s “Jubilee” where they turn up for about twenty seconds, wrecking a parked car like apes at a safari park. In a better world, that movie would have been a documentary, and they would have starred in it. Nothing Jarman and his cast came up with quite matches the feral chaos of that one scene.

I suppose it was inevitable that there needed to be a girl gang counterbalance to first wave UK/London punk rock. Whoever got the job, I’d probably love them by default. But that they were terrifyingly young and violent, representing the next generation, ready to purge the grumpy post-pub-rock punkers (Johnny Rotten was Ari Up’s step-dad, for chrissake; she was, like, FIFTEEN or something when she wrote the lyrics to all those classic songs), was and is a fantastic happenstance.

That they were completely fucking brilliant and left The Clash et al in the shade was even better luck, and all four (later three) original Slits deserve eternal credit on that score.

That they were also incredibly weird is the icing on the cake, and we’ve got Ari Up, one of the strangest and most divisive front(wo)men in history, to thank for that.

Poorly served on Youtube beyond that never-quite-satisfactory “Typical Girls” clip you’ve probably seen a dozen times already, here’s a quick Sendspace greatest hits;

Vindictive (Peel Session)

Fuck yeah!

Shoplifting (“Cut”)

Best Song Ever: final round contender.
Best Scream Ever: winner.

Ping Pong Affair (“Cut”)

Precocious, hilarious teenage wisdom.

Difficult Fun (“Return of the Giant Slits”)

What the hell IS this..? Instinctive, experimental music; destination: unknown, but beyond bargepole reach of your puny filing system.

Fade Away (New Age Steppers w/ Ari Up)

Sounding more righteous than ever just at the minute.

Labels: Ari Up, deathblog, The Slits

Napalm Death –
Rare Tracks 86-88 7”
(white label)

Just like the cover says: a bootleg of unreleased studio takes, split EP tracks and live cuts recorded by the “Scum side one” and “From Enslavement..” line-ups of Napalm Death. 15 tracks on a 45rpm 7”.

If you know the score, you won’t gain much from reading further. What more needs to be said? I guess I’m aiming this one at the uninitiated. I don’t mean that in a snobbish sorta fashion, but let’s face it, I don’t write about extreme metal much round here, and chances are there is a significant portion of what I laughably call my readership for whom the idea of listening to Napalm Death would seem an outlandish, nay abhorrent, suggestion. This one goes out to them.

Ahem.

As my tastes have drifted back toward heavier punk/metal recently, I’ve been playing early Napalm Death a lot, and it never ceases to leave me cowering, electrified and awed, if you’re able to triangulate some combination of those varied reactions. Napalm Death is not of my era, not of my culture, and alien to my social circumstances. Nobody (except possibly John Peel) has ever told me I should listen to Napalm Death, and yet I do.

Well I remember, many years ago, when a friend of mine bought “From Enslavement To Obliteration” as part of some ‘three LPs for £5’ deal. We took it home and put it on. We thought it might be funny, if you can believe that. Needless to say, “From Enslavement To Obliteration” is about as funny as cancer, and at least half as harrowing. Birthed in a whole other universe from the camp bombast of ‘Maiden or Venom’s gonzo Satanism, or indeed from the Anal Cunt/Agoraphobic Nosebleed school of goofball grindcore that infested our schoolboy brains through the ‘90s, the suffocating, cathartic violence of the early ND records has existed to wipe the grin from the faces of “lol, metal” chancers like me, every day since they were recorded.

Even more unsettling was a quick glance at the lyrics sheet, revealing a complete absence of the kind of gore and corpse-fucking I had assumed bands like Napalm Death were supposed to bellow about, their unintelligible outpourings instead forming an expressionistic response to the agonising frustrations of global injustice, with a directness and fury that put most of our socially conscious ‘punk’ heroes to shame.

It was all a bit too much to deal with back then. I didn’t really have much of a feeling for truly malevolent music, how ever much I might have fronted. 2010, and the time seems right, don’t ask me why.

I know this isn’t exactly an original observation, but the more I listen, the clearer it becomes that Napalm Death were less a metal band, more an incredibly intense punk band. I mean, they draw on some metal background for sure, but only the bits that really matter – the lingering post-industrial nihilism of Black Sabbath, the screaming adrenalin overload of Slayer. And who, seeking to fuck people up with extreme rock music in the mid-80s, would not draw upon these things? This is the music of men smart and angry enough to know you’re not going to get very bloody far taking your cues from, I dunno, the Exploited or some shit, and that it doesn’t matter what your hair looks like or what kind of trousers you wear either. In spirit and overall emotional heft, they are closer to Black Flag than anything else – music that foregrounds full spectrum HEAVINESS (in the hippie sense of a ‘heavy cat’) over any genre bullshit. Only difference is, ND had a bigger war in mind, with a lot more casualties. They had a copy of “Reign In Blood” too. More of a lightning rocket attack than ‘Flag’s noble trudge through the trenches. Just keep that in mind, ready your neck muscles and drop the needle.

The very nature of this music and its culture – the extremely short songs, constantly fragmenting line-ups, labyrinthine discography – makes it an effort for anyone without nerd-level scene commitment to get a handle on precisely what the hell’s going on over the course of this 7”. As such, I’ll avoid tripping myself up by trying to identify the specific musicians on different bits, and instead just say that there’s nothing on this disc that suggests the music is anything but the work of a single, unified force, drilled to the point of desperate perfection. The dedication it must take for a band to essentially swap their whole line-up halfway through an LP (as ND did on “Scum”) and yet maintain such a unique and demanding sound is mind-boggling. Where did they find TWO guys who could play bass like that? Two guys who could si - uh, make noises with their throat – like that?

I’ve listened to plenty of doom, but I’ve never heard bass that swings so deep, so cthonic as the sound the guy is getting on the studio cuts on this record – ultimate bass cliché I know, but it’s like being hit in the gut by a chunk of flying masonry. Standing in the room where that sound was happening must have really fucking hurt, a point that’s not lost on the vocalist (Lee Dorrian I assume? Did they have another guy before him?) – twenty five years of absurd metal ‘vo-kills’ later, and still no one sounds like that – it’s like someone’s tearing his fucking soul out. I don’t need to tell you about the drumming – you can guess. Guitar sucks the whole sound into itself like a vortex – indescribable fucking distorto-wall/harmelodic whammy nightmare shit, like you might compare to Ron Asheton or Kerry King were the tone not so cruelly, chaotically vile.

Some song titles: “Your Achievement”, “Deceiver”, “Multinational Corporations, pt. 2”, “Retreat To Nowhere”, “Understanding”.

In short, this disc is a sightseeing tour of a couple of years in which one (or, weirdly, perhaps several) of the most deadly serious, unstoppable, flat-out terrifying rock bands ever to exist were performing under the name “Napalm Death”.

Unless you’re a fan of generic, midfield Death Metal (which is fine), the Napalm Death brand has been creatively redundant since probably about the dawn of the ‘90s. Such is the way with ‘heritage’ punk/metal bands. Somewhere in the record racks though, these guys are still there, ready to play songs for you:


No hurry or anything, but one day you might feel like letting them in.

Labels: METAL, Napalm Death, singles reviews

My Teenage Stride –
Creep Academy b/w Cast Your Own Shadow
(Flea Circus)

More bloody indie rock for you. I know you love it really.

Blind-buying a record with an awesome/WTF cover such as this one, photocopied on folded green paper by a tiny, untested label (Flea Circus – “itching to please you” says their logo!) is clearly a gamble. I mean, I laughed and threw it in the 'buy pile' as soon as I saw it. Wouldn’t you? But at the same time, I realise there’s maybe a one in four chance this’ll be the best band I’ve heard in my life; otherwise, chances are I’m treading into “let us never speak of it again” territory. A “Drink Up Buttercup situation”, as we like to call it round here… or at least we would if I ever talked out loud to anyone about this crap.

Upon further examination, I was disappointed to learn that “My Teenage Stride” is the band, and “Creep Academy” is the song. That’s not the way round I would have done it.

But do I win? Well… it’s a close call, but I’m gonna go with YES. Not that this is thee best new band I’ve heard, like, today or whatever, but that’s ok - I don’t think they’re trying to be. Not a mindblower, but My Teenage Stride (god, that name) do jaunty, agreeable sorta business that people with even the slightest investment in nerdy, white-boy American guitar music would be hard-pressed to hate.

“Creep Academy” is the livelier, more insistent number here, and, oddly, the one I don’t really get on with. ‘S ok, but indistinguishable form any number of sloppy, college town home recordists circa ’94-’96 really. Nice but undistinguished. If there’s a shiny hook in there somewhere, they’re careful not to tread on it.

“Cast Your Own Shadow” is the real doozy - a sweet, unforced hug of a song that resets the clock on all my jaded, cultural context-bound griping. Sounding like a bit more of a one-man effort, a ‘Son of a Gun’ thump and shimmery ascending keyboard riff help frame a lovably hesitant vocal that does it’s best to hit all the right notes in an I-hope-nobody’s-listening sort of way. The title’s allusion to Beat Happening seems entirely appropriate, more emotionally-speaking than musically, as My Teenage Stride evoke memories of a long gone golden age of wistful, big-hearted lo-fi self expression – kinda like Grant’s songs, or like Tommy Jay, or Julie Doiron, or probably an endless amount of secret stuff we’ve not heard, sitting quietly in cupboards or on harddrives, because it’s makers never felt the need to shout or make a fuss about it.

Actually though, music-wise, this sounds more like The Pains OBPAH than anything - uncannily so in fact, although I’m sure it’s not deliberate. Song construction, keyboard tone, rhythm, general feeling – these bands are drinking of the same well. Like, imagine if you suddenly discovered the Pains had home-recorded rough demos of all their tunes with a whole lot of heart and quirk, and you subsequently never felt the need to play their studio output again..? This song sounds kinda like that. It’s a GREAT song. My faith in men with glasses singing to themselves in sheds and hoping nobody can hear is hereby renewed.

http://www.myspace.com/myteenagestride
http://myspace.com/fleacircusrecords

Labels: My Teenage Stride, singles reviews

Pierre Raph –
Jeunes Filles Impudiques 7” EP
(Finders Keepers)

Is this what it’s come to, Stereo Sanctity? Reviewing porn soundtracks?

Um, apparently.

As a teaser for their forthcoming extravaganza of Jean Rollin soundtrack reissues, Finders Keepers here present a 33rpm seven inch disc of music and sounds from 1974’s “Jeunes Filles Impudiques”, aka “Schoolgirl Hitchhikers”, the first of numerous ‘adult films’ made by Rollin under his Michel Gentil pseudonym to help pay the rent and finance his own, more personal films through the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Composer Pierre Raph (who also worked with Rollin on “Requiem for a Vampire”, “Les Demoniaques” and “La Rose de Fer”) provides the music, whilst a lively cast and some English language dubbing artistes provide the, uh, other stuff.

Side A kicks off with “Gilda & Gunshots”, a giddy confection of double-speed rock drumming, distorted whip sound effects (I guess they’re supposed to be the gunshots?) and orgasmic gasps and shrieks, warming up into a startling runaway train prog excursion with the addition of muted trumpet and a sinister, minimal bass line. Play it daily, and let housemates/neighbours know you mean business.

Track two is a forgettable bit of ‘sensual’ renaissance faire guff, but I like how it’s warm and fuzzy and crackly as if it were taped straight off a battered mono film print (which I guess it quite possibly was).

“It’s time for you to know that Jackie and I have, let’s say, a very… intimate relationship, and act unblushingly when we are together”, says the voice of the same woman I’m sure I’ve heard dubbing the female leads in dozens of Euro horror movies at the start of side two. Fair enough. I act unblushingly when I hear the dreamy combination of ‘Sketches of Spain’ horns, owl hoots and an incessantly repeated Hank Marvin-style guitar phrase that follows. Things wrap up with a jolly tune that sounds like the theme from an uncharacteristically light-hearted Spaghetti Western in which bandits probably grin straight to camera and dance with old ladies a lot, and we’re out.

Bravo, Finders Keepers!

And if you like the sounda that, the full soundtrack album for one of my all-time favourite movies “Le Frisson des Vampires”, as performed by forgotten French acid-rock combo Acanthus, is in the shops now, and by my reckoning is more essential than food.

http://www.finderskeepersrecords.com/

Labels: Finders Keepers, singles reviews, soundtracks, weirdness

Something More Cheerful, As Promised.



It's ages since I did one of these, but lack of interest's not gonna stop me!

Tune in via the embedded box above for happy hits from The Nervebreakers, Elli et Jacno, Overnight Lows, The International Submarine Band, Ego Summit and *more*.

Labels: 8 Tracks

Moe Tucker Bummer.

Well this was a pretty dispiriting thing to wake up to on a Monday morning.

Apparently, sixty six year old Georgia resident Maureen Tucker thinks taxes are too high, and is ‘furious’ that America is drifting toward socialism.

I don’t usually feel the need to make a fuss about this musician or that getting old and cranky, but this is a stone drag for me, given that Maureen Tucker is one of my all-time, list-topping musical heroes, and particularly in view of all those great, righteous songs she sang on her solo records about how much she resented having to work at Walmart to feed her family, and getting screwed over by bosses and corporate double-talk.

I guess her legitimate frustrations with the sorry lot handed to the working class in America must have found some slightly different outlets in the fifteen years or so since she made those records.

It’s a bit like if Jonathan Richman shaved his head and started punching people, or if Fred Cole signed to Vice, or…. hang on, scratch that last one. : (

Quoth this guy in the comments on the Guardian piece on this;

Sorry to disappoint you guys, but Yes, this is indeed "The" Mo Tucker from the Velvet Underground. […] I am a huge VU fan, and sadly, it is her in this video. I am actually the person who posted it on Youtube. […] I still love Moe for her contributions to music, her kindness to a fan on 2 separate occasions, and I can only hope that she, like so many others, are being misled into voting against their own interests. Love you Moe; don't be fooled.

Indeed.

It’s funny isn’t it, how so many right-thinking people’s worldviews seem to go completely haywire when they hit sixty-ish..? It always seems ridiculously patronising to going around telling people over twice your age what they should be thinking (maybe they know something we don’t, for chrissake), but c’mon Moe – forty years as one of the coolest people on earth and suddenly you’re hanging out with these swine? Pull yourself together.

Will try to post something a bit more cheery for tomorrow.

Labels: bad news, impotent rage, Maureen Tucker, politics

Chiltonism III:
In Touch With All The Chicks.


>> Alex Chilton – Shakin’ the World <<

Writing about Alex Chilton’s early solo work, it is easy – TOO easy – to end up portraying it as a punkoid rejection of the flawless power-pop he helped create on the first two Big Star records.

That’s the version that’ll go down in legend, but just like any other generalisation you might try to nail to this man’s supremely weird career, it ain’t quite so.

Chilton didn’t abandon the power-pop calling after the SisterLovers holocaust – indeed, recordings like “Shakin' The World” (also found on “Dusted in Memphis”) make me think he understood it better than anyone.

Y’see, what killed power-pop as a viable creative force stone-dead almost immediately after it’s ’79-’80 christening at the font of Greg Shaw & Bomp! Magazine wasn’t its inherent conservatism (just look at the parallel garage revival – thirty years young and still a ton o’ fun), but rather the curse of effort.

All those fucking skinny tie Rickenbacker guys – they’re workin’ too hard, as Paul Collins conveniently put it in one of The Nerves best tunes. Sweating blood over their perfect three minute ditty, mortgaging their house for studio time til they’ve produced the fucking thing to within an inch of its life, until we feel their exhaustion, their dedication to the cause seeping through each note; until it becomes a bloody chore to listen to, in short.

I ask you, is that what the magic of pop songs and loud guitars boil down to? Did The Who spend 36 straight hours thrashing out the best possible arrangement for “The Kids Are Alright” before they laid it down?

God love ‘em, but it’s a lost cause.

Chilton knew this, years before such try-hards became an active hazard. That’s why he took “Shakin’ The World”, an anthemic pop killer to rival anything from #1 Record, fitted it out with an obtuse set of lyrics gently parodying Madison Avenue advertising men and knocked it off in one take, then apparently chucked it in the vault and forgot about it before going off to hang out with Tav Falco or whatever, knowing instinctively that we’d all hear it and love it sooner or later.

And lord, was he ever right to keep it quiet. Just IMAGINE what the sub-Tom Petty brigade would have done to this one, in ‘praise’ of their imagined Big Star mentor. They’d have bludgeoned the life out of it. All those uncertain pauses ands sneaky almost-collapses – bulldozed. All those hilarious, deadpan lines (“we’re practicin’ bending spoons..”) – gurned up with comedy signposts til they wouldn’t raise a grin from a chimp.

As it is, Chilton’s “Shakin' The World” is a lithe, creeping, wonderful star-gazing thing, and I’d contest there’s more pure power-pop essence to be found in the bit where he slurs “we’re in touch with all the chicks, all the chicks on Lex..” than in the whole back catalogue of, say, The Plimsouls or whoever.

(I shouldn't say that - I quite like The Plimsouls...)

Labels: Alex Chilton, power pop